Darryl Demos

In his most recent Achieving Beyond blog post, Patrick Seaton introduces us to "Organizational Whack-a-Mole", where the moles represent the common and recurring challenges that pop up across every department in your company. Read about how his Conversation Frameworks serve as your diverse set of mallets, ready to hit these challenges back into the ground with intentionality and consistency. Ready to whack those moles? https://buff.ly/3Wr5qIe #leadership #business #blog #AchieveBeyond

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Really exciting news. Not just for Microsoft as a capital partner, but for what it really says: (1) BEAD is not going to be enough, (2) historically marginalized communities risk being left behind AGAIN, and (3) community-centric investors and philanthropy need to combine forces. Thank you Microsoft for your trust and partnership! Onward! #digitalequity #digitaldivide #impactinvesting #blendedfinance

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Raising $2M is far more challenging than raising $50M...a true fact of business life. The team at CGS has navigated the sub $20M capital market for over 25 years. We understand the intricacies and challenges of piecing together $1M to $3M to $10M to support a company's growth. Especially now, this requires finesse, a ultra-tailored outreach and a thoughtful strategy. With extensive experience in raising capital for our ventures, we have now shifted our focus to assisting small and medium-sized businesses in securing growth capital. We take on some of the load from operating CEOs and CFOs to allow them to actually run the business while we help raise the capital. Collaborating with CGS means accelerating your company's growth trajectory by streamlining the path to capital. Let us support you in achieving your capital goals. Learn more at www.trustcgs.com.

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💬 According to Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc.'s article in the first quarter of 2024, CEO exits were almost twice what they normally are. It’s wise for CEOs, even at the beginning of a role to plan for how they will eventually exit: - How can you be sure to leave on your own terms? - What kind of legacy do you want to leave? - Where do you plan to go next? Chief executive roles are both highly consequential and highly visible, so transitions are critical to get right. How you leave has big implications for your career prospects and the company’s future health. If you’d like to strategize a bit on your eventual exit, even if it’s a ways off, let’s chat. I’m happy to offer some pointers on how to stick the landing. Learn from a leader who's been where you want to go. Book your free 30 minute CEO coaching session today.

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📢 Attention SaaS Companies: Vermont Joins the List of States Taxing SaaS What this change means for SaaS companies: 📅 Vermont's new sales/use tax on SaaS takes effect July 1, 2024. ⚖️ This change follows the passage of House Bill 887, overriding Governor Phil Scott's veto. 🔍 21 states have now enacted legislation or issued guidance taxing remote access software. 🌎 Post-Wayfair economic nexus provisions and remote employee locations can trigger tax liabilities. 🛡️ Periodically monitor your nexus posture and state policy changes to avoid surprises on sales/use tax. Armanino can help you evaluate your risk profile and ensure compliance. Don't let unexpected tax issues catch you off guard! https://ow.ly/galY30sEvjo #SaaS #TaxCompliance #SalesTax #StartUp #TechTrends

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How do you make old stories exciting to new generations? What can a YouTube movie critic and a wealth managing attorney teach us about life through the lens of slasher story structures? NEW JUST PRESS RECORD - but first, I think I need to explain myself. I feel like my brain got broken open sometime in high school after discovering the Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey stuff. It made me want to get all deep about how The Bible and Gilgamesh and all the monomyths were everywhere. But it took me years to start to see how (and why) even more constrained formats could be so… informative. I feel like I sensed it in music first. Why a million country songs could still find Hank and Hank Jr. and even Hank III’s creative genius. Why a million cocaine rap songs could still be comic book universes I wanted to inhabit. Why the punk stuff worked. Why Ian MacKaye outgrew hardcore before hardcore arrested itself in a lack of development. And although I knew I saw it in movies, I don’t think I fully embraced it in the horror genre until I talked it out with CT Reese and Frazer Rice. I watched a LOT of horror movies in high school too. I just don’t think I ever got quite this philosophical about it. Better 20(+) years late than never. Back to where we started: What can a YouTube movie critic and a wealth managing attorney teach us about life through the lens of slasher story structures? YO. Sorry for the informality, but YO. This is wild. We covered: Story structure and the teenage mind, Creating within constraints without constraints, Flandersification/cartoonification of characters, The language of genres, Why entertainment requires creating feelings in an audience, …and I’m just scratching the surface. Yes, we are talking about horror movies, but if you create or consume anything, you want to hear this. The personal and professional applications of understanding a heavily stylized and personalized genre like horror movies run deep. And who knows what lurks in these depths (queue scary music)! Watch CT Reese and Frazer Rice on Just Press Record (on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel): https://lnkd.in/evWYGkQj

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Altitude News Edition #011 from Cirrus Capital Partners is officially out and I have to say I'm pretty excited about this one! When we launched our Altitude newsletter a few months ago, we knew we wanted to keep everyone updated on how things are going at Cirrus, but we didn't want to bore people with a dry email filled with macro-economic updates and transaction tombstones. Company updates are tablestakes but engaging a reader base is, well, hard! After 11 editions, I feel we're finally falling into our rhythm and it's great to see our clients and partners so engaged in our newsletter! It's not everyday you see an email that covers the latest at OpenAI, snapshots around SOFR/Prime/CPI, and spicy GIFs/memes all blended together in harmony. Is it harmonous? I actually can't promise that 😅 but people seem to like it and we hope you'll check it out and "catch the next flight" with us. Thanks to our committed reader base and to Sutheshna Mani for helping bring this to life every couple weeks! #newsletter #capitalmarkets #founders #investors #startups #nondilutivecapital

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It’s one of the most predictable of economic impulses. Facing competitive pressure? Then try to limit the competition. With labor unions in Massachusetts, one oft-attempted approach has been to pressure public-sector decision-makers to impose so-called project labor agreements on public projects. Although they don’t say so explicitly, PLAs in effect limit public work only to firms whose workers belong to trade unions. Such agreements usually drive up costs for the taxpayer… …In the future, when faced with union lobbying for PLAs, elected officials and public decision-makers should cite Callan’s lucid ruling on the matter and say a firm and emphatic no. Why, they might even want to quote the judge, who pithily summed things up this way: “The public benefits from an open, fair, competitive, and robust bidding process. The PLA requirement unnecessarily curtails that without legal justification.” https://lnkd.in/e3r8Dx9M

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As PE firms prioritize people in #value creation, they are scaling their talent functions by leaning on operating partners. Drew Seaman, managing director of Hunt Scanlon Ventures, takes a closer look at how #talent and #technology are giving new lift to the role >> https://lnkd.in/eKpK62Ft

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Regulators seized the troubled Philadelphia bank Republic First and sold it to fellow regional lender Fulton Financial, the fourth high-profile bank failure since last spring. The bank was closed by the Pennsylvania state regulator on Friday and sold after an auction run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., confirming an earlier report by The WSJ. Republic First faced some of the same problems as the three regional banks that failed last year: paper losses on bonds that lost value as interest rates rose, and high proportions of uninsured deposits that can quickly flee.   In the first quarter, Lancaster, Penn.-based Fulton had about $28 billion in assets and around 200 locations throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia. A deal with the much smaller Republic First should allow it to scale up some without the increased regulatory scrutiny that comes when banks have more than $50 billion in assets. Fulton said the deal would nearly double its size in the Philadelphia market, and all the Republic First branches would reopen as Fulton at their regularly scheduled hours. Regulators had been prepared to seize Republic First late last year, people familiar with the matter said, before the bank announced it had reached a deal with investors to shore up its balance sheet. After that deal collapsed this March, the FDIC resumed efforts to seize and sell the bank. Republic First operated branches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York under the name Republic Bank. It had around $6 billion in total assets at the end of 2023. People familiar with the matter said several banks had been exploring making offers. The most interested were expected to be midsize banks with established beachheads in or near Republic First’s network of branches that dot the Philadelphia suburbs and stretch across the Delaware River into western New Jersey. The lender’s relatively small footprint didn’t move the needle enough for larger regional banks, including PNC Financial Services Group and Citizens Financial, the people said.   This bank failure is distinct from the ones that set off a monthslong crisis in 2023. Republic First is much smaller than Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and the similarly named First Republic, which each had between roughly $100 billion and $200 billion in assets. Since there is a buyer, the government won’t be left with the decision over whether to backstop deposits over the FDIC limit of $250,000, as it did with SVB and Signature. The long, drawn-out failure also gave depositors more time to prepare, as compared with the rapid collapses of last year. The FDIC said it expected the failure, even with the deal, to cost its insurance fund about $667 million. The nation’s biggest banks had taken billions of dollars in charges to rebuild the insurance fund for last year’s failures. A relatively orderly deal should prevent the failure from sparking a wider crisis in confidence. 

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Thanks to CFO Brew for featuring me in your piece about "What CFOs Need to Know for a Sound IR Strategy." Love it they included my favorite saying, which is that you have to "punch investors in the face" with what you want them to know! https://lnkd.in/gZUjuN8q

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My colleague, Jennifer Flynn, spoke with Yvan-Claude Pierre of Cooley to cover the current state of the IPO market and thoughts on the future of what we can expect. An interesting factoid from part one of the conversation: 38 IPOs raised $1 billion or more in 2021, compared to only 2 in 2022 and 3 in 2023. Check out their conversation, Taking the pulse on the IPO landscape. http://spklr.io/6041UprH #IPO

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Over the next four weeks, the vast majority of publicly traded companies will update shareholders on business conditions in Q1. It's called "earnings season," and it happens four times a year. So buckle up, because it's relatively likely that you'll read about one company's success, followed by news of another's missteps, more than once in the coming weeks. In the table below, you can see the next month of company reports. On a busy day, more than 400 companies will check in with their numbers. On slow days, typically Mondays and Fridays, you can expect to hear from fewer.1 What's A Popular Topic to Hear About? Updates on inflation and artificial intelligence have been the most popular topics. In Q3 2023, “AI” was said nearly 150 times. In Q4 of that same year, the term “inflation” was mentioned at least once during the quarterly calls of over 250 S&P 500 companies. Either could be popular again this quarter.2,3 So far this earnings season, several large banks in the S&P 500 have posted results and their focus has been on the Fed and interest rates. Of course, you would expect banks to talk about interest rates, whereas it may not be as important to a tech company, for example.4 It’s best to prepare for some market volatility as Wall Street starts to collect info about the 2024 business climate. If you want to know when a particular company is reporting, please contact my office. Most have already set the date they are prepared to check in with results. 1. MarketWatch.com, April 19, 2024. Earnings Calendar 2. ResearchFactSet.com, February 29, 2023. From December 15, 2023, to February 23, 2024. 3. Insight.FactSet.com, December 5, 2023, “Fewer S&P 500 Companies Discussing AI on Earnings Calls for Q3 Compared to Q2.” 4. CNBC.com, APirl 11, 2024. “What to expect from bank earnings as high interest rates pressure smaller players.”

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Big pre-open gains in a large tech company, which beat earnings estimates and authorized a $110 billion buyback program, and a large Health Care company, which reported better-than-expected earnings, have contributed to the upside bias. Read more in the Morning Brew.

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