Michael Hoffman

💰 New grants for founders - shared straight from Mogul Millennial, Inc. funding database! Check out the post below for the latest funding opportunities, and follow Mogul Millennial, Inc. for more content like this! #startup #business #founder #entrepreneur #smallbusiness #blackowned

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Had a great conversation with Jacquelyn Miller and Christina Farr on the ins and outs of the direct communication method for startups. They had lots of great advice, which you can check out at the blog. My big takeaway, personally, is that there's truly no substitute for authentic expertise: Founders eat, breathe, and sleep their startup's market, giving them the kind of nuanced, insightful perspective that nobody else can provide. You don't need to be a professional writer or a seasoned on-camera personality to shine; you just have to give your real thoughts on the topic.

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Now that curation has earned its way into more and more programmatic circles, it's only fitting that Pesach Lattin has dived into the question "are all data curation solutions interchangeable?" Spoiler alert - they aren't, which makes this article a must read both those who are already capitalizing on curation and those just getting started. Drew Stein Audigent Ted Smith Greg Williams Jake Abraham Gina Cavallo Chris Meredith #data #curation #programmatic #programmaticdata

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Sharing a critical perspective from Bryan Cunningham from our recent company update webinar. It's more important than ever to hear from those on the frontlines of protecting our democracy and way of life. Please take a few minutes to watch and consider the insights shared here.

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First-Time Founders | Understanding Your Fundraising Journey we discuss why first-time founders should avoid comparing their fundraising experiences to those of veteran founders. We highlight the importance of credibility and track record in attracting investors.

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What does it take to create the next-generation builder platform? 💡 I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jesse Pollak who shared the compelling origin story of Base and the vision behind launching Base Camp in Idyllwild, CA. Base Camp is more than a summit —it’s a crucial step toward creating an open, decentralized platform that’s globally accessible. Jesse emphasized Base’s mission to build an onchain platform that’s as transformative as the internet itself. 🚀 Curious about how Base is leading this charge? Stay tuned for more insights from our conversation and what’s next on this journey! ♻️ if you found this insightful, don’t forget to like, share, and spread the word! P.S. How do you see the future of open-source platforms shaping the tech landscape? #BaseCamp #Onchain #Innovation #OpenSource #CommunityBuilding #FWBFest #Idyllwild

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Values-aligned investing is a well-known concept. Could values-aligned advertising be the next frontier? Imagine if mission-driven organizations of all stripes (companies and nonprofits) put a portion of their marketing budgets toward local, independent, nonprofit news sites.... The type of responsible journalism that is the bedrock of stronger, democratic, connected, informed and engaged communities. Investors and funders: you could encourage this as you do responsible investing. And advertising in local news is astoundingly effective with the chance to reach hard-to-access audiences and open and loyalty rates through the roof (Documented for ex. has click through rates for some ads of 25%+!). And there are ways to make this easy to scale from local to regional and national, like URL Media - which works with a consortium that reaches over 25 million people. Let's support the news organizations that are crucial to our communities! #valuesalignedadvertising #supportlocalnews #missiondriven

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Thrilled to be featured in ADWEEK’s recent article on the ad tech M&A landscape. The past 18 months have been a whirlwind – high inflation, rising interest rates, and global uncertainty put a damper on liquidity. M&A activity slowed, and fundraising became a challenge. However, I see the current chess moves as a prelude to consolidation. This will unlock cash flow and pave the way for more strategic M&A deals in the near future. Expect to see some “average” deals this year, but the market is resetting for a stronger 2025. Get ready for solid returns and a more dynamic ad tech landscape next year. Thanks to Catherine Perloff! https://lnkd.in/dg7PQ6eU #adtech #investing

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Lotan Levkowitz of Grove Ventures is a rising star in the VC landscape! He is super intelligent, kind, and very articulate with his words. I really enjoyed talking to him about Deep tech investing, Grove Ventures, and the US elections, among other shenanigans and rhymes. Check out the interview and subscribe to the channel! It is a command, I mean, a request, I mean, do what you bloody want. https://lnkd.in/d6gjSvdQ

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Political donations play a critical role in shaping the landscape of electoral campaigns in the United States. These contributions not only provide essential funding for campaign activities but also reflect the engagement and priorities of different groups of Americans. Using data from AnthologyAI, we explored the nuances of political donations to uncover patterns and strategic insights that could enhance campaign fundraising efforts. https://lnkd.in/ey-J39DQ AnthologyAI

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The Future of Fundraising: Gen AI Trends and Predictions. Gen AI is changing the game. 1. Empowering non-profit organizations. 2. Optimizing donor engagement. 3. Revolutionizing fundraising strategies. How will you adapt? Are you ready for the future? #GenAI #Fundraising #FutureTrends

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Pro PR Tip 💡 Build media connections and relationships before you need them. Disinformation is a growing problem and having reporters who already are on your side and know what you stand for is the best way to combat the Internet trolls - which seem to be everywhere (even in places you'd expect to be credible). It's much harder to get your commentary placed in the midst of disinformation if they've never heard of you before -- but if they've covered you before and trust you, they'll continue to trust you. Because while you can't totally avoid the dark side of the Internet - repeating your values publicly, prioritizing a positive message and stacking reporters who champion your work will always help you come out on top. 🔥 P.S. If you'd like more easy and actionable PR advice that is designed to help you get more media coverage right now (and just in time for the biggest PR season of the year!) make sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter Fintech & Friends. #pr #pragency #publicrelations #startups #fintech #media

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🗞️ Breaking News: Red Ventures Selling CNET at a huge Loss❗️ Context: Red Ventures, the privately held digital media and marketing juggernaut based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, is selling CNET, one of the largest tech publishers on the web, to Ziff Davis for just $100 million. For context: Red Ventures bought CNET for approximately $500 million. Reason for the Sale: Total traffic to CNET has dropped by a staggering 50% over the last three years. The main driver behind this decline is a 68% drop in organic traffic (loss off Google rankings and traffic). Tables turned: This sale is a stunning turn of events for CNET, which once bought Ziff Davis (then a tech magazine firm) in a deal worth roughly $1.6 billion - more than two decades ago. Catch Up: - Ziff Davis trades publicly with a market value of $1.94 billion. The company lost about half of its marketcap over the course of the last 48 months. Strategic rationale: If Ziff Davis is able to ink a content licencing deal with Google, Bing/Microsoft or ChatGPT (or else e.g. X.AI) - like Reddit did - it might turn out to be a very smart deal …

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Whether in political campaigns, brand marketing, or social activism, winning the narrative requires mastering the current communication mediums informed by audience consumption patterns and not being beholden to legacy methods or key performance indicators (e.g., money raised, speeches given, etc.). Meet your audience where they are—not where you or the establishment are comfortable. As Joshua Rothman observes in his latest The New Yorker essay, the age of digital torrents is reshaping political speech. Today, the ability to produce endless, malleable content—think podcasts, memes, and viral clips—outshines the once-prized, polished soundbite. This new paradigm rewards riffing over rehearsing, volume over nuance, and even a bit of chaos over coherence. Additionally, as politics adapts to our tech-saturated reality, one wonders if we are trading thoughtful dialogue for an endless scroll of words that hardly matter. #socialmedia #digitalstrategy #politicalcampaigns #strategiccommunications #politicalcommunications https://lnkd.in/gydCgE6s?

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Next up on Embracing Erosion? Alex Pattis, the General Partner of Riverside Ventures and founding team member of Hampton. Alex is also the co-founder of Last Money In Media, a leading VC newsletter that delves into Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) within the Venture Capital ecosystem. Alex has become a leading voice advocating for the SPV investment format versus the traditional VC fund model. So it won’t surprise you got super deep and into the weeds on all things investing, but we touched on plenty of other topics such as: 🚀 How to scale a company from concept to 9-figure exit 🔄 How to break away from the traditional consulting model and apply product approaches ⏩ Why it’s important to iterate quickly and often with messaging 💸📈What signals are important to pay attention to when investing in startups Give it a listen 👉 https://lnkd.in/gEKv5ghE The Compete Network

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#adtecheconomicforum – Brian O'Kelley, Scope3 asks: Why is #adtech worth VC investments? Darcy Frisch, Hearst Ventures: We've never lost money investing in it! Complaints are: you gotta scale so much and the margins are so small! (They're still pretty good.) A good VC firm like ours realizes there are immediate 10X growth plays, but there are also "minnows" who will take some time but demonstrate solid—you must have a balanced portfolio. We go looking for 2nd-time founders—you know the market, what do you see is the big adtech opportunity? You've got upside, home-run opportunity because you see what the edge is but have the connections to make it a reality. (No notes on who said this, DOH!): There's no whitespace for the old Lumascape categories of 2008—DSP, SSP. VCs are looking for transformative opportunities. Sanja Partalo, S4S Ventures: We haven't been jumping into the new adtech companies, like those involved in AI, because we don't see opportunities in selling to enterprise companies. So we're just studying. Eric Franchi, Aperiam: 2010, era of big adtech winners, was coming out of an (extreme) economic downturn; similar to now. AI has consumer-use implications. The multiples might be even bigger right now. O'Kelley: Gotta admit, #adtecheconomicforum is not the youngest crowd—are these 2nd-time founders going to understand the wants and ways of Gen Z? I worry we lost talent to crypto/blockchain, and now losing more to AI. Where is the hot young talent (and the new gen of founders)? Franchi: There's an incredible group of young founders right now—and they run in packs. They'll introduce you to their friends. Hang with the founders. Beeler.Tech

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While building Daisychain a big part of the vision has been: * reporting on campaign performance and other activity should be real-time. * customers should be able to build their outreach audiences using activity and data from all of the different platforms they use and they shouldn't need to wait for audiences to recalculate. We built the product initially by storing data entirely in Postgres -- one of the most popular transactional databases. It still powers most of our product. It's a solid row-oriented database, but it's not a column-oriented database designed for analytics and aggregations -- and some of our larger clients pushed the limits of what we were able to squeeze out of Postgres from a performance perspective. Some parts of the Daisychain product interface could be slow as a result, and it really bothered us. We've just wrapped up the final pieces of migrating our reporting and audience creation infrastructure to Clickhouse and I couldn't be happier with how the project has gone. Queries that used to take 10s of seconds are now measured in milliseconds -- and we think we can make it even faster in the future. The PeerDB (YC S23) team (recently acquired by Clickhouse) has been solid partners and colleagues as we took on this work. We hope to keep up the close collaboration. They're great. This is perhaps an odd milestone to share during the beginning of GOTV but making the UI in our product fast is important. It makes it possible for organizers to run more ambitious campaigns with complex targeting. Our vision has always been to do the hard technical work to give organizers super-powers -- whether they're getting out the vote or working for change in their community. We have more to come on this front -- the underlying infrastructure was designed to support some new features we plan to build -- and we'll have more to share on that front later this year, after we win this election.

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Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline Chris MetinkoGené Teare February 27, 2024 Venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups last year totaled only $705 million — marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows. The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data. Last year’s total investment in Black-founded startups in the U.S. marks the lowest amount since such startups raised only $582 million in 2016. The drop in total dollars also meant Black-founded startups received their lowest share in the venture market since at least 2016, per Crunchbase. Black-founded startups received less than 0.5% of the $140.4 billion in venture funding all U.S.-based startups received last year. In 2021, Black-founded startups received 1.4% of all U.S. venture funding. In 2022, it was 1.1%.

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