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Great piece by AdEx today on the Outcomes Era and why it's become such a thing in the last 12 months. Sharp Pen client tvScientific, one of the best representatives of the Outcomes Era, was quoted. Discourse merchants on the comeup.

I'm doing pod ad reads for Aaron Goldman and I've decided I will be innovating on this and doing the best (read: most eccentric) ad reads in the adtech pod world. Watch this space for more. Aaron gave me 13 ad reads to get progressively weirder with. He may regret this.

Great to talk to Seb Joseph at Digiday about Cluely's marketing strategy — and how it led to a $120M valuation. There's something for every adtech company to learn from Cluely. The marketing playbook has changed. Check out the article: digiday.com/marketing/what…

Why did the Soham Parekh story resonate so hard with Silicon Valley insiders? Probably because a lot of CEOs, investors, etc. are actually fed up with post-Covid work norms and this episode gave them an opportunity (and extreme example) to speak out about it.

I’m going to this — are you a business / tech nerd in NYC, are you going to this

If your marketing / comms person hasn't demonstrated an ability to build an audience, why would you trust them to build *your* audience?

Jonah Goodhart had one of the best adtech exits of all-time with Moat to Oracle for $850M. He came on Open Market to talk what's changed in adtech GTM, how his dad inspired Mobian, and why AI fundamentally changes digital advertising. Check it out wherever you get your pods.

Getting traditional PR is often thought of as a mystery. But it boils down to 3 tactics: 1. Make the customer the star The brand or pub says your solution is great, not you. 2. Share surprising or controversial data (eg Adalytics). 3. Really hot take from credible CEO.

Sharp Pen has added $1.7M in net new revenue YTD. Throw out the 2005 marketing playbook. Releases, press pitches, blogs? Dying. Where: social. Who: the CEO. What: a bold challenge to the status quo. The CEO is the chief evangelist. We help them step into the role.

Let's say you're the CEO of a company doing $20M in revenue, and you want to build a $1B public co. The story you tell customers to get from $20M to $30M is not the same story you tell investors, the media, or employees. The latter is bigger, future-facing, aspirational.

The thing about my generation’s obsession with “social justice” is if you’re obsessed with finding the injustice, you see it everywhere. It’s the lens, not the object. Nothing is “ok that’s great.” Everything is a zero-sum game where someone is getting screwed.

I told the hostess of the Midtown Manhattan restaurant I went to before the Acquired live recording that I was going to see a “tech business podcast live.” She was very impressed and said that’s what all the most eligible bachelors in NYC do.

I'm very befuddled whenever I listen to podcasts with entrepreneurs and they're like "I didn't like the business I grew and ran for 5-10 years." I'm 4 years in, and I love my business. I use my brain for what it's best at. I'd think if I didn't, I would... do something else.

When will we get to the point with SaaS tools where I can say "give [insert team member] access to billing" instead of me having to find a help page and then do that?

I posted the other day about BOK trying to disrupt Ticketmaster 20 years ago and Ticketmaster still needs to be disrupted. Who will free us from this hell? Feels like the brand is vulnerable and the product is mediocre to bad.

The best thing to do on a flight is work. Nothing makes the time go faster. Especially deep work that you don't have time for during normal workdays.

My favorite is when (usually envious) people ask me if it's bad that a CEO is driving a ton of attention on LinkedIn. Fellas, is it bad to have thousands of potential customers, investors, and employees hearing your message every week? Would it be better to be invisible? (No.)

Excellent byline by Aperiam CEO jason fairchild on the case for investing in adtech. "Adtech is beautiful" Link 👇

If you want to hear me amped up (and who doesn't), tune into today's Open Market podcast to talk about Cluely and the CEO evangelism playbook adtech companies should be running.

Depends on the founder's breadth of skills. Some absolutely would benefit from a commercial co-founder. It really just depends on whether you can sell and get people. If you can do those 2 things in addition to engineering, more power to you as a solo technical founder.