Cate Jarrett and the Art of the Executive Interview

Some people can get a founder to say the thing they didn't plan to say. Cate Jarrett is one of them. She hosts and interviews for a living, in front of crowds and one on one, and she's built a career on the moment a guarded executive finally sounds like a person.

We partnered with her on Executive Stories, and she's the reason it works. Cate runs the conversation. We produce everything around it.

One guided executive interview becomes months of content you own. No weekly show, no podcast treadmill, no phone propped on a stack of books at 6am.

Why we wanted Cate

Anyone can point a camera at a founder. Getting the line worth keeping is a different skill, and it's hers. She's spent years across the table from founders, CEOs, and chiefs of staff, in rooms like Cannes Lions, SXSW, NYFW, and Tribeca.

Host is only part of it. She's also an executive producer and a creative strategist, so she shapes the angle and the story from the first call, long before the founder sits down.

Sit-down interviews, the floor at an event, the street, a festival stage, a symposium panel. She reads the room and gets the answer either way. That range is rare, and it's the entire job.

We know because we've done it with her. We worked together at Cannes Lions, so this isn't a cold intro or a name on a slide. We watched what a good host does to the footage in real time. The same question from a different person pulls a different answer, and that difference is why you bring in a pro.

Most brands know they should, they just don't know where to start

This is the part we hear constantly. A company knows its founder is the story. They know corporate storytelling built around a real person beats another explainer nobody finishes. They know they should be doing more video.

Then nothing happens. Not from a lack of will, from not knowing where to start. A standing show sounds exhausting, the calendar wins, and another quarter goes by with the best asset in the building unfilmed. Executive Stories is the answer to where do we even begin. You begin with one good day.

Cate is the face, we're the production behind her

She handles the conversation. We handle the rest. We bring the conversation to you, wherever you are, and set it up so it looks and sounds like the brand you already are, not a webinar and not a hostage video. The founder shows up, talks for an hour, and gets back to running the company.

After editing, that one sitting turns into a whole library. An anchor piece that carries the story. A few features that go deeper on how the thing works and why it's different. A stack of short cuts framed for wherever you post them.

Between her side and ours, every angle is covered, the strategy, the conversation, the corporate video production, the edit. It's why this moves fast for the brand. You bring the founder and an hour, we bring the rest.

And you own all of it, the footage, the edit, the clips, for good. It keeps working for months instead of disappearing by Monday.

What one day leaves you with

Most brands treat an executive interview as one video. We treat it as raw material for a quarter. The same hour that makes the hero story also makes the recruiting clip a candidate watches before the onsite, the ten seconds that opens a keynote, and the answer you paste into a reply when a prospect asks what makes you different.

So one guided conversation becomes a founder story, a set of feature pieces, twenty plus short clips, and a tight sizzle for the top of a pitch. From there it keeps going, into newsletters, LinkedIn, sales follow-ups, and investor updates. One day feeds the pipeline for months.

It's built for the company with the best story in its category and no clean way to tell it. That's who Executive Stories is built for. If you want the longer version of our thinking, we wrote about how to film a founder without making them look like a founder too.

We've wanted to build something around a host this good for a while. Glad it's Cate.