This is a private newsletter for CEOs, founders, and executives responsible for driving growth at their firms. It’s written by me, Brooks Dyroff, CEO of The Street Sheet.

Through our publishing division, The Street Sheet, and our advisory arm, The Street Sheet Studio, I’ve helped financial firms grow trust and distribution, working with organizations ranging from legacy institutions like J.P. Morgan to public fintechs like SoFi, RIAs managing billions in AUM such as Griffin Asset Management, and emerging companies like Augment Markets.

This year, I’m sitting down with executives we work with to extract practical insights on growth, positioning, and trust-building. I’ll be sharing those lessons privately with a small group of peers (aka, you).

If even one idea helps you grow more effectively in 2026, this newsletter has done its job.

Please treat these updates as confidential. If you’d like to add someone from your team, or if you no longer want to receive them, just reply.

Lastly, if you want help implementing proven growth marketing strategies like the ones discussed here, including content, lead generation, and compliance-ready distribution, you can find my calendar here.

Hi Everyone - Brooks here, CEO of The Street Sheet. Happy New Year. I hope the first full work week of 2026 was a good one.

If you're receiving this, it means you've been added to my private newsletter. More on that below.

First, I'm excited to announce the soft launch of "The Street Sheet C-Suite", a video series in which I'll be speaking with other CEOs, founders, and executives about a range of topics, including:

In addition to the questions above, I'm also going to press our guests to share some of the following:

After we film these videos, we plan on sending the full video, along with short-form content and written posts, to our audience of 125,000 investors.

It's a win-win.

I'm also planning to reflect on these conversations and extract key insights for the executives on this private newsletter.

My hope is that even one small nugget from these conversations sparks an idea that helps you grow your business in 2026 and beyond.

Additionally, if you read, watch, or listen to someone that you want to meet, please let me know. I would love to make an introduction.

So, with that said, let's dive into our first conversation with a friend, and someone I deeply admire, Nick Greenfield.

— Brooks

From Lyft’s Early Days to Reinventing Dental Care: Candid CEO Nick Greenfield on Startups, Markets, and the Future of Oral Health

Nick is a startup operator and founder best known for being one of the first four employees at Lyft, where he helped build the company during its earliest hyper-growth phase after it spun out of Zimride.

After spending his early career inside high-growth Silicon Valley startups, Nick went on to co-found and lead Candid, a Series B dental aligner company. Candid focuses on empowering general dentists with an orthodontics-in-a-box solution designed to scale care and improve long-term oral health outcomes.

The company has raised $86.4M from top-tier investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, and Headline.

You can watch our full conversation by clicking here or the video image above.

If you don't have time, here are three CEO-level insights from my discussion that translate well to any business being built in 2026:

What stood out most is how operational Nick is about customer obsession. This is not a value on a wall. It is how he personally allocates time as CEO.

He said:

“Our internal company motto is customer obsession drives profitable growth.”

And then immediately made it concrete:

“I get really excited getting up in the morning and going to speak with our customers, to speak with our sales team that’s out in the field, working with our customers.”

The takeaway for other CEOs is simple but uncomfortable.

If you are not regularly talking to customers yourself, you are outsourcing the most important signal in the business.

Nick ties customer conversations directly to product design, growth, and retention, not to feel-good feedback loops.

In 2026, when AI, automation, and dashboards abstract leaders further from reality, Nick’s approach is a reminder that first-hand insight compounds faster than any KPI.

Nick’s thinking on growth is especially useful for executives frustrated by diminishing returns from paid acquisition. He is intentionally leaning into things that are hard to scale because they teach the company how to scale correctly.

He described this through Candid’s small, highly targeted customer conferences:

“I found that building community is a really critical mechanism for driving customer growth.”

And expanded on why these experiences matter:

“What they’re going to take away from learning from each other and ultimately collaborating on how to use our product better… being the company that is helping drive that experience for them is invaluable.”

Nick then tied this directly to Airbnb’s early playbook:

“You’ve got to figure out things that you can scale again, potentially in a local way, and then figure out how to take that national.”

The insight here is that scalability is often the second step, not the first.

CEOs who only pursue immediately scalable channels miss the chance to build trust, advocacy, and usage depth. Nick is deliberately earning the right to scale by first proving what actually changes customer behavior.

The most human and transferable insight came at the end of the conversation, when Nick talked about success outside of metrics and valuation.

He said:

“Winning means being able to create space and time to hang out with my kids.”

And later, reinforced the lesson many executives only realize too late:

“I think about some of the most successful people in the world and what they’ve said about what they regret. And it’s almost always, I wish I had more time to spend with my family.”

What makes this insight powerful is that Nick is not saying this from the sidelines. He is running a highly intense, fast-growing company. He is traveling weekly. He is still choosing to optimize for presence when the opportunity exists.

What ties all three of these ideas together is that real growth rarely comes from shortcuts.

It comes from proximity to customers, from doing unscalable work long enough to understand what actually changes behavior, and from building businesses that serve your life rather than consume it.

At The Street Sheet, we think about growth the same way Nick does: as a system built on trust, consistency, and first-hand insight.

That philosophy informs how we advise firms through The Street Sheet Studio, where we help financial companies turn their expertise into durable distribution through content, lead generation, and compliance-ready marketing.

If these ideas resonate and you want help putting them into practice, here’s my calendar. Let’s find a time to speak.