Founder & CEO @Quorum_co. The intelligence layer for the independent voices shaping public markets. Prev: co-founded @Say (acq’d by @RobinhoodApp)
New York, NY
Joined December 2011
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Looking forward to speaking at the @TomorrowXSummit next week in Austin, TX. 🤠🚀
Excited for the panel w/ @jrtuttle, @mattjoanou and @austinhankwitz
If you want to catch up while there, hit me up [email protected]
🤠
I'm speaking at @tomorrowxsummit in Austin next week with @jrtuttle, @zhascoe, and @austinhankwitz.
Market Advantage: Reaching Next-Gen Investors Through New Channels
If you run Comms or IR at a public company, come say hello. 📈🔬
This is true for pre-seed founders to public company CEOs and every stage in between.
Founders, you started a company! Congrats, you’re now the chief storyteller.
A lot of technical founders don’t love this part of becoming a CEO. You want to build the product, solve hard problems, and assume that if what you’re building is good enough, people will figure it out.
They probably won’t.
As CEO, perhaps the biggest part of your job is explaining what you’re doing over and over again to investors, customers, candidates, and your own team. You have to make them understand why it matters without assuming they have the same technical context you do.
That doesn’t mean turning into a marketing person or dumbing down what you’re building. It means figuring out how to explain a complicated idea clearly enough that other people actually care. A good test is whether you can explain what you’re building, why it matters, and why now without spending the first ten minutes teaching someone the underlying technology.
Start with the problem and why anyone should care, then go as deep on the technical details as the audience wants to go.
You can build something technically incredible, but at some point you still have to convince people to buy it, fund it, work on it, or believe it should exist. Learning how to tell that story is a huge part of the job too.
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ALMOST 8 YEARS AGO 🤯 @elonmusk
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Corporate comms is changing. More and more companies are going direct on X, and not just from the CEO.
Love this line from @lulumeservey: "The best spokesperson for any endeavor is not the one who has the most polish, the longest tenure, or the 'right' credentials. It's the person who holds the secret knowledge upon which the enterprise is built, the person who can not only describe the idea but, in the face of inevitable opposition, fight for it and win."
We all saw what $META did the past few weeks with the Muse launch. They let @alexandr_wang cook.
People don't realize Meta also has
@andymstone (comms),
@boztank (CTO),
@mosseri (runs Instagram),
@finkd (Zuck).
Each offers a differentiated perspective.
The pattern: the people closest to the work are becoming the comms channel. No press release, no spokesperson filter. Just the person who built the thing, telling you about it directly. And it has implications for how the company is understood in the marketplace.
Should I keep doing this for other companies?
2nd time building a company and the emotional roller coaster is back. 4am wake-ups, phone reminders, highs are high and lows are low.
Trying to remember that ACTION CREATES INFORMATION. Sitting at your desk talking to AI won't build the company. Gotta get out into the world
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There is real value in forward-thinking IR for public companies.
Look at $HOOD, $PLTR and $TSLA. They’ve helped build engaged, loyal and informed investor communities by making management accessible to retail investors, independent voices and creators.
These voices increasingly shape how public companies are understood. For IR and Comms, engaging with them is an opportunity to explain the business, understand what investors are questioning and build trust.
Include them in product events, investor days, earnings calls and annual meetings. Give them access, substance and room to ask real questions.
The days of “we have too many mouths to feed on the sell-side to focus on anyone else” are OVER.
Some people might disagree with this, but genuinely think that investor relations and capital formation will become the most important role across all the large private equity firms
The investing itself is more or less commoditized
People are all paying the same multiples for these companies, everyone knows what the key diligence focus areas should be, and proprietary deals barely exist at scale
Very few firms add any unique operational value, and financial engineering is widespread knowledge at this point
The only competitive advantage you have as a business is how much capital you can raise from your LPs, and then deploying that capital to earn management fees
Investor relations and capital formation will end up as the roles that firms actually care the most about, because that is what drives the earnings engines for the firm
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💯
most corporate comms ppl still haven’t grasped how news and information is distributed on X. still chasing podcasts that don’t clip effectively and waste money on grifters to post about their company/ products.
someone with 1k followers who shit posts and shares R-rated memes can still get their content at the top of the search. the user doesn’t have time or appetite to scroll through someone’s history to determine if news or an interview clip is good enough. a clip is a clip. useful information is useful information.
a smaller super fan account that regularly posts about your company/ industry is FAR more valuable than a 300k bot-infested account that everyone knows is a grift. it’s not about the follower count, it’s about consistency and engagement. it’s about who the algo recognizes as an authority on your company and industry.
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WHOA 😳
“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will…seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.” @peterthiel
(This book was written before this recent AI wave)
I've been thinking a lot about the word Zeitgeist lately. It translates to “spirit of the time.”
Specifically, how it applies to public companies.
At any given moment, there is a prevailing market understanding of a company: what matters, what people are excited about, and what they're skeptical of.
Increasingly, that understanding forms in public, across dozens of fragmented conversations.
Something gets said on an earnings call.
Someone picks it up on X.
An investor connects it to a statement from six months ago.
A podcast goes deeper.
A Substack post develops a counter-thesis.
Slowly, the market's understanding shifts.
Markets have always run on narratives. What's different today is how quickly those narratives form, how many places they originate, and how visible that process has become.
Yet most of the ways we understand companies still give us static snapshots: a research report, an earnings note, a news article, or a noisy social feed.
Snapshots tell you where understanding is today. They miss how it got there and how it is changing.
What used to look like a collection of fragmented conversations is becoming something much more important:
A new layer of market understanding.
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Setting up my @bot chief of staff. What name do we go with?
56%Pepper
44%Jarvis
9 votes • Final results 1
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