Sean Garrett

Sean Garrett

Founder and convener at Mixing Board

I’m in the (even more) idealistic phase of my career. It actually is about the friends that you made along the way. Also, what you learned and, most importantly, what you can share.

This perspective is now manifested in founding Mixing Board - a community of brand and comms experts who share knowledge with each other and clients looking to gain their unique perspective that otherwise couldn’t be found in any one place.

Mixing Board is a big leap. Entering #2020, I was struck by a feeling that forces were aligning to leapfrog our industry’s tendency to take iterative steps forward (however smart). Suddenly with the ‘benefit’ of quarantine, I was afforded the mental space to think about an approach that hadn’t previously existed but borrows from new and emerging models in other industries. It’s an approach that’s inspired by a belief that the value of the comms and brand functions can be greatly increased through both collaboration and new business models centered around the impact of smart strategic perspective.

Now, Mixing Board counts 100+ amazing and generous CMOs, heads of comms, seasoned brand strategists, social and content experts, community builders, researchers, speechwriters and policy veterans in its community. And, they are providing their expertise, mentorship and help with building teams for organizations looking for smart advice and fast tracks to solutions.

Mixing Board wouldn’t exist without my experience with Pramana Collective and the brilliant people who worked there. We avoided providing easy solutions, creating messaging that just sound good or suggesting tactics that could get attention but wouldn’t have lasting impact. Instead, we created methodologies and approaches to help organizations get through inflection points by helping them get aligned as an organization and helping them assert their internal truths. Mixing Board is an opportunity to take this approach and scale it in profound ways.

In 2019, I was named by the Holmes Report as one of the top 25 innovators in communications.

Before Pramana, I was Twitter’s first communications VP. In 2011, TechCrunch accurately called my team "the best in-house tech PR team in the business".

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