2025 Annual Impact Report
How we impacted CEOs last year, by the numbers
As former VC-backed founders and CEOs ourselves, we know the challenge: when you need help, it’s unclear who to trust. Investor advice feels tainted. Consultants who have never led companies mostly charge too much for bad advice. And while other CEOs offer invaluable support, they have limited bandwidth to help when you need it most.
Since our March 2025 launch, we have focused relentlessly on serving Founders and CEOs by building Not Another CEO as the #1 place for CEOs to grow themselves and their companies.
Not Another CEO pays forward the collective wisdom of the world’s best CEOs in formats that are useful and digestible. We are proud of the platform and programs we have developed and are committed to continually evolving, seeking your feedback, and publicly measuring and holding ourselves accountable to ensure we make a real impact.
This is our first annual impact report, covering our partial year since launching in March 2025. When analyzing the impact we had on CEOs last year, it’s a little bit of art and science, both quantitative and qualitative. Over time, we want to better measure the full downstream impact of Not Another CEO, but for now, we’re going to focus on reporting on as many of the signals as we can.
Thank you for all the support, engagement, and honesty. We could not be more excited for 2026 and the first full year of Not Another CEO.
David Politis and Nick Freund
Co-founders, Not Another CEO
Table of contents
Not Another CEO newsletter and podcast
Not Another CEO communities
Not Another CEO coaching and advisory
Our goals for 2026
Get involved
Not Another CEO newsletter and podcast
The newsletter is the most publicly visible part of Not Another CEO’s ecosystem. Since launching the Substack in March 2025, we have exponentially grown our reach and heard amazing feedback from CEOs.
Growth and reach
We grew from zero to 30K Substack subscribers in just 9 months, along with 16K subscribers to our YouTube channel. Our audience is 50% founders/CEOs, with the remainder being investors and technology executives.
We saw 1.024M views across our content properties, including 656K on the Not Another CEO Substack and 368K on our YouTube channel.
Top podcast episodes
We published 55 Not Another CEO Podcast episodes in 2025 (including one shot live). 48 CEO interviews, 2 conversations with top-tier VCs, and solo “pulse” episodes where we spoke about issues broadly impacting CEOs.
We keep setting a new high-water mark for the most-watched episode. The top episodes of 2025 were:
Nikhil Trivedi, Co-Founder of Footwork VC
How to adopt AI: incentives, small wins, and champions
Matt Price, Co-Founder and CEO of Crescendo
Shensi Ding, Co-Founder and CEO of Merge
Chieh Huang, Co-Founder and CEO of Boxed
Top clips
We published hundreds of clips across LinkedIn, Youtube and Instagram that distilled wisdom from the interviews into quick, consumable lessons. The top 5 clips were:
Top articles
We published 43 articles (33 written by Nick or David, and 10 written by other contributors). The top articles we published were:
3 things every CEO & leader should do before next year (David)
The silent struggle: Why many founders resent the company they built (David)
Don’t let thanksgiving pass without doing this (David and Nick)
$220M to zero in revenue, a US government investigation, and 45 other existential challenges CEOs endured (David and Nick)
What I learned as CEO of a failed SaaS company (that every AI founder should hear) (Nick)
The top articles written by our contributors were:
Why enterprise AI companies need forward deployed engineers (Shawn Thorne from True)
How Chili Piper avoids meetings with decision memos (Alina Vandenberghe from Chili Piper)
How 12 years, 5 startups & 500k tickets shaped Mirage’s AI-first CX (Eli Winderbaum from Mirage)
6 Startup Mistakes that cost founders everything (and how to avoid them) (Ryan Purcell from Gunderson)
The Imbalanced Life, an excerpt from Shoveling $H!T (Kass Lazerow from Buddy Media)
Not Another CEO Community
2025 was also about building founder/CEO communities where leaders could meet, support, and learn from each other. As of today, we have started and managed two communities across New York and Atlanta. If you are a CEO interested in joining, please apply:
Across these communities, we directly support 500+ founder/CEOs, most of whom are Seed to Series C stage via in-person events and peer Whatsapp groups.
In-person events
We organized 17 in-person CEO events with more than 350 attendees. The most popular formats were small group dinners and quarterly poker nights.
Speaking engagements
We also spoke at 20 events serving the broader ecosystem of founders, from conferences like Venture Atlanta, to VC functions like Radian Capital’s CEO Summit, Vertex Intersect, and Flybridge Founders week, to non-profit events like SaaSBoomi Caravan.
WhatsApp communities
We actively managed and moderated WhatsApp groups for our founder/CEO communities, where leaders can get direct support from peers. In these communities, founders/CEOs supported each other via 150K messages across 5,000+ posts, or about 20 messages per workday. CEOs can apply to join here.
Not Another CEO Coaching and Advisory
For us, the highlight of Not Another CEO is seeing the direct impact on CEOs and their companies. This happened across:
Nearly 300 one-on-one conversations with founder/CEOs in coaching and advisory sessions. We also hosted 10 virtual masterclasses covering topics from navigating difficult moments, adopting AI in Customer Experience and Engineering functions, and building a brand as founder/CEO.
We have had the opportunity to actively support CEOs navigating (and avoiding) failure, going through acquisitions and securing funding, and having difficult conversations with their investors. We supported leaders driving growth, building their teams, and making the tough calls to let people go. We have gotten directly involved by moderating company off-sites and strategic planning.
Finally, we launched the Not Another CEO agent, our AI agent trained on all of the content and knowledge shared by CEOs in our communities.
Our three goals for 2026:
Make the collected wisdom more accessible. We have hundreds of hours of video, and multiple books worth of content written. There’s too much to consume, and CEOs don’t have time to digest it all. We want to make it easier for everyone to access the wisdom we are collecting and curating at Not Another CEO.
Deepen engagement within the community. We want to go deeper with our 30K+ subscribers and get folks more actively engaged. We’re going to make it easier for founders/CEOs to join and get support from peers.
Help more CEOs execute. We want to help more CEOs and their teams apply the collective wisdom of the world’s best CEOs through our 1:1 and small-group advisory work and coaching.
Get involved
If any of this resonates with you and you would like to get involved, here are some ways to help:
🔈 Spread the word about Not Another CEO by liking this article, following our Substack, posting on social media, or sending one of our articles to a CEO you know.
🎥 Nominate great CEOs or investors we should interview by replying to this post or emailing nick@notanotherceo.com.
🖐️ Join our community if you’re a Founder/CEO. Apply here or reach out and tell us about the challenges you’re dealing with.
Awesome progress!