Executive Briefing
The things that inspired me in 2023
A year-end gift guide for the mind.
By Dan Frommer on Sunday, December 31, 2023 at 8:00 am
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“Instead of a holiday gift guide,” I wrote near the end of 2019, “here are some of the things that made me smarter this year.” After 2020, 2021, and 2022 editions, let’s keep that tradition going again this year.
The founders who made the most of a confusing (consumer) year
It was a year of mixed signals and soft landings: While many braced for a US recession, consumer spending actually continued to grow, setting new records, while unemployment remained low and steady. Investors — still cleaning up the mess of 2022 — were generally conservative with consumer product brands. And unless you were huge and growing like crazy, strategics weren’t paying up.
A lot of this is probably how it’s supposed to work, but the previous era of nearly free money was a new game that was fun for a while, until it wasn’t.
Still, it wasn’t hard to spot founders and teams making great stuff, launching cool and important projects, growing impressively, and persevering with the resources they had. That’s also how it’s supposed to work.
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