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Most companies don’t have a growth problem.
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Jason Shafton posted thisCompliance kills more good marketing work than budget cuts. Not because compliance is wrong. Because most teams sequence it wrong. Loop them in too early — every concept gets watered down before you've even committed to one. Loop them in too late — the entire campaign gets shelved two days before launch. The fix is one rule: COMPLIANCE REVIEWS FINAL DRAFTS ONLY. How that looks in practice: 1. Business stakeholders align on the message 2. Copy team writes the actual draft 3. Internal review surfaces any concerns 4. THEN compliance reviews — not for ideation, for greenlight Your compliance team is not your strategy partner. They are your safety net at the end of the trapeze. Treat them like one and you will ship faster — and almost always cleaner. What stage do you loop your compliance team in?
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Jason Shafton posted thisMost agency timelines do not slip on scope. They slip on something dumber: communication channel mismatch. I kicked off a website project last week with a great client. Smart team. Clear vision. Compliance-heavy industry, so the work has to land on time. Inside the first 20 minutes of the kickoff call, I caught the problem. We were defaulting to email. They are a Microsoft shop. Their inboxes are stacked with internal threads, vendor messages, and compliance notes. Anything I send sits in a queue. We are a Slack-and-Google shop. Our pace lives in real time. Different channels run at different speeds. If your fastest collaborator is in your slowest queue, the project moves at the speed of email — which is to say, three days for a one-line answer. I flagged it directly on the call. Asked the founder for his cell number. Asked our PM to text him after the meeting. Then we agreed on the rule: anything time-sensitive moves to text or Slack. Email is for documents and contracts. The lesson is not USE SLACK. The lesson is to look at every collaborator and ask one question: How fast does my message actually reach this human? If the answer is WHEN THEY NEXT OPEN THEIR INBOX, you do not have a slow project. You have a slow channel pretending to be a project. Most projects that miss deadlines do not need more meetings. They need fewer queues between people who already know what to do. Find your slowest channel. Move the urgent stuff out of it. Watch the timeline tighten without anyone working harder. What is the slowest channel on your team right now?
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Jason Shafton reposted thisJason Shafton reposted thisMost founders don’t burn out from work. They burn out from carrying everything. On Founder Mode, we break down what actually changes as you build: → Why balance shows up when responsibility is shared → How fast you need to form real opinions → The signal hidden in how people respond to you → And why discipline beats hustle every time The real edge isn’t doing more. It’s knowing what not to carry. CHAPTERS 00:00 – Cold open: Sleep is the ultimate PED 00:51 – Welcome and the three topics 01:00 – The founder sleep crisis 03:52 – Topic two: Taking over a new company 04:00 – Why consultants get more leverage than FTEs 07:09 – Getting acquired and the listening tour 09:02 – The week three framework (not day 90) 12:13 – Search Engine Journal takeover and the five-question email 16:03 – Closing every credit card on day zero 20:17 – Topic three: Building the say-no muscle 24:31 – The 14-hour flight test 26:25 – Five key takeaways
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Jason Shafton shared thisThree habits separate founders who last from the ones who burn out by year three. Sleep. Listen. Say no. In our latest Founder Mode episode we unpacked all three. Sleep is the one founders sacrifice first and pay for the longest. The mythology of the all nighter is a holdover from a different era. Modern leadership requires judgment, and judgment lives downstream of recovery. The founders who treat sleep as a strategic input outperform the ones who treat it as a weakness. Your calendar is a reflection of what you actually believe. Listen is the discipline most operators think they have already mastered. They have not. There is a difference between waiting to talk and actually receiving information. The best leaders I have worked with stay quiet long enough to learn something they did not already know. They ask the second and third question. They let silence do the work. They notice when the room is performing for them instead of telling them the truth. Say no is the highest leverage skill in the entire founder toolkit. Every yes has a price. The customer that takes you off your roadmap. The hire that pulls the team in three directions. The investor whose check comes with a vision you do not share. The meeting that drains a half day and changes nothing. The founders who scale clean are not working harder than everyone else. They are saying no with more precision. These three are not new ideas. They are the ones we already know and ignore. The point of the episode is not novelty. It is the reminder that the discipline already exists. You just have to choose to practice it. Pick one of the three this week and tighten your standard around it. Sleep earlier. Listen longer. Say no faster. If you want the full breakdown, link in the comments. Which of the three is the one you keep meaning to fix and have not yet? — I share what actually works while building multiple businesses and working directly with founders and operators scaling real companies. 🚀 Follow Jason Shafton for posts on growth and building breakthrough brands ♻️ Repost if this was useful, share it with someone building or investing 💬 DM me if you want help growing your business
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Jason Shafton posted thisA founder I talked to had a senior product marketing rec out for a year. They almost hired someone. Then pulled back. The reason: "Are we setting up this person to fail by not having a good leader for them?" Most companies do this backwards. They hire the IC because the title is cheaper. The IC drowns because no one above them is setting strategy. The manager (usually the head of sales) does not have time to coach them. Six months later the IC quietly leaves. The fix is uglier: pay more, wait longer, hire the VP first, let them build the bench. Three filters before you post the IC role: 1. Can the IC tell you who their best manager was and what they learned from them? 2. Does the leader they would report to have the craft judgment to actually grade the work? 3. Will the IC have a peer at the same level who can review their thinking? If any answer is no, you are hiring the wrong layer. Skip the IC. Get the VP. Then build the team.
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Jason Shafton posted thisIn my first board presentation at Soothe, I tried to show ambition. I told the room I believed we could drive customer acquisition cost to $75. In the moment it sounded credible. It signaled standards. I thought I was anchoring the team to a high bar. Instead I handcuffed myself. We drove CAC to $100. Given our channel mix and product realities, that was an enormous improvement. The marketing engine was working. The math was moving in the right direction. The response from the board was the same every quarter. 100 is not 75. What I had intended as a directional model became a commitment in the minds of everyone taking notes. The number followed me into every meeting. It shifted how progress got judged. It shrank the room I had to experiment, because every dollar of variance had to be defended against a target I had volunteered under interview lights. Here is the lesson I learned the hard way. Targets without internal data are not ambitions. They are traps. The job of a leader is to inspire the team without weaponizing your own optimism. That means under promising and over delivering, especially with numbers. Anchor the room on what you can defend with data. Then create upside by outperforming your own floor. The same instinct that makes you want to sound bold in the interview is the instinct that will cost you the most political capital after you are hired. If you have to inspire people with a number, frame ranges and scenarios instead of a single point. Keep the conversation on the actions that move the metric. Do not let the metric become the conversation. Founders and operators get measured by the gap between what they said and what they shipped. Make that gap your friend. What is your rule for sharing targets so they inspire action without becoming a weapon? — I share what actually works while building multiple businesses and working directly with founders and operators scaling real companies. 🚀 Follow Jason Shafton for posts on growth and building breakthrough brands ♻️ Repost if this was useful, share it with someone building or investing 💬 DM me if you want help growing your business
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Jason Shafton posted thisIn the world of AI, the highest-touch service wins. I was on a call yesterday with a founder who just raised $140M. His company powers one in six US laundromats. They have 99% retention. They are AI native by every metric you would want to count. When I asked what he was investing the round in, his answer was not agents. It was not models. It was people. In support. In customer success. In services. His logic: "It is easy for a company to create AI support infrastructure to get efficient. It is hard to bet OPEX on people who deliver experiences." When everyone is shipping the same agent, the same model, the same automated workflow, the differentiator inverts. The thing that is hardest to copy becomes the thing that wins. That thing is no longer the tech. It is the human on the other end of the line. The customers who feel this most are the ones AI is supposedly built to serve. SMBs. Small operators. People who sold their house to buy a laundromat. They do not care if the support team is in the Dominican Republic or in a server farm. They care that someone picks up. That someone listens. That someone fixes it. The companies that out-AI everyone else are not winning by building more AI. They are winning by deploying AI to free up humans for the moments that matter. Three implications if you are running a growth team: 1. The "AI savings" pitch is over. Your customers do not want a discount because you replaced humans. They want the savings reinvested into more humans on their account. 2. Your moat is now your bench, not your stack. Anyone can buy the same models. Almost no one will pay for the humans behind them. 3. "AI native" should mean AI in the workflow, humans in the relationship. Reverse that order and retention will fall faster than new logos can replace it. The unsexy truth: the more AI eats the world, the more analog the moat becomes.
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Jason Shafton posted thisWe just rebuilt a client website. 95 percent of their traffic hit the homepage. But they had spent the same effort on every interior page. Same words. Same rounds of revision. Same designer hours. The mistake is treating a website like a museum. Every room equal. Every visit guided. Real users don't tour. They land. They scan. They leave or they convert. Here's what changed when we ran the math: We took the design budget allocated across 30 pages and put 70 percent of it on the homepage. We simplified the rest. Conversion went up. Build time went down. If 95 percent of your traffic hits one page, that page deserves 95 percent of your attention. Stop spreading your design effort evenly. Concentration wins.
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Jason Shafton shared thisMost categories have one obvious winner because somebody decided to be the curator. Sephora did it for beauty. Whole Foods did it for groceries. Goop did it for wellness. The strategy is the same. Find a fragmented category. Apply taste. Build a destination. This is Pashmina D. Pashmina is the founder of Bar & Cocoa, and she is doing for craft chocolate what those brands did for their categories. Bar & Cocoa is the curated home for the best fine chocolate makers in the world. Europe. Asia. The Americas. If a maker is on the site, it earned its way there. What I respect about her approach is the discipline behind it. She runs the entire business. Global procurement. Import compliance. Brand. Growth. Customer experience. Most founders would have specialized into one slice and hired the rest. Pashmina built the whole stack herself because the curation is the product, and she did not want it filtered through anyone else's taste. The result is a business with a clear answer to the question every premium brand has to answer. Why you and not someone else. For Bar & Cocoa, the answer is selection. Every bar earns its spot. Every maker is vetted. The customer is buying access to a point of view, not a transaction. In our conversation Pashmina walks through how she built the sourcing engine, what makes a chocolate maker worth carrying, and how she thinks about premium retail in a category most people associate with grocery aisle impulse buys. If you are building anything in a fragmented category, this one is for you. Link in the comments. — I share what actually works while building multiple businesses and working directly with founders and operators scaling real companies. 🚀 Follow Jason Shafton for posts on growth and building breakthrough brands ♻️ Repost if this was useful, share it with someone building or investing 💬 DM me if you want help growing your business
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Education
Honors & Awards
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Google Operating Committee Award
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For the launch of Google Music
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Google Operating Committee Award
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For the launch of Google Instant
Test Scores
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Cumulative GPA
Score: 3.78
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English
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Chris P.
Everyone keeps saying “the algorithm is unpredictable.” It’s actually becoming more predictable than ever...if you’re paying attention. Here are 3 platform updates that tell you exactly where social is heading right now: • Threads now lets users customize their feed using the “Dear Algo” prompt. Translation: platforms are rewarding intentional engagement and clear signals. • YouTube is integrating Shorts deeper into Google Search. Short-form video is no longer just scroll content, it’s searchable content. • Hashtags are quietly making a comeback on Instagram. Not 30 spammy tags. 3 to 5 niche, keyword-driven hashtags that support SEO and discoverability. The common thread? Search matters. Signals matter. Specificity matters. We’re moving out of the “post and hope” era and into the “optimize and position” era. The platforms are literally telling brands how to win. Most just aren’t adjusting their strategy fast enough. If you’re a brand or founder trying to grow in 2026, your content isn’t just content anymore. It’s search strategy, brand positioning, and discoverability all in one. That’s exactly what we help our clients build at Ground-Up Social here in San Diego. If your social presence isn’t driving discovery, leads, or real brand growth yet, let’s change that → groundupsocialmedia.com
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Mike Calvo
♿ From The PWD Media Co-Op: Driven By Purpose Podcast Episode 45: A Discussion With Drew Davis, Creator, Entrepreneur, and Founder Behind STACKED | Isaac Shapiro | Cleanlogic and The Inspiration Foundation https://lnkd.in/ejp5YNb5 What happens when someone refuses to be defined by their condition? In this episode of Driven By Purpose, we sit down with Drew Davis, creator, entrepreneur, and founder behind STACKED, to talk about the real story behind his rise. From growing up as the only disabled student in his school to losing over 100 pounds and building a multi-million dollar brand, Drew's journey is raw, unfiltered, and powerful. But this isn't just about business. It's about changing perception. Through humor, honesty, and content that actually connects, Drew is reshaping how people see disability and proving that authenticity wins. If you've ever felt underestimated or overlooked, this episode will hit. Key topics include: ▫️ Growing up with cerebral palsy and breaking expectations ▫️ The mindset shift that changed everything ▫️ Losing 100+ pounds and taking control of his life ▫️ Why authenticity beats polished messaging every time ▫️ Building a brand that actually stands for something This isn't about being inspirational. It's about being real. Watch now to hear one of the most unfiltered stories we've had on the show. Driven by Purpose Cleanlogic The Inspiration Foundation Stacked Flavor Co
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Anton Chernyshov
Gamma + n8n + GPT-5 is kind of wild... It basically turned into an AI presentation engine that pulled in $47K in deck services last month. 🤯 While agencies charge $3K–$5K per deck and take two weeks… this thing spits out investor-grade presentations in *11 minutes.* No designers. No PowerPoint prison. No revision hell. 🙏 Here’s the workflow in plain words: → Client fills a form with 5 things: topic, audience, goal, brand colors, deadline → n8n fires off a GPT-5 run that builds the entire narrative architecture → Gamma renders a polished, investor-ready deck instantly → System auto-exports to Drive, drafts the client email, logs everything in Sheets → Every output is tracked so delivery is literally instant And the whole stack runs 24/7 while you sleep. 😴⚙️ Why it feels unfair: → You generate 50 variations while competitors build 1 manually → Each deck costs pennies, you charge $500–$2K → No designers slowing anything down → Quality looks Fortune-500 level → Delivery happens automatically through pre-written emails One consultant used this to productize their entire firm. They jumped from 4 custom decks a month to 40+. Same workload… just scaled by automation. 📈 The real shift is psychological: You’re not selling “presentations.” You’re selling *presentation infrastructure* that compounds.
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Michael Holdmann
Currently in USA there is $700M dollars a year in Unmatched Royalties due to Missing Metadata - we are putting that for the first time into the pockets of the creator! PraSaga Foundation is introducing Sample Class Tree Diagram for the Global Music Industry. Excited to share a groundbreaking resource for the music industry! The class tree diagram maps a comprehensive framework for managing music assets, royalties, and compliance on the blockchain. It’s designed for developers, artists, and businesses to build scalable, transparent systems. Key Features: Core Classes: SPClassAccount and SPClassObject form the foundation, extended by ClassFungibleAsset, ClassNonFungibleAsset, ClassConsumerAccount, and ClassBusinessAccount. Standards: Integrates ISRC, DDEX, GDPR, WIPO, ASCAP/BMI, and CISAC for global compliance. Innovations: Includes ArtistAccount (owning all IP), SongAccessObject (one-time, 5-time, 30-day, unlimited access), ConsumerPurchase, and RoyaltyPayout to supporting entities (manager, promoter, record company, streaming service, agent). Use Case: Enables royalty distribution, access management, and secure transactions using SagaPython. Perfect for music tech innovators, blockchain developers, or labels seeking efficient IP and revenue management. Let’s revolutionize music industry infrastructure together! #MusicTech #Blockchain #Innovation #royalties #rightsmanagement Call to Action: Share your feedback or use cases! Join SagaStandards sagastandards@prasaga.com build the tree, implements the standards as classes, create the on-chain ontologies, ensure
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Todd Stearn
Not too long ago I had the pleasure of connecting with Lee-Ann Johnstone for an episode of the Affiverse Podcast to talk about Aragon's vertically-integrated performance marketing business model, our approach to social traffic (influencer + paid), the importance of data in performance optimization, and general best practices for affiliate marketing after 15 years in the business. Lee-Ann poses some perceptive questions to her guests and it was a pleasure talking about the direction of the industry and what brands need to do to succeed in today's affiliate marketing landscape. (Hint: if you're not growing, you're slowing!) #affiliatemarketing #performancemarketing
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