dannygronerportfolio

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https://www.barrons.com/articles/trump-media-djt-truth-social-stock-price-meme-mania-84010fc7

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/02/09/boyfriend-sickness-romance-dating/

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10 Things I'm Most Proud of from 2023

I entered this year in transition, looking to formally split my role in half. I spent 50 percent of my time and with my attached metrics focused on what got me here, which is PR portfolio support. And the other 50 percent of my time and attached metrics went toward dealflow, measured on total number of introductions I made to the investment team. I learned quickly in Q1 that while those two pursuits might leverage the same sentiment and sensibility from within me, they required different outlooks and approaches. I had to learn to be be both - at once.

My proudest achievement of 2023 has yet to close yet, but it's a deal that we expect to land in the arriving weeks. That would be the first I sourced to make it into our active portfolio. On the one hand, I had hoped to boast this deal before the end of the year. On the other hand, I am riding this wave for what it is and how it will get done, and I have something to look forward to along the continuum of the years. This lead of all of the leads I've generated - 18 qualified ones in 2023 - has the best backstory to it. And I look forward to telling the tale.

I continued this year to assist job seekers in looking for work, mostly marketers who I can help more than others. In a similar vein to the above, I shifted from racking up volume to considering precision, finding the people who might be left without completely if not for my gentle touch. I clocked less than 50 percent of the volume I did last year while giving myself more grace and also spare time to expand into other arenas, too. I have made this endeavor a set part of my everyday work and life, and I am confident that dozens more will get on their way in part thanks to me next year. Several of this year's candidates told me that I changed the game for them and unlocked something in them they didn't know was there. It's all so gratifying.

I completed another year of posting weekly in my Substack, which is the equivalent number of words of a second novel. I didn't grow the readership this year as I had hoped, and I have lost some of my readers from the year prior. I am not too worried about that, as the initiative continues to be valuable to me as a place to put the topics and ideas that would have otherwise died inside my head. Journaling has always helped me grasp how I feel, and whether I have something to say. And this project solidifies that aspect of my self. I know what the next 10 topics to write about will be. And I have gotten good feedback of late from active readers that I am writing well in addition to writing often.

A popular PR newsletter featured my essay this year about my transformation from PR guru to business consultant. I received some immediate accolades when that went out, but I have continued to plug it with mid-career job seekers since as a model for how they can and should be thinking about themselves and their careers. I send it along, unprompted, after calls with those who'd benefit from reviewing it. I've adopted a similar approach for how I conduct follow-ups with appropriate people for Forecast Labs. The meeting is the middle of the process, not the beginning. And I supply them with two podcast episodes we lined up this year as part of our one-pager. That serves well as top of funnel for our marketing efforts.

This year, half of the press I brought in overall was for Forecast Labs itself. The anchor came from TechCrunch in March. We continued to get a steady stream of press from top-tier publications, including Bloomberg (x2), Financial Times, Inc. (x2), and Quartz. We have begun to receive enough inbound that we don't really have to pitch more at all anymore, and reporters see us as a go-to source and resource to find what they seek. We pair up reporters with the sources they need, sometimes within our portfolio and often not. This is a winning formula for us to keep focused on achieving our business goals first and always, PR goals to complement what we're already seeing and saying.

In particular, we were helpful to reporters during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. As other PR people and executives faded to the back, waiting for the fiasco to pass, we went to work in those first few hours to make ourselves available, actively pitching into the storm. We were rewarded for it, both for Forecast Labs and for the portfolio companies that happened to bank at SVB. You can find our coverage in The New York Times, Fortune, Crain's, Slate, and The Verge, among other places. That episode was an example of how we didn't prepare specifically for something we could have predicted, but we had built expertise and also trust internally to seize on what we could say when others weren't able to.

There's nothing I enjoy more than lining up press for a new portfolio company even before they are announced as one. That's what happened in May when on my initial call with the executives I heard a nugget that I felt was a standalone story, outside of our corporate announcement. So we went and got that story done first, in Modern Retail, before writing up the formal press release that yielded coverage in Axios. I listen closely for both paths forward, knowing that we have more legs to stand on after the announcement is in the past if we have original insights to offer for how the business is growing.

The best example of that came from Public this year, our furthest-along property, that yielded the most coverage of any portfolio company with 10. Among the publications that covered them were AdAge, CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. That company had a massive year in terms of corporate announcements, and we were there every step of the way to support the growth opportunities that they spearheaded.

For one of our latest portfolio companies, Outcomes4Me, we found a clever way to squeeze into The Wall Street Journal, and we also saw a long profile run about one of their workers in Cure Today. This assignment perhaps more than any other that has sat in our portfolio requires a deft hand because of the nature of what they offer and who they serve. Sensitivity to cancer patients comes first always, and if we can foster those stories publicly to help the next person feel less alone and more supported that extends the coverage beyond mere placements for its own sake. There's a strong sense of purpose when speaking to the operators in-house at Outcomes4Me, and it raises everyone's awareness of how the media writes about the most devastating times of many people's lives.

And, finally, I got myself cited in a couple of stories, as usual, this campaign in The Washington Post and Shondaland, among others. Additionally, I spoke to several reporters on background this year, pointing them in the right direction and offering perspectives on some topics and themes that wouldn't match exactly to where I can be the leading expert rather more as a conduit to get there. Whenever I am the right person, I step up. And otherwise I'm just happy to assist in the ways I know how.

(Here’s a link to the 2022 list.)

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https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/a-decade-after-unicorn-entered-the-vernacular-whats-changed.html

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