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- Graduated from Georgetown University in 2007
- Studied economics and political science
- Moved to NYC to work at Deutsche Bank in their investment banking division
- Joined a travel / home-sharing startup - did finance, partnerships and digital marketing
- Worked at a seed stage venture fund and started doing digital marketing consulting work
- Started and ran digital marketing agency
- 70+ clients, mostly tech companies, in 5 years
- Joined a fintech client full-time as CMO while continuing to operate agency
- Grew from $2m in annual revenue to $20m+ in revenue
- Left in 2021 to focus on consulting, investing, and advising
- Currently on the boards of Urban Dove and Forum Education
- Recently purchased a 75 year old candlepin bowling alley
- Renovated and rebranded, grew revenue 80% in year 1 + 4.9 Google rating
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- Another small business to acquire
- OR - to join a small/medium sized company
- To meet new people doing interesting stuff!
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- Profits and growth are downstream of service/product quality which is downstream of company mission and culture.
- Reputation is what keep pricing power and margins high.
- Market growth is more determinant of company success than it seems.
- An underrated quality in new employees is whether or not they have experience as the customer or know the customer’s issues well.
- Good leaders prioritize the truth even when its hard/difficult.
- Marketing should be visual, simple and empathetic.
- People purchase when they trust you.
- The speed at which a company (or person) learns is most correlated with success.
- Being close to customers is the best way to continually improve.
- Being correct is only half the equation for winning. You also need to be counter-intuitive.
- Every business can break down into a series of inputs and outputs. Good CEOs have a clear mental model of this so they can fix where the machine it’s slow or stopped.
- For marketing hires: can they speak to your market (in all forms of media/communication), in the places and ways that they want you to?
- Marketing is about creating a presence where your target customer says “this place/company is for me”.
- On management of employees: Most people want to feel useful and impactful. The extent to which they feel this is the extent to which they will feel motivated.
- With rare exceptions, make decisions for the long term not for the short term.
- Never sacrifice product/service quality. Most company failures are some recursive loop of cutting costs, lowering quality, losing customers, cutting more costs, etc.
- Having two people doing the same job can be beneficial - they teach each other, raise each other’s bar, fill gaps in each others understanding, etc.
- Companies/marketing teams need an explicit or implicit R&D budget. Keep ~20% of effort/budget for testing/experiments.
- Work and productivity are two very different things.
- Making decisions from a deep understanding of causal relationships is more useful than being data driven alone.
- Management in its best form is a form of technology (leverage and tools).
- Good judgement comes from recursive thinking on your experience.
- With managers of teams, it’s important to convey that team culture is their responsibility. Standards to be upheld but also culture.
- A marketing team’s goal is for your target market to say “this company gets me” - through every touchpoint you have.
- Behavior at an org will trend towards the behavior you allow.
- When hiring for leadership roles - back people who actively want to be leaders, not just those with tenure/experience.
- Good service is all about hiring the right people that are oriented towards service in their general life approach.
- Team internal culture ebbs and flows and mission and customer orientation are key. People turn inward (political games, etc) when not focused outward.
- Good investing (or any decision-making for that matter) requires asymmetry of outcome distribution.
- Small amount of progress each day compounds tremendously over time.
- One way to think about investment ideas is as a 2 x 2 matrix with → actual truth on one side and perception of truth on the other. When an idea is both true and the perception runs counter to that, this is where returns are. If something is true and everyone believes it to be true, returns are priced in.
- Pay people above market and have high expectations.
- Market to an acute pain point not a chronic one.
- Market as counterposition to the current expected option.
- Context capital as the new key in an AI world. Custom RL will be new business moat. Learning history → business equity.
- Employees need to be doing things they naturally want to be doing. Find what inspires them and have them doing those things.
- Companies should explicitly define what ‘good communication’ means at their organization. Poor communication is a bigger driver of problems than it might appear.
Contact me:
james.shook @ gmail