What's Wrong with Thought Leadership and How to Fix It

Dan Fogarty: The biggest problem with thought leadership and then this has only become gonna become more of a problem. Is people don't wanna spend time with their ideas, but expect you to spend time with their ideas. Welcome

Jacob Miller: back to the Startup Wisconsin podcast. In today's episode, we're sitting down with Dan Fogerty, a thought leadership strategist who helps founders and executives tell their stories more authentically on LinkedIn.

Dan's got a fascinating background. He started in journalism at places like USA Today and the Boston Globe, but a boxing related concussion led him to leave media and build his own business around content strategy. What makes Dan's approach different is how he brings a journalistic rigor to thought leadership.

He's not about doing generic LinkedIn posts. Instead, he helps people find what's happening in the room, the insights that only come from being deeply embedded in your industry, and the meetings that you have every single day. We talk about what's broken with thought leadership, his process for helping clients discover what's worth talking about.

And his perspective as a recent transplant to Madison, Wisconsin. Plus we'll get into his new AI tool talk box and his thoughts on what founders should be doing more of to tell Wisconsin's innovation story. And we're all about that. So let's jump into my conversation with

Dan Fogarty: Dan Fogarty. So I started in journalism.

I worked for some pretty big companies. When I first started, I worked for a blog in New York City that was very small. And so I got exposed to the internet. The financial crisis had just happened. It was 2009. The jobs outlook was in the gutter. I had just graduated college and the only job I could get was writing for a blog.

I actually went to school for marketing. I had, uh, minored in English. I'd always wanted to be a creative writer, and there wasn't any marketing jobs. And so I was just kind of like messing around writing about the Knicks living in New York City. And this blog kind of tapped me and said, do you wanna write about sports?

And I said, hell yes. And then didn't get paid for like the first six months I was in that job. But. It exposed me to the internet. It exposed me to writing a headline, to, uh, writing content, to capturing a moment, social media analytics, um, marketing the site, going to events. I did some TV hits. I was on the Gym Rome Show on CBS Sports Network.

I flew to la exposed me to all these different things, um, through that kind of first job where I like was getting paid nothing, but I got this just internet, ground level, floor seats kind of view of things. And then I got poached by USA today, USA today, like a lot of media companies. And, you know, around kind of that like 2010, 2011 period, they're trying to figure out the internet, right?

So they have these, they have this print product. They know they have to adapt. And so they kind of look around the room and they say, who's the youngest person we could hire that we could bring in to, like, tell us about the internet? But like, I knew just as much as them. Yeah. Like I knew some stuff, but like I was just coming in, I'm like, sure.

That was my entryway into like a large journalistic outfit, right? Like I didn't go to journalism school. I'd had, I kind of found my way into it. And then once I was there, I was around people who really knew this stuff, right? Like, who knew how to tell a story? Um, who knew how, how to build out these journalistic products.

Um, I was at USA today for a while. I got then got poached by Boston Globe Media. Now I'm in like a real newsroom for boston.com around, you know, writers and reporters who are breaking news, who are doing lifestyle restaurants. But yeah, there might be like, you know, uh, some real important city journalism.

There might be like an accident. There might be something that really matters. So I'm watching people. Report on deadline and having to tell these stories, but we're workshopping headlines where, you know, I'm helping them decide what stories to tell. So all of that kind of shaped my view of how to tell stories on the internet that you have to stick to the truth that was just ground into me.

Yeah. Um, that, that used to be a bigger deal. Now, I hope is still a big deal, but yeah, it's a big deal. Yes. I still believe it's a big deal, but also how to package that. And when I say packaging, we'll get into this a little later, later, but basically have to make sure that the story is optimized enough so that a busy person will stop and pay attention to it, but not oversold to the point that like, you're killing your credibility.

Hmm. So we're coming from an era of like content farms where I don't know if like you remember all like outbound, uh. Outbrain was like this company that would have like, you know, content kind of on the side of whatever web webpage you clicked on. And a lot of this stuff has been cleaned up, but there's still like those like seedy corners of the internet where you get, you know, tricked into clicking on a headline and now you're in like, you know, a slideshow of, uh, 50 worst ways to die and you're getting sold, like, you know, yeah.

You know, erectile dysfunction pills and there's all this like, weird stuff happening and like, how did I get into this weird corner of the internet? And so, you know, Buzzfeed obviously was popular at that point. Yeah. They had a massive valuation. Um, they had like a ton of money being invested in the company.

They had kind of gamed the way that you told stories on social. I think as that company progressed, they learned how to ride that line better, of not over promising, but they really, it was like the companies, like the New York Times we're looking at these upstarts and saying, well. We know we need some of that, but if we go too far in that direction, we lose what our core brand is.

Yeah. And what our core business is. And so that's kind of the outlook I have on content, which is you need to package it so that people that are meant to see it will see it. You can't just throw walls of text at people and expect them to like decipher your, you know, crazy unabomber scribblings. But also you can't go so far away from what it is you're actually talking about.

Right. Like, you have to, you, you can't over promise. You have to deliver on whatever that headline or hook or whatever you wanna say is. Um, so I spent time there and 2016 I actually, I got a concussion. I was boxing at the time. Oh. Just as a hobbyist. I was, you know, really into boxing. Got a concussion, was like so messed up from it that I couldn't do my job anymore.

I couldn't. Uh, I was an editor at a busy news desk, so I would have reporters coming up to me. I would have Slack messages. I would have this thing on deadline, this thing on deadline. I'd have to go into a strategy session with the Boston Globe people to talk about our, you know, subscription, uh, strategy and distribution model and audience building.

And so all these things are kind of crashing in on me and my brain could not process all of it at once. Yeah. Because of the injury. So I left, I had to, 'cause I couldn't do the job anymore, and I figured it would be a matter of time before they fired me anyway.

Jacob Miller: Hmm.

Dan Fogarty: So I, I was kind of at this crossroads of my life.

I had always wanted to write a novel. I had a little bit of money saved up. I said, okay, let me take my shot. I end up writing a novel about an MMA fighter with brain injuries and all this other kind of stuff thrown into it. The novel years later gets published, but at the time. My savings, were running it.

Mm. You're not just, nobody's just gonna pay you to write a novel unless you're, you know, Jonathan Franzen and you've already done, or you're, you know, George R. Martin or you've done stuff already and they're waiting for the next one. You, there's no money there. So, yeah, I had to make money long-winded way of saying how I got into this.

What I do is I'm still living in Boston. I'm like, okay, how can I make money from my core set of skills? Well, I know that there's a lot of businesses out there that are trying to figure out social media, but they're also trying to figure out storytelling. Thought leadership wasn't like as much of a thing back then.

It wasn't this like generic term that gets, that everybody knows, but it's kind of just been beaten to death at this point. But people didn't know what content marketing or any of that stuff really was. But I would essentially go to businesses. I was going to like mom and pop catering companies. I was also emailing tech founders and AI guys from like MIT, like, Hey, do you need help writing your blog?

Do you need help doing this? Do you need help with your LinkedIn? Do you need help with your website copy? And so that's where it started and I started getting these little rinky dink jobs and just kind of like 200 bucks, 300 bucks, 300 bucks, 200 bucks, 400 bucks. Like just building, try to slowly to build that business.

Any kind of writing or any kind of content or social media or video that you needed for your business? How could I fit into that?

Jacob Miller: Hmm.

Dan Fogarty: So it's a certain amount of education that happened, a certain amount of selling, but it actually like allowed me to sit with some of these ideas and start to, you know, try to evolve them at that time.

When I'm doing this, there is no ai, there's no even really AI transcription. I don't even think Otter existed at that point. And if it did, I didn't even know about it. So I'm literally talking on the phone or on Zoom with these guys. It was mostly guys 'cause it's like tech dudes or rich guys. And I'm talking to them and I am listening to the conversation, I am recording it.

But then I would have to go and spend three hours with the recording to kind of pour over, okay, this was said, this was said, and now I'm connecting the dots and I'm creating something. So it, there was no shortcut. I, it forced me to build that muscle memory mm-hmm. To build those neural connections with picking that stuff out.

And now I've gotten good enough at it that I can kind of run that software in my head as you're talking. Sure. Like with my clients, I can kind of run that program, but do it in a way that allows you to get there. You don't wanna short circuit it. I don't wanna come in and I'm sure I'll have some recommendations for content and how to do it in best practices, but I don't wanna like be so prescriptive that I'm not gonna let people not get to the, get to the idea themselves.

Because people have different ways of communicating. Yeah. So that's basically what turned into this business. It starts picking up steam around 2020. Pandemic hits. I'm like, I had had another full-time job as I was doing this on the side. The novel gets published around 2022, but around 2020, I'm like, okay, maybe I go all in on this.

Maybe this is like the business I built. Maybe it's not just quite like a freelance side gig and now I'm doing this job, this job let me go all in. And I think because of the pandemic and people being at home, they start to understand, wait a minute, LinkedIn is a source of information, right? Like thought leadership is a way that I can meet people, quote unquote, that are running these businesses and understand how they think.

And it's not some corporate jargon or some brochure or some like marketing speak that got thrown together by five people on a call in New York. This is actually, I'm hearing from the people that are building the thing or selling the thing or out in front of the thing or researching the thing. Um, and that's how you get to know people, right?

Like just from this conversation, there's gonna be people that listen to me that are gonna be turned off. There's gonna be other people that are gonna be like, okay, some of what he said was smart and he seems kind of cool. Maybe at some point if I need something, I, I would want to talk to him about that.

That's kind of it. It's like a conversation you have with people and that's what led me to here.

Jacob Miller: Was there like a specific moment where like you were like, this really makes sense, I'm gonna go all in on this direction?

Dan Fogarty: I had always wanted, I'd worked in corporate, like I was in like journalism and working at these, you know, prestigious publications, but the jobs kind of saddled the line between like helping with the journalistic enterprise and a kind of a corporate junior executive type of thing where it's a lot of strategy meetings.

Yeah. And a lot of like getting buy-in and a lot of red tape. And I was interested in how businesses were run. Yeah, but I wanted exposure to other rooms. I wanted to like talk to other people or consult or do something where I had exposure to other businesses. I had all these things I wanted to be when I was 27, 28 years old.

Yeah. And I just, I wanted exposure to those things. How could I do all of it? And what it started to click for me personally was when I started to talk to people who were from diverse forms of business or who had different types of ideas or different sectors. And I was learning about AI when it was kind of this novel thing kind of floating around and I was learning about, I don't know, HR tech or you know, how to run a business and how to build a startup.

Because I'm talking to these people as they're doing it on the ground floor. I'm talking to these VCs about what they're seeing in the marketplace. That became tremendously in interesting for me personally, it sort of became like a mini MBA Yeah. Where I'm getting exposure to all of these types of businesses and, and all of these different thinkers.

That was exciting. I think though, the, the turning point when I realized this is a business really is probably COVID. Okay. Because people were at home and they're, they spend more time on LinkedIn, they're spending more time on every social media network, but they're kind of getting that like, professional fixed, you could call it water cooler, you could call it Yeah.

Trade talk panels, that kind of professional connectivity. And I do think people wanna learn about industries and learn about their jobs and learn about what's going on. Yeah. That, that newsfeed started to become a place of congregation where people weren't just sharing what was happening during COVID and.

It became a source of news and people really started to, because the engagement was high and it was still kind of the Wild West with link with LinkedIn at that point, even with the other social media sites, there was still a degree of like, well, if you don't have 50 million followers, this isn't really gonna reach anybody.

Right? Like LinkedIn was still kind of the wild West at that point. And so people would get tremendous amounts of engagement, whether it was sharing something personal or professional on the platform. And people started to see, okay, well there's, there's a way to do this where I can authentically talk about what I am building.

And I don't think that means you go full Facebook and you turn it into a confessional. I think it means these are my ideas, these are the ideas that kick around in my head when I'm sitting in that corporate meeting or when I'm running this company, or when I'm out walking the dog. And I'm thinking about how this industry is shaped and how it operates and what it's gonna look like in three to six months.

Those aren't sales tactics. That's just a window into your brain. And if you can find that, if you can find that lane and you find that place in the Venn diagram between what you care about, talking about what other people want to ingest and in what has to do with your company or enterprise, and you operate in the middle of that, that's powerful.

And that's, that's where I try to get to with my clients. And that's what I recommend to anybody who's trying to do this stuff. You, you want to kind of become your own publication. You wanna become your own journalistic enterprise. Are you an Axios? Are you a Buzzfeed? Are you a New York Times? Are you an an economist?

What? Wall Street Journal? What are you, I I And, and there's no knock on any of those, right? Mm-hmm. It's just what is, what are your values and principles? So I think when people started to see, okay, yeah, you've got like the engagement driven kind of schlocky stuff that's like designed as clickbait again, go back.

Roll the clock back to 2008, 2009. That stuff existed then. Mm-hmm. All of this is the same movie over again, by the way. Yeah. All of this is from before you were you or I were even an idea to be born. Okay. Go back to like tabloid newspapers. Yeah, go back to like that stuff's always been there. Riding the line between going too far in that direction, but also knowing that you have to make it engaging.

'cause people are busy 'cause they're coming from work and they're gonna see the headline on your newspaper at the newsstand, but you have to determine what that line is between good taste and then stepping over the line and hurting your own credibility. Yeah. So people started seeing this and the numbers were insane and, and that's people needed time to see it and they were at home and they had no choice but to see it.

And they saw that it was leading to conversations that these weren't vanity projects. This is what personal branding, which we'll talk about, but it was like a term that I hate and I'll tell you why I hate it, but. This is, this is, this is a sharing of your ideas. Like there's a reason that people want to be invited to the World Economic Forum.

Mm-hmm. Because you're being, you're being validated for to, to some degree for your thoughts on what is shaping your industry in the world. That's cool. That's not just you posting a selfie and like, on my way to work, got my star bes like da da da da. Like, okay. That's cool. Lifestyle content is absolutely part of the picture for some people, and there's stuff that I do around that, but when you can clearly be seen for your ideas, that makes you trustworthy, that makes people wanna do business with you.

Yeah. Even if you already work for a brand that's already terrific. Okay. Even if you already work for a, whatever, name, any brand, uh, Nike, they've taken a bit of a hit over the years, but that's a consumer brand, but any B2B brand name. monday.com. recovery.com. Locally. These are, these are great brands. And also I want to know what's the chief growth officer Think about this over the next three to six months.

'cause that's who I'll probably be working with, right? Mm-hmm. Or their head of enterprise, or I wanna know what their founder thinks. I wanna, I wanna know what Ben thinks. I want to know what, what does it, what does it look like for this company over the next, however amount of months? What are they seeing in the industry?

What tactics can they share? 'cause they're in it every day and that's valuable information. So people started to get it and that's when I said, not only is this something I want to do because of the mini MBA aspect, but there is a actual business here. So let's talk about thought leadership. Yeah,

Jacob Miller: let's talk what?

Dan Fogarty: Let's

Jacob Miller: get into it, man. Everyone has this idea of what it is. It's a term that's been floated around for quite a while. Um. But from your perspective, like, you know, what is broken or boring about it and what are people getting wrong?

Dan Fogarty: There's a few things. There's a few common mistakes that people make with thought leadership.

One is that they, they just sell, they think that thought leadership is like tricking you into telling you about their company or product. Like a bad webinar, like a timeshare. Like a timeshare. You know, I'm gonna invite you into this post, but you ain't leaving until you say yes to the time. Like, no, people don't want that.

They don't wanna be sold to in that way. Uh, another issue is people don't know what to talk about. They don't know how to connect the ideas that kind of swim around in their head when they're out for a walk or they're in the boardroom to like, what is happening in the room and in the industry in real time.

Or connect it to current events or connected to an outlook or provide. To basically treat themselves as a journalistic publication, which sounds haughty and it sounds hard. Um, but that's really my job. My job is to kind of come in and just take what you say, ask you the right questions that a journalist would ask you, and distill from that and crystallize that.

What are the things that are actually of value that an audience wants, right? And, and also has to do with your business. But yeah, those are, those are two of the big ones. There was a third one. The biggest problem with thought leadership, and then this has only become gonna become more of a problem, is people don't wanna spend time with their ideas, but expect you to spend time with their ideas.

So, let me say that again. They don't wanna spend any time with these ideas. They don't want, they don't want to spend time with the discomfort of forming an idea, which sometimes can be uncomfortable. They want to just put it out. But they want you to stop, stop the scroll, click more, watch the video, read the 10 lines of text or the 30 lines of text, and then give you the trust, give you their time.

I spent eight years writing a novel that most people finish in about two weeks. I designed it that way to be a thriller. It's gotta move fast, but mm-hmm. I spent eight years for you to spend two weeks with me. That's the bargain. Now, I'm not saying if you're running a company that you have to be James Baldwin or Ernest Hemingway, or Tom Walt, right?

Or Sally Rooney or whoever. You don't have to pour over every idea and suffer and be neurotic. There's a, there's a time when you can get too precious with your ideas. What I am saying is you have to spend enough time with it so that you kind of follow it and you find it right. Like, it, it, it might come to fully formed.

It might just be a voice note. That you record and boom, that's kind of it. And it's just so in there 'cause of your muscle memory and it's like really novel to other people who are outside your bubble. That's valuable. But in general, if you are just using chat GPT, if you are just using Claude and you're trying to do this perfectly packaged post every single time that is following the same sentence structures as everybody else, it's got the same kind of words in there.

It's got the telltale signs and people are seeing it. And worse yet, you haven't spent, you've spent less time with it than you expect other people. That's like me trying to make a cake that I spend five minutes on and it's outta the oven and it's still Glock, it hasn't even baked. And I say, eat it. Yeah.

And you're like, I, I, no. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. It's thought leadership, it's valuable. Eat it. And you're like, I, no, I, I, there's other cake I could buy. I don't understand. Why are you offering me this Glock? And that's the problem. That's the biggest problem and it's only gonna become more of a problem.

Jacob Miller: So how do you help, like a founder, for example, find out like what's worth talking about?

Dan Fogarty: That's a great question. So there are certain, uh, things I'm gonna give you the process that I go through with clients and then there are like some other kind of buckets that generally, not all the time, but generally can work.

Hmm. Some other kind of tips, tricks, whatever you wanna call it. Sure. So I'll just talk about kind of the generalized tips and tricks. First, look at your Google calendar over the past three weeks. Just open it up. Look at the meetings you had, the conversations you had. Was there anything interesting there?

Take time with it. Be intentional because were you talking to investors? Did you do a pitch? Were you talking to potential customers? Did you have a team call about the product? What was in there? You probably have call transcripts. There's probably stuff in there that you can pick out from there. Now, whenever you do this, whenever you use content from this, you always wanna make sure that.

If it's a call transcript that the people you were talking to know that it was being recorded, right? You wanna kind of focus on what you said, but just as a thought exercise to kind of spark an idea what interesting things happen, what makes an investor lean in when you pitch, what makes a customer actually kind of light up when you talk about the product?

Because a lot of founders have trouble just even talking about what they do. Mm-hmm. So you're kind of out in the world ab testing the messaging already. Now you kind of, you kind of know. Okay. So that's kind of step one. Um, another thing is just read journalism about your industry. Okay. Read, uh, I don't care if it's wired, I don't care if it's a niche substack about HR, tech, I don't care.

Whatever it is that you like. Could be Scott Galloway. Could be something much smaller and concentrated. Think about it. Listen to podcasts and just content of rounded. And that will start to spark idea. You will have ideas. Mm-hmm. From their ideas. Okay. Like you will start to see, oh, okay, wait, well Gallo was just talking about this thing happening in the market.

Well actually, like that reminds me of this thing. So that's a great way, I like keeping a notebook idea capture or just emailing yourself like, yeah, yeah. Just things that pop in your head. They don't have to be fully formed. I did this when I was writing the novel. I was just like, guy green shirt, subway looks unhappy.

That would bring up something for me. Mm-hmm. When I went back later and looked at it, maybe it was a scene, maybe it was a character, maybe it was a piece of dialogue, maybe it was nothing and I threw it away. Hmm. But I'm capturing some of those ideas. Okay. Yeah. Another thing is, if you listen to podcasts like the Daily, the Daily had, uh, a round table of business journalists.

These are the tippy top journalists, New York Times business journalists. They're talking about the tariffs. When the tariffs are first starting to hit and they talk about it now. These are journalists, they're like, buy the book journalists. So you can't necessarily say to them, Hey, what's gonna happen?

What's Trump gonna do? What's gonna happen tomorrow? Because they're gonna tell you, I don't know, and it would be irresponsible of me to tell you, but, and a lot of executives, particularly at larger companies, fall into that boat, right? Mm-hmm. But what you can do is you can give an outlook for three to six months, and you can couch it.

You can say, this is scenario A, this is scenario B. This is best case, this is medium case, this is worst case. You can couch it, but you can do it with a degree of expertise and knowing what you're talking about. By just by doing that, you are showing, not telling, you are showing them, I know what I'm talking about.

You're not saying, look, I know about supply chain. Okay? I know about su. If anybody knows about supply, if anybody knows about supply chain, it's a, I don't know what that impression was, where did that come from? But it it, you're not just saying. I know this thing. You, you, you're showing that you are in the room.

You're showing that you know about, you're showing that you've thought about. Right? Okay. So those are kinda like boilerplate things you can try to do. I would also like just walk outside and record a voice note and start talking. I think that's valuable. Um, it's gonna feel super weird. Mm-hmm. Super weird.

I think you should do it while you're walking. So you don't have to feel the existential dread of standing in a room talking by yourself. That's, you know, this is pacing in circles, pacing in circles. This isn't taxi driver. Okay? Get outta the house. Walk around the block. Okay? Um, but you do that, that starts getting things going.

You're gonna come outta meetings. You're gonna be like, oh, that, that's, that's something. There's something where I just had an interaction. People are social. Through these collisions of ideas and concepts, you're gonna have things kind of organically happen. Now, how do I do it formally with a client? I sit down with them.

We have an hour long kickoff. And what I do in the kickoff is I say, okay, what are your business goals for the next three to six months? What does it look like? Tell me about this quarter. Tell me about next year. Irrespective of marketing. Doesn't have to do anything with marketing or content. I don't want to hear how many followers you want or engagement, which is a whole nother conversation.

I want to know the business. What are you willing to tell me? Tell me what I don't know about this business and what you want to have happen in this business. So have an honest conversation with yourself. Maybe that's leads, maybe that's raising a Series A, maybe that's landing some kind of enterprise client.

Maybe that's, uh, making a, a big splash with a hire or rolling out a product. I don't know. But be honest with yourself about the business. Okay, now this thing is happening. We've established these three things, these home runs that you want to hit. Okay, this hire you wanna make, or this funding you wanna get or whatever.

Who are the audiences for these different objectives? Mm-hmm. Okay. It might be coastal vc. It might be private equity firms, it might be, uh, other tech leaders that you wanna poach. It might be customers that you want. It might be, you know, enterprise clients that you want to hear your message. Who are these people?

It's gonna flow naturally from that first question. Get specific if you can. You know, you don't have to do a full persona exercise, but like, who are these people? You, you know who they are 'cause you've been in the room with them probably like, maybe you've had no contact with them and you've only got some idea.

But usually you've like sort of started to pitch to these people already so you know them, you know their pain points, you know what they care about. Let's have a conversation about that. Then it makes ideating content a lot easier. 'cause you know who you're talking to. That's really the central question you always have to come back to is who are you talking to.

Mm-hmm. Then it becomes, this is where like I kind of come in and I get you talking about things that we know that this audience cares about. But we're not talking about like how great your product is or why they should invest in you or whatever. That's like, it's too on the nose and people don't wanna be sold to, and it starts to feel like a brochure.

But if you say that you are an expert in manufacturing, or you're an expert in staffing in this region, okay, you're an expert in staffing. Let's talk about the jobs report just came out last week. What do you see in the numbers? Okay. What, what are you hearing on the ground from, oh, you, you hire, uh, chiefs of marketing at, um, you know, high growth startups.

That's what your staffing agency focuses on. Or you focus on like manufacturing companies in the Midwest and you're hiring for this role, this role. What are the common misconceptions that these companies don't get right when they're trying to hire? What is the playbook for trying to get to this eventuality that you help customers get to?

And then people's eyes kinda light up 'cause they realize, oh, wait a second. I'm in the room. I see this stuff every day. I see stuff. That other people don't see. And that is what you have to get to what is happening in the room. I, I talk about this all the time. It's a concept that I just, people are tired of hearing about it, but it, it's, what is central to getting this right is what is happening in the room.

And that's what a journalist does. A journalist takes people into rooms that they otherwise do not have access to. Whether you're talking about NBA trades like Luca Duch to the Lakers, or you're talking about trade negotiations with China, or you're talking about, you know, deep seek coming out and like the, the uproar in Silicon Valley, what it means for ai and are we gonna still be buying this kind of chip?

Like that's what good journalists go to the source and they find people who are in the room. Hmm, well you are in the room, so let's talk about what you are in the room for. Because if you've got something good that's, people are gonna want to like be in that room with you and that's. It's almost like, it's like a playbook, a mini case study, but it's also an exposure to your brain and how you think about this and how you communicate.

Mm-hmm. That's the best thing you could ask for that is gold, because now the person that's gonna buy from you sees how you think, sees how you operate, or the, the VC who's gonna invest in you, or the person who's thinking about, oh, uh, I might work at this company, or, or whatever. They're seeing you and you're just saying who you are, and they're saying what you think and you say, you're saying what you see, and that's all it is.

It's a relay of that.

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If you don't think we're working out within the first 45 days, ready to see how we can help you and your team, just head over to headway.io and book a free consultation today. When a founder's like, okay, them as an individual posting through their profile on LinkedIn, like that kind of is like establishing this, you know.

Quote unquote personal brand that the internet has kind of like labeled, but then there's the company brand. Yeah. So how do you help them kinda like bridge the gaps or just understand the differences there? Yeah, yeah.

Dan Fogarty: I would say that, think about it, how it is in real life. Yeah. Okay. Um, Ben from a recovery.com is a really good example.

Okay. Like when you see Ben talk about the company, something happens, like when you're in the room with him and he is talking about his team, he's talking about the mission, he is talking about the product, and he's talking about the industry and kind of some of the problems with the industry. Something happens.

It's like, it's like a different bend from the bend that you're just like, oh, this is a cool guy. We're just talking whatever. And then something happens. Something probably happens with you in relation to that brand. Like when you talk about it, there's something that is in there that you are intellectually stimulated by passionate about, that intersects with who you are as a person.

Right. That's kind of what we're looking for. And there's also ICP considerations, right? So if you're the chief growth officer or you're selling into enterprise, like that's a big part of it, right? Mm-hmm. Like we're gonna talk about enterprise problems in the industry and pain points, right? And, and, and, and factors that you have to bring in if you are a large scale, whatever, right?

That's what we're gonna hone in on. So it's who you are in relation to the thing, but it's also like, who, who, who are you talking to? Because some founders are very technology driven. Some founders are really good salespeople, some founders are an extension of the brand, the brand is them. Mm-hmm. And so it's, it's, it's easy, but I think it's kind of, it goes back to that Venn diagram thing.

Like, I don't think people want to hear from companies that, that, I wanna be careful here because company pages on LinkedIn or brands themselves still have. A place, they're kind of still the facilitator. It's like inside the NBA is a brand, but it works so well because of Charles Barkley, Shaq, Ernie Johnson, and Kenny Smith.

That, that the guys that, that, that lend this thing, knowledge, expertise, and personality, they're the humans behind it. So how can we tell that story? How can we tell your story? Where it kind of runs in conjunction with the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But again, it's like, I hate the term personal brand because that makes it feel like a vanity project.

I think screw personal brand. Don't think about personal brand. What are your values? Hmm. What do you care about? Yeah. Why did you start this thing? Mm-hmm. Or why do you work here? Or why do you care about this work? Yeah. Or what stimulates you about it intellectually? Like come back to that. Come back to the inner calculus that occurs.

Do not think about branding. You are not a branding exercise. You're a person.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think there's a lot of, uh, conversations around, uh, people finding their identity and what they do and not who they are. And so like, I think there's a lot of like, just opportunity, like obviously you can talk about skillset and things like that, but there's something to be said about when people just start bringing themselves through in their writing, like their actual like feelings about stuff and how like they just, again, it's like that personal perception versus just like me as a CTO versus me as me.

Yeah. Like I, this is how I really feel about this stuff that's happening versus like objectively this, but subjectively that,

Dan Fogarty: how would you talk about your business or your industry or your thing or your job? Over cocktails? Yeah. Or if you don't drink, how would you talk about it At a baseball game or over coffee or you're taking a walk, you may not want to share all that on the internet.

True. In fact, I would recommend not sharing all that on the internet, but there's a certain. You start to see the person in relation to the thing.

Jacob Miller: Hmm.

Dan Fogarty: It starts to come through. Yeah. So your content should be an extension of that. Again, like not, you're not just like throwing stuff out there. You're not sharing state secrets.

It's more the way you communicate and you, you get it out of your head that you're all of a sudden doing like a marketing thing. Like if you start thinking about it as like a marketing thing, it could start to get jargony, it could start to get awkward. It could start to just like not feel right. Yeah.

But when you're just talking about your job with peers or a friend and you're not, like, there's not a camera on you and you're not like sitting down like, I have to do a thought leadership now. Like mm-hmm. What is that? And, and I think that comes out through conversations. I think that comes out when another person is talking to you and asking you questions with real, genuine curiosity.

And that your streams of consciousness, the ways that you speak your linguistic fingerprint, the way the words you use, your modes of communicating. Mm-hmm. And like your actual passion or intellectual stimulus from talking about the thing comes out. If you can capture that, which is the whole crux of my business, that is kind of what you're looking, that's, that's the personal side of it.

It doesn't mean you go full Facebook and you turn into a confessional and it's all per, it's just like that can be too much. That can be too intimate. That can almost feel transactional by way of intimacy. You don't want that. This isn't about manipulation. This is about really actually talking about the thing Conversationally.

Conversationally doesn't mean dumbed down by the way, conversationally means comes out of you. Right. It's real. Um, how can you do that in an intellectually sound way, in a professional way, but kind of toe that line.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Yeah. It, it just makes me think about, 'cause you, uh, you were sharing, uh, it is, maybe it's been a little while since, since you first shared it, but speaking of conversations, the AI tool that you're kind of working on with some of your clients and that you're building, um, is exactly leveraging, like that kind of like approach, like, okay, we're gonna have a conversation and this tool's gonna help us figure out like what stories or what angles can we pull out of this conversation?

Like what, where's your story within all this stuff? Or what, what can you produce, uh, for content in this quarter from all this conversation? Do you wanna like maybe share like how you approach that or like how the idea came to be?

Dan Fogarty: I'm kind of curious. Well, like most people, when AI first came out, I said, how can I get rich?

How can I not have to work anymore? How can I make this machine do everything I do? So the idea started from that extremely selfish idea, um, that line of thought and. I just moved to Madison. I was in the Level Set program at Starting Block, and I was like, okay, I think the thing I wanna build is just an extension of me.

It's ai, but can I use all of the journalistic expertise I have, the way that I ask questions, the kind of the, the formats. I have, the kind of kickoff format, and then I kind of segue into this and I've got this module and I, I, I have this process. How can I put that into an ai? 'cause then I wanna scale my business, right?

Mm-hmm. And I think what I learned in my customer research, talking to clients, talking to people in the field, talking to people I've never worked with before, is that you could build the best content tool on the planet, best marketing tool on the planet. And there is an audience for it if they're just using it one-to-one.

But most people want an expert in the loop. They want an editor in chief of their news. Hmm. So if the AI is doing the busy work, like it's taking what we talk about and it's turning that into a post, you still want that editor in chief to be working with you to say, well, I would take out this part. I would take out this part, I would reframe this part.

Jacob Miller: Mm-hmm.

Dan Fogarty: So it's called Talkbox. Talkbox is a tool where I'm talking to you. We're in a, we're in a Google Meet, talk box is running. We press record. It records. I just have a conversation with you. I ask you questions. I go through my whole process. I ask you questions a journalist would ask you, and then talk box, because we've programmed it with prompts.

All my prompts built up over the years. In the backend, it generates a draft of a LinkedIn post, a Substack article, any piece of written content you want, even business books start to experiment with that. And it should be 95% of the way there. Hmm. Sometimes it's a hundred percent of the way there. But you still want somebody with you to A, get those streams of consciousness out of you, but B, to kind of like walk you through it and tell you like, no, this is good.

Or I think we should flesh this out a little more. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Kind of be your content strategist on the backend, kind of be your journalist on the backend. Now, I think there's gonna be tools that, in fact, there are some tools out there that you can use on a one-to-one level that you just talk to and it asks that AI asks you questions.

There's a conversational element and you use it. I think that's great for a lot of people, for a lot of solo founders, for people that kind of understand content already. Yeah. That's a great tool. I think there is a large swath of people for whom they still want humans in the loop. Mm-hmm. And I think in general with ai, that's gonna be the case.

You're gonna have an addressable market that is cool with just using this. Health tech feature this content, feature, this marketing thing, this coding thing. Yeah. By themselves. 'cause they either have some institutional knowledge or they're comfortable with just doing it. Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of people out there and they have taste.

And they have taste, or they have, and I think even it's, I think even the people that need, want a person there have taste, but they may not have the institutional knowledge or like they, they're probably gonna want a therapist working with them on the AI tool. They're gonna want somebody who understands development and coding to like be pulling the levers and knowing what buttons to press.

And I think with AI in general, there's, that's gonna be a pretty big market. Mm-hmm. And so that really is how I approach this thing. Yeah. You know, and building out talk box. I think when you're talking about software, obviously the product itself is gonna matter a ton. It's number one. But so is data, so is kind of the lead you've built already, but so also is relationships.

Mm-hmm. Relationships matter, face-to-face, relationships matter. The feeling you get by talking to another human being matters. How can we maximize that and maximize the expertise that people have while also maximizing the ai, doing the busy work so Dan doesn't have to go home and like listen to the recording and like pull out the threads.

Yeah, yeah. Pre, pre auter, pre transcript. Right. That's, that's, those are the products I'm excited about.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually kinda curious just because your background's in writing, like, how do you feel about this? Like, I mean, obviously the, it's nice when the, you don't have to do the busy work, but do you feel like I'll never let AI replace like me doing writing as a

Dan Fogarty: practice?

Right? Yeah, there are, there are certain things that are off limits. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well. I kicked around the idea of, well, if I wrote another novel, would I use AI in any capacity? I have some feelings about this. Um, I think for one, certain things are untouchable, not because there's a necessarily a boundary, but because the machines can't get to it yet.

And I think if you go back and you read James Baldwin, who is pound for pound, I think the best writer that's ever lived, and you look at the way that he communicates and that he writes, some of it is style and technique. A lot of it is things that he felt in his body and things that he witnessed and ideas that formulated around those feelings.

That really, because he was a one of one mind could have only ever been expressed by James Baldwin.

Jacob Miller: Hmm.

Dan Fogarty: That is what makes really, really great. I hate even using the word content, like Yeah. Within James, you know, around James Baldwin's work. Any kind of like great movie or, uh, even a great newspaper article has a sense of time and place and feeling.

Mm-hmm. Um, you could read some kind of, even going back to the NBA trade, uh, example, like you could read an ESBN article about the Lakers GM and the Maverick's GM kind of cooking up this trade and it starts like in a coffee shop in Dallas. And that's a sense of place and like the feelings mm-hmm. And the anxieties and the, the things around this.

But going back to James Baldwin, like that is a one of one thing that even if you tried, you couldn't reproduce. You could have an AI try to write a James Baldwin novel, but that inner uncanny valley as a human, you're gonna feel it, you're gonna, you're gonna be repulsed by the fact that it's like video game graphics from like 1998 on Sega cd, where it's like photo realistic, but you're like, I don't like this.

Something about this is weird. That's what turns on in you when you see a piece of content that you know is ai. Yeah. Um, at the same time, I do think there are gonna be works of art Star Wars movies, but even like, um, the Brutalist was an Academy Award-winning, uh, prestige movie that had AI generated buildings in the background because it just would've cost way too much to have that detail otherwise.

So I think there will be high level artists that use AI to do some of the busy work because they understand those processes of like maybe research or details, or, I have a setting in upstate New York, let me quickly research all of the types of trees that exist in upstate New York. So as I'm writing backdrop writing, you know, backdrop copy around this, like kind of setting the scene of the scene, I know that it is accurate or let me run my work through the AI to make sure that.

You know, all of the, that the seasons line up and that when I said a scene was set during the day, I didn't say that later on it was at night, or that this character had red hair and later on had black hair. There's like a certain amount of, again, it's like having research assistants and copy editors.

How can you use it in that way? Yeah. Now, I don't know. We, we, we might get to a place where there is some content that has a special stamp. There might be movies produced in Hollywood that there might be a committee that awards a certain kind of stamp, uh, to movies that are a hundred percent organic.

Yeah. Yeah. Just those same way we have organic food. Mm-hmm. There are certain novels, movies, high level art that is a hundred percent organic and gets that stamp if you use, if you're the brutalist and you used AI to do some of that, those buildings in the background, tough luck. Sorry. I know Adrian Brody's in the movie, but no, it doesn't get the stamp.

Yeah. So I think there's that aspect. I also am interested to see in how more IRL stuff, culture. People might start to come back to that. There might, you might see a resurgence in local theater. Yeah. You might see a resurgence. There's already a resurgence in comedy. But these are experiences that you, that you have to, that yeah.

You could see in a TikTok clip, but like, when you're in the room, it's different.

Jacob Miller: I'm kind of curious how you think about just being in Madison. 'cause you lived on the east coast and then you came over here, uh, to Madison, uh, I'm assuming because of your partner. Mm-hmm. Um, so I'm just kinda curious what your experience has been so far in like the Madison startup community.

I love

Dan Fogarty: it. I love this place. I, uh, my wife decided to go back to school for her master's in social work. Um, she's from the area, she's from Stoughton. I'd visited a couple times. The first time she ever took me to Madison, it was in February. She took me to a GameStop, um, in a strip mall. And, uh, I said Never again.

Don't ever take me back here. Uh, I was like, this is like a bad part of New Jersey. I don't, I can get this at home. Do you need any water? No, I'm okay. Okay. Just brings back memories. So, um, but once we made the decision to move here, I, I knew I wanted to try 'cause I had spent time in Boston. I'm born and raised in New York.

I love New York. I don't think there's a higher concentration of human talent in the world. I think if you're in your twenties and you're trying to be an actor or you're trying to be a writer, or you're trying to be a business person or a, a start a fashion brand or go into finance, there's just no better place to be.

And you just like, it exposes you to so many different things professionally and personally and romantically that you just, there's no other tonic like that in the world. If you can afford to live there. Yeah. If you can, if you can make it happen. If like, it's just getting increasingly hard to live there.

And I think a lot of people, me, my friends included, it be started to just become like a survive thing. Mm-hmm. Like you're not going to a Broadway show every night. You're not going to the best new restaurants. You're kind of just like trying to just live there and stay there. And I think with my injury, I'd had a brain injury in 2016.

It was so stimulating and it wasn't necessarily healthy for me. So when she said, Hey, I'm thinking, you know, what do you think about Madison? I was like, hell yeah. There's lakes, there's trees, there's still a startup community, there's still good restaurants. I can bike a lot of places. Uh, we can go hiking, we can just go walk our dog.

The dog parks here, the size of state parks. It's, it's, it's incredible. So when I first got here, I was like, this is amazing. Mm-hmm. This is, this is great. And I think, I mean, I talk to a lot of people. That, uh, work here that maybe have some civic tie to the place that are kind of in the Wisconsin ecosystem.

And one thing that I talk about is there's like a, there's like a gap between if you are a student or if you're like settling down and you're in a committed relationship or you're getting ready to, that's kind of the, those are like the sweet spots. And older folks too have a great time here. But like if you're in your twenties, I don't know if I was single in my twenties, I don't know if I would have the same reaction.

But I, I do know that when I moved here and I was with my wife and I was just around this place and, and I could, I could bike to a Father John Misty concert at the Sylvie and pass by some lakes and I could go hiking on the weekend and I didn't have to have my head on a swivel all the time like I did in New York City.

And there wasn't this rushing anxiety of just simply surviving even beyond that. The people here were genuinely kind. I know the Midwest nice thing gets talked about a lot, but. I guess I've gotten some of that, but I really have found that people in Madison are genuinely kind, not fake nice. And they genuinely will have a coffee with you.

They genuinely will give you their time in a way that in New York just simply doesn't happen. Um, so, and, and also Midwest nice isn't all that bad. Like, you know, east coast people, I love the East coast. I love my blunt East Coast people. Yeah. There's just, there's no better thing than like, than that. But there's times if I'm in the parking lot at the Walgreens, I don't want to hear your blunt take on it.

I don't know you, man, back up. Give me the Midwest. Nice. In that scenario, there's sometimes that the politeness, I like the politeness, you know, gimme the politeness and I think I was, I was ready for the politeness. So, but even, but that's, I'm saying that jokingly, but people are. They're open here.

Jacob Miller: Mm-hmm.

Dan Fogarty: And in New York, you

Jacob Miller: have to have a shield all the time.

Dan Fogarty: Yeah.

Jacob Miller: Who was the first person to kinda, uh, invite you in Felt, or it felt like they were inviting you into the startup community? Or did you just kinda like, I'm just gonna show up to this thing. Like how, what was your kind of path into the, the startup community?

Dan Fogarty: Leslie, at Starting Block is amazing. If you've never met Leslie and you're, and you're moving here, you're thinking about moving here. I, it was before I moved here, I had a call with her about starting block. 'cause I was looking at it as a coworking space. Mm-hmm. Eventually it becomes this place that I end up doing a kind of a accelerator at.

But Leslie is just so funny and so amazing and so welcoming and, um, she was one, I would say cliffMcDonald@recovery.com. That's somebody whose input and advice. And the way he sees things, I respect immensely. Mm-hmm. He's also, he grew up in Boston and so there's that Oh, sure. East coast transplant thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, he's just like, I mean, this guy's, he's a football coach. He's a former football player. He's a super smart guy. He's an athlete. Yeah. And like you, I'm just like, this is a guy I want to listen to and, you know. Yeah. I'll follow into battle kind thing. Yeah. You know, he's super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Um, those are two people who I think were extremely cool and kind of informed early on how I saw this place and what this place could be.

Um, who else, what other shoutouts could I give? If anybody else comes to mind, I'll tell you. But those are the two kind of big ones.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. What was, what was the first kind of like. A social like gathering you went to? Like, was it like something at Starting Block or, I'm just kind of curious what kind of event it

Dan Fogarty: was.

It was the Father John Misty concert at the Sylvie. Okay. It was like the day the night I moved here with my wife. We went to a Father John Misty concert at the Sylvie, and I walked in and I was like, well, this is nice. This is like a, um, this is, this is a venue you would find in a major world class city.

And oh, there's an artist that only travels to major world class cities and, well, these people are pretty nice. See these people around me seem pretty nice, you know, I don't feel like I have to like get ready to fight. Uh, this is cool. Nice. And so I was just like, cool. Okay. I like this. And it was a nice way to kind of ease into, into being here.

But I do think regardless of where you move, um, making friends as an adult is hard. Mm-hmm. And building a social calendar as an adult is hard. Um, and I learned this. You know, as a guy in kind of my mid twenties, moving to a mid-size city where like, I kind of just expected things to happen. Mm-hmm. But it, I literally created a Google doc before I moved to Madison of all the communities as I was gonna throw myself into.

Really? Yeah. So startup community. So I knew I was gonna go to starting block, there was gonna be programming there, people there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a thing I could plug into, uh, like fitness and martial arts. I wanted to find the boxing gyms around here. I don't get hit in the head anymore. I don't spar, but I do hit the heavy bag and I do like to be part of that culture.

Yeah. Yeah. So I found the boxing gym, um, theater I'm into. I, I, I like acting. I like doing theater. So like Yeah. Who are the, who's making, who's making exciting theater? You know, um, my friend Matt Rains is a really great, um. Director and actor living in Madison. And I was gonna audition for one of his plays, but we ended up just being buddies.

He was like my first friend Nice. In Madison. He was awesome. And so that's, it was like, I had to go in with a plan of how to find these different communities and really put myself out there. But I was writing down places I wanted to try to eat, um, parks I wanted to go to, uh, communities I wanted to be a part of.

So I, I did come in with a plan.

Jacob Miller: I'm actually curious about your perspective, uh, on the founder community here and what you feel like, um, you know, you, you think founders should be doing more, like founders should be leaning into this. I, I just your observations of from Boston, New York City and then coming here and just your experience with founders at Starting Black.

What do you feel like founders should be doing more of and

Dan Fogarty: that, that they're not really doing? This is gonna be completely biased, so I'll give you the biased answer and then I'll try to answer it more broadly. Sure. I think they should be telling their story more. I, I think that if you want to, there's all this talk about like the Madison startup community and the Midwest startup community and like hand wringing about are people investing enough here or what's gonna, are there enough big companies here, blah, blah, blah.

Like, oh, Epic's the only big company, or this or that. It's like, I think we have to tell the story and it's not like some civic, uh, outfit that's gonna just tell that story. I think we as individuals need to talk about what we're building and why. And I think also like what you're doing right here is a great example.

Having people in conversation. Hmm. Right. Like have, having these collisions of ideas and I think just continuing to build on that. I mean, founder day is tomorrow, the capital entrepreneurs are putting on this great event and that's, that thing is just steadily growing. How can we just continue to build these spaces where people can collide?

And then how do we amplify the story and not in like a salesy brochure type way. Yeah. But in a way that's like, this is just what's happening. This is just what's happening. This is just what's happening now. Mm-hmm. A bunch of other questions about like capital and large companies and just all that.

There's mm-hmm. Even broader questions about Madison, the city. Right? Like, what is the city gonna look like in five years? What is the city gonna look like in 10 years? Oh, is it gonna be like Austin or like this, or like that? Yeah. Like, it's like a popular talking point, but there's all these issues with housing and Hmm.

This coming from somebody who loves the place, I think people in Madison need to decide. I don't know how you do that. I think you just kind of come together, but like, if you don't decide what the city's gonna be, it's gonna, it might be some like Tech Boys Fever Dream or it like with just like tons of apartments and.

Coworking spaces that look like bad WeWorks and then the soul of the place dies. Or it might look like just nothing. Like nothing happens. And like people get, like, there's no new housing. People don't get built and like the NIMBY crowd takes over and like, there's this, I don't know, I'm not saying anything is bad or good, I'm just saying that if you don't decide what your city's gonna be, 'cause I do feel like the city's at an inflection point.

It will just, it's just gonna happen and, and somebody else is probably gonna decide that developers are gonna decide mm-hmm. That tech people are gonna decide that. Um, I don't know, like people who are involved in the ci in the civic side of things, I don't know too much about that, but they're gonna get involved with that, so.

Mm-hmm. I do think that there's kind of a inflection point for this place. And what I hope is that we lean into this is I'm a total newbie. I am, I am a, I am a evil. Bad, dirty, coastal city, slicker. Okay, so take this with a grain of salt. And by the way, I moved, when I moved to Boston, I was like, well, this is how Boston should do.

If you want to piss people off, have a new New Yorker come into Boston and start talking about like the way things should be. I learned my lesson folks. It's not gonna happen again. But, yeah. Yeah. But I think, how do I wanna say this? Like, you have things that only you, you have an isus, you have lakes.

Mm-hmm. I think it's, I think it's the only city on an isus besides Seattle. Um, you have this beautiful confluence, you. One of the most amazing campuses. The energy from uw. Yeah. I go to women's volleyball games. I go to men's basketball games. I, I, I could pay 20 bucks to see a 12th ranked men's basketball team play.

I could go to Camp Randall, I could watch the football team Alabama comes here to play football. Like that's world class. You have a pro sports team? Yeah. Yeah. With the NIL you actually do have a pro sports team, and you have a pro sports team, and you have this campus and like, there's a great vintage clothing kind of movement here.

There's great local theater here. There's, there's people putting on really great work. There's, uh, really great local media. I was shocked by how good as a media person, I was like, I love Madison Magazine, Madison Minutes, the City Cast Madison podcast. These are, this is like local news and local journalism and local media, and there's so much pride in this place.

Mm. And so how do you take all the things, all the natural gifts that this place has? How do you take the kind of cultural things that it does well and the vibe, the brand of the place, and lean in and double down on those things and make sure that everybody gets taken along on the ride. Yeah. That it's inclusive and that people are brought along for it and that it's fair and that it's like actually a fair place to live for people.

Mm-hmm. How do you, how do you bring that, because I'm not saying that some of the tech guy fever dream stuff isn't good, or that we don't need more VC capital or whatever it is. Like Yeah, you need a mix. You need a mix, but if you don't also double down on those cultural things and those like human soul things and those livability things that make this place great, then it just becomes a copy and paste of like a WeWork and like luxury buildings that are lame.

Like Yeah, and luxury. Luxury buildings are cool, but like if the whole freaking thing looks like a bad luxury building, yeah. You lose something. Yeah. Like how do you, how do you keep growing a city without changing its character? Yes. And And you can't be so conservative that you don't want to answer the question.

Mm-hmm. Because people will answer it for you. Sharks. Sharks are circling the lakes, my friends. Okay. They're gonna make those choices for you. Yeah. Or if you stymie the sharks and you stop the sharks and nothing happens, well then congratulations. Nothing happens. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know, and I'm not one to say new, this needs to be New York City that you need like, you know, industrial style warehouses that like look like they're from Berlin and we're playing tech music at 2:00 AM That's not what I'm saying.

This doesn't need to be an oasis for 25 year olds. It's not what I'm saying. Right. I like my peace and quiet. What I'm saying is take what you do well already, which are so many things, and the things that I mentioned, which is only a slight piece of it, and double down on those things. Invest in those things and make sure people are brought along for the ride.

Don't leave people. You said a lot

Jacob Miller: today.

Dan Fogarty: I'll be running for

Jacob Miller: mayor. I'll be, yeah. Uh, so how do people, you know, find out about you? What of the services you offer? Just give, give us the, the rundown how people can get in contact with you.

Dan Fogarty: Yeah. Go to I am dan fogerty.com. I am Dan Fogerty. That's Fogerty with an a I think probably the best way though.

That's, if you wanna work with me. Great. Just follow me on LinkedIn. I talk about a lot of this stuff on LinkedIn. I share best practices for storytelling, for businesses, thought leadership. Wow. All that stuff on LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn. It's F-O-G-A-R-T-Y. Send me a message if you wanna talk of a book.

All right, cool. Thanks again, Dan.

Jacob Miller: It was good.

Dan Fogarty: Thank you, Jacob. All right. Thank you team. Thank you, team.

Jacob Miller: Thanks for joining us on the Startup Wisconsin Podcast. Wanna support the show. Don't forget to subscribe and get updates. If you're feeling generous, you can share, rate and review our podcast to help others find us.

Alright folks. Until next time, let's keep moving Wisconsin forward.