Innovation·7 minute read
What venture-backed founders keep getting wrong about communication.
Four common mistakes we see in the first eighteen months — and the discipline that separates the companies that break through.
Rita Almeida
The Square BriefIssue 01 · Summer 2026Published from Lisbon
Insights · Vol. 02
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The Square Brief · No. 01
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- Issue 01
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The quiet economy of trust: how ambitious companies are rebuilding influence in a low-trust decade.
Six essays, three interviews and a field report from the organisations relearning how to earn attention on purpose.
Featured insight
Strategy · 9 minute read
The end of the announcement. The beginning of the narrative.
Press releases treated newsrooms as distribution. Narratives treat them as readers. A field note on why the most influential communications teams have stopped announcing and started publishing.
Written by Inês Marques
Editorial Director, The Square
June 2026
Editorial
Vol. 02 · No. 01
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A curated selection from the desk. New writing on the practice of communication, the shape of innovation and the organisations we watch.
“The audiences that matter are already reading. The question is whether they're reading you.”
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Innovation·7 minute read
What venture-backed founders keep getting wrong about communication.
Four common mistakes we see in the first eighteen months — and the discipline that separates the companies that break through.
Leadership·6 minute read
Executive visibility, without the vanity.
How to build a credible public voice for a founder or CEO — one that compounds trust rather than performing it.
AI·5 minute read
AI has a communication problem, not a technology problem.
Why the companies winning the AI narrative are the ones translating capability into consequence.
From the editor
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We didn't start The Square Brief to add another voice to the timeline. We started it because our clients — and the journalists, investors, policymakers and talent around them — have less time than ever, and more decisions to make.
Everything we publish here answers a simple question: does this help someone think more clearly about the work of building an ambitious company?
If it does, we file it. If it doesn't, we don't. That's the entire editorial policy.
— The editorsLisbon
Editorial archive
Previous editions.
A publication rather than a feed. Each edition brings together the writing, interviews and field notes of a season.
Issue 01
The quiet economy of trust.
Summer 202612 articles
Read edition →
Issue 02
Communicating the age of AI.
Spring 202610 articles
Read edition →
Issue 03
Europe's new industrial voice.
Winter 202511 articles
Read edition →
Issue 04
The talent narrative.
Autumn 20259 articles
Read edition →
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