Trust at Scale: Matchfire Told the World It Could Turn Water Into Wine, People Believed Them | Joey Leslie & Lea Brandy | Up+Adam
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Spotify Matchfire is celebrating 25 years, and in Part Two of this Up+Adam conversation, Adam sits back down with President Joey Leslie and Executive Creative Director Lea Brandy to talk about what happens after a company survives the early years and starts asking a different question: how do you keep evolving without losing what made the work matter in the first place?
The conversation gets more personal this time. Joey talks about learning to trust other people with decisions he once felt he had to control himself, and Lea shares what she has learned from working alongside him for more than a decade, including the value of not letting perfection become the enemy of good work. They also talk about the kind of creative tension that makes teams better, what each admires in the other, and why long-term relationships inside a company can become a real competitive advantage.
There is also one of the wildest stories in Matchfire’s history, a fake Kickstarter campaign for a machine that supposedly turned water into wine. The campaign went viral around the world, drew massive media attention, raised money for a clean-water cause, and became the kind of idea Joey says probably could not happen the same way today.
From there, the conversation widens into bigger questions about purpose, trust, leadership, and relevance. What does “doing good work” mean now? How has purpose changed inside corporate America? What does San Luis Obispo give a company that might be harder to build somewhere else? And when every agency has access to the same AI, software, and tools, where does a real competitive advantage come from?
For Joey and Lea, the answer has less to do with technology than with people, experience, reliability, point of view, and doing what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it.
If you missed Part One, go back and start there for the full Matchfire story, including the early internet, eBay, purpose-driven marketing, AI, creative judgment, and the idea that when creation becomes almost free, taste becomes more valuable.
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