The email arrives at 11:47 p.m., subject line “URGENT: Q3 Messaging Alignment.” Inside sits a paragraph seventeen people have already touched. It says nothing wrong. It says nothing at all. Somewhere between the first draft and the version now glowing on a phone screen in a dark kitchen, every rough edge got sanded off, every honest sentence got smoothed into something that could belong to any company, any leader, any year. The person reading it doesn’t hit send. She just stares at the words and asks herself the question more executives are quietly asking these days. If this could have been written by anyone, why did I bother writing it at all?
Meet Iza Montalvo
Iza Montalvo is the founder of OLAN MEDIA and The Public CEO, a columnist for Inc. Magazine, and the builder of a coaching platform helping leaders fix exactly the problem in that inbox. After fifteen years inside newsrooms, U.S. government offices, and corporate communications departments, she has built her career on a belief that sounds almost rebellious in an era obsessed with content volume: the most dangerous thing a leader can do right now is sound like everyone else.
From Newsroom to Founder
Montalvo’s story starts at St. John’s University, where she studied journalism, and it starts the way most reporters’ stories do: by getting things wrong in front of an editor and learning fast. “You have to ask questions, talk to people, check the facts, and sometimes admit that your first idea was wrong,” she says of those early years. It is a habit she never let go of.
That instinct followed her into the U.S. Congress, where she saw firsthand how message discipline shapes public perception. People rarely absorb an entire policy brief. They remember the one line that made sense to them. It was there, watching complex ideas get reduced to something a tired constituent could actually hold onto, that she started asking a question she still asks today: can people understand what I’m trying to say?
Long before any of that, there was a smaller classroom lesson. In third grade, her teacher was her own mother, and there was no special treatment waiting for her at that desk. If anything, the bar sat higher. She didn’t understand it then. She understands it now. Her mother wasn’t teaching science. She was teaching standards, the same ones Montalvo would later demand of herself through every industry shift that followed.
And there were many. Traditional news gave way to the internet. The internet gave way to social platforms. Now artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of communication again. Each time, she had the same choice every professional eventually faces: defend the old way, or become a beginner again. She kept choosing the beginner.
The Business of Sounding Human
In 2017, Montalvo launched OLAN MEDIA. In 2024, she founded The Public CEO. This year, she added a column at Inc. Magazine and became an instructor on Maven. But the project drawing the most attention right now is a personalized LinkedIn coaching app, and the origin story matters.
A major tech company, backed by names behind platforms like Instagram, approached her to help build a coaching tool. As she looked at what already existed, she noticed a gap. “Most of them were focused on helping people create content,” she explains. “I saw an opportunity to make it more personal for the user.” So instead of another content generator, she built something closer to a mirror. It coaches based on a person’s actual story, strengths, and goals, evolving as they do rather than issuing the same generic advice to a founder, a physician, and a lawyer alike.
That distinction sits at the center of everything Montalvo believes about the moment we’re in. As AI tools become available to everyone, the content they produce is converging into a single, flattened voice. “I believe the amount of content people can produce with AI is going to become more and more homogeneous,” she says. Her conclusion isn’t fear. It’s opportunity. If everyone has access to the same tools, then perspective, the part no prompt can replicate, becomes the only real differentiator left.
She’s just as direct about leadership itself. Montalvo doesn’t believe great leaders have all the answers. She believes they build rooms where someone will tell them when they’re wrong. “Make it safe for smart people to share their perspective and ideas,” she says, and she means it as a warning as much as advice. A team too comfortable agreeing with you isn’t a sign of strong leadership. It’s often a sign you’re about to make a very expensive mistake alone.
The Montalvo Playbook: 5 Lessons
- Get curious before you get confident. Ask the question before you defend the assumption.
- Make it safe for smart people to disagree with you, or you’ll only ever hear your own idea repeated back.
- Your experience isn’t a reason to stop learning. It’s the advantage you bring into whatever you learn next.
- Don’t compete with AI on volume. You will lose that race, and it isn’t the race that matters.
- Ask yourself before you publish anything: could a stranger tell this came from me, specifically, and no one else?
Attention Is Easy. Demand Is Earned
Back in that dark kitchen, the unsent email is still sitting on the screen. Somewhere, a different version of that same moment is happening on a much bigger stage. AI has made polish free and instant. It has not made honesty any easier to fake. Montalvo’s entire body of work argues that the leaders who win the next decade won’t be the ones producing the most content. They’ll be the ones who never let their own voice get edited out of it in the first place.
She didn’t build a communications company to help people sound like everyone else’s idea of a leader. She built one to make sure they never have to.
Iza Montalvo is the Founder of OLAN MEDIA and The Public CEO, and a Columnist for Inc. Magazine, based in Greater Orlando. She helps founders, executives, and public figures build authentic, high-impact personal brands in an increasingly AI-saturated world. To connect with Iza or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
