David Shor

What I actually do

I get brought in when a company knows something is wrong and the explanations from inside disagree with each other. Usually the symptom sits in one function and the cause sits in another — the product team is blamed for a demand problem, or marketing is blamed for a product that is hard to buy, or everyone is arguing about a dashboard that has been measuring the wrong thing for two years.

Being able to read the architecture, the funnel and the P&L in the same afternoon is the whole job. It is also why the practice sells three things rather than one.

How I work

There are people who lead with ego and a big personality. Any good leader has some of both. My personal style, and how I am told I come across, is as a subject matter expert who is not afraid to voice opinions and disagreements — but politely, and using logic or evidence.

I tend to approach my work as a series of challenges that need to be solved, so I leverage every relevant resource in my arsenal to figure out the best paths forward. I seek consensus most of the time, but I also know when to insist on my recommendations or instincts.

In my years of running companies, team members have seldom left the team. I build trust by asking questions, treating every team member as my own client and as a subject matter expert in their area, and talking openly about how I see things coming together.

The through-line

Four times now I have ended up first into a category, and it has never been because I predicted anything. It is because the same trick keeps working: the binding constraint on a market is usually not in the discipline everyone is arguing about.

A retirement product stalled on three lines in a general ledger, not on investment returns. Outdoor advertising was stuck on its own measurement conventions, not on inventory. Digital marketing had quietly built a decade of optimisation on top of cookie data that was systematically wrong. And at-home healthcare has moved the consult, the follow-up and the prescription out of the building while leaving the blood draw inside it.

Each time, the fix required someone willing to work one discipline over from where the noise was.

Before this

I founded and ran Prove, a performance marketing agency, for roughly a decade — enterprise healthcare, energy, automotive, retail and financial services, SOC 2 certified, with a Medtronic relationship that ran five years and then renewed for four more. Before that, Quillion, the performance and lead-generation operation serving Wongdoody. Before that, Mira Outdoor Media. And before all of it, in my twenties, a Variable Universal Life design that became the default funding instrument for non-qualified retirement plans.

Since 2020: World Back to Work through the pandemic, Wanderhome in short-term rental investing, and currently Diagnostic.ly, where I am Chairman and CTO, and Velocity AI Ventures.

Personally

I live in Fort Worth, Texas. I have two daughters, both in graduate school. I graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts. The people whose work I follow are listed here, which is probably a more honest picture of how I think than anything above.

A note on the name

There is a well-known political data analyst and pollster also named David Shor. We are not the same person, we have never met, and if you arrived here looking for his work on electoral coalitions, you want a different website.