I’ll never forget hearing that for the first time. It came out of the mouth of a software engineer turned entrepreneur/CEO. He ended up wrapping his company around a lamp post. His entire executive team left and his investors lost money. Now he’s king shit of turd island. In spite…

The analog world used to determine what happened in the digital world. Now, the two have flipped. (By Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️) Part I Over the past year, we have written extensively about the bifurcation between Native Analogs & Native Digitals. Native Analogs are Baby Boomers and Gen Xers born anywhere from the 1940s all the way up to the early ’80s. Today, they range between the ages of 40…

Remember when Hustler was a naughty magazine? In the business world, Personal Branding spawned offspring: Hustleporn. Gary Vaynerchuk says hustle is “the most important word ever”. Grant Cardone sells a “hustle muscle” lime green wrist band on his website. And Tai Lopez says, “hustle until the haters ask if you…

There are moments in life when it feels as though God, the Universe, or some higher power taps us on the shoulder and says, “You’re next.” And our success is then dependent on whether or not we choose to listen — and, more importantly, choose to take action. These exponential…

(This is an excerpt from Category Pirates Mini-eBook, “The “Me” Disease: Why Personal Branding Is A Lie” In 1997, entrepreneur, acclaimed author and founder of Skunkworks, Inc., Tom Peters, wrote a column for FastCompany’s print magazine. The title of the article was, “The Brand Called You.” This may very well…

Mrs. See’s Candies makes 26 million pounds of chocolates per year. And they give away one million pounds of it. As samples. When you walk into a See’s store, the first thing that happens is the wonderful smell of chocolates engulfs your senses. Then a friendly greater, dressed in an…

Plenty of people in Silicon Valley would pay $10,000 to sit down and chat about business with the extraordinary David Sacks is one of the all-time great entrepreneurs. He’s the founder and CEO of Yammer, which sold to Microsoft for a cool $1.2 billion. He was also on the original…

When was the last time you clicked on a company blog post, opened a company newsletter, or listened to a corporate podcast and said to yourself, “Wow, I sure am glad I clicked on that!” The business world has unknowingly created a Content-Free Marketing Industrial Complex. The Content-Free Marketing Industrial…