a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Why, How, and When of PR

Episode Date: January 26, 2017

"Punch above your weight" -- If there's one thing public relations (PR) should help startups and founders do, it's that. Unfortunately, some companies are actually punching below their weight when there's a strong company, founder, product ... yet nobody knows about let alone talks about you. Or worse, someone else defines you first. Or you just become a hype machine. So what conversations should you be in? Is it good or bad to do PR before you have a product? And operationally, WHEN is the right time to build a PR function; WHO should you hire (whether a full-time PR person, consultant, or agency); and HOW can you tell the good from the bad? How do you even know "it's working", when time-is-money for both the startup and the PR firm that's billing you hourly or monthly? There's no easy answer, but it doesn't have to be that hard, either. In this episode of the a16z podcast, partners Margit Wennmachers and Kim Milosevich -- PR veterans who've seen all sides of public relations, from agency to big companies to startups -- share how to strike the just-right balance between doing PR too early or too late, time wasted or time wisely spent, and knowing to say "not now" vs. no... It's all about the art of persuasion. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with Margaret Wrenmuckers, who runs the marketing team at Andrews and Horwoods, is an operating partner and co-found one of Silicon Valley's top PR agencies, Outcast. And I'm here with Kim Milosevic, who used to work at Outcast, did PR at Skype and multiple other places, and is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz,

who covers some of the most interesting companies, actually, in our portfolio. Anyway, okay, you guys, welcome. You work with our founders every day. And a lot of them have questions about, first of all, why do I need PR or I want PR? And so I'd like to hear your thoughts on some of the best opportunities for doing PR. I mean, there's some obvious times to do it, but maybe it's not so obvious. I think at one level, PR is a good forcing function for the CEO and the rest of the team to really figure out what is your story. And your story is very, very important because the story is the company, and it doesn't

just help you get the article in TechCrunch or the New Yorker, both of which are great, but it helps you with recruiting and retention, helps you raise money. It helps you explain yourself to customers. Overall, it's an important thing to be able to know. how to do, even if you don't want to get articles at one point or another. Right. Because you might be a founder who doesn't necessarily have a big name already and you can't just recruit on your own brand name. So you may have to actually have people look you up and see that you're legitimate. It's a very competitive environment. Yeah. And I think one of the things I talk to a lot of our founders about is

that you have very few moments, especially in your early life as a company where you have news. And so when you're dealing with like a funding announcement, a company launch, a product launch, a big customer announcement. Those are the announcements that you really have to make the most out of because the rest of the time it's going to be figuring out how do you get yourself into the existing conversation and how to maximize that. So it's sort of like how do you figure out how to make the most of those few moments where you do have something to actually announce. This morning we had a conversation with a founder and she was like, well, we do continuous release. So there's no product announcements. We can still sort of bundle five important things and

create an announcement to create a moment in time where people's like, oh, maybe I should pay attention to this company because what they're doing is really interesting. The big important stories, I have nothing to do with the news announcement. Exactly. That's just a way of going and talking to a reporter and saying, here's why that company is interesting and has nothing to do with a new cycle. You know, on the flip side coming from a media background, when you get a lot of pitches from people saying stuff like, oh, I have this announcement and we hired this person, I'm like, I don't really care and no one else does. But I think what you're saying in terms of it's an opportunity to get.

in front of journalists and build a relationship, that's definitely a valuable mindset. Right, because a lot of the media, they're covering a million things. They've got a busy plate. They're covering, you know, not just the startup stuff. They're covering the Apple announcements, the Google announcements, all of that. And so they have to prioritize it. And so if you come to them with like, and we're launching this product, this company, then it gives them, I think, a little bit more of excuse to sit down. And also to give them a timely moment to put pen to paper. I had an interesting conversation with one of our founders yesterday where, you know, a lot of these founders are doing more with blogging, which I really encourage. And one of them

particular was saying that using Medium as a vehicle to talk about what they're doing as a company wasn't just useful for them to get it out there to the public, but was also a really useful vehicle for them to reinforce all the stuff internally. It's like, it's funny. It's all the same stuff I'm saying to the company, but I put it in a medium post and I write it down. And everybody's like, yes, okay, I got it. And it can share it. And it just somehow sinks in a bit more. So it's also a really valuable internal communications tool, no matter how big your company is. As Ben will say, no one will read your blog post more carefully and sometimes more critically than the people that work here at this firm. So how do you balance when a company wants to stay in stealth mode?

And it can be for various reasons. And I want to also begin by us defining what stealth is because there are versions of stealth where you're actually not really stealthy. So what's up with that? There's a pretend stealth where people walk around and they say we're in stealth, but they have a full website up and whatnot. And I just think that qualifies itself. What is stealth then? I think there's still stealth. We could start there, which is there's, you know, maybe a landing page, but they're not

actively out there promoting themselves, which I feel like is really hard to do in this day and age anymore. Yeah, but people do do it and well, actually. A common stealth situation that we see is they, let's say, raise some funding. They want to announce the funding, mainly to help them with recruiting and start building, you know, a great team. They don't quite have a product yet or they have a product that has to go through a long regulatory approval process, which I'm seeing more of now that we have our biofund. And so they need to kind of get something out there, start talking about who they are.

But then they probably want to go quite a bit for, you know, six months to a year until they have the product, which I usually agree with because if you don't have a product, if you're not ready to start going out there and promoting the thing heavily and drawing consumers in, let's say it's a closed beta product, for example. It doesn't make sense. for you to go too crazy on the PR side yet, that strategy can work. So that's probably the most common stealth situation I see. I want to pick on something for a moment before we continue with this stealth and not stealth discussion, which is should companies really be doing any kind of PR if they don't have a product? Like, what are the pros and cons of that? Well, I think if you're an

enterprise software company, for example, you have long sales cycles and you want to start engaging in the market and you want to start talking to CIO. So you really want to be out there because it'll take a while to close those deals. So I think there are lots of reasons to engage. It's also reasons to engage in, let's say you're operating in a completely new category and you need to quote unquote evangelize like why people should be thinking about this category differently. Like there's lots of reasons to do it. I think the point that came made that that is super important is like the delta between where you are today and what vision you highlight and how much you put yourself out there shouldn't be too big because then you're just a hype machine

and you lose credibility, right? But if you are actually doing here, with your product and your shipping and whatnot, but nobody knows about you. You're really punching under your weight and you're leaving money on the table. And that's just a shame. That's great. So what about this case? And so going back to the stealth thing, this case of companies that are public, but they want to keep a low profile. And I'm thinking of cases where companies are trying to build a network effect.

And part of that strategy might be keeping it on the down low while they go and do that. How do you navigate that on the PR side? I think it's entirely case by case. I see that happen more often when a small company is in a very, very competitive space. with big incumbents who are innovating and could very quickly squash them if they wanted to. So it makes sense for some of those folks to really build the base, get the viral loop in and working for quite some time and have like a pretty good size user number before they start kicking in the PR side of things. There are other things that they could look at doing.

If there are specific markets that they're trying to go after, let's say college, they might be able to do some more on the ground type efforts might be more marketing or more on the ad side, even than PR. And there's different forms of PR. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go out and do a huge press tour and talk to 50 folks. It might mean just putting out a really good blog post explaining who you are. So there's this reference point. So if recruiting is a big goal of yours, people can come to your site and they know what you're about. And, you know, if you do a few interviews, you're out there a bit more and people have more reference points to understand kind of like who you are, what you're about, your approach. Like, that stuff can be

useful to you early on. So there might be some ways for you to do some level of PR where you're talking about how you see the world that don't necessarily mean hyping your product. One potential big downside of not doing any PR, regardless of what market you're in, is that you don't define you, but then someone else does, either the competition or someone who just doesn't know your story or your version of the story. And that, I think, is a big risk if you just leave it up to the world to define you. How do you advise companies to think about PR in this broader competitive landscape? Mark Benioff in Salesforce is a really great example of that because he was walking into an incredibly competitive space and was so effective in creating this narrative,

you know, punching above their weight and kind of rattling the competition, the strong incumbents to say that there's a way that this can be done differently. What is important to know, though, is that that's who Mark Bennyoff is. So he's like sort of leaning into his strengths. We always like to say, you shouldn't try to be somebody, you're not. So don't then say, like, oh, I'm going to take a page from that book and do exactly that because it's like, well, that's sort of very specific and personal to him. I think a lot of people sort of say, like, I don't want to PR yet because I don't want to tip off my competition. I think that's sort of excuse for, I don't know how to do PR. It also is not that convincing because

is if your shit isn't three times as good or 10 times as good or faster or cheaper than the competitions, then, like, they will catch you and, like, there's no amount of secrecy. The competition is going to watch you. Now, there are exceptions to this case. Instacart did a really great job of getting the local stores and then getting whole foods and whatnot. And that is important to their business because they have to have the supply of the local stores that people enjoy shopping at, right? So you may not want to do the big announcement until you've done those deals.

I will say I always encourage our CEOs and anybody who gives me a chance to talk about this. It's like, just don't not do it because you're afraid of it. Yes. Oh, you don't want to learn how to do it. It's obviously natural for a CEO not to know how to do this, but you can totally learn it. You bet up something really interesting about the local exception. So one question I have for you guys is we think about tech as like software eating the world. But sometimes that world begins in a very local marketplace or a local market.

The local question has gotten harder, so it can be pretty expensive. If you have news that's good enough for a wire story, that's always fabulous. But I think then the story can't be purely local. I sort of think local PR is what you get out of it for what you have to put into it is a tough equation in a lot of cases. If you're saying I want a local approach in every state across the country, then certainly it's probably not going to work that well and it's going to be incredibly expensive. But I think if you, let's say, have a product that is very local in nature like OpenGov is. a good example where they're going after these, you know, specific municipalities like cities and state governments and they're able to get some good, you know, customer success stories

in those specific situations, then I think those are very important case studies for the county or city nearby. And if they are trying to tackle a particular geography, then I think they can be pretty specific about how they go after it. But if you're thinking, oh, we've got, you know, this consumer product that we can sell anywhere and we're trying to get the local people, people in each place, it's like, well, then you might as well do a national campaign. And the more you have developed your independent direct channel, the more you can do there, particularly in smaller markets. And so just to clarify that when you guys talk about, you know, being able to own your own

narrative, what's the difference between talking to a reporter, putting out your own blog post to putting out a press release? I mean, do we even like press releases? I used to always read things about die, press release, die. There was a waste of money, waste of time. No one reads them. Unless you're a public company and it's for public filing purposes, but I think that's even changing.

Right, blog post count as under SEC rule. Exactly. So the way I think about the press and blogging is that you want to do both. The press has an important function, which is to kind of inspect the world and the companies that are in it and the technologies and whatnot. Having relationships where there's an open dialogue, it's just a very good practice, right? Because that will happen no matter whether you choose to or not. But then the other thing is sometimes you are at odds with the press's view of things and your own view of your things.

And it's very, very useful to have a direct channel where you can tell your story your way. And at least for the record from you, this is how you see this issue or this problem or this product or whatnot. So I think both are important. Okay. So a frequently asked question is, when is the best time in timing-wise for a startup founder to bring in a PR agency? The one thing to know is that PR is not a transactional thing. It is a long-term thing. It's much more like enterprise sales rather than anything else.

So it's really hard to do as a project. There are exceptions to that, but it's a long-term thing that has very much to do with telling a story over time. A reporter will not listen to a pitch, whether it's from a PR person or anyone, and go like, oh, let me just write this down. There are exceptions to the rule, like your famous, well-known founder, you know, that's different. You're in the news all the time, right? Or you have huge news. But in general, people want to discover the story over time, and they're not sitting there to take dictation. It's just not how it works.

So if you're not like an Apple or like a super famous founder, you basically need to have this long relationship building. And then I think the other thing people get confused is that everybody has a relationship. So the PR person, the CEO. Well, actually, I want to push on this one for a second. Oh, go push it. Yeah, because I read somewhere that founders should maintain their own PR relationships. Like you actually shouldn't be going through a PR person because it sort of creates. this middle layer. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on that. They ultimately are the ones who are

talking to the press and telling their story and should be maintaining the relationship with the media ongoing. But many of the founders have never done PR marketing any of that before. So having an expert who actually knows how to pitch the media has some of those relationships built already and can leverage them on behalf of the founder is a great way to start. The founder is running a business. So to expect them to be, you know, the perfect PR person, the perfect salesperson, the perfect operations person, engineer, all those things. And one, I think it's probably just a little too much to ask. That's why you're paying somebody to actually maintain those relationships, keep it going,

think about the different moments that they can be communicating with the media. I mean, it's a full-time job. Now, you know, for them to respond and engage, they should absolutely do that and talk to their PR person about the best way to do that. So it's not that they shouldn't have a direct relationship, but they also are writing a company. It doesn't scale. Right. I mean, it's sort of like do all of your own HR, do all of your own sales.

You're going to very much run out of steam. So then how do you advise people to think about how to construct a PR function inside their startup? Do you hire an agency? Do you hire a contractor? Do you have someone in-house? Is it a marketing person? It's so different based on who we are. I would say the more complicated the story or the technology, the higher the need to have an internal person in there sooner.

If you're in the, I don't know, quantum competing space, you're going to want to have someone in the company fairly soon. Is this just because it's complicated? Because it's complicated. So this is going to be just for the sake of simplicity, right? But the internal communications people tend to be best at knowing all the engineers, stock and product management, they sit in meetings and don't charge for it because it just works differently. And they're very well suited to mind the stories and figure out, okay, we've got all this coming up.

What would the actual calendar look like of announcements, if you will? And then the external folks, although they can also do that, it's not cost effective, but they have the benefit that the internal person sometimes doesn't is they see the bigger picture, not because they're different people or more talented. They just are working with reporters on all the cloud stories or they know what 60 minutes is up to. And if you're internal, it's just harder to do. But that doesn't mean you have to have both and you don't have to have both at the same time. Yeah. If you're a small company and, you know, it's an enterprise company, you have a. very small group of customers that you're trying to reach. Let's say your main goal for PR initially

is recruiting. You may not need to hire somebody. You may just need like a good agency to help you with some key moments and help you start building those relationships. But then as Market was saying, sometimes you do have a very complicated story and you need a lot of messaging help. And you do need somebody internally who's trying to help you figure things out. Let's take the world of Bitcoin, for example. It's just changing so quickly. There's so many news events that are happening outside of your company. It's changing so fast. It's hard for people to understand. And it might help in that case to actually have somebody internal, depending on the size of the company. You know, again, mining those stories, understanding what's going and then going on

and then help you figure out what opinion you want to have on those matters, you know. So not just your own announcements, but help you build out like a whole thought leadership platform, which I know sounds super buzzwordy, but it's real. Yeah, it's out there talking about something that's not just your own product news or company news. When do people tend to bring on a full-time PR person? Like, is it like a year in, six months in three years? It depends on how far is the product along and how long is the sale cycle? If this consumer app, it's just a different thing, you are not going to announce it

until the thing is in the app store and people can actually use it. If you are in an enterprise sales cycle, you're going to want to start talking about it, you know, and not overpromise, but you want to have some sales. motion going supported by PR before you're shipping the product. So it's just there's no one science fits all. A lot of early stage companies have very limited budgets. And they have to really think about where they're going to spend those dollars. And I think their first instinct is to only outsource PR. Actually, I've heard the opposite. There's varying levels of skill and experience on the on the CEO side of having to handle PR. And I think sometimes when you haven't had sort of this experience of hiring an agency,

you're very suspect about that because you're running, quote unquote, all this money and you don't even get a person. Right. And you don't even get to see the person every day. So I've heard the opposite. It's just like I'm not spending money on that. I've had the same experience. At best, I would hire one person.

And as with all things, you know, we're big fans of having the right combo. But when you have one person, you have made a commitment to an employee, right, which is harder to undo than an agency. And an agency gets you more variety of, you know, these people know this, media, these people know this, right? And both, the pros and cons to both. It limits your opportunities to be opportunistic, right? Because you have, let's say, an internal person who's going after a list of, let's say, 20 reporters who cover particular space versus maybe working ideally with an agency who has relationships across the board with, let's say, everybody in the tech and business media and is aware of other

opportunities happening elsewhere that you might be able to angle away for your... And all the lists that are being created of the, you know, under such and such, which you can argue the value or what, but like you just are in the flow if you are doing that all the time. And there's 100 people doing that same thing all the time. Because you're constantly hearing about what stories people are writing and what they're working on. And if you're a technical company, it's unlikely that you're going to find out about the one time that the news hour will do something on cloud computing. But if this is what you do all the time and you've worked with them on other stories, you're going to know. And they also know to come to you. Right. So back to the question of the agency. Do you have to do a retainer, like an agency of record? Break that down.

Like, how does that work? Well, you have to commit to a certain budget. Now, different agencies do it in different ways. Like some do it flat agency or a flat retainer fee and some bill for time. But even the ones that bill for time are working against a budget. So you do have to commit to some level of budget. And I think it is harder to get some of the. agencies to work with the smaller startups because they want, you know, a minimum budget of,

let's say, $10,000 a month, which is tough for a very early stage company. And for a seed stage company, that probably doesn't make sense. Don't even go there. Unless you happen to have a consumer product that everybody can use and you can get a lot of mainstream media to cover it and, you know, maybe your profile, you're going to be punching above your weight a bit. But generally, it doesn't make sense. It probably makes more sense for you to have a consultant or a very small agency. But yeah, generally it's they are working off like a monthly budget slash retainer. They're pros and cons. So the retainers, the flat retainer sounds great because you know what you're doing.

But there's no incentive on the agency's part to actually earn that retainer every month. Interesting. It's kind of misaligned. If there's a lot of attention, you're going to go like, okay, let's prioritize, which is probably a useful exercise regardless because I don't think there's such a thing as like just take all the stories you can get. That can get you into a lot of trouble. But you also want to make sure that people.

people are spending energy and it's like, well, there's no new product. What are we still going to do? And all the great stories that are being written about companies or products, they're not about a news item, right? So you kind of keep everybody honest, I think, on the, you know, bill by the hour method. Even though it does sound really expensive, but you're saying that there's sort of... You tell them what your goal is. So you're in charge of this process as a CEO. And you say, like, my goal is to be on David Letterman when this has actually happened to me. Well, if you want to build up to that momentum, this is what's going to cost you. And then you get to decide whether you want to do that. The place where you don't want to be is like, well, I want to spend $12,000 and the agent saying, like, for what you want, you should really spend $30.

And if there is a mismatch, don't spend any money at all. Right. Because there's a certain level of activity that you have to have. Right. You have to have, if you don't have profile, you have to have spoken a couple of places before you do this, before you do this, before you get to TED Talk. And that just costs money to build up that presence and the brand. How do you then determine? the criteria for what makes a good agency.

Because I think this is a number one question that comes up for a lot of technical founders who've never, I mean, at least for other jobs like product, you kind of know how to hire. I think it applies to all non-engineering stuff. Here's the shocking part. I'm always surprised at how few people call reporters to ask about it.

Oh, did you reference checks? I've never thought of that. So if you're hiring a PR person, don't you want to talk to the reporter who writes about your beat all the time or your general area and go like, well, who do you actually like working with? Who's helpful to you?

Oh, that's so great. I don't think anybody does that. It's harder for young founders who have never had any interaction with the media, and they kind of don't know where to start. If you have the relationship and you've already been talking to the media, then absolutely you should do that. In most of the cases that I'm dealing with, they have never done any PR.

They've never spoken to the media ever before. And so I think they're going in a little bit more blind. So how do you sort of open their eyes? Well, I think you should start by some recommendations and list. and I say talk to as many people as you can. I know it's a time-consuming process, but ideally this is a partner that you have for many years. And a lot of it is just chemistry.

Like when you're talking to the person, do you feel like they understand what you're trying to do? Do they get your product? Do they get your technology? The problem that you're trying to solve, as they're talking about it, can you imagine them pitching it to media? And this is ideally a person that you're talking to almost every single day.

Do you trust them? They seem smart. And if you don't have that basic chemistry, then it's sort of done. One thing that I see people overotid on, which I think is a mistake, is they want to find someone who really, really gets what they do. Yes. Well, the whole frickin point is that they can help translate this very wonky thing that you do

to an audience that will then write it down, have to write it down in plain English to an even broader audience, right? So you don't want to benchmark them on how well do you get your thing. You do want to benchmark them. who do they know that is important in your ecosystem in terms of press, analysts, other influences, pundits, what do they know that you don't know? Because that's precisely the point, right? If they know what you, if you feel like they totally get what you do as much as your other people in the firm, I don't think that's the right benchmark. So do you then ask them for a portfolio sample of past successes?

Like, how do you know? Look, if you're in enterprise software, there are agencies that do that particularly well. So you look at, okay, who represents workday, who represents Salesforce, right? You know, you go down the list and there's certain comfort, they must know those beat reporters and those companies do actually have beat reporters, right? So you do that. And then I think in the meeting, you want to sell as much as you want them to sell to you because a lot of good agencies have a choice, just like good employees.

Right. You know, they need to be recruited. You want to get them very excited about what you're trying to do because you have to to do that anyways. We want them to be very excited when they're telling your story to the rest of the world. So there's a recruiting element and there's an education element. And then you want to go in that meeting initially based on just what you've heard, how could it launch? Knowing that it's not going to be the perfect plan. But if they can't keep up in the conversation in the meeting, it's probably not a good idea. And then the other thing is if you're hiring an agency and not a

freelance person, who will actually be working, who will be the team? There's a lot of bait and switch. Who are you actually going to be talking to? So like the fancy big agency head will come in and sell the deal, but you're actually working at the really junior accounting, which, you know, if that person is very smart and jazz, they'll go kill for you because that's their, that's a career-making opportunity. So that's not necessarily bad, but you want to know who that is. Yes.

You should meet them. And you should just ask them straight out. Like, you know, you say this is going to be my team, but who is the person I'm going to be talking to every single week on our call and who's going to be working on it in your office? Yeah, because it's a good chance it's not going to be the person that has been selling it to. Maybe it is, but it's always good to know exactly who, is that is that one of the interesting things about enterprise sales that Cranny have said is that actually you don't want someone who has domain expertise sometimes because you want someone who doesn't already know the playbook that they're going to learn it from scratch. Is there a similar rule? Because how do you sort of navigate the domain expertise question? Well, look, I mean, there's a certain practicality to the whole thing. There are domains that are very well established and the agencies or the people who have worked in those domains to just know. However, you don't want to get someone who only knows that playbook and only has the muscle of like big company, blah, blah, blah, because the way you may be going

about your go-to-market or the technology fundamentals may be very different. So you don't want this person who just been there, done it. There are also sectors that are or companies that are stage where they've hit a bit of a wall and you might want to find someone who's outside of the domain but who gets very excited about and who sees past like the flurry of what the five insiders say. But I think there are advantages to having an agency that understands the space or has enough understanding around the space where they can jump in. And if they've had great successes with other companies in that space and it's not competitive to your company, that's an advantage for sure. We've talked about it, you know, it's very much a

relationship business. So if you've successfully worked with a reporter on 20 stories all in enterprise technology, don't you want to be client number 21 who gets the benefit of all of that without actually paying for that? Okay. How do you think then about criteria, more criteria for judging both really good PR contractors, PR people? So we talked about network, we talked about domain expertise, chemistry, reference checks. Like, what are some of the concrete things that founders can do when they think about hiring their PR function? Well, I think a lot of it is talking to them about what they would do with the profile of your company and your personal profile. Isn't that kind of like making them do the work for free, though, if you're asking them for that? And like, give me an idea

of, you know, what you'd like to do. So what would a plan look like? I don't think there's anything wrong asking, can you give me a sense of what, you know, three month plan would look like? You know, having been on the agency side, when you really want a piece of business, like, why not write the plan? Because you're going to be doing the plan. It's like design agencies. You have to show mockups as part of that pitch. And the other thing I think sometimes gets coupled that shouldn't be, is, okay, so you have a company that's runaway successful. And then all the success gets attributed to the agency's work. So a good way to kind of get at, can they think outside of this particular playbook that worked really well because they were good and the CEO was good is like, okay, so of all of your case studies, what actually applies to us? Like how would you apply past successes to us? So to see that they really have. the ability to custom think that they're not just auto mating their. Yeah, and if you don't, you know, if you're looking for somebody who has done crisis before, give me a couple scenarios that you dealt with and then go talk to some of their

existing and past clients, some that they give you and some that they didn't give you. You actually figure out very quickly who rises to the top and who doesn't. So the challenge when you're doing these reference checks on or the vetting process of agencies is teasing apart how much of the success was, because sometimes you can just have this tailwind of a great product or a team. Right. Or the CEO just has the gene, right? And they're just along for the right.

Well, that brings me to how do you measure the success? Like, how do you know it's working? What I would say to people to CEO is like, if you are trying to see the success of it in a spreadsheet, don't bother. Because you will never ever be happy. It just doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work that way. This is really hard for engineers who are very quantitative in their thinking. And when they don't, they are not given a spreadsheet that tells them like, okay, this is.

The ROI of my PR investment. I've gotten this out of what. I've put in, like, it's very frustrating to them. And I understand that, but, you know, it's like Mark Andreessen said once, like, you know it's working when it's working. I know it sounds very, very, very, very vague, but it's true. I mean, are you seeing your company show up in the stories relevant to your space? If you're a Bitcoin company and there's a Bitcoin story that's written and there's five companies listed and you're not one of them, then there's a problem there. And how do you fix that. And if you can't see any positive traction moving forward, then I think that's an issue.

You definitely know when it's not working. I love the skeptical CEOs have to go through the cycle of it not working. In order to know. How come people aren't calling anymore and are fawning all over me or whatnot? Like, you can tell that. It slows down your recruiting. It's harder to get everything. Your entire network just sort of gets, is slower and you have more hurdles. And when it's working, if you don't know the opposite, you may not know how to feel it. It's not going to show up in a spreadsheet. Well, what is reasonable for them to ask? So you can measure lots of things. You can measure number of interviews. There may be a situation where, you know, your person or your agency is getting you all the interviews. You're not converting them into stories. But you're getting the interview.

You're getting the interview. So part of that is on the team and part of that is on you. Right. So how can we work on that? And are they giving you the training? Are you accepting the training? Or you got like, no, I've got this and then there are no stories and then the complaining begins, right? And the other part is, so how many stories are there? And then the tricky part is that you can measure and you can measure, you know, dollar for, am I getting the interviews, am I getting the stories? It's very hard to go. And then so-and-so called and gave me a $5 million contract. Oh, you can't link it to outcomes. You can't link it to outcomes. Now it does happen sort of anecdotally, particularly at the very early stage, but like it's not. Again, with a spreadsheet, not so much. Do you guys advise like clip reports or other sentiment analysis or any other? Yeah, I think it's very useful to get a sense of how much press coverage you're getting and how positive and also tracking what the competitors are doing and is there covered significantly different than yours. And if so, why and having that conversation with your PR firm or consultant to understand, okay, how is it different? Why is it different and what's our plan to better our own coverage? There should always be that plan because it's actually easier when you have a straight up competitor, right?

You can measure more. Because you can measure against it. Yeah, yeah. If their PR firm is saying, like, look, you're not going to get that fast company profile. You know, you're a seed stage company. It's an enterprise play. You've got, you know, one customer so far. It's just not going to happen.

Then they need to help give a plan for what it's going to take to get there. And that might take a couple of years. But as long as they're really outlining what it is. Now, the entrepreneur, founder, what have, you might still say, like, that's too long. That's ridiculous. A good agency or a good intro and personal. They don't say no. They say not now and here's why and here's what it would take.

And then you're in the same conversation working on it together versus, you know, you can't ask me for that. That's unreasonable. Because unreasonable is the entire reason for them to be in the spot that they are because they set unreasonable goals for themselves. In the first place. Achieve them. So you can't go with that's not right. The thing I want to bring up, though, that is really important is a lot of times I'm hearing folks hiring a PR firm or consultant and then feeling like the problem is solved, I can take a step back, go run my company,

because now I have somebody doing my PR, and then it's very easy for them to judge and say, you know, it's taking too much of my time. I don't like the results. The reality is just because you're hiring a PR firm or consultant doesn't mean that it's going to be less time. If you have a good PR firm, a good consultant, it should be more of your time. Look at Mark Benioff. Do you think that he's built the profile that he has for him itself and for the company without putting a lot of time into PR. And he's very good at it. But I think for you to think I'm hiring somebody to solve the problem so I can spend less time on it, that's dangerous. If you're not getting phone calls from your PR firm saying, I want you to do this interview, I want you to join this dinner, you know,

would you go on CNBC? Would you go to this event? Then it's a problem. If they're not asking for more of your time, it takes a lot of work to build a profile. And in fact, the talented C&B. is Beniof being one of the best examples. They will make the budget. They will make the time. They will be incredibly demanding in all the right way. So they double down on everything. The things to look out for, if you're complaining about it, taking too much time.

If you feel like you're having to re-explain the technology, re-explain your product or what the goal is, that's a problem. You shouldn't be spending more time on that. It should be evolving. It shouldn't be repetitive time. They're going to need your brain power. to come up with it. You don't want them to completely come up with their own ideas, messages in a complete vacuum. It should be really coming from you. They should be working with you. And then they should be your channel to get it out there. But yeah, if you feel like it's a time suck in the

sense I don't really get what you're doing and understand it, that's a problem. Right. No, the difference. So one of the themes that you guys have touched upon throughout this is the importance of a plan and progress against those goals, whether it's measurement, whether it's figuring out what to do, how to judge. So what is the plan and what goes into one? Yes, there has to be a plan, but it's more the act of planning than the actual document because, you know, particularly successful companies, things change all the time, right? And so the plan goes out the window because there's new stuff to work with, which is great. But you need to have a plan and a planning process to put some method to all of this. And you need to also make sure, particularly when you're

an outsider, you gain the client's trust. It's like, okay, what is actually going to happen? So that's why a plan is really important. A good starting point is sort of, if this is your goal for this year and for next year, then here's what needs to happen in the first 90 days, and then here's what needs to happen from there, and here's how much time we need from you, you know, all that kind of stuff. You hear the kind of activities. One thing to ask for, to get really granular specific with their plan and to do something we call the pitch grid. So thinking through, you know, not just the media outlets and the reporters that you want to go after and pitch, but thinking about what is the story you want to tell,

and then what are the ingredients that you need to tell that stuff? story. Because if that story is not going to hold water without a customer, for example, then you're not going to be able to tell that story or pitch that story until you have a customer. Or let's say that story needs some competitive heat. You need to sort of put yourself up against another big competitor to make it interesting. So you have to think through all those different scenarios and have the opportunity to talk through. Is this a story that we want to tell? Is it the right time to be doing it? If we think the CEO has the skills be a good speaker, as opposed to an interview,

build all of those activities. So there's speaking, there's media, there's your content channel, there's all those kinds of things. The actual specifics end up changing a lot because you may not have plan on raising around and then you do and then there's a new cycle. But your product's delayed

and you maybe need to push back the launch. Right. What are you going to do when you don't have news? Maybe you have to get a bit more creative about things. A competitor has launched, all these things. It's good about and other news, right? So those details will change. but the actual activities that you can track.

Yeah, the things I tell the companies look out for when they get the plan from the agency consultant or even internal person is how quickly are they moving into action? I think it's a warning sign if an agency puts together a plan and two months of that plan is just prep and getting up to speed and onboarding. It's like in those, definitely within the first month, you should have at least a couple of meetings set up. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean automatic coverage because that's never automatic, but at least getting you in front of people to start having this conversation. And a lot of agencies will go like, well, first we need to get the messaging straight. We need to get, that's all true. But like, those are not happening in isolation. You just take a reporter who really gets the space already and, like, have an off-the-record conversation.

You'll learn a lot in those three to five interviews that, you know, in a conference room just will never come together in the same way. You could even inform your messaging, right? Of course. I've always been grateful to a reporter. So, like, here's why I can't write that story. I'm just like, yes, now I know what to do. If you were to get a story, what would you want that headline to be? Because that's really going to inform the story that you're telling.

That might be a good directing function for the founders to get to the core of like, okay, what do you want your company to be? Like, I just talked to a company recently and they said, we don't really want to be positioned as X company and X space because the space is a bit noisy and there's all these other things. And what it came down to was actually like what they wanted on their website and what they wanted their customer conversations to be was one thing. But what it takes to get into the media is a slightly different thing. Right. I see this all the time. Of course, none of this is guaranteed. Right. But at least it directs you toward the types of people we want to be meeting with.

You may during those conversations realize, you know what, we're actually not going to be ready to talk about that product stuff for like another year. So let's focus on these other things. When you talk about there being sometimes two levels of stories, like something that needs to be for selling the product itself and then for actually selling the brand, that also gets to the question of where does the PR function sit in an organization? And particularly in an early stage startup, does it report to the CEO, the C.O, the marketing person, if there is a marketing person, where should the PR person sit? How do you sort of see it involve over the life cycle of a company? I think the more connected the PR function is to the CEO, the more successful it will be. the more access that they have to the vision, the story, the timeline of everything, every aspect of what's going on with a company that means both good and bad, let's say you have to do layoffs. Let's say that there's some other internal strife going on in the company. The closer you are to the CEO, the earlier you're going to know and the more you're going to be able to put a plan around it and manage it. I think the farther you get away, you know, in some companies it might make sense to do that. But I think it definitely puts a PR person at a disadvantage, being able to be able to get away. You know, in some companies, it might make sense to do that. But I think it definitely puts a PR person at a disadvantage, being able to be a able to maybe move quicker and really continue to help like tell the brand story. And that may impact what we may go talk to the New York Times about tomorrow or what we may say and when we're up on stage. And the more in the know they are, the more they can be planning for that stuff.

I violently agree. Maybe not at the very early stage. But if you're a successful company and you should all plan for that, you're not going to get great talent unless they have direct access to the CEO. Now, there's a thing that some people can do, whoever does your review at the end of the year, that may not be the best use of the CEO's time. But if you're, if you don't have access, you're going to be very much disadvantaged. And as a result, the CEO is also not going to get the high caliber talent that they really want. And it also may inform, you know, very important decisions. Like I've been in cases where the businesses decided to shut a product down, fine. But how it's done and when it's done. that should be, you know, PR should have a strong input into that because it's going to have consequences on your reputation. Right. And there are so many other examples or some other crisis situation. PR should be a really critical input instead of the decision being completely done, wrapped up, and then handed to PR to deal with. The mistake people make a lot is that they expect them to do the polish and, oh, send this off versus be a part of it.

Yes. The other thing, as companies get bigger, one of the dangerous things that can happen if PR's sort of, completely hid under marketing is that it can become too directed by that function. Marketing is going to be driving a lot of their priorities, which might not be the right priorities. And just to be clear, there's a big difference between PR and marketing. Huge. Is it the best use of time for the PR folks to be doing PR for marketing activities, or is it better for them to be more directly connected with what's happening on the corporate side and focusing on reputation and the media strategy and the messaging as a company, of that. If your company is your story and it impacts everything, everything you do, recruiting,

hiring, like fundraising, everything, and the primary person that helps you tell your story is somewhere else in the bowels of the organization. How is that going to work? We're in the world of persuasion. Nobody has to do anything where we're concerned. And so you need a lot of creativity to figure out like what might be good ideas, but you also need some process to make sure that people actually do their job. All right, you guys. Well, thank you. you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Sure. Thank you.