Speaking
I speak to founder and investor audiences: conferences, portfolio days, founder communities, and podcasts. Based in San Diego, available in person or virtual.
The talks
Finding the unnamed problem, building a position competitors cannot copy, and why fighting on features inside an existing category means the high-ground play is already lost.
The core argument of Nobody Knows What You Do: why messaging that worked founder-led stops transmitting at scale, what it costs, and how to diagnose where the story leaks.
When to hire fractional, what good looks like, and how to structure the engagement so marketing gets institutionalized rather than outsourced.
On the record
Most attribution is theater. The obsession with attribution models obscures the harder work of building a narrative that compounds.
Quotable · Marketing as infrastructure
Most growth-stage companies have narrative debt. They just have not named it yet. Naming it is half the work.
Quotable · Narrative debt
Marketing is a strategic function, not a creative one. Creative execution is the easy part. Alignment is the hard part.
Quotable · Marketing as infrastructure
For organizers
Speaker introduction · Under 75 words · Copy and paste
Jeff Lerner is the founder of Misnomer Marketing, a fractional CMO practice for B2B founders. Over 25 years across startups, Google, and AT&T, his work has helped clients raise more than $425 million and achieve four exits totaling over $2.5 billion. His forthcoming book, Nobody Knows What You Do, launches Fall 2026. He lives in San Diego.
Need a longer bio, a headshot, or a specific angle for your audience? One email covers it.
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