The View from the Office. 

I met up with Jason Saltzman at Culture 36, a coffee shop on 36th street in midtown Manhattan.

Jason and I connected last year when he cold emailed me a chart illustrating a point that I had made in a LinkedIn column.

The chart he sent was so damn good it prompted me to write a new post, this time citing Live Data Technologies, the firm where he was then working. 

That was the point, of course. 

Jason’s title at Live Data was Director of Growth and he put the firm on the media map with guerilla tactics that leveraged creative content to raise the brand’s visibility.

It’s a deceptively simple and effective strategy that is harder to execute than it looks. 

The trick is to anticipate trends reporters would find interesting and create charts that illustrate the phenomena thereby inviting media coverage.  

It’s not so different from what PR people do when they call reporters to pitch ideas, but it feels less objectionable to a journalist because the data anchors and validates the idea. 

Jason suggested that his career path was somewhat ordained if not clear.

He grew up in the tech and entrepreneurial-focused Menlo Park, a stone’s throw from the big venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road. Steve Jobs’ daughter was in his pre-school class. 

He said it was only much later that he realized how formative that environment would be. 

Initially, he pursued a career as a professional cyclist. He had started riding when he was five, got serious at nine and turned pro in high school. He reached the ranks of the top 500 or so riders in the world before concluding he would never make it to the top. 

He retired from professional racing at age 24 in 2021. 

He said it was surprisingly difficult to transition into a new career because of a CV dominated by bike racing. He had studied economics and psychology in college and was interested in marketing and data-driven storytelling.

He landed a role with Adrian Alfieri, the founder of Verbatim, a content agency for startups before being recruited by Live Data Technologies CEO J. Scott Hamilton. 

That was a “light bulb moment” in which he realized that the world was both simultaneously content flooded and quality content starved.  

He recently left Live Data for CB Insights where he taps into the company’s silos of information on 10 million companies.

He said: “Data is the foundation for great stories. A massive amount of data is a treasure trove of stories waiting to be told if you can ask the right questions.” 

I heard similar ideas earlier in my career at Bloomberg. Mike Bloomberg saw content – in the form of news – as a promotional engine with data being its rocket fuel.

Jason is currently in the process of relocating to Palo Alto but will be in New York to visit the CB Insights office once a month.  

You can connect with Jason via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.