The Military Veteran’s Post

Come join us on Thursday 9 May 2024 (6-7 pm) at Marines' Memorial Club & Hotel for our 2024 Leading from the Front Series featuring a Live Podcast with Marine veteran, entrepreneur, and CrossFit CEO Don Faul, moderated by Army veteran and Context Ventures' Tim Hsia.

Executive Summary: Content Led Growth 1/ I’m a firm believer in the power of media/content and marketing. Media Mobilize & Context VC might be one of the most active media investors with investments in Morning Brew, The Hustle, 6AM City, beehiiv, SparkLoop, and others. At Media Mobilize, we help marketers reach and acquire customers at scale across email newsletters, influencer advertising, web, YouTube, and podcasts. Additionally, successful marketing has been core to The Military Veteran's growth. For all the above reasons, I was looking forward to interviewing Dave Gerhardt. He’s one of the smartest marketers I know, and we recently interviewed him on The Military Veteran podcast. 2/ Dave and Exit Five embody/manifest four major business trends: ✏ Content led growth (or my updated & fancy way of saying content marketing): how companies and creators are growing through content 😎 The consumerization of B2B marketing and media: how the best B2B marketers are taking notes and adopting consumer marketing tactics 🏗 Creator to Company: how he’s scaling beyond being a creator and institutionalizing his work through ExitFive, a company. In his words, he first had a business with his creator content, but with ExitFive, he now has a company 💸 The virtues of bootstrapping a business: how bootstrapping helps founders stay disciplined because some founders believe they need to immediately spend what they raise 3/ Here’s what Dave Gerhardt shared about starting a business: 💡 You can build a business around topics if you have deep expertise and deep passion 📈 It takes a while to become an expert, but experiences and content compound. For example, Dave started as an intern at a PR agency and now  runs a thriving business. He advises military veterans, marketers, and frankly anyone: “Get in somewhere and learn on the job.” 🤝 Surround yourself with intelligent people and learn the vocabulary of the industry, whether it’s marketing, military, or any other industry/vertical 4/ Here are some marketing trends and topics that we discussed on the podcast: 🤖 AI and ChatGPT are cool, social media is cool, new tech software is cool, but a big and engaged email list is the best thing for marketers because it provides owned audiences 🎣 Marketing is sales without getting on the phone or sending off 1:1 emails. Sales are a bit like spearfishers—trying to find one fish at a time, whereas marketing uses a net to catch a lot of fish. 5/ As I was drafting this post, I realized that the virtue of participating in a podcast is that you learn something the first time you interview (listen and learn—referencing my post from yesterday) someone. However, I really grasp concepts when I listen a second time and when I write/share the takeaways/insights from a conversation. Additional context: This podcast episode stemmed from a LinkedIn post Dave wrote on Veteran’s Day thanking veterans. I then messaged him, and he agreed to join us on our podcast 🔥🙏!

I am so excited for The Military Veteran Startup Conference on 2/8 & 2/9 in SF! Here's an overview of the agenda, speakers, and why this is the highest ROI event of the year for founders & VCs👇 💡 WHY YOU SHOULD COME: 👉 MVS is the densest gathering of military veterans and spouses in the early-stage ecosystem. I guarantee that you will come away with valuable new connections. Past attendees have reported - ‣ Hiring new teammates ‣ Raising capital from new connections ‣ Growing sales pipelines We've even had co-founders meet at MVS and launch new companies! 📅 AGENDA: Check out the image below - so many great panels and topics. 🗣 SPEAKERS: I'm excited to hear from - ⚡ Tom Davin, the Co-CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company ⚡ Kevin Mandia, the founder of Mandiant (now part of Google Cloud) & Ballistic Ventures ⚡ David Hornik of Lobby Capital ⚡ Jake Wood of Groundswell ⚡ Liza Rodewald of Instant Teams ⚡ Henry Ward of Carta ⚡ Sarah McBride of Bloomberg ⚡ Lior Susan of Eclipse ⚡ Paul Madera of Meritech Capital ▶ Jim Stallings of PS27 Ventures ▶ Paul Kwan of General Catalyst ▶ Timothy Young of Eniac Ventures 🔥 "IRON" Mike Steadman 🥊🏴☠️of IRONBOUND Media cc: Tim Hsia, Carina Cho, K. Holden Lindblom, Helen King ---------------------------------- Let me know if you're planning to join us in the comments below! What panels would you want to see at a startup conference for veterans? Let me know in the comments! Snag a ticket here before we sell out - milvetstartups [dot] com

Executive Summary: The Military Veteran podcast update & our latest episode with Joe Musselman of BVVC 1/ 📈 At The Military Veteran we just released our 54th episode. Our first episode was in October 2022 with George Dutile of the The Brydon Group. The podcast is a bit over a year old. Brendan Aronson & Blake Rodenberger have primarily been responsible for the consistent growth we’ve had with the podcast 👏👏! Here’s an end of year update on our podcast: ⚡ We’ve had over 8,000 podcasts downloaded ⚡ Our most shared podcast was our interview with Bob Pragada, the CEO of Jacobs ⚡ We are a top 10 podcast for 418 fans ⚡ We are the number 1 podcast for 84 fans ⚡ 98% of our listeners joined us this year ⚡ Our top podcast episode downloaded was with Morgan Hitzig of Peregrine 2/ We've interviewed a number of Context VC founders including 🔥 Kris Sandor of Readyly 🔥 Garrett Smith of Reveal Technology 🔥 Sonny Tai of Actuate 🔥 Luke Hutchison of Perfect Venue 🔥 Aaron Kline of Boom & Bucket 3/ We’ve also interviewed nonprofit leaders like 🔦 David Kim of Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation 🔦 Christine Schwartz & Alec Emmert of Service to School 4/ We’ve had two venture capitalists on the podcast: Sherman Williams II of AIN Ventures and in our latest episode we welcomed Joe Musselman, the founder and managing partner of BVVC. In this episode Joe joined us to talk about: ➡ Why investing in national security is good for the world and for business ➡ Which skills veteran founders can learn and leverage to become successful ➡ Why Joe founded the The Honor Foundation ➡ What drew Joe to venture capital after being a non-profit founder The Honor Foundation (THF) is a career transition program for U.S. Special Operations Forces that effectively translates their elite military service to the private sector and helps create the next generation of corporate and community leaders. cc Matt Stevens, the CEO of THF. Bravo Victor Venture Capital's mission is to find, fund, and follow-on with mission-first founders so the United States and our allies win. It does so by investing in companies to reaffirm America's position as the world's leader in software, hardware, and advanced manufacturing technologies. 5/ We are really excited about our upcoming episodes as we have some fantastic upcoming guests such as: 🎧 David Hunt of Crossrope 🎧 Erik Huberman of Hawke Media 🎧 Dave Gerhardt of Exit Five 🎧 Don Faul, the CEO of CrossFit 6/ Please let us know who else we should invite to our podcast! We appreciate our listeners and audience 🙏💯💪!!