Greg Galant

Gregory Galant is the cofounder and CEO of Muck Rack, the leading provider of AI-powered PR software built for how brands and agencies work. He is also the co-creator and CEO of The Shorty Awards, which honor the best of social media, and launched The Work Remotely Forever Pledge, a commitment by business leaders who promise not to force their employees to work from an office. Since launching, more than 75 companies have signed on.

I'm Greg Galant, CEO and cofounder of Muck Rack, the leading provider of AI PR software. We help companies, corporate communications teams, and PR agencies share their stories with the world, by helping them find the right journalists to pitch, monitor the news, build reports, track relationships, everything a communications department needs. We also help support a free and independent press, by providing free portfolios and other resources for journalists, forever. I got my start in digital media really early. I started a podcast when I graduated college. Back in 2005, podcasting was barely a concept, and no one had done anything like that before. One of the people I had was Ed Williams, who had us podcasting startup itself. He pivoted to a little side project called Twitter. That led me to get into the social media world really early on. Eventually my cofounder, Lee Semel, and I launched the first ever award show for best social media called the Shorty Awards. The first ceremony was in 2009, and it took off like wildfire. Seeing the success of the Shortys in the media made us realize that there are lots of journalists using social media to figure out what to cover. We launched the first version of Muck Rack back in 2009 as a free website that became very popular with journalists, we had over ten thousand journalists request to be added. A lot of PR people were using Muck Rack to figure out which journalists they should talk to. We relaunched Muck Rack in 2011, keeping it a free website for journalists, but then adding this whole software package for the PR community to be able to find the best journalists, monitor the news and build reports. We wanted to find a really rock solid business model so that we could scale and have it be sustainable. It took us five years from 2009 to 2014 to get the first million in revenue. Four years later, in 2018, we got to five million, then we went from five to ten in just one year from 2018 to 2019. And from 2019, we quickly grew leading to our series A, our first round of external institutional funding of $180 million. It shows, I think, the power of being patient in the early days and knowing that it takes a while to build something. Most recently we’ve made two important acquisitions to round out our full platform. Last fall we brought social media listening to Muck Rack through the acquisition of Keyhole, to help PR people understand their brand perception across social and traditional media channels. And then in January of this year we acquired Dublin-based Media Intelligence company Ruepoint, which allows us to deliver even more robust professional services through curated monitoring, digests and insights on top of our really powerful data and tooling. We’ve grown to more than 400 employees around the world, enabling them to work remotely from almost anywhere. And we work with nearly 6,000 companies and PR agencies, helping them communicate with the public, including amazing brands like Visa, Pfizer, International Rescue Committee, Golan, NPR, Pepsi, The New York Times, FedEx, Axios and Google. Plus we've enabled tens of thousands of journals to create their portfolios online and showcase their work.

Cycling, Throwing an annual Festivus party, Bootstrapping for 13 years until getting a $180M Series A, Quoting every Seinfeld episode