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Hello and welcome everyone.
I'm Patrick O 'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open -ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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My guest today is Lulu Misurvi.
Lulu is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a company that partners with founders to level up their communications around all strategic initiatives from hiring to fundraising.
Recently, I've been fascinated by the challenge of founders telling their story and Lulu might be the single person that I would want to turn to personally to solve a storytelling or communication challenge in my business.
We discuss the evolution of media and its pitfalls, innovative methods for managing crises, and the power of going direct with your communication, her overall philosophy.
Please enjoy my great conversation with Lulu Misurvi.
Okay, Lulu, I think it's fair to say that now you and your team are the most sought after partners in the world for people tackling big challenges trying to tell their story.
I'm really curious, if we were building a timeline with those notches on it, where the end notch is you starting your business, what do you think the key formative experiences were for you personally that got you so interested in this thing that you do so well?
I think my primary selling point is actually being unencumbered with experience in doing communications.
The world comes I think is so broken that the more experience you have in it, the more compromised you might be and the harder it is to break away.
I have very little experience in comes and experience and other things.
What maybe makes me a fit for startups and founders is having been born in this little village that was poor and backwards and rural and communist and to this day doesn't have running water electricity and to this day doesn't have free access to information and seeing the contrast there and understanding
the stakes of what some of that's one.
Two is I've lived in a lot of places and I think it helps me picture how words come across if there's a culture barrier.
There might be a culture barrier between a Norwegian and a Chinese person or a German and American person, but there's also often a culture barrier between a tech person and a DC person or a finance person and a heavy industry person.
Just thinking about how words translate through those cultural membranes.
Then another thing is that my actual professional experience is a mix of having studied security studies and counter terrorism, having studied geopolitics, having worked in tech geopolitics and finance.
Everything except comms basically and through that combination learning and figuring it out.
I would not say that I'm perfect, but I think that the bar in the industry is frankly so low that if you have a good mindset and are willing and eager to help founders, it can get you pretty far.
There's many things in there that I want to ask about, but before we do that, I want to lay a bit of a foundation because I'm sure we'll map back onto the foundation a lot.
What is your overarching philosophy for how companies and leaders should tell their story?
The founder asked to be accountable for the story.
The founder holds this secret knowledge and this vision that other people don't.
If that's not true, you have no business starting a company.
Get out of here and go work at IBM.
Get a job. Unless you have that secret knowledge and that secret vision and something to bring to the world that's new, you have no business being a founder.
Everybody that has business being a founder knows something that everybody else doesn't know.
I'm belaboring that point because it's really important to me, but the core thing to internalize is if you have that knowledge, you cannot then transmit it through seven other layers until it becomes something that is fully familiar to people and fits fully into some comfortable narrative that already
exists. You have to figure out a way to speak to people directly with your voice, your passion, your vision, and not have it trickle down too far because you lose the thing that's special.
There can be too many middlemen such that by the time your message reaches people, it's been watered down beyond recognition and it's not special anymore.
What would you say the norm is?
The norm is using a ton of middlemen.
If you look at a professional company that has all of its layers and structures in place, the CEO tells maybe a CMO or a VP of comms who then tells the person who's in charge of corporate comms, who then tells the person who's in charge of media relations, who then pitches a reporter and then they'll find
a reporter who already wanted to write something similar because they have a narrative already in mind and then it's beamed through the prism of that reporter's worldview to specific readers of that publication and then those readers get that version.
You can even hear through the process of me describing this, how contorted it is along the way.
Today, there's absolutely no need to do that.
Not only do you not need to do that, you shouldn't be relying on that.
You can do it every once in a while.
You might need to reach policymakers in DC and they do read, let's say, the Wall Street Journal and you got to be in there, but you can't just be doing that.
That's maybe 1 % of the playbook.
Why is it so pervasive then?
If it's so ineffective, how has it gotten to the place that so few follow your advice?
I think people are larping as communicators and as executives.
There's never been a real playbook for comms that is analytical, grounded in reasoning and logic and first principles that has intellectual rigor and there have been some great, great PR and propaganda people throughout history and they've had their own playbooks, but there is no definitive best practice
to doing so. It's not like math.
People will just look to other people doing it and everybody is a pale shadow of someone who came from before.
If you would trace it all the way back, maybe we're all larping as Edward Bernays or something, but it becomes one of these things where there's four mice and they like to run on a treadmill and you take them out one by one and put in new mice and then pretty soon all the new mice are imitating the old
mice and they don't know why and I think that's what's been happening in a corporate setting, probably for a lot of other roles as well, but especially for comms.
Bernays is interesting because so much about what made him singular and original was technology around him.
The ability to disseminate new messages to masses through new technology and obviously today we've got a very unique landscape.
What about today's landscape of where and how information flows is most important and interesting to you?
So we're between two worlds today.
I'm not even talking about traditional media versus social media.
That's the old old world is traditional media, transitioning to social media.
I think where we are today is social media transitioning to AI driven, hyper personalized, very prolific where you can't tell human made from AI made very soon.
Media, whatever the term will be for that, it's a combination of information overload, trust breaking down, AI slop, very persuasive, real and fake versions of things.
We're right in the middle of that and the key technologies are social media, generative AI, and this is not a technology, but influencers and individuals as mediums.
If you were to think about against that backdrop, your whole idea of founders going directly to their audience, telling their story in their words in an unvarnished way, no middlemen, maybe pick an example of somebody that you've worked with or not that does this especially well to sort of dimensionalize
it for us. What are the key components of doing Go Direct Well and who has personified that in your opinion?
There's a couple of different ways to do this.
If you're an earlier founder in a smaller company, you should just straight up do it yourself.
But if you're a founder of a larger company, you can't and shouldn't try to do everything yourself all the time, in which case you have people who are helping you.
My point is that you shouldn't be dependent on them and outsource it to them because the buck does stop with you and not with your VP of comms, but you can be working with those people and having them help you take on the load.
Big company, I think Toby Luca does an incredible job.
He takes personal responsibility for the story of Shopify.
Everything about the narrative and the way the history is presented and the lore of the company and the lore of him and starting out with his janky online snowboard store, he owns that and he tracks it.
There are people who help and that is the way it should be, but he never abnegates that responsibility.
He's a good example of it.
Palmer at Andorral is another great example.
Andorral has several founders and they all do a great job.
Palmer is more visible.
The reason he does a great job, similar, is Andorral has a great comms team, very talented people at every level.
They do what they're supposed to do and then there's the Palmer alpha where on top of that, he takes personal accountability and he puts in personal creativity and he puts himself out there for personal risk.
There are times when he's being attacked, not the company, and he puts himself out there for that as well.
So those are a couple that I think are doing a great job.
If you think about the subcomponents of Go Direct, how would you break that concept up into pieces?
Are there ingredients that add up to that overall Go Direct recipe?
I'm trying to crystallize this better, but I think that there are a few core ingredients.
There might be variations on the recipe.
Whenever you post a recipe online, there's somebody who's like, I doubled the butter and it was good for me.
Maybe you can double the butter, but the core ingredients are, number one, it starts with the founder and they have to have a clear vision and they have to be willing and eager to take on that responsibility.
You can't do it in a self -loathing way where you hate every second of it.
You have to appreciate what it means for the company and be willing to lean into it.
I think that Alex at Scale is a good example of this.
He is a founder's founder.
He gets into the weeds.
He does what other people would call micromanaging and he cares so much, and he does that with comms as well.
He has never shied away from taking a bullet on behalf of Scale.
He's willing to do that.
That's one. Two is you need to have a very clear view of what your goals are and what you're trying to accomplish.
This is super important because a lot of people will just flail around and do activity.
Once they feel activity is done, it gives them the illusion that something has happened when, in fact, they haven't moved any closer to any specific direction.
Communication is a vector, not a scaler.
It only matters if there's a direction attached to it.
If you know that your direction is, we have to get more customers or we're going to go raise a round at the end of this year, or we need to get this thing done with regulators.
Whatever the big goals are, all the comms should be pointed in that direction and then everything else is wasted motion.
If you don't have a direction, then everything is wasted motion.
Two is having a clear direction.
Ramp, which is a fantastic company, I'm really proud to work with them.
One of the reasons I'm proud is that they've always been very clear about what they are and what they're not.
They have a bunch of competitors and copycats and wannabes over the years who have tried to rampify themselves.
It's never quite worked because Ramp knows that they're there to save customers time and money.
They say it 10 times a day.
I've heard them say probably 10 times in a single meeting and everything is geared towards that, including the comms.
Whereas if somebody is just splashing around in the pool, that's not sustainable.
You can't splash around forever.
You'll also never arrive anywhere.
So, number one is the founder knows what they're about and they're willing to take on the responsibility of being the keeper of the vision and the message.
Two is the company has to have clear goals that they're working toward.
Three, related to two, is you have to know the audience and know your audience is actually a cliche at this point.
It's become so much of a truism that it's faded into the ambient background and people don't think about it enough.
Maybe we should rebrand it or something so it becomes fresh and salient again.
But know your audience is important because if you're talking to the wrong people, it's worse than talking to nobody, partly because of the expended time and partly because you might be making new enemies or making unwanted friends that then tie you down in unpredicted ways.
So, I think of the audiences as here are the people who actually have a say in the future of the company.
If my goal is to get more users, then these are the users and I care about them and people who are not users, I literally don't care about them.
If I have to make them mad in order to please the users, I will make that choice without hesitation.
So, there's the people that you really care about.
Then, there's the haters and every founder has haters and the bigger founder you are, the more haters you'll have and as the company grows, the corpus of haters will grow.
Most of these haters are irredeemables, the David Petraeus term for people you can't convert.
Every once in a while, you hear wonderfully inspiring stories about, I used to be a hater and then I came around.
It's so rare that I actually don't recommend expending much energy on it.
If you have the opportunity to convert someone okay, but I wouldn't make it a core part of your strategy to convert people who hate you, if you're going to engage with them at all, you might consider letting them attack you until they overstep in order for you to round up your true allies.
That's a good use as oil.
And then, there's the swing voters.
It's the people who actually could be your people, but they just don't know it yet.
Just like in an election, the swing voters are deserving of a disproportionate amount of attention.
That's your audience.
And then, last I would say your medium and your hook.
You need to reach people where they intellectually hang out.
So, the type of person who hangs out on Reddit or listening to Joe Rogan or listening to NPR or going to conferences or reading The New York Times, these are different people who get their ideas in different places.
If you're trying to reach someone who reads GORN and you're in The New York Times, again, you're just screaming into the void.
So, the medium and the messenger of who they're hearing this from and where they're hearing it is the key for whether it actually reaches them and they'll absorb it.
I love the ingredients.
One of the things to double click on is the message itself.
And I always think about, I think it was Graydon Carter's rules for content, which was narrative, conflict, and proprietary information.
You want to have all three of them in a message.
How do you think about the most well -constructed packets to then send through all these different channels to meet the customer or the person you need to influence where they are?
What are the Graydon Carter trifecta?
It's good for news and breaking news.
And in an age where you had to break news in order to justify the inches in the columns, that totally makes sense.
Today, we're moving more toward opinions and personalities.
I don't think that formula is necessary anymore.
It's a formula. But even newspapers are moving more toward opinions and editorial.
A new way to think about it would be, I don't have the catch phrases yet.
Maybe we can make up the catch phrases.
The way I describe it is that you need to know their cultural erogenous zones, what they care about and what they think about.
Then you need a gateway drug.
Sometimes I'll describe it as an API, but you basically need a bridge from what they're currently thinking about and caring about to bridge them to the new thing that you want them to think about and care about.
At the very beginning of this conversation, I said that the founder has something new and secret to share with the world that people don't already know.
And that's the whole point is that it's different.
You also can't just blast somebody with something they've never heard of before.
You have to give them something in there that's familiar or related to something they already care about.
And so I think the formula would be the hook.
And the hook has to relate to what their cultural erogenous zone is.
And you have to be in their culture to understand that.
Then the gateway drug or the bridge, the segue, and then the new thing that you want them to understand or think about.
One interesting set of questions is around the people that you choose to work with.
So you work with a small handful of companies.
I think you've got 30 times that waiting in the wings that would love to work with you that you don't have capacity to work with.
And so obviously, I'm sure you're incredibly intentional about who you choose to work with.
I want to hear the reasons why you work with the ones that you do and maybe some categories of reasons why you don't work with some others.
What the criteria that you seek and avoid are for who you pick as customers.
We choose a lot on vibes and chemistry, not just because it makes work more fun.
It does. But also because I think vibes is the best measurement we have so far about whether things are going to go well.
With early startups especially, you don't have enough data points from the company in order to make an educated judgment about how well things are going to go for the company.
And so you look at the founder and you stare them in the eyes and you think, is this someone who's going to make it?
We just read vibes a lot.
I think you can cultivate an ability to do that.
Mine is pretty good.
It could probably get a lot better too.
But we go by vibes.
That's one. Two is we think about how much does this company need us right now?
We've talked with really awesome founders of awesome companies who are doing just great.
And we could come in and ride those coattails and collect a fee and it would probably feel like we had gotten a Cinecure.
And we don't want that.
We like when there's a delta between where the world is now and where the world should be with this company succeeding.
So for example, working with Safe Super Intelligence, it feels like one of the more important things we could possibly be doing is supporting those guys in any way because what they're doing is so monumental for the world.
Building a Safe Super Intelligence, it's in the name.
And then the third thing we look for is just the structure of the company.
So is the founder really in the weeds?
Is the founder doing things themselves or are they delegating a lot?
And how directly are they willing to work with us and work with their audiences and put themselves out there?
Sometimes founders will use another person like a crush.
You do this so that I don't have to, but I feel better knowing that you're there doing it.
That's not our model.
Our model is to help the founders look great and be the best version of themselves as a public advocate for their company, not for me to go do everything for them forever.
So it's more teach a man to fish, less sell a man a fish a month at a time.
Let's say we're zoomed in on a company's launching a new product.
Is part of what you bring to the table the recognition of what the outside world will most resonate with?
Companies obviously know themselves really well.
They have an opinion on the things that make them special.
And maybe sometimes that's not the same set of things that will most resonate with an external audience.
Have you heard of the illusion of transparency?
There's different words for it, but you've probably felt it.
Let's say you and I are chatting and you say a thing that completes a thought that's in your head and I'm completely lost, or there's a misunderstanding.
I take it wrong. I get my feelings hurt.
It's you assuming that the outside world can know what's in your mind and you forgot to complete the thought, or you didn't read the room properly because you're too much living inside your own head.
And that's easy for anybody else to do.
So part of our job actually is reading the room, figuring out what the room is and then getting inside of it and then reading it.
And then reporting back to figure out, okay, if you're going to launch, these are the people, this is what they're talking about right now.
This is what they care about.
This thing that was cool two weeks ago when we started talking about this has actually turned cringe in the meantime.
We're not going to go with that anymore.
So hyper reading the room is an important skill.
And then I have my co -founder, Sergey, and he's the CTO of our firm.
He's my autism translator.
I will talk to and listen to one set of people more and he'll talk to and listen to another set of people more.
And between us, I think we've got a pretty wide spectrum of text.
So the reading the room exercise we do together.
It seems like this has become a sub genre of communications that's really interesting and important.
And people are vying to one up each other on the more impressive launch.
The Cognition launch comes to mind with their product, Devon, which was obviously well done, just based on the insane number of impressions and discussions and comparisons that it made possible.
And I'm curious how much of something like that is luck or attributable to real skill behind the scenes.
Obviously, it's a blend of the two.
It seems like there's this launch arms race.
And I'm just curious for you to zoom in on launch and what you think separates the great from the good.
Launches are more important now than they used to be.
So sometimes when you ask people do launches matter, they'll say, no, do you remember when Airbnb first launched?
Remember when Facebook first launched?
It doesn't matter. It actually matters a little bit more now because there's so much more noise and because the bar has been raised.
It's important to take it seriously.
The other thing with startups is if you're starting from nothing and nobody cares about you and you have no name recognition and your family thinks you're worse than unemployed for working on this thing that makes no sense to anybody because it's new and nobody's heard of it, you can use every opportunity
to make people care that you can have.
And the launch is the first of those, introducing yourself to the world in a proper way is the first of those.
The last reason that the launch is so important is now if you don't quickly establish what you're about, you don't have the luxury of quietly building for a long time and then just gradually shaping the perception.
Somebody else will just do it for you.
There are so many competitors and reporters and independent writers and influencers and gossips and especially in AI.
We do a lot of work in AI and the scuttlebutt in AI is intense.
It's the biggest water cooler in the world.
Everybody's gathered around and word will get out and it'll be this contorted, distorted version that doesn't represent what you want and then you'll spend a lot of time trying to put that back and clean up and start over.
So, come out strong with the thing that you stand for when we work at the companies on launches, I recommend they write a manifesto.
I don't want to live in a world where everybody's writing a manifesto for everything all the time but it is good as a forcing mechanism if nothing else to write down what you stand for and what you value and then come out either with those words or something that reflects those words.
Launches do matter and they matter more than they did before and if you don't launch yourself, somebody will launch you for you at some point.
So, you got to do it even if just defensively.
On launches, luck versus skill for the Devon launch.
99 % was the cognition guys built Devon.
They built something genuinely great and new and impressive.
Then out of that remaining 1%, I would say half of it is we did a good job and then half of it was luck.
There's always animal spirits on social media.
You can't fully predict.
Now, if we zoom in on the half percent that I would attribute to skill, what goes into that half percent?
It's having a very clear story about what this is.
So, everything and every person is a thousand things.
You could describe yourself in a thousand ways if you were forced to.
There's enough material there.
Every product or company can be described in a thousand different ways.
The taste and discretion and creativity in describing it in the single best way and choosing the number one best one out of the thousand is where a lot of that skill lies.
This founder mode essay, PG's essay that went viral over the weekend, I think more than half of that was a great name.
It was simple. It was familiar.
People understood it, but it was also new.
So, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has written a whole book about what makes things go viral.
He talks about blending the novel with the familiar and that being a magic formula.
Finding a way to describe what you're doing that is simple, crisp, and familiar, but novel, is a big part of it.
Teing up your allies is a big part of it.
You can't just put something out into the world and if you say it, they will listen and hope that all your friends will rally to you.
It takes some time.
In the case of Cognition, it took between a month and two months to brief some people and prep some people and get people ready.
There are people who are latently happy to support you, but they might not know how and they might not be ready to do it.
You can help them help you.
Then there's the normal logistics stuff of the site should look how you want it to look and your post should sound how you want it to sound, the video should be what you want it to be.
If you're going to do press, choose the right reporter.
Reporter selection is probably the number one thing in press.
People stress a lot about the pitch and the prep and what do I say in the interview.
If you choose the right reporter, what you say in the interview matters a lot less.
What are the characteristics of the right reporter?
Is it different in every scenario or is it often the same talented few reporters?
It's different reporters, but I think it's the same criteria.
Traditionally, you would start with what's the outlet, what's the beat, and who's the reporter.
I think now it's flipped because we've gone from institutions to individuals.
Start with who are the people who are knowledgeable in this space and love it.
They're excited about it.
They're not here just to hold you accountable and to get maximum metrics to send to their boss.
They genuinely love it.
For Cognition, for example, and same for SSI, which was actually Vance, because he is intellectually curious about AI.
He's not the only one.
He's just an example, but he just keeks out and he loves it.
You want somebody who will match your energy and reflect your energy back as you're talking to them, and then they will research it through the lens of somebody who loves this thing.
Who are the people who love it and know about it?
You'll come up with a list of maybe 30.
There's many people.
But within those people, now look at what kind of personal following do they have, who follows them, and then how many of the who.
Then what's the publication they work for?
Do they work for publication?
Maybe they have their own sub -stack and that is great too.
But if they work for a publication, then who's their editor?
You might have a great reporter with a not so great editor that becomes an unforeseen problem.
Then the publication itself, who is it read by?
How big is its reach?
How well is it perceived?
There are some publications that are read by a ton of people but are not seen as prestigious.
So USA Today is one of the biggest circulations, but it's not seen as prestigious compared to The Financial Times, which has a smaller readership, but is seen as a higher bar.
So qualitative judgment there.
Then lastly, do they have a paywall and do you care about that?
Sometimes I've gone to publications that are smaller or have less name recognition because for that thing, we didn't want a paywall.
Or you don't care because you're trying to reach a specific set of people and all those people subscribe anyway.
I'd love to turn to a topic which is probably the most broadly relevant for this audience.
So this audience is entrepreneurs and CEOs and then professional investors.
That's the two big categories.
The thing that both of those people do all the time is fundraise.
And I'd love to talk about what you've learned helping companies fundraise successfully.
My guess is that the ideas are applicable both to an investor trying to raise a fund and a company trying to raise a round.
But the movement of capital flows is like a key, key part of what at least this audience cares about and what drives business.
And fundraising does feel like this constant battle.
What have you learned about the people that do this best?
How would you steer them?
The people who do it best are unapologetically who they are.
They don't fit into one specific persona.
They don't have to be charming and amazing salesmen.
Sometimes it's better if they're not, you don't want someone who stands up and is like, hello, sharks vibe.
If they're supposed to be a security researcher, whatever persona or vibe it is, just lean into that.
I have seen a founder that can't make eye contact.
I've never seen him do it.
I don't know if he's capable.
It was like maybe a rare medical condition.
Like can't make eye contact.
Speaks in a full monotone, looks down, mumbles, and that's what he's about.
That's his vibe. He is totally unapologetic for him.
Wallets fly out of pockets when he walks by because he exudes the vibe of a cracked engineer who knows what he's doing.
That's totally fine.
If you're going to go into salesy mode, then fine, but be authentic about it and be just an authentically good and charming salesperson.
It's valuable to have a founder who can sell their thing too.
The worst mistake is the founder is one thing and then for the purpose of fundraising, they try to make themselves another thing.
And they can't pull off the other thing.
Practically, no one ever can.
So, it looks like you're nothing.
So, you don't have the new thing and then you also don't have the old thing.
You're not hot tea, you're not iced tea.
You're just lukewarm tea and you've got nothing and nobody and you have no natural constituency.
That is probably the biggest mistake.
The other things that make fundraising seem to go really well, there's normal stuff, having connections and having a good product, the basics, but within the realm of what is easily controllable, what makes it go well is if you can describe your thing, your company, your product, in the context of a macro
narrative. So, maybe your thing fits into a thesis of American dynamism.
Maybe your thing fits into a point of view around US China competition.
Maybe your thing fits into a point of view about what's going to happen to AI over the next three and five years.
So, it has to fit into some larger worldview and then you have to convince people about the worldview and if they buy that worldview is plausible, then your product or your company is the only natural explanation.
If you agree with this premise, then you're going to want this, obviously.
It's easier than saying, here, I have a company.
Let me pitch you on my company because, number one, you're so clearly self -interested that that self -interest is undermining your pitch the time you're making it and two is investors are pretty mimetic.
This is not meant to be a dunk on investors, but it's human nature.
It's not just VCs are mimetic, it's we're all mimetic, but if you can fit yourself into a macro narrative or show the relationship between you and what's happening out into the world, then investors have, number one, a way to understand why this matters and, number two, a way to look great to the rest
of their firm and the rest of the industry when they invest in you because they're trying to signal to other founders and to other people about the quality of investments they make and they need a way to explain why this all matters.
What do you think about getting through crises?
It seems like one approach lately has been like, just post through it.
Don't even acknowledge some negative story or something.
Just keep going. That's one method.
Another method might be attack it head on, especially if you've got the facts on your side.
Famously, in the investing world, this would be like fighting against short sellers or something that release a really nasty story about your business.
Is there any lessons you've learned on managing through a crisis and communications through a crisis that you think are important for founders to understand?
Don't listen to your lawyers and never apologize if you didn't do something wrong and if you don't mean it because you'll regret it later.
If you talk to founders who apologize for something at the time, the woman who was kicked out of the wing, for example, she went back later and said she wished she hadn't done that whole routine.
They always regret it because you compromise yourself and you do compromise yourself for nothing because an apology doesn't appease people, especially if you didn't do anything wrong and it's insincere.
One, they can tell if you don't mean it, but two, if you didn't do anything wrong, then by definition, there's nothing to apologize for.
Apologizing isn't going to change the situation.
Do not apologize for something you didn't do wrong.
If you did something wrong, apologize wholeheartedly.
This is the Ben Horowitz, if you're going to eat shit, don't nibble.
I subscribe to that.
It starts with the ground truth of, did you mess up?
If you did apologize and if you didn't, don't apologize.
It's so simple and people get it so wrong.
They'll start apologizing or not apologizing based on all sorts of other garbage factors.
Who's mad at me? Am I getting ratioed?
That's how they decide whether to apologize or not.
Who gives a shit? Did you do something wrong or did you not?
Don't compromise yourself.
Don't sell out like that.
So that's the biggest thing.
Don't listen to what people tell you about what you should do to change the situation.
Either you're wrong or you're not.
At the end of the day, you got to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you stood for something.
You have principles.
And if we all just go about caving and apologizing, if we didn't mean it, this world would just fall apart.
What is the ground truth?
Did you do something wrong?
Number two, if yes, apologize wholeheartedly.
If no, fight it. And the reason I say don't listen to your lawyers is not that I'm not a legal process enjoyer.
But I do respect legal opinions and the law.
However, what I mean is a lot of times the lawyers are optimizing for one thing, they're optimizing for minimize legal risk at all other costs.
And this is the same thing where during COVID, it was like minimize COVID transition at all other costs, we're going to close schools, kids are going to fall behind, people are going to have mental health crises, you're not going to be able to bury your grandmother, that's fine.
Minimize transmission.
That's not the right way to make decisions.
And if you're a CEO, that's not the right way to make decisions because you need the whole picture.
So if you're the CEO and the founder, minimizing legal risk is one consideration.
Another consideration is principles and being true to yourself and doing what's right and courageous.
Another consideration is your reputation long term, you might do something that minimizes legal risk, like stay quiet and issue a really bland statement and go undercover for a while, and don't apologize, even if you messed up.
But that actually could shred your reputation longer term, which could be way more expensive, both financially in terms of people will boycott you and not buy your product or not trust your company or not accept the job offer.
And on a moral level, you've just paid a really expensive price for something that could have been a temporary pain.
Those are the biggest things in the crisis.
I would say pragmatically, try to fight the crisis before it happens.
If there is dry tinder lying around you, do something about it before the hot summer day comes before the campers come by.
If you know that there's skeletons in the closet, deal with them, address them, have a crisis plan in place.
I still do these tabletop war room exercises, the same type of thing that the Marine Corps would do.
They do there's better and more involved.
I do a basic version, which is let's take a crisis scenario and it hits.
And then your senior team is in a room and now what do you do?
Because people will realize in the moment that there are cracks in their plan.
It'll be tiny things.
You're my boss and it's 5am and I'm not sure whether to wake you.
So I wait until six because that seems reasonable and now we've lost an hour because I didn't make the right call.
These small things that you don't think of, all of that needs to be in place and thought of when the time comes so that everything that you can do on autopilot has to be done on autopilot because all of your organizational, operational, and mental capacity has to be spent on dealing with the crisis.
You sparked my memory.
You mentioned counter terrorism earlier.
Is there anything from that field that you're curious about that applies to all that we're talking about?
With current insurgency, one of the big lessons is the importance of winning over the local population, the importance of winning over the tribal elders and the leaders in the community and getting to them because they'll propagate the message for you and they'll do it coming from them, which is way
better than coming from you because you're self -interested and you're probably an outsider.
So one is paying attention to those people.
Going to one person who is considered an authority in a certain community is better than going to 200 or in the age of social media, maybe a thousand other people.
Another thing is the importance of the leadership and the personality is paramount.
So people have to trust you as an individual and trust you as a person in order to trust the organization that you lead.
Charismatic leader is so important that one of the strategies in counterinsurgency is to get the leader because things fall apart.
So for you to be a strong leader and for you to be the embodiment of how everybody else should be acting during this crisis is absolutely crucial.
Sometimes it's tempting to be like, I can let my emotions take over because I've got advisors around me.
Well, no, people aren't looking to your advisors for how to act.
They're looking to you for how to act.
If you think about the broader set of mistakes, setting aside the middleman category of mistakes where everything's just watered down, so maybe more isolated on mistakes made by the founder themselves.
Are there other major common ones that you've seen over and over again that you would urge people to protect themselves again or not commit?
Let me put it in an analogy.
A common mistake is playing American football instead of rugby, and I'll tell you why.
So founders should be playing rugby.
The difference between football and rugby, and I played rugby in college, so I have a soft spot, but by a society, I still think it's the right approach.
With American football, once you get tackled, the play ends.
So you'll do everything to avoid being tackled.
You see players run and look backwards around and lose yards all over the field just to avoid the tackle.
Whereas in rugby, the play is more continuous, and you might run into the tackle because you know that the play isn't going to stop and that your teammates are there and you're going to keep going.
Because it's continuous, you will take the tackle often, run into it, use the force of your momentum to get as many yards as possible, and then have your teammates pick up the ball and help you.
Running a company, especially through a crisis, but in any situation is more like rugby because the plays don't stop.
You're just going, going, going, going, going.
Ideally, it never stops.
In a crisis or in a normal situation, if someone is coming to tackle you, it's often a mistake to run from it.
Either you've done something wrong and it's time to confront it and you've got to deal with that at some point, or you haven't, and why would you let somebody besmirch your name and slander you and crap on your company and get away with it?
Because two things will happen.
One is that your employees will respect you less and the morale will go down.
Two is that you are unfavorably shaping incentives for other people to attack you in the future, unfavorable to yourself.
You're showing the world that you can attack me for something I haven't done and get away with it and more people will come out and try.
This is another lesson from counterinsurgency, where as if you establish that if you hit us, we hit you back twice as hard, or if you hit us, we're not going to take it lying down, you'll be accountable for everything you claim as a fact.
Then it just raises the cost and the barrier for people trying to do that in the future.
For founders, the biggest thing is if you're going to be tackled, you might consider running into the tackle and using your own force and momentum to drive them back and change where you stand on the field.
In the history of this field or in the current landscape, who most inspires you?
There are a lot of founders who have done this extraordinarily well.
It's pretty cliche to say Steve Jobs, but I'll say it for a different reason, which is that by all accounts, he knew what his reputation was, the unfavorable parts of it, and he knew what people would say about him.
It didn't matter because he had priorities and making new friends and being liked universally was not one of those priorities.
Excellence was one of the priorities.
He is somebody who was able to put his own potentially hurt feelings aside in order to pursue the thing that was the most important.
Running a company doesn't always feel good.
If you stand for something and you're making something that is different and it might be a threat to incumbents and it might make people uncomfortable, you're going to have people be upset at you and you need to decide upfront that that's worth it and you're willing to fight for your company and you're
willing to fight for this better world that you're trying to help shape because it's worth it.
I think for that reason, Steve Jobs is a model because people will sort of flippantly talk about times that he was an asshole to somebody.
Imagine having the strength to know that a lot of people think that you're an asshole.
That would be hard for me.
In history, this is not a direct inspiration, but it's ideas that I find inspiring.
My co -founder recommended to me Eric Hoffer who has written about how mass political movements happen.
True believer. Yes, true believer is very good.
There's a lot in common between mass political movements and just regular mass movements of believing in anything.
The one key similarity between a political movement and what a company's trying to achieve is people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their life and you want to get them to think about that more and more and more until they just freaking can't stand it anymore.
They can't stand it.
They're not going to live like this another day.
They're going to change their whole career path and come work with you.
They're going to abandon this other thing they've been using and use this thing instead.
Every time somebody joins your movement, joins your company, buys your product, there's a cost to them.
Maybe there's a cost of $200 and they have to buy the thing.
There's a switching cost.
They have to do something differently.
There's a learning cost.
They have to learn how to use your thing.
There's a cost to them explaining to their family why they're leaving Google to work for this word that their family can't even pronounce in a company they've never heard of.
You have to make those costs worth it to them.
Prospect theory tells us this.
People fear downside more than they want upside.
It's a lot easier to tell them this current state that we're all living in is unacceptable and now we're so close to something a lot better.
That's easier to tell them, and you can say it truthfully, than to say, things are fine now, but they could be even better.
The way I discovered your work speaking of sources of inspiration, I think it was two or three years ago when you wrote about the lessons we can learn from the way that K -pop groups have built their fan bases and their audiences.
I remember just reading that just thinking, this is so cool and original and different.
I'd love you to recount that experience of learning about that method and what you remember from it and why you're moved to write that piece.
Obviously, I think it reached a lot of people.
It certainly reached me.
I've only recently recovered from my research for that piece.
It is so addictive, Patrick.
Do not go down this hole.
It'll alter your life for years.
It's like I was taking meth to do research and then had to kick it after the research was done.
It is designed to be incredibly addictive.
All the things I wrote about, about how they hook you, completely worked on me in the process.
I was watching K -pop music videos at 1 a .m.
as a grown woman. Like what am I doing?
The reason I got into it is actually my little sister who's a lot cooler and with it than I am.
She was telling me about K -pop just exploding and all her friends were into it and she was living in LA at the time.
People would come to work and just talk about K -pop.
I was fascinated by this because I'd heard a little bit of K -pop and their music was just okay.
In my opinion, what is going on here?
I went into the rabbit hole and I found that K -pop is such a major industrial manufacturing complex or K -pop stars.
It's like how Spartans trained fighters.
If it matters to this nation, you will figure out a way to systematically train kids to do this and do it well.
The same way that Spartans would choose the most promising youngsters and put them in these schools and then pair them up with older mentors.
They're doing this with promising K -pop celebrities.
If you're a good looking and or good singer and or good dancer and or some secret charisma factor, you get to go into these training academies and then you have to be selected from there and then you're put into a group and the groups are curated top down.
So that they're this ideal blend of different types of personas and the things that make K -pop so addictive all summer is a couple of them.
One is it's about the personalities and the individuals that form the band.
If you notice anything from One Direction to NSYNC to Spice Girls all the way back, there's always different personas.
There's the sporty spice and ginger spice and whatever other spice.
There's the cute one and the bad boy.
The different personas glue people because it creates friction and drama and diversity inside of this group.
So instead of one thing, you get five things.
So it's like in the Starburst package, you and I have the added enjoyment of debating over orange versus yellow.
Making it about the personalities and the interplay and the relationships brings so much more flavor and interest to the groups beyond just the songs and the dances.
And a lot of fans are into it for the personalities, not the songs and dances.
The same way that a lot of fans of fighting and UFC and MMA got into it by watching Ultimate Fighter and getting into the personas and the drama on Ultimate Fighter.
And then by the time the finale happened, which was a big fight, they were hooked on MMA.
They formed these communities around things and you're creating your own community so you know this.
Being part of a community makes the things so much more sticky.
People who are in a community of Tesla owners, they can't get rid of their Tesla.
They'll be humiliating.
What are you going to go do?
Join the Volkswagen community instead?
You have all the sweaters, you have the friends, you have the meetups.
You're in it. And the communities even have rivalries against other communities so being a member of this thing larger than yourself becomes a part of your identity.
This is really important for startups where if you're not just an employee of a company but a member of a movement, that becomes part of your identity.
It makes you so much more loyal than any amount of HR, best employee, awards, whatever else.
It feels ephemeral.
You have an opportunity now to be part of this group's journey now because in a couple years, they'll have to go join the military and disband and that might not be here forever.
Capturing something special about this moment creates a sense of urgency.
I have to go to this concert because they might not tour again next year.
And same with a company.
We're at our Series A now.
You have still a chance to get in on the ground floor.
Next year, this opportunity will be gone.
Can you describe why you chose the name, which I really love, the origin story for your business and then beyond the name, the most interesting version of the vision that you'd be interested in sharing with this specific audience.
How do you think about what it could become in five to 10 years relative to what it is today?
I love the name too.
It is quite nerdy and we debated it quite a bit.
Arostra is a speaker's platform and specifically the rostra was the speaker's platform that stood in ancient Rome, both in the Republic and in the empire era.
It straddled those two eras.
So it was there at this pivotal moment in history when Rome really was the center of the world.
And this rostra was the center of Rome.
In terms of ideas being spread, you could look at the entire globe and ideas and power would come back to focus on the rostra.
It stood nearby the Roman Senate.
It was called the rostra because a rostrum is the battle ram of a ship.
It was built on top of the rostra, rostrums of captured enemy battle rams.
It went so hard. I wish I could have seen it in the original.
The rostra was the place where you would go make a political speech.
It was where the eulogy for Caesar was given.
It was where they turned the sentiment of the people of Rome to either vote for you instead of me or to hate versus love Mark Anthony.
Really history was made from there.
So we called it that even though Sergey and I debated this for a while because it is kind of a mouthful, not long but two hours in a word.
Chachi PT couldn't even tell you like two hours in a word is a lot of hours in a word.
Impossible for like half the people on this globe to pronounce correctly but we like it.
If we play this forward x number of years, today you're working with a small handful of incredible companies.
What do you want out of it?
What do you want it to become that it's not already or do you just want to get better and better at the work you do with a select few group of companies?
I'll start with what we're not trying to do.
We're not here to be revenue maxing.
I drive my three kids around in a minivan.
My husband and I live a normal life.
Any additional money we make from here just sits somewhere or gets given to someone.
Our lifestyle isn't about to change.
Same with Sergey and same with our other team members.
We like having freedom.
There's merit in being free just to be free.
There's an intrinsic quality to freedom where exercising it just makes you more fulfilled as a person.
A lot of times you're limited in being able to exercise freedom because of wanting to maximize revenue and we always choose a former.
We'll always choose freedom and doing what we want.
We'll turn down great money all the time because we simply want to do something else.
The thing we want to do is to, number one, change how founders think about how they communicate to the world.
Everybody thinks it's important and everybody hates it.
I'm rounding up to everybody, but it's got to be over 90 % of the people I talk to.
In the coming years, if you graduate or if you finish YC and you know two things and one of them is build something people want and the other one is go direct, then I would be thrilled.
For this to just become the way things are done in tech now, you have to take accountability as the founder and you own the message.
We want to change the culture and move people towards that.
There's a lot of founders already doing it.
They're setting examples that are more powerful than what I'm able to do, but together, I think we can really push this change and accelerate it.
We don't make money off of that, but it's better for tech.
I think what's better for tech is better for the world, so we should do that.
Then the second thing we want for Rostra is we want to have grown up with founders that we really admire and enjoy working with.
Every great, great founder today who's at the top of their game came from somewhere many years ago.
I wasn't in comms and I didn't know how to do comms and I wasn't around, but I would love to one day be someone who was by a founder side and help them through that journey and have some really incredible companies be doing incredible things in the world where in some small way I help them to propagate
the message to be able to get there.
Then lastly, for Rostra itself as a company, TBD, we don't know.
We're less than six months old, so we're playing it by ear.
You said something really important there that I find totally true, which is people understand how important it is that they do what you suggest, but they hate it and they want help.
We hear that all the time.
Maybe it's the most common thing we get asked.
How should I launch?
How should I talk about the company?
How should I do marketing?
It feels like this thing that is inaccessible and I'm curious why you think that is.
Obviously, you've got an opinion on what to do about it.
We've talked a lot about it today, Go Direct, et cetera, but why do you think it's such a pain point so consistently for such talented people across so many domains?
Historically, there's been a near monopoly by traditional media.
The only way you could get any message out at scale is to either be incredibly fabulously wealthy already so that someone would just write about you without you having to do anything, or you'd have to go around begging somebody to cover you, somebody who already has a platform would need to loan it
to you with their agenda and their lens.
Going around begging people to cover you sucks.
It's miserable. It's demeaning.
It doesn't work. The results aren't good.
Again, I think in today's world you could do it, but don't rely on it.
That leads to a life of no joy.
I think historically, it's been so miserable that people still associated with that and it feels horrible.
Secondly, the talent density in comms is not awesome.
There are really, really outstanding people, but there's not enough to go around.
There are many, many founders who have never worked with a single one that is magnificently good at what they do and sharp and matches their energy and really cares and has the intensity and will fight for them and doesn't have the principle agents problem and is not saving context for a future job
and is just willing to give it everything.
It's so hard to find, which is why when I was looking for a higher for Rastra, we looked really far outside of traditional comms people.
We had a former nun, we had a rabbi, we had someone from the CIA, someone from the White House, we had a diplomat, we had several founders, we had medical doctors.
Someone like that who learns can do a better job than the average comms person.
So the industry has really gotten a bad name, unfortunately.
What question do you never get asked that people should ask you?
Something that people should ask me is, what do I need to do such that I'm not going to need you anymore?
People often come to me because they're frustrated with the way that comms works, which I share that frustration, I get it.
It's hard to find people that you gel with and who are really in it with you.
I have maybe 10 clients.
It's hard to find these connections.
Something needs to be done.
They want to launch or they're foreseeing a crisis or they're in a crisis or they're just having a hard time getting people to understand, especially with AI.
There's just so much misunderstanding out there.
There's a lot to be done to write their perception and to do fact checking and all of that.
What I think is a productive line of thought is, what are we going to do together such that you could keep me around if you'd like to and let's hang out and talk or whatever, but don't need anyone, including me.
Become sovereign, become independent.
You should be able to have anybody quit, leave, go to a competitor, and you will be able to keep going because not only can you do every job, but you have the basic understanding of every function to be able to carry on and replace that person if you need to.
In comms, the basic understanding of the function is so low because it's been so uninteresting and been so miserable that people don't want to touch it.
Only now are people learning through experience that it is hard for me to walk away from work that I'm doing and have everything carry on just as well.
And for the sake of founders, I would want them to not depend on anybody, not even me.
Great one. I'm glad I asked.
You mentioned Manifesto earlier.
What question prompts would you offer people where if they answer those questions well, they'll have the component parts of a Manifesto?
The first one is what gives you a right to exist?
There's already 40 ,000 companies doing something like you and then there's 15 companies doing what sounds exactly like what you're doing and then there's three other companies that are literally doing exactly what you're doing, at least to the outside eyes.
Why don't you just go join them?
What gives you a right to exist and to take up space on this earth and to take up any of our time?
The most important thing is what is missing in the world today that only you can fill?
And a lot of companies are never able to answer that question and it makes it hard to invest in that company.
If I'm going to bet my career on you, I'm going to go leave Google to bet everything on you, your equity will be the financial security for my kids and my grandkids and you're telling me that you can't name something that would go missing in the world if you were to vanish tomorrow.
A stair elixir. That question has to be answered for you to not only have a Manifesto but to have a company.
The other which is related is why can only you do this?
And these things you can write it down or not write it down but you have to have an answer.
The answer has to exist.
Why are you the right person to do this right now?
The next question would be how are you approaching this or how are you approaching it differently?
Maybe it's a new problem, you're approaching it with an old way or maybe it's the same problem but you're approaching it in a new way but what is your approach?
How are you going about it?
If you're going to get us to Mars, how are you getting us to Mars?
And you don't have to share trade secrets or expose any part of the master plan that you don't want to but people need to be convinced that the plan exists.
And then the next one is what are your principles and values?
What do you believe?
And if I were to invest in you or work with you or work for you or be a partner to you, what type of human being am I putting myself next to?
Do you stand for what I stand for?
Is your vision of the world similar to my vision?
If you believe that you will only succeed in vision A of the world but I happen to believe vision B, then we're incompatible and that's okay but it's good to know that upfront.
I don't want to find that out the hard way after we've signed stuff.
It's a fascinating list and it does seem like any company would benefit from trying to write this thing.
And if it's not good, that says a lot about what they should do with their attention and their time.
You know how YC has the application for getting into...
I didn't apply to YC, although I work with Gary and love him and YC.
I actually did the exercise of filling out the application before starting Rostra.
Just for my own, do I have answers to these questions?
Is it a vanity exercise?
Am I starting a company because it feels good to be a founder and I'm free from a big corporate?
Is there something deeper that's there?
Because I'm bringing people along with me and I owe it to them to know that I don't have bullshit reasons that I lied to myself about.
I did that exercise and I think what we're talking about here with these questions that you have to answer in a manifesto to know that there's a reason your company should exist is an exercise that founders should do as well just to be truthful to themselves.
Is there any other exercise that you would encourage beyond the manifesto on founders to undertake to understand themselves better and to increase the odds of a successful Go Direct communication strategy?
Take the manifesto and say it or put it in every medium and see which one is the natural medium for you.
Compare your writing to you on a video and a recording saying it to you creating a series of short posts about it or turning it into memes to you delivering it in person, even if it's just over the dinner table and see which of those is the strongest.
Because different founders and different people have different modes of communication where you can be awesome in one and not in the other.
Gorn, for example, I got to hang out with him and had a great time.
He does not feel comfortable in a podcast setting because that's not his setting.
He feels incredibly comfortable writing, but even then, he feels comfortable writing posts.
He doesn't want to write a book.
He knows his medium and he's excellent at it.
Some people seem less interesting and less compelling than they actually are because they've chosen the wrong medium and the medium is stifling them.
They've chosen the medium for the wrong reasons.
Our audience is there, which is a decent reason, but not the best reason.
People expect this of us and our blog is here.
I'm going to put this on our blog.
And then they end up looking not as good.
So choose the medium that actually works for you and everything else can be shaped around it.
I think if everyone listening could take all the million ideas you shared today and try to apply to themselves, everything would get a little bit better.
The 10 companies are very lucky to work with you.
Luckily, you're very willing to share lots of the ideas that you've gleaned over the years.
You may or may not know my traditional closing question to ask everybody, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
Part of my childhood was in Norway.
I lived in Oslo. Growing up, we always had very little money, just a function of being immigrants moving from place to place and not speaking the language.
And so I was in public school just learning Norwegian and no one was really talking to me.
I was not the popular kid in school, as you might imagine.
And I held open a door, it was just in a community center type thing, for an older man who was coming down the hall.
And it took a while.
It was one of those awkward gaps where she just kept walking because now I'm standing there and he's taking another eight seconds.
He walked through the door and then he thanked me in Norwegian.
I got to say, you're welcome in Norwegian.
And then he reached into his pocket and he gave me a 10 kroner coin.
And he patted into my hand and said, you're a nice girl.
And it wasn't the most extravagant act of kindness that one could do, but it meant so much because I was stranger in a strange land and here is this random person who had never met me and had given me this little kindness and stopped to chat with me.
It was enough of an impression that I still remember it one, two decades later.
Such a nice, random act of kindness.
Sometimes these things are so big and it's so nice to zoom in on a small moment like that.
I think the work you're doing is so singular and so helpful in a universal way that I've benefited from it.
I'm sure now everyone listening will walk away from this with 30 questions to ask of themselves.
So please keep doing what you're doing.
It's been awesome to follow along and thanks so much for your time today.
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