Founder, P33 | Executive Thought Leadership Agency

Helped 50+ B2B tech companies build their Founder/CEO Brand and implement Executive Thought Leadership Programs for LinkedIn. Customers, results & process: project33.io

About me:

I'm Finn, 29, grew up in Bremen, Germany, studied Physics & Philosophy in Heidelberg for 3 semesters, dropped out of college in 2017 because I was doing it for other people, flew to New York with no plans, documented the journey on Linkedin, Instagram and Youtube, and started my first company (Project 33) on the back of having grown a small audience. We're a small remote agency that helps B2B founders & execs create thought leadership content for Linkedin.

In my free time, which I try to have as much as possible of, I read (fav author: Nassim N. Taleb), write, run, lift, code (currently building an app), cook, make Youtube videos, turn books into Instagram accounts, grapple (BJJ), and travel (lived in NYC, Cape Town, Bali, Minsk, CMDX, Lima & Antalya so far). In December 2020 I married the most beautiful woman in the world. In January 2023, I became dad to the most beautiful baby girl. We currently live in Berlin, Germany.

Finn Thormeier

If you're in B2B marketing, you should be studying Sydney Sloan. She was: CMO at G2, CMO at Salesloft, CMO at Drata 🤯 Plus 16 years of multiple leadership roles at Adobe.

And last week, I got to sit down with her and ask about her biggest lessons + advice for GTM leaders going into 2026.

Some of the things we cover:

- The advice Sydney would give herself before her first CMO role
- Buyer research shifted from 29% to 50% on AI chatbots in 4 months, and what that means for you AEO strategy
- Why you probably don't need marketing automation the way you used to
- “Human in the loop” vs “human in the lead”
- The Show-Up-Bigger-Than-You-Are playbook
- Reorganizing GTM teams around outcomes, not functions

You can listen here:
-- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/daewkRiJ
-- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dtpHYD4Y
-- Apple: https://lnkd.in/dstuaPUb
-- Substack: https://lnkd.in/dJnX9Sud

Some of my takeaways:

1. The shift to AI search is happening FAST. G2 data showed that in April 2025, 29% of buyers said they started their research in of of the AI chatbots. By August that number hit 50%, just 4 months later. In 2026, every company needs to make sure their brand is the citation source LLMs use

2. Sydney got this advice from the CMOs of Okta and Snyk: Show up bigger than you are. You don’t need a massive budget, you need one anchor event or one bold move. At Drata, they bought out every ad space for two blocks around Moscone Center for RSA conference so attendees couldn’t miss them. At Salesloft, they bought a billboard on Highway 101, but the ROI didn’t come from the traffic driving by, it came from leveraging photos of it online. Big one-off events can signal momentum to investors and customers more than anything else

3. We’re entering the “Rick Rubin economy” - AI lowers the barrier to entry for content and code, so the only differentiator is taste. You can’t prompt your way to good taste. You need to hire for context and judgment, or leverage advisory boards of influencers who actually understand the market. AI provides the speed, but humans provide the creative direction that determines if anyone actually cares

4. Do we need GTM Architects? Everyone is rushing to hire GTM Engineers and build AI workflows, but in software development, you need engineers and architects. They work at different levels of abstraction - software engineers build and maintain software, software architects design the system as a whole. We need this for GTM: someone to map the strategy, choose the agentic platforms, and decide *what* to automate before you build it. Sydney sees this as a separate role, likely sitting in RevOps

5. The biggest mistake new CMOs make: obsessing over their domain of the marketing department. Sydney’s advice: Spend your first 90 days building deep relationships with your peers - the CFO, CRO, CEO. If you don’t understand the business context and have alignment with your peers, even the best marketing strategy in the world won’t save you

Top LinkedIn ghostwriting agency for CEOs, founders & execs -- Founder at Project 33 and Host of the Executive Brand Podcast

People forget that *high engagement* usually means *easy to engage with*. What's easy to engage with? Short posts, selfies, black/white takes. 

That's the real reason why there's so much of that stuff on Linkedin.

So when your local Linkedin influenster who gets hundreds of likes on every post and whose main product is a $99 course tells you that this is the kind of content your NEED to create, remember:

In B2B, inbound/customers/conversations with VPs+ often come from high trust. 

What builds high trust? Deep insights, balanced/nuanced takes, complete breakdowns - aka stuff that can't be skimmed in 3 seconds.

I discovered Louis Grenier a couple weeks ago - how did it take me so long?? This man grew his LinkedIn to 39,000+ followers and built a successful solo-consulting biz while breaking ALL the rules of LinkedIn the "gurus" want you to believe in:

- Bright orange profile pic
- Uses the F word ALL the time
- Spent $8,500 to produce a YouTube (!) mini-series to market his services
- Wildly mixes his post formats
- Regularly includes links in the post copy
- Publicly ROASTS his sponsors
- Pays zero attention to the algorithm

Dave Gerhardt called him the french Harry Dry

If the all LinkedIn Gurus were right, Louis should be nowhere near where he is today, getting nowhere near the results he's getting.

Want to learn how he does it?

This Thursday at 11am EST, I'm doing a live Zoom call with Louis to ask him about his approach and how, you too, can Stand The F*ck Out. We'll include audience Q&A, so you can bring your own questions.

Join us here: https://lnkd.in/dQ7J9vXh

I strongly believe almost all companies who currently do great marketing, I'd eg. list Clay, PostHog, 37signals, have some version of this mindset when it comes to brand. Here articulated by Chris Evans, co-founder of incident.io. 

You gotta have taste, take some risks, have fun, think about the customer, and just trust that it will all somehow, in the end, benefit your company. You can't measure it and you shouldn't even try. Almost by definition, if you could measure and attribute brand marketing, it would be called demand gen.

In prepping for a podcast episode, I was reading a CEO's Linkedin content today. What stood out to me: I actually LEARNED things. It's crazy that this feels like a rare experience these days on Linkedin.

The posts weren't formatted with tons of bullet points and 5-part lists and one-line paragraphs.

The hook was just a regular sentence that didn't feel "optimized"

The overall posts and topics didn't feel engineered - no trend jacking - just grounded lessons from 10 years being in the industry.

The average post of this CEO got 20-40 likes.

There's plenty of people in his space that are getting 10x that.

But he was talking about marketing fundamentals, lessons learned, deeply thought-out takes or rebuttals on current trends, and I actually found myself taking notes, rethinking certain decisions of mind, doing additional research to fully understand his point of view.

Maybe because of this, when I looked at the 20-40 people who did engage, many were CMOs, VPs, CEOs, and a good amount of lengthy comments, people who actually, read, internalized and responded to the post with their own thoughts.

This is much rarer than it should be.

So much of content is performance. Probably my own included. Trying to fit some template. Trying to stick to some "best practices". Optimized and engineered for engagement, which is often a race to the bottom.

My sense is that this CEO has his own quality bar. Decides what to publish based on what *he* deems insightful, not what the algorithm is nudging him towards. Maybe I'm wrong here.

We should normalize publishing content we feel PROUD of, in the style that feels like ourselves - that's the bar.

My podcast episode with Jessica Gilmartin is live!!! Jessica has an insanely impressive track record: CMO at Calendly, Head of Revenue Marketing at Asana, Head of Product Marketing at Google. Today, she advises founders and first-time CMOs through $100M ARR on marketing, GTM strategy, hiring and org design.

And last week, she joined me on The Executive Brand podcast.

What we cover:

- Why CMO + CRO combo roles usually fail
- Why companies now hire CMOs from smaller, scrappier startups
- Where AI is truly useful vs pure hype
- Why random acts of marketing kill momentum
- How Calendly moved from viral PLG to focused enterprise ABM
- The real reason CMOs only last 18 months
- Why taste, courage, and focus still matter more than tools
- And much more

Listen here:

-- YouTube: https://lnkd.in/grQb6kgv
-- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpBmkJWg
-- Apple: https://lnkd.in/gXPSpKEU
-- Substack: https://lnkd.in/gBeDP56X

Some of my takeaways:

1. We’ll replace most of our day-to-day work with AI in 5-10 years. But right now board members are mandating AI adoption without specific use cases. The reality is AI is making teams 10-20% more efficient and that it works as an enabler, but not as a replacement. The best use cases she’s seeing are data enrichment for lead prioritization, competitive research for product marketing, and using LLMs as synthetic customer panels

2. There are three paths to CMO: via product marketing, via demand gen, and via brand. In B2B, 50% of CMOs come from product marketing, 50% from demand gen, almost none from brand. That might be an opportunity

3. CEOs keep hiring the wrong CMO. They want a unicorn who's great at both strategic messaging (product marketing) and growth (demand gen). It’s like finding an engineer who's great at backend AND designing beautiful interfaces. Hire for your actual problem/bottleneck right now, not the one you’ll have at $100M

4. Attribution is broken and that’s okay. You’re getting 70-80% accuracy at best. Jessica’s approach is to use the 80-20 rule. Get directionally correct data so teams understand where they can make impact and then work from there. The bigger issue is that companies wait too long to implement basic data and reporting infrastructure

5. Random acts of marketing kill focus. At Calendly, Jessica pivoted the entire team to one thing: repositioning for enterprise customers. Marketers hate focus and they want to sprinkle seeds everywhere. But the winning strategy is making big bets, being explicit about trade-offs, and ensuring no one goes off track

Reminder: your most interesting thoughts are those you want to keep to yourself.

LinkedIn Playbook with Jess Cook and Joshua Perk of Vector 👻

Partner with '𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆' to Streamline Production | Animator.

𝟭𝟳𝟳% 𝗜𝗡𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗦𝗘 𝗜𝗡 𝗢𝗥𝗚𝗔𝗡𝗜𝗖 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗖𝗛 | 𝗚𝗘𝗧 𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗘 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗖𝗛 & 𝗦𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗦 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗦𝗛𝗢𝗥𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗟𝗘𝗠 𝗠𝗢𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗦 𝗙𝗔𝗖𝗘: ⬇️
❌ They failed to convey their message in 60 seconds.
❌ They don’t get expected traffic or views from their short video content.
❌ Their brand's identity is lost in a sea of mismatched visuals, titles, and icons.

Sales or Educating people, particularly with video, is exceptionally challenging and unique.

Imagine you’re closing more deals explaining or showing value with LinkedIn short videos, YT Shorts, IG Reels or TikTok Videos. 𝙈𝙮 𝙘𝙡𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙀𝙓𝙋𝙀𝙍𝙄𝙀𝙉𝘾𝙀 𝙞𝙩, 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙅𝙐𝙎𝙏 𝙞𝙢𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙚.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗢𝗪𝗘𝗥𝗙𝗨𝗟 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗨𝗟𝗔 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗨𝗡𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗞 𝗛𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡:

For those who want to close deals/sales QUICKLY and more VIEWS 

𝗛𝗢𝗪 𝗜 𝗛𝗘𝗟𝗣 𝗙𝗥𝗨𝗦𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗢𝗥, 𝗕𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗦 𝗢𝗪𝗡𝗘𝗥, 𝗣𝗢𝗗𝗖𝗔𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗥:

✔️ Stand Out with a Distinctive Brand Title, Icon, and Smooth Transition.
✔️ Captivate Your Audience with Custom Animation to Educate and Add Value.
✔️ Convey your Message with Focused Visuals and Graphics (Remove backdrop if needed)

𝘓𝘌𝘛’𝘚 𝘔𝘈𝘒𝘌 𝘐𝘛 𝘏𝘈𝘗𝘗𝘌𝘕 𝘞𝘐𝘛𝘏 𝘛𝘏𝘌 𝘙𝘐𝘎𝘏𝘛 ‘𝙑𝙄𝘿𝙀𝙊 𝘾𝙊𝙉𝙏𝙀𝙉𝙏 𝙎𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙏𝙀𝙂𝙔’ 𝘛𝘏𝘈𝘛 𝘉𝘖𝘖𝘚𝘛𝘚 𝘚𝘈𝘓𝘌𝘚

Reach out to me and see how I can help you out.

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The Battle

Finn Thormeier

Shajjadul Islam Swajon

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taplio

The Battle

Finn Thormeier

Shajjadul Islam Swajon

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Finn Thormeier's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreFinn Thormeier's LinkedIn Performance