Executive Coaching · Company Building · Capital
Building
valuable companies
and resilient
leaders.
Gannett.Partners works at the intersection of human potential and enterprise value — with founders, executives, athletes, and creators who are building something that matters.
The Work
Coaching without capital is advice.
Capital without coaching is a bet.
Company building is where both become real.
I
Coach
Mindset & Performance
Executive coaching for founders, C-suite leaders, athletes, and artists navigating the complexity of leading at scale. Our balanced approach — championing and challenging — deepens awareness, questions assumptions, and unlocks perspective.
Certified in Berkeley’s Active Communicating® methodology and Harvard McLean Institute of Coaching. 98 NPS across 15 industries and 10 countries.
II
Build
Formation & Scale
Active company building at the intersection of education, media, IP, and the creator economy. We co-found ventures from 0 to 1 — shaping vision, assembling teams, and building with co-founder-level commitment.
Entrepreneur in Residence at Yale Ventures. The GP Applied Venture platform has launched DOC CARES, and is unveiling a new venture from stealth in 2026 — in media, artist monetization, and AI.
III
Invest
Capital & Returns
Stage-agnostic capital alongside the work. We invest selectively alongside leading managers, entrepreneurs, and talent — small on the cap table, large in value.
We also work with investors and family offices seeking co-investment opportunities where operating expertise matters as much as capital, with particular focus on cultural assets: catalogs, rights, libraries, and the businesses built around them. Recent exits: SpaceX IPO (2026) and secondary sale (2025), Geologie (2025), Jackpocket (2024), Classy (2022).
The Model
The framework behind the work.
Most advisory firms tell you what to do. Most investors write a check and wait. We do neither. Our Coach / Build / Invest model compounds on trust, not spend — built on a concept we call Founder Due Diligence, the same rigor private equity applies to operations applied instead to the person building the company.
Read the full frameworkThe Thesis
Culture is an asset class. Most of it is still unpriced.
Music proved it first. In under a decade it went from a risky consumer business to something banks and insurers will lend against. Insurance companies now hold bonds backed by song royalties. The most cautious money there is has put culture on its balance sheet.
Sports, media, education, and the creator economy are the same shape and about a decade behind. They earn steady, contracted money year after year from something people care about. What has been missing is anyone who can value them from the inside.
North Texas is where the next decade of it gets built, and the capital is already here.
$20B+
Music catalog acquisitions, 2018 to 2024
$2.225B
Largest music royalty fund ever raised, April 2026
$19.2B
Deployed by North Texas family offices in 2024
$200–950M
What that could mean here. Our estimate
The Seat
The people who price these assets rarely sit in the room where they get made. The people in that room rarely price them. We have done both.
Brands built on the shelf. Underwriting on Wall Street. Operating at the top of culture, from catalogs and estates to the icons. We build these businesses, we run them, and we invest alongside the families and firms that own them.
See the convergence mapSources · Catalog acquisition volume and fund data: industry reporting, 2025 to 2026. North Texas family office deployment: The Dallas Morning News, July 2026, citing a Praxis Rock Advisors estimate covering roughly 190 Dallas-area offices. The implied local allocation applies a 1 to 5 percent rights allocation range, drawn from published commentary on family office entry into music rights, against that deployment figure. It is our own estimate, not a published number.
Applied Ventures
The proof of a practice.
These are not portfolio logos. They are founder-led companies co-built through the GP Applied Venture platform — at the $12T intersection of education, media, sports, IP, and creator economy, multiplied by AI & tech.
Social Impact · Education · Culture
The national nonprofit platform founded by Tracy “The D.O.C.” Curry — Dallas native, Grammy Lifetime Achievement recipient, and community architect.
Launched — 2025
Visit →
Music Infrastructure X Marketplace
$40B+ in global brand-creator spend still runs on email, PDFs, and law firms. Independent artists own 43% of streaming and 100% of their rights. We’re building the operating system that connects them.
Launching — 2026
Preview →
Who We Serve
Every client is at an inflection point.
Which is yours?
Beyond the early proof, now facing the decisions that define everything — capital strategy, team architecture, market positioning. You need someone who has built a company, not someone who has studied people who did.
You have the title and the team. What you need is a confidential space to think through the decisions that don’t belong in any other room — with someone who has held the same weight.
Your platform is the asset. The question is how to build something that outlasts the performance — companies, IP, partnerships, presence. The creator economy has rewritten the playbook. We know the new rules.
Coaching, advisory, and company building solutions that support your value creation platform. Co-investment opportunities where operating expertise is as important as capital.
Trusted by leaders from
The Founder
The most important variable in any business is its leader.
Chris Gannett is an operator who has built, banked, and operated brands in culture. Emmy-winning, Guinness Record-holding, and recognized with Sony’s CEO Award for Global Entrepreneurial Achievement, Chris has spent his career as the operator behind icons — building them on the shelf (Dr Pepper, Oreo), underwriting them on Wall Street (Citi), and operating them at the top of culture (Sony Music, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, The D.O.C., and American Idol, where he served as CMO through its $509M sale).
He founded Gannett.Partners to work at the intersection of human potential and enterprise value, with the founders, athletes, and creators building what comes next, and the capital backing them.
Two theses guide the work. The $12T convergence of education, media, sports, IP, and the creator economy, multiplied by AI and technology, is turning brands in culture into an asset class: durable, ownable, and still early for those who see it clearly. And North Texas is where it gets built first. Capital and culture are converging on Dallas-Fort Worth, “Y’all Street” and “Y’allywood,” and co-founders from Dallas and New York are choosing it as their first commercial footprint. Not out of loyalty. Out of conviction.
The firm’s Applied Ventures are the proof of concept: two co-built companies, including DOC CARES, founded with hip hop icon The D.O.C., and one more emerging from stealth. Chris has stood up new ventures, raised against them, and killed the ones that did not earn their economics. Realized outcomes include Classy (2022), Jackpocket (2024), Geologie (2025), and SpaceX secondary and IPO (2025 and 2026).
A Yale Ventures Entrepreneur in Residence, Chris serves on the boards of the Dallas Regional Chamber and DOC CARES, and was named to D Magazine’s 2026 Dallas 500.
Happy husband, father of two, music fan top to toe.
