Knowledge Creators 🤝 Cool Stuff

The latest content + happenings from the creators we rep here at Smooth

CatGPT on the news 🗞️ | Cat’s “no phones” parties caught the attention of local news this month—and for good reason. Her viral TikTok about tech boundaries and screen-free socializing sparked a huge conversation about what digital balance looks like in 2025. Ain’t no party like a no-phones party, we’ll tell you that much.

The Wall Street Skinny takes Carlyle 📈 | Jen and Kristen took The Wall Street Skinny to the offices of private equity giant Carlyle (maybe you’ve heard of it), unpacking what it really takes to build confidence and careers as women in finance. Building a business that helps people and staying true to yourself doing it? That’s TWSS.

Baratunde brings it at Afrotech 🔮| Baratunde Thurston is the definition of one to watch. This week at the Afrotech conference in Houston, Baratunde gave a top-tier talk: The State of the Future, a look at what it means to be human when tech, media, and nature are all rewriting the rules. The creativity here? Unmatched.

Brand Campaigns Hot Off the Press 🗞️

Some of the fun partnerships our team’s been working on with creators + brands

Ruffin Mitchener x Flodesk 💌 | Love when this happens: creator (Ruffin) works with brand (Flodesk) that actually helps them run their business (Brydge Club) in real life. Ruffin’s breakdown of how she’s using Flodesk to build her angel investing collective is music to the ears of her audience—one that wants needs to know the tools founders are using to level up.

The Coding Sloth x Oracle 💻 | The Sloth’s latest collab with Oracle dives into what makes modern software infrastructure actually work—a compelling story told with his signature voice and clarity. Cannot get enough of these videos, really truly.

Tommy x Dovetail 🪄 | “I think I just solved this” is music to the ears of everyone who follows Tommy for his UX design and storytelling expertise. That’s how he tees up this partnership with Dovetail—bringing its customer insights platform to life with a perfectly nerdy, perfectly entertaining breakdown of how teams turn feedback into gold.

Thoughts for the Road 🛣️

A little something we’ve been chatting about here at Smooth HQ

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times: Cheers is not a good email signoff Meeting people live and in-person is the future of community-building. We’re as long as could be on events with our knowledge creators.

But when we say events, that can mean a few things: It could be a Smooth Session we host in NYC. It could be a meetup like what CatGPT did at SF Tech Week earlier this month. Or? It could be a casual hang at long last, after nearly a year of working together.

We finally got to do that last one with Jen and Kristen of The Wall Street Skinny, and it rocked. Meeting them in person was fun, yes, but it was also an important reminder of what we do and why we do it.

Jen and Kristen are lifelong friends building something remarkable—and also deep subject matter experts on banking and finance with years of experience at some of the most important firms around. 

• They’re using that experience to offer inspiring, educational, and (actually) funny content for people who want to understand and break into high finance. 

• And The Wall Street Skinny is so powerful because it’s so specific—we’re not talking “day in the life of an investment banker.”  We’re talking “the difference between passing and failing a private equity LBO modeling test in 10 seconds.”

We started working with them because we knew that specificity was a winning strategy. And hanging out with them, finally, at our own little mini-event, reminded us why we’re so excited to keep working with them: They’re the exact kind of knowledge creators we aspired to work with when we started Smooth 4 years ago. Incredibly knowledgeable. Skilled and creative communicators. True experts. Good people.

Meeting in-person reaffirmed and magnified all of the good vibes we already had from Jen and Kristen. Now…we just gotta do it more often.