Pirate Wires - 10 Rules Every Founder Should Know: Inside Anduril’s Secret Comms Strategy w/ Lulu Cheng Meservey and Trae Stepens

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In this episode, Mike Solana is joined by Lulu Cheng Meservey and Trae Stephens to discuss effective comms strategy. Trae Stephens is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder of Anduril. Lulu is the former comms at Activision Blizzard and Substack and is the Co-Founder of TrailRunner. Lulu breaks down her 10 rules that helped shape Anduril into the multi-billion dollar company it is today and navigate through some of the lowest PR moments. This is an inside look into a company that you won’t find anywhere else. You can also read Lulu’s full piece in Pirate Wires linked below Featuring Mike Solana, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Trae Stephens Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/anduril-comms-strategy-early-days?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Lulu Twitter: https://twitter.com/lulumeservey Trae Twitter: https://twitter.com/traestephens TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Trae and Lulu To The Show! Like & Subscribe! 2:30 - Overview of Lulu's Piece In Pirate Wires 3:50 - The Beginning Of Anduril 8:00 - Getting Kicked Out Of An Uber - How Lulu Approached Comms Issues At Anduril 14:00 - Going Through Lulu's 10 Rules 14:15 - Start With The Ends 30:15 - The Inner Circle Comes First & Win Over Tribal Elders 42:00 - Building Your Own Audience To Fight Back 48:00 - How Founders Can Navigate Comms 51:30 - Repeating The Mission Over & Over Again 58:15 - Act Like An Insurgent, Not An Incumbent 1:01:30 - Reacting To Google's Comms Nightmare With Gemeni AI 1:07:15 - There Is No Peacetime - Someone Is Always Coming For You If You're Succeeding 1:10:00 - Thanks Lulu & Trae For Joining! Subscribe Or D**

We view comms strategically. What is the story we want people to know about Anduril? The people who decided not to work at Anduril are people who absolutely shouldn't have worked there and it's awesome that they don't work there and today the company is better because of who doesn't work there. When you join Anduril you're signing up to build weapons. Everyone's on the same page and that makes our whole comms strategy much easier. So much more now of a groundswell of people who are fed up of unfair attacks. Every time they attack you, it should be unpleasant for them and they should not want to do it. It should create the opposite of job security for them.

It should create the opposite of prestige for them. You want to be the next Danderel, you want to be the next Palmer, Trey, Brian, Matt, like that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself through that in order to push your story out into the world. All right, we've got a special podcast today. I've got two of my favorite people here. I'm going to start with Trey, my good friend. You guys have seen him before on the podcast. He's a partner at Founders Fund and a co-founder of Ondrel, a defense technology company that we are all extremely excited about and have had the great

pleasure of kind of watching from the ground floor. It's been super exciting. One big piece of that, one huge piece of that I think that we just almost never talk about, and not just at Ondrel, but in tech generally is comms. And so we also have here today making her grand PirateWire's debut, Lulu Miservi. Lulu is someone who I have followed for a few years now. I think it was COVID when the awful summer of COVID when everyone was shoved in a clubhouse chat room. And I've been following her since then as a few years, I'm going on four years now. And she has occupied a very interesting place in the discourse where she is talking to founders about really like comms in a hostile, a uniquely hostile moment for tech when the press has never been more hostile. I think that Lulu is the person

now today that founders call when they're in the middle of a crisis or about to release some sort of really important product. I think that she is definitely the person you should be following on Twitter if you're interested in comms generally. And she's a founder herself, which means that all three of us have something in common. We know the special hell that is starting companies. But today we're really going to focus on the comms piece. And, uh, a lot of it is going to hinge on this piece that we published in pirate wires. Uh, and that is inside on roles, calm strategy, 10 rules for mission driven founders. This is going to be a kind of complimentary piece to that. We're going to go over the 10 rules, but, um, you really should check that piece out for the, for the, uh, for the full breakdown. This is going to be more like sort of the highlights and, um, kind of an overview plus the highlights of things that I find

interesting, the things that I sort of really was curious about expanding on. Uh, and I just want to get to it. I want to talk about the early days of Andral and I want to talk about comms and I want to talk about how you guys should be building your comms team, um, with two people who just, uh, sort of saw one of, I think, the better examples of a successful comms strategy for an early stage startup that was really just kind of like totally under siege by the press. Before I get started with all of that, did I miss anything? Did I get anything wrong? Do you want to add anything? Do you want to compliment my outfit? I will accept any of those things. I'll compliment your outfit and writing later. Thank you. Classic. Um, so that's, so Trey, you don't have anything to say about my outfit. I mean, your, your shoe that's very present in the video frame is something else.

We can co-sign my compliment later. It's okay. Yes. Uh, okay. Let's break it down. Um. I want you guys to take me just before we get into all the rules and sort of navigating the moment, take me back to the beginning. Like what was being built? This maybe we'll start with Trey for this or sort of setting the ground floor here. What was being built and what was the broader sort of tech terrain at the time? Like what was your goal and what was kind of happening in the Valley at that time? Yeah. You know, when I joined Founderson in 2014, not knowing anything about venture capital, I started looking at the national security space to see if there was kind of a, you know, V2 Palantir SpaceX kind of lineage out there in the community already operating.

And I met with hundreds of companies and was surprised to find that there wasn't really a next Palantir SpaceX. There wasn't really a whole lot of stuff going on. And so with a bunch of people on the Founders Sun team, with a bunch of my former colleagues at Palantir and also with Palmer Luckey, who was the inventor of Oculus. We were kind of brainstorming what a next generation defense technology company might look like. And to my surprise, the Founders Fund team kind of encouraged me to go and try to build this crazy company. So, you know, unlike today where there's, you know, hundreds of people that are trying to build in like critical strategic industries or defense more specifically, we were kind of, you know, out there by ourselves operating. And so when we went and started talking to venture funds, you know, they didn't really have any idea what bucket to even put this in. A lot of the LP agreements that they had with

their investors prohibited investing in defense technologies. And so we were kind of in this weird window where it was interesting, but very, very unique. And so part of the challenge for us early on was communicating to the world why we thought this was important. And, you know, we were in this transition period as a country where we had gone from, you know, 15 years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations against essentially like rogue states and terrorist organizations. And we were transitioning to this world in which we were starting to think more about great power, great power conflict. And so from a timing perspective, I think we like really hit it, uh, in an interesting window. Uh, but the mess, the, the storytelling part of this was really important because people maybe hadn't fully mentally shifted to that, that new thought process. Right. So there are a handful of maybe problems that you're

facing when it comes to comms right away. And it's, I don't want to say trouble, but there are questions surrounding like how that story is playing when it comes to raising, possibly when it comes to hiring and when it comes to maybe selling to the government, is that maybe correctly identifying the things that you guys were thinking about when you were thinking about comms? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. There's a bunch of different audiences that you want to speak to. At first, those audiences were definitely the, like all of these really patriotic people that if they're not already working for Palantir or SpaceX, maybe they did in the past. And that crew was very easy to communicate with. It's not a giant, you know, chunk of engineers, but they're like a noble set of people that really want to work in national security.

It's easy to recruit them. And then you have the people on the other side that are like, they're never going to work on national security. These are like the activists that Google that were protesting Project Maven, whatever. And like, we really don't need to communicate to them at all. You're never going to win them over. But then the bulk of those people are in the middle of that Gaussian curve. It's like the people that could probably be convinced that this is worth doing, but you need to tell them why you need to tell like, you need to explain the problem to them. You need to explain how we're thinking about ethics. And that was something that Lulu and her team did an awesome job of helping us

think through and getting the messaging out that we needed to get out to lay the groundwork for what ended up turning into like a big industry around defense tech that all started from that early communication strategy at Anduril. Yes. Before we get into the strategy, your comm strategy and how you were thinking about it, how do you think about the problem? Sort of Trey, kind of roughly summarize it as you remember it or when you kind of first looked under the hood, so to speak, what did you see? Okay. Well, so three things that I probably should have said up front alongside how stunning your outfit looks is number one, Frey was basically running comms for Andral and still kind of is.

And Palmer, Brian, a lot of, a lot of other people, but primarily the group of founders, like I got to help help Shannon Pryor who runs comms today is amazing. But the reason all of this works is because the founders are in the middle of it. Like when, and it's not always glamorous. Like when people want somebody to yell at, they go yell at Trey. And so a lot of this is happening because Trey Palmer, those guys are willing to step up and own it. And that makes a big, big difference. And I think we'll touch more on that later. But that's number one is like

they're running the calm strategy. And number two, right now, defense tech is super hot. I think Trey's right, you guys caught it at a great time. That could stop being the case anytime. And so the beauty of what we're talking about is it, these are things that are true, regardless of whether the thing you're doing is popular or not. The fact that defense tech was not popular and now is, has not changed Endroll's comp strategy. And Palmer says we could wake up tomorrow and something has happened in the world that makes defense tech no longer the cool thing, but we're going to keep going. So that's the second thing to know. And then the third thing is, Trey, you said at the time you were looking for the next SpaceX or the next Palantir, there

are so many companies now that want to be the next Enderal. Like founders come to me, they want to be the next Enderal or that they want to be the next Trey or Palmer or Brian, whatever. And you don't get to that place without going through what you guys went through in the early days. And I think, um, I hope that we can talk about that a little bit. Just if it wasn't fun, people were mean to Trey. People were mean to all of you guys. Uh, I got kicked out of the Uber, but that's part of what I had Uber on my list of things to talk about. I do. I want to talk about this place. I had Uber on my list of things to talk about. We'll talk about it.

I want to talk about this. I mean, this for me, when you talk about the comms problem that you're facing, I think that you guys are maybe, I would love to hear a little more about that moment. I mean, there's like the Google Maven of it all and there is the Uber story. Lula, just tell the Uber story. I want to hear the Uber story.

Okay. So Trey didn't know this at the time. I think you and Palmer found out like six years later when I wrote the piece. But it was after we had done, I don't know, we had done a day of demos or something. And I was going back to the airport. I was taking an Uber to LAX. And I called Josh on the phone saying, it's so cool to be out here with these guys. Like the tech is really working.

We can see it. It's helping. I think I said border agents, something. The Uber driver got super weird. He hid his phone and pretended that the navigation didn't work. And then he told me to turn off my phone, which when someone gets weird, you don't want to turn off your phone. And then he pulled off the highway on the next exit and he made me get out. He said, I can't be around people like you. So like,

I took my luggage and got out of the Uber on the side of the highway and called a new one. And that was, you know, sort of symptomatic. And I don't know if you know this one, Trey, but I emailed, I think you know who this is, but I emailed a very high profile defense slash technology writer to meet with you because you guys would have gotten along great. And he wouldn't because you were too close to Palmer and he hated Palmer. And then he stopped talking to me for suggesting that he meet with you. So it was, it was really ugly. Oh, and then at your, at your birthday party, a lot of guilt. And he said, I could share this publicly. But he said that when he invested in you guys, he would get all of these angry text messages. And he got one that said he made a fascist investment because of supporting Andrew.

We were coming out of the cultural moment was uniquely hostile to anything that was contrarian at that moment when you guys were founding the company. And then within that, to anything that was contrarian at that moment when you guys were founding the company and then within that so like anything that would have been a little bit weird would have been controversial um palmer had just gone through a whole thing at facebook where um i mean people just were really hostile to him based on very overtly like and i would say like common political beliefs uh and then your guys are building a defense technology company. And defense is, you know, it's, it's, it's like war, it's military, I was actually just talking to someone who works at Google, who in Google, you have to kind of like,

you have to interview for the teams that you want to sort of like move to. And he was in the process of this. And he's himself he's former military and the interviews all went really well until that came out they kind of stopped and then a few months later while drinking um they were at a bar a group big group thing and someone just relayed casually to him like oh man we really loved you but i just i couldn't get into the whole military thing um there really is that kind of a bias and then that that bias exists really, I don't want to, I don't want to judge the entire industry, but it is certainly then it was very common to, um, to encounter people who really just hated this kind of work and hated people who worked with this kind of work. So

that's the challenge. Um, and now when you think about building a company in tech, which is considered by the rest of the world is like one of the most like hippie dippy pie in the sky places that would never touch defense. Um, you know, what do you do? Like, how do you solve these challenges? How do you, how do you have an effective comm strategy in such a hostile environment, not just from, from the press, but from like other technologists, other VCs, other engineers, and obviously the woke HR people, but you can, you're never going to reach them. How do you reach the rest of them? We've got your rules here and we can maybe just list them really quick before we focus on a few, if that's cool with you.

So you have, well, I'll start with this first one actually, and then we'll go to the rest, but the very first one is start with the ends. Can you kind of walk us through what you're thinking is with that? Because it sounds simple, but I do think it's important. Yeah. Well, in honor of Andrew and the mission, I based it off of ends, ways and means, which is a classic military framework. But you start with the ends in the sense of you first have to know what you're trying to accomplish.

Not for comms. People get lost when they start setting up comms goals in a vacuum. I want to go viral. I want impressions. I want my, what's the succession quote? Like I want my Twitter to be off the hook. Instead, if you start with the business goals of we want to recruit this many of this type of people and we want to increase revenue by this, then you can sort of reverse engineer

the comms strategy to make that happen. So Trey was talking about you have to know whom to ignore, basically. Matt Grimm is really good at that, by the way. He's really good at like, these people don't matter. And so having that near maniacal focus on the only people who matter helps with something that is not kind of generically popular. So something that might not kind of generically popular. So something that might not be mainstream popular could be wildly popular with the people that you actually care about. And so the people that Andrew was talking to really,

really loved it. The people who were working at Google at the time, maybe not. So, I mean, it was during the time of the protests over Google being part of project Maven, which by the way,

I think is like Google Maven activists walked so that Google Gemini activists could run. I mean, that's still there, but it's just a different set of people. When you say start with the ends, you mean like start with how you want to be perceived? Is that? No, no. What? Close. Yeah. how you want to be perceived? Is that? No, no. What close? Yeah. Start with what business goals you're trying to reach and then figure out how you need to be perceived by which people in order for those goals to be met. So in this case, the goals were recruit the best tech talent and get contract in, get contracts. In which case you have to be perceived as being competent, fast, and cheaper by people making procurement decisions. And you have to be perceived as exciting, interesting, mission-driven, solving hard problems by tech talent. And now you know

who needs to perceive you in what way in order for them to make the decisions that help you meet your mission. And once you know that, you have the equation you can build out. What do you think would have been the exactly wrong strategy at this point? The kind of thing that people tend to do or would have the impulse to do? Become a nationally beloved brand. That is like the number one impulse where we want to be the Apple of this or the Nike of this. And Trey, I'd love to hear what you think. My opinion is like that impulse would have led Enderal to try to please everybody and make sure nobody gets mad and just be popular and beloved and try to go mainstream. And it would have watered everything down. And probably a lot of the people inside the company today who came

for that mission, even the Chris Rose, like really senior, really important people might not have found it as compelling if it had been diluted to suit popular taste. Yeah, I think that's true. The other version of becoming a nationally beloved brand, and I mean this more in the government beloved brand context rather than the general audience beloved brand context, is to say a lot of things and not say anything at all. This is like, if you go and look at the marketing posture of other companies that do a lot of government work, it's just nothing. Like, they say stuff, they sit on panels,

they write blog posts. Like, you could go to the website of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grummanman and copy and paste text from one and like close your eyes and then open your eyes on a blank page and be like which one of the five companies said this you'd have no idea you'd have no idea they're completely indistinguishable and the government loves this they love the lack of identity of any kind because it's low risk. You have no exposure to criticism. You're just saying boring, flaccid platitudes. And I think it's really tempting when you start a company like Anduril to say like, man, we should just be as boring as possible

because we don't want to annoy anyone. We don't want to offend anyone. And it turns out that like, you have to say things to stand out. And our strategy from the beginning is like, look, we're going to say things. It won't always be popular, but we're going to be integrity.

We're going to be in integrity with what we believe is true. I have, um, also by the way, the, the really, um, the,

oh, sorry, Mike, but like the creative, innovative, um, the, the, sorry, Mike, but like the creative, innovative, um, people in the government actually turned out to love that. Like they, they, they became activated when they heard that messaging, they got really excited by it. A lot of them became really awesome champions of Andrew.

I had this thing, uh, it's, it's a little bit of a departure from tech just for a moment, um, or from defense technology just for a moment. I guess I write science fiction. I wrote science fiction for years. Now I'm writing more nonfiction. Give me book two. Give me book two, Solana. So frustrated. I still hate you for that, by the way. I got it. I mean, I need an agent to take it away from me. I'm too busy to be working on the book right now. He's the George R.R. Martin of sci-fi. I've got book two ready to go. Just need the right person to pack the whole thing up. Now that I've got a big old audience looking to buy the book, a topic for another day.

The point is just, I was really committed to this idea of myself as a science fiction writer or a fiction writer. And so for years, I kind of danced around my opinions online and I kind of wanted to give them, but I didn't want it to sort of like affect my brand or something. And ironically, it was not until I started saying things that I had an audience at all. People didn't care what I had to say until I said something, which is something that it feels like almost too obvious to share. And yet nobody seems to understand this. And it's a lesson that people keep having to learn. And it is a lesson that I think anyone who's ever succeeded at saying something has learned at some point, unless you just can't help yourself and you just run your mouth constantly.

But I do think it's like a weirdly underexplored and important point is that you have to say something. Something that came, the Lux guys say this a lot and Scott Rubin over there, I think came up with it is you can't be a thought leader if you don't have thoughts. And a lot of people approach it as I just want to be a thought leader and here's the things, but it's not anything noteworthy or novel. The last thing that I can think of on this topic, on the topic of being really specific about your goals and kind of ignoring what's not your goals is the people who decided not to work at Andral because of that are people who absolutely shouldn't have worked there. And it's awesome that they don't work

there. And today the company is better because of who doesn't work there. there and it's awesome that they don't work there. And today the company is better because of who doesn't work there. Yes. Um, I want to, I want to, we had a lot here, so I want to move on, uh, to, I mean, I don't like to, I'm not going to believe, believe or, uh, go direct. We kind of all know it at this point. Um, this is a, uh, I think your position is like, you just don't need to go to the New York times. Like you have, you have, uh, you have a megaphone potentially, I guess for this one, I do have a question. Um, you know, with someone like Palmer, it was very easy. There are a lot of people who not the job was easy, but like this part going direct was easy. There are people who care what Palmer has to say. I do know that a lot of founders struggle with like, sure, I can go direct, but you know,

I don't have any Twitter followers or, um, you know, I don't have a podcast or something. How do you recommend, how would either of you recommend navigating that? Like if you didn't have a Palmer, like he's like the Hulk, right? If you don't have a Hulk on the board, what do you do for going direct? It takes less time than people think to build an audience. I mean, first of all, if it's a problem that you don't have an audience, then that's a problem. You don't want to have a year from now or five years from now. So you should go build one today so that you don't have that problem later. But secondly, it doesn't take as long or as much as people think. So Mike, you and I worked together quite a bit, or we chatted quite a bit once I got to Substack. Before that, I don't know if you noticed, I had like a thousand followers on Twitter

or 200. I don't know. It was like something, uh, something small. It didn't matter. And then, um, at Substack, when we started getting attacked at first specifically by the New York times, and then for a while, everybody, um, I decided I should probably go and build an audience because this is going to be leverage and this is how we fight back. And it took like six months cut, you know, it was, it was frustrating and sort of cringy and embarrassing and you have to put in work and time, but under a year you can build an audience if you just work on it. Yeah. This was a, this was like the first I saw of the combative PR strategy where like the PR lead for a company was just telling the press to like,

they were idiots basically. And it was, uh, enjoyable certainly as a person who was at that time on Substack. I, and now a minor investor in Substack, um, definitely loved it. Uh, you have act like an insurgent, not an incumbent. You have increased pressure and decrease area. Can you like, you like broke out an equation for this one. I'm like, it was a very, you don't have to see that in like, uh, in cell space, not in cell. What is it? Uh, in, um, you don't often see that in word cell spaces. Um, can you break the equation down and kind of just like walk us through what you were thinking about there? Well, it wasn't recorded that Mike Solana just called me an insult.

He did. He did. Yes. We're still laughing right now. What is this simulation? Okay. So it's, it's the same.

It's in cons as in physics, pressure equals force over surface area. So it's this, if given an amount of force, if you spread it over a lot over surface area. So it's this, if given an amount of force, if you spread it over a lot of surface area, there's very little pressure versus if you concentrate the surface area, there's tremendous pressure. That's why like a needle can poke through, whereas a sheet of paper has a harder, harder time. And the way to use that in comms is if you are on offense, you want to concentrate the pressure because you want to break through.

offense, you want to concentrate the pressure because you want to break through. So let's say that if you do have to get adversarial, let's say that a bunch of people come after you, Mike, and they're attacking you. Well, as opposed to making it you versus the world, you might want to pick one of them and just hammer away at that person and break them apart from the path, use them as a symbol of what's wrong for all the rest of them. It's easier than being like me versus everybody. Whereas if you're on defense, then you want to diffuse the pressure. You want to diffuse the force so that there's less pressure on you. So if someone is attacking you in this case, you would say you would frame it as they're attacking independent creators.

They're attacking writers creators they're attacking writers they're attacking podcasters they're attacking entrepreneurs and people who want to have a foothold in media and make it about you're standing up for this cause and you're standing up for this community as opposed to you being isolated where others won't stand up for you and we did this a little bit with with enderle with substance like it's a pretty universal principle like if you're attacking enderle you're attacking people who want to innovate to make America stronger. You're attacking people who actually want to collaborate with the government. Why are you attacking that? That's unequivocally good thing. Or if you're attacking Substack, you're attacking independent thought, you're attacking

independent creators, you're attacking writers and journalists. And so why would you do that? I think this is like a very, very important principle for every founder and every company. If you are being attacked, you need to find a way to diffuse that pressure so that it's not you naked and alone taking arrows. And then if you're on offense, you want to concentrate as much as possible. Yeah. This is interesting because it seems to be an equation that the press itself follows. You know, oftentimes when they want to take down an entire company that's offending them for some reason, it's like you find some one weird thing that has gone wrong, one really bad story, and you sort of frame that as the entire machine, right? We've

seen this with everything from Uber to more recently the self-driving car stuff, right? You have a bunch of fake accidents. You have potentially a lot of life saved because you're taking drunk drivers off the road and things like this. You have one accident and that becomes what the company is. So it's like you're sort of adopting from the people who are attacking and using those tools in your favor. No, it's universal. Yeah.

in your favor no it's universal yeah i remember i remember a lot of like trey trey will have stories about fielding attacks but there was a lot of that um in the early days you know still sporadically now but defense tech is hot now where people would attack you trey like ad hominem um people would you know talk about you specifically as a person. Ideally, that should be spread out across the whole industry. Why are you attacking one individual for this? But that's what people would do. Wait, I need some examples of trade being attacked personally. I mean, there were a lot. I mean, I think in, you know, 2017 to 2021 or whatever was a different window than the last two or three years. But, you know, people would think of national security or border security or whatever as being like foundationally anti-globalist or racist or something like that. like foundationally anti-globalist or racist or something like that. And so people would come at me and be like, you know, you're, you're being like an American exceptionalist or something like

that. Um, and, and I think like, obviously this has shifted because people are starting to realize that the geopolitical end of history did not actually occur. And there's still like bad people that want to do bad things to innocent people in the world. And someone has to stand up for them. Otherwise, they're just going to get walked over. And so, I think it's like less popular to think that we've reached an end of history than it was just even a few years ago. But I think, you know, to Lulu's point, one of the things that I think I learned is that I spent so much time just being angry at how stupid the mainstream media was or I perceived that they were stupid. And I think like I mostly just pity them at this point. Like their incentive structure kind of sets them up that they have to tell a specific story in order to feel like validated in their day-to-day career.

And I think they've convinced themselves like intellectually that they're actually doing the right thing. But it's like less and less interesting to humanity. Like they're just becoming irrelevant by not actually telling real stories and just focusing on like political hit pieces. telling real stories and just focusing on like political hit pieces. And so, I think part of like telling your own story is what Lulu just said about increasing surface area. It's like you have to point out to people that the whole incentive package that they're trying to deliver is like foundationally philosophically broken.

And doing that, you kind of immunize them because in some ways they're like, well, I'm not going to come at you if you actually come back with like a better story than what I'm delivering because that increases risk to them. And so it just kind of calms everyone down. I think, and also like when it comes to where you're delivering this story to go back to the go direct piece, it kind of, I think, I think I'm going to be able to relate it to these next two. Uh, Lulu, you correct me if I'm wrong. Um, but after nail the narrative, which is your next one, which is sort of like repeating the narrative over and over again, and you can hit it again if you want to, but I want to get to just, you had, uh, inner circle comes first and win over

the tribal leaders. And this I think comes down to like, this is really how you're disseminating the story that you want to tell as a founder. My read of this is like inner circle is, you know, that's your team and you're getting them to sort of disseminate that story sort of internally. And then tribal leaders, that's more broad, right? That's like you're hitting up the leaders in the industry outside of your company. Can you maybe just like speak to that for a second? And I've got a connection I want to make. Yeah. There's a, there's a quote from a famous general that says, when I see a problem, I trace it in concentric circles, going back eventually to my own desk. And that's what inspired this metaphor of concentric circles. And you have to start inward and go outward. Um, for a couple of reasons, if you don't start with

the people who are closest to the company, and then you skip them and go straight to the public, the people who are close to the company might not know what is going on. They might be confused and they might put out a message that contradicts with yours. And now you've lost an enormous amount of trust, or they might see you speaking to the public in a way that you haven't already briefed them on. And now they're confused and now they feel like maybe they're not really part of this mission. So it's just super, super critical to start with the inner circles and go out. So usually if you are trying to announce something or trying to do a rebrand or whatever you're doing, start with the, make sure the founders

are on the same page, get the executive team, get employees, and then go to investors, then go to key customers, then go to influencers and go outward from there. And so you just want to sequence it the right way. And then talking to what do you want to dwell on that for a moment? Or do you want me to go on? Yeah, I would like to dwell on that, actually, because there's a really important story that came out of this in the early days of Anduril, where, you know, these other big tech companies, Google was not the only one, by the way, but they were the most famous related to this Project Maven activism, was basically the employee basis saying, we don't want to do work

with the Department of Defense, or we don't want to do work with the federal government at all. And the reason that those things became so explosive was because the company, the executives, the sales team, whatever, they were trying to sell to the government and the rest of the team, maybe the engineering team, maybe the project managers, whatever, they didn't know that this was happening. And so when it happened and they found out that they were under contract, they got pissed rightfully or wrongfully, you know, they felt like it was not what they signed up for. And so, you know, at Andorra, we had kind of messaged this in a in a soft way, like, it just seems so obvious, like, yeah, if you're joining a defense tech company, we're obviously selling to the government. But we hadn't like gotten super aggressive or explicit

with it necessarily. And then in talking to a journalist, I kind of made this dumb mistake where he kept poking me. And finally, I said, look, when you join Andro, you're signing up to build weapons. Like, that's what you're doing. There's no illusions. Everyone that comes in the door knows that this is the case. And I got in a lot of trouble for this. Like, even in our network, people internally didn't really blink an eye because it turns out it was right they all knew what they were doing but people were like oh crap like that's a really spicy comment ended up being like the headline of the story it was it was unfortunate um technology company builds weapons yeah exactly and so and so now we we just, this is like a thing we say internally. We just tell people like, look, if you join Anduril, you're joining to build weapons. That's what this is. And so everyone's on the same page. And that makes our whole comm strategy much easier because we're not like walking on eggshells to make sure that we're not like surprising people internally. It's like everyone knows, we're very clear. And I think that's really important. And you've never had an employee like clutch their pearls, right? When they find out that Andrel is building so-and-so because that's what they signed up for

when they walk in the door. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody knows. What do you think that press reaction even was? It's not as if defense technology companies had never existed before. Um, like where did the surprise actually come from? Or was it more just the jarring, maybe overlay between the, what tech in general has had become at that point? Like the, I'm thinking of like the crunchies and we're going to, it's like the very like Google sort of language that was like very like benign and happy. And like, it's like smiley faces everywhere. Is it like the combination of that thing with defense that drove them crazy? Because obviously they know what a defense technology company is.

No, I don't actually think it was either of those things. I think it was, you know, you and I, I know we've talked about this before, Solana. I used to read Wired Magazine from cover to cover. Like I would sit on the, you know, on the metro in DC on my way into work and I would just page by page, just read through Wired Magazine. And I would learn about all this really cool stuff that was going on in the world and read about founders who were starting great companies. And I would finish and I'd put it back in my backpack and I'd think, wow, this is great. There's so much exciting stuff going on in the world. And somehow, someway, and you can use even Wire Magazine as like a microcosm of this,

this is just not the way the media interacts anymore. There's no, no one is interested in writing positive stories about potential things that can happen in the future. It's all just like scaremongering. And so I think what happened is the media is like, okay, there's a defense technology company. There's probably some version of this that we could tell about strategic deterrence. There's probably some angle we could tell about getting our men and women out of harm's way doing dull, dirty, or dangerous jobs. There's probably some story that we could tell about like advancing the state of the art so that it makes it almost impossible for our adversaries to compete. Therefore, they won't compete at all. But instead, it was like, okay, but the Terminator story is way more interesting. And so, the only

story that we can tell is the one that hypes the scariest possible outcomes in this world. And so, that's just what they have to do. There's no alternative. There's no one with the interest or the courage to write something other than that story. And so, you just have to go into these engagements of that in mind where you're just like, I know what they're going to do. They're going to try to make this some super negative pessimistic thing.

And so, like, what is the message they need to hear to get them to the point where they at least accept that there is an alternate future that's possible? But it is. You made such a good point. The Terminator story is all they want to tell. And the reason is because it's such a good story. Like, Terminator is a great movie. Terminator 2 is an amazing movie. It's riveting. It's dramatic. It's exciting. It's badass. Arnold Schwarzenegger's involved. We love the Terminator. The dystopian myths and the anti-tech myths, they're easier

stories to tell. There's so much natural tension. There's so much natural drama. I sometimes go back and forth on how much of the motivation behind the negativity is even political's so much natural drama. I sometimes go back and forth on how much of the motivation behind the negativity is even political so much as these are just fun stories to tell when someone's doing really evil shit. How do you, Lula, I would love your thoughts on this. How do you combat such lush, powerful narratives that are dark? How do you fight back against that? Well, part of the answer is also an answer to your question, Mike, about why do stories turn out this way?

And I think it's a question of incentives. So Derek Thompson has been very thoughtful on this more than me, but my more rudimentary analysis is everybody responds to incentives. And the incentives right now in media are pretty messed up. It's really, really hard to be a writer. There are some awesome, hardworking, principled, honest, ethical journalists who are being taken advantage of. Yeah. But even in traditional newsrooms are being taken advantage of by the business model.

They're not being treated as they should be. I wish they would all go independent. But there is an incentive to get readership, you know, get as much engagement readership as possible so that you can get that job security. to latch on to the flashiest, clickiest thing so that your article becomes, you know, like one of the ones on the leaderboard of the site. And so that results in things like this, which I was just pulling up. I don't know if you can see on my phone. Wired, you go to the search bar. The default search in the search bar is racial justice. I don't know, Trey, if you've noticed that from your favorite publication.

The default is racial justice. I'm wired. And so like, it's just- By the way, I want wired back. Can someone freaking save wired? You guys subscribe to the White Pill. We're on it. White Pill. White Pill is it. But I don't think it's even the fault of a lot of these individual journalists. It's like the industry is under so much pressure from a messed up business model that people are just reaching for these other things that are sort of a corruption of what they probably would like to do in a lot of cases. So that's one. It's just like the incentives are messed up. And then in answer to in answer to what you just asked, how do you combat that? One is you have to you have to reshape the incentives. So knowing that everybody acts on incentives, you have to shape the incentives for the people who

might attack you to make it harder to attack you and less appealing. It should be difficult and annoying. Every time they attack you, it should be unpleasant for them and they should not want to do it. It should create the opposite of job security for them. It should create the opposite of prestige for them. And so one way to do that is to set a norm. This is established deterrence. Set a norm that when people tell lies about you, misrepresent you, you're not going to take it. And public companies do this in a way like public companies will say they're priming the market, right? You want to get investors used to this is how you behave so that they know if something is normal or unusual. And you want press and your audience to know this is how you respond to attacks. And it's just normal. What you don't want to do is never do it and then suddenly pop

off because then people will be like, what are you scared of? Like, what's going on? Are you in crisis? Why are you overreacting? Are you being defensive? You want to just build your own rhythm. You need allies. ecosystem has changed in such a way as there are now a lot of allies for founders, entrepreneurs, people working in tech, who they can go to for help kind of getting their own story out

and fighting back against stuff like this. You talk about deterrence. I think a lot about my own journey as a sort of like communicating type person online, you know, in tech. Like I, I'm the CMO at Founders Fund. I run a media company. Um, but a few years ago, five years ago, nobody knew who I was. And at least not online. Nobody knew who I was. I didn't have any real power against these people. And it was frightening. Uh, and interestingly enough, like when I had far less influence, I got attacked far more often, uh, by the press specifically, like tech journalists. They loved to dunk on me back then. As my follower count increased and as the friends

that we all have sort of online, I don't know, proliferated when there were suddenly way more voices in tech that were sort of just, I think, outwardly pro-business, pro-technology, critical of the industry, but just pro our existence. As we became more dominant, we did establish broad deterrence. And I think now it's not even necessarily, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is it's maybe not even necessarily about, you don't have to build this from scratch. You can plug into a network of people who are interested in this. What do you think about that? I have said to founders before who don't have their own audience, the sentence, write something that hopefully Mike Solano will retweet. And I don't know if that's exactly what

you're talking about. But there is so much more now of a groundswell of people who are fed up of unfair attacks, and who feel like, you know, talking about diffusing the pressure when it's attack on you, instead of it being I'm being called something bad. It is now they're doing it again, this thing that we all hate, you're spreading it across this huge surface area. And then you get sort of 1000 points of light to rise up. You, you may not be the biggest account in that uprising of voices, but people like you and other people with big followings also care about the issue. And so I think it's really easy now for founders. I don't want to make it sound overly easy, but it's much easier than it was before for founders to tap into that and find a community of

people who's willing to support them. Yeah. They have this natural base of support, at least, which kind of brings me to one of your points, or which does bring me to one of your points on win over your tribal elders. Can you break that down for me? Yeah. Well, I said in the piece, one of the first things that we did with Andrel was Trey and I just spent like, what, a week kind of gallivanting around DC and putting on blazers and meeting with people. And that was trying to find who are the tribal elders or who are the influencers that when you talk to them, they're going to go and talk to 10 other people. What you want is amplifiers. And the way that you spread a message is to find 10 of those and then have them go out and tell 10 people and have them go out and

tell 10 people as opposed to you trying to tell everybody at the same time. So it works in a couple ways. One is it's more credible coming from someone else than you, like you talking about yourself is self serving on its face. Whereas when you pick these influencers and brief them and get them on board, then it becomes more organic, and it spreads without you, which is a lot better. And then two is they actually know whom to talk to more than you would like. We put together a list of, I don't know, 50 names. If we had to put together 2000 names, I wouldn't have known whom to put on there like right away. Like today, Trace could probably do it off the top of his head. But in the beginning, it was unclear who those right names

would be. But we could start with people who definitely were it and then they knew the right people to talk to because it was just in their orbit. I mean, Trey, you've been doing that basically all along. You're constantly hosting stuff. Basically, people don't even see 99% of the comm strategy. There's a few public moments, but most of it is just grinding day in and day out. Trey is hosting five-person dinners or closed-door events that nobody ever hears about. But I think that's where a lot of the real, real work gets done. It's not, I think that one of the most difficult things for people when it comes to comms is like, especially in tech, it is historically not been taken seriously. And a lot of the kind of work is it's like work with air quotes around it. Like you just said a five person dinner. And I think a lot of sort of more engineering type people might roll their eyes

because they don't understand the value of like friends, like strong friends who are willing to fight for you publicly, who are plugged into situations where they can influence culture. And they don't understand, maybe, maybe they don't understand how, how powerful that is. Do you, I hate, sorry, Trey, I don't want to skip over you, but I do want to, because Lulu's been in comms forever. Like, am I right there that like, it hasn't really been taken seriously? Maybe that's the problem that a lot of founders have

is they just like fundamentally don't value comms and then until they need it and then they don't have it. Yeah, I think comms and PR have been done poorly for so long that people dismiss the entire thing. There are a lot of founders who just hear coms and they already don't want to deal with it. And I don't blame them because the vast majority of coms that we see and hear about is stuff that they don't relate to and don't want. It's sort of like Honeywell 1997 type press release, calling up reporters and begging them to write a story. So I don't blame people.

Like when you hear comms and PR, does it make you excited? No, probably not. Yeah, I think one of the big differences, and this was a push that Lulu made for us early on, is that a lot of people think about their comms strategy as like how you manage inbound media inquiries and who's like moving pieces of paper around and writing press releases and, you know, coming up with like talking points for internal all hands meetings and things like that. Whereas WeView comms strategically,

it was like, what is the story we want people to know about Anduril? So that if somebody tries to frame it in a different way, they're going to have to fight through explaining why what they're saying is different than what we've transparently told the world. Like one example is this document. This was like the manifesto for Anduril. was like the manifesto for Anduril. Like we told everyone why we started, the history of the industry, why it's changed today, what it is that you need to do to actually fix defense. And anyone who writes a story about Anduril, if they say something other than what we tell them right here, they have to explain why they're saying that the thing that they believe is true

about the company is not in our manifesto just makes it harder yeah you're using this word fight and you know it's i think we kind of keep is like this combative environment it's this hostile environment we're fighting um lily you asked a question sort of off camera that or raise a point that i thought was pretty interesting you were talking about how it feels inside of it all and you really wanted to kind of touch a bit on that. Like it is this, I don't know, what is it? You're sort of at war, right? You're in a state of like information war.

Do you want to kind of unpack that? Yeah. I mean, when you're in it, when you're the founder and it's your company, you are seeing everything that's being said by everybody all the time. All of the attacks are personal, either they're directly personal or they're about the company and that's personal because it's your company. And so there's like intense fog of war. It's very stressful. It feels bad. Um, a lot of times comms, uh, feels like a total waste of time. And I think when people think of traditional comms, I think traditional

comms is a waste of time. It's a of time it's useless it's dead it's totally obsolete but um the thing you have to do for the company like you have to just suck it up and do it is counterintuitive it feels bad it feels like you're exposing yourself more you're um acutely sensitive to all of the negativity that comes with it, that that is just part of the journey. And I think of the phrase, like, a mentor of mine would say, everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die. You want to be the next danderel, you want to be the next Palmer, Trey, Brian, Matt, like that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself through that in order to push your story out

into the world. And to find those true believers, you want to find the people who are going to feel your story in their spine and want to come join you. And there's just no way to do that through, you know, through a curtain through other people, and you can't delegate it. So just one thing to belabor this is the farther away you get from the founders, the more things get diluted. The mission, the passion, the vision, the knowledge. Palmer has knowledge in his head that is like secret knowledge that other people don't have. And Trey has a piece of that. Matt has a piece of that. Put together, that's the leadership of Andrew. A bunch of other people couldn't create this company, couldn't run this company. And when you convey that to

another person, you lose a little bit in the fidelity and then you lose a little bit. And the traditional way of doing it is you brief another person who briefs another person, they pitch a report or the reporter maybe writes it and then they write it in a way that their editor wants for their audience. And it's nearly unrecognizable or it's turned into total pablum. their editor wants for their audience. And it's nearly unrecognizable or it's turned into total pablum. And so to keep that message spiky and concentrated and interesting, you have to just keep it as close to the founders as humanly possible, which means the founder has to do some of this themselves. And sometimes that sucks, but there's just literally no other way. Right. Well, even, I mean, this is the point you've brought this point up now.

It's like almost every point comes back to this. This is, it's the founders, it's the founders mission led sort of strategy for comms. The comms is led by founders. Like you, even at the top of this conversation said, Trey does the comms, like Palmer does the comms. They're the people who are running comms, not the comms professionals. Part of that is just, I mean, it's like every piece that we've talked about. It's like they have to be sort of intricately woven into all of it, every piece of the strategy. Probably another part is every single one of these people has a unique tool set, right? Like how do you think about, I do want to get Trey's sense on this first of all, how it all

felt. And then I want to know how we identify the strengths of a founder sort of, sort of to, uh, to pursue a strategy like this. Cause I think they're all sort of unique, but maybe Trey first on. Yeah. Well, I will say that Andrew does have a head of comms. Her name is Shannon Pryor. She's really, really good at what she does. Um, and I think that the, the primary thing that you want your organizational heads doing, working with the founders, is reminding them of what's true about the strategy. And I think I said this in a tweet after the PowerWires article. irritating thing that I learned from Lulu that I'm still irritated by every day is that you have to say the thing and then you have to say it again. And then you have to say it again. You have to say it again. You have to say it again. You have to say it again. And I'm hearing myself say it every time. And I think this is really stupid. I'm saying the same thing I've said a

hundred times. And Lulu would constantly remind me, yes, but it's the first time they heard it. And so, you have to keep saying it until they believe that it was their idea and it's cool to see this like by the way i said that to trey like probably a hundred times before it's something yeah very annoying um but like it turns out that like it it works like you go into these environments like like you walk into the Pentagon and there are people saying literal sentences that we created at Andoril as if it was their own idea. And Shannon has a really unique ability internally to say, here is the strategy. Here's what we want people to think.

And here are the individual units of work that we are going to do to execute on getting people to think those things and then keeping us on message. Like saying, OK, Trey, you're going to go do this interview. You have to say this and you have to say it again and you have to say it again and you have to say it again. I want you to say it four times in the interview. And I think having someone that's making sure that you're doing your role as the storyteller for the business is incredibly important. But it also is something that we have to own personally, like to take a responsibility for it. And I think this is where the evaluating founders piece comes in. Aside from Andrew, like when with my founders fund hat on, I'm meeting with companies.

I want to see that the person can tell a compelling story because telling a compelling story isn't just about getting the media off your back. It turns out that same skill set is required to recruit talent. That same skill set is required to raise capital. That same skill set is like, and this is why a lot of times when you look at deep tech companies with highly intellectual academic founders, they don't work because the founder isn't actually good at this core storytelling piece. They're just scientists. And I think that it cannot be understated how important someone like Palmer is because he's not only a total freak genius, like mad scientist that knows something about

everything in a way that I never thought was even humanly possible. But he also is a brilliant storyteller. And he can sit down for 15 minutes with an engineer that's like running an entire org inside of a major tech company and convince them to come join Andrew. And that is like, it's like an unbeatable superpower. And so that is an important thing. If anyone that's listening to this podcast is a founder and they don't think they're a good storyteller, you need to find a good storyteller. Otherwise you're screwed, man. It's not going to work.

Well, how does that work exactly? I mean, do you bring someone in to kind of do it for you? That doesn't feel, it feels sort of counter to the message of this strategy. I mean, do you, do you, you, you bring someone in to kind of do it for you or that doesn't feel, it feels sort of counter to the message of, of this strategy. Like, I think that a lot of what you guys are both saying is you need the founder. Obviously Shannon's running the strategy, but you are the thing that she's like, she needs you. So is there a way that you identify maybe different strengths that you have or how do do you navigate? How do you as a Shannon navigate a team without a Palmer? Yeah, I think, well, first off, I'm not suggesting that you should hire like a professional comms person to do it for you. I'm suggesting that you need a

founder level person alongside you in the business. Now, the reason I say founder like person is like Johnny Ive was not the founder of Apple, but he's a brilliant storyteller. And that was an important part of what made Apple's kind of like rebirth work. And so I think that you could do this at a very senior level, but it has to be a founder minded person. And I think Lulu will have opinions on this as well. And she and Shannon work really closely together and have for a long time. But I think Shannon views each of us, each of the co-founders as a different tool. Like, you know, she's going to work to build the house. Maybe Palmer is a hammer. Maybe I'm a shovel. Maybe Brian is a drill. And she knows how to implement those tools to complete the construction

of the house. But we're all different. And so if there's like an opportunity that's a Palmer shaped opportunity in Palmer, for whatever reason, isn't available, you don't just swap in Trey. You don't just swap in Brian. Sometimes the right thing to do is to say this Palmer shaped opportunity is no longer an opportunity because Palmer is not available. opportunity is no longer an opportunity because Palmer is not available. So I think like she's figured out in the right environment, these tools can be really useful in the wrong environment.

It's a, it's a explosion waiting to happen. We have, I mean, the sort of the strategy moves on, we have, you know, taking more risk, turning FUD to fuel and staying the course. I feel like risk and FUD to fuel are kind of, they feel related to me, um, in that I think people are naturally, um, not just founders, but anybody online is, is naturally and understandably very scared of horrible things that are being said about them. Um, but the risky thing to do is to find some way to own that and maybe find the true thing inside of it and lean into a strength where you didn't maybe previously understand that you had one. An example of this for us at Founders Fund is Hereticon. You're getting attacked all the time for these controversial opinions and saying these things that are, you know, well outside

the Overton window, according to a very, you know, narrow minded group of people only. And I remember sort of looking around and realizing like, that's, that is awesome. That is us. That is what we do. And that should be who we are. And how do you, how do you attack someone at that point when you turn the vitriol into that, the only their best weapon, when you turn it into like a badge of honor, um, is that maybe, am I just like, I think that's roughly what you're talking about there. And maybe how do people think about that? How do you think about that process? Yeah. Um, there's a line in the piece that says the world is going to treat you like an insurgent and you win by acting like one.

And it's related to that, where as a startup, you're threatening something. If the world were perfect, you wouldn't need to exist. Like, why would Andral need to exist if everything was going great and there was peace on earth and the U.S. was already strong, as strong as it could be? The people that you are threatening and the institutions that you're threatening are going to try to fight you. And you should use that you can either be injured by it, or you can use it like that energy is not going to go away. So orient it so that it's helping you. And tactically, the way you do that is number one, you know, start with the inner circles, make sure that your employees are okay. Make sure that your employees expect that there will be opposition and criticism of what you're doing. And that should actually fire them up more. Like you want to build a culture where every time there's a hit piece on you, um, the employees laugh it off. They joke about it. They meme about it, or they say like, it's working. We're really getting to them. That's the kind of culture you want to be where it's like a band of underdogs. And people understand that they're here to do something really hard that a lot of people don't want you to succeed at.

And then beyond that, you also want to make it so that it's what you said. The thing that could be a weakness is now a strength invert like the Charlie Munger invert. the Charlie Munger invert, take the take the weakness, either, if it's a true weakness, like fix it, or where does a badge of honor make it part of the thing and own it. And then lastly, as you're going out and talking to people and introducing your company for, for the first time, I think you want to set the expectation that there are people who don't want this to happen, or there are people who don't like this. And we believe this anyway, like you start with the counter argument. And then the rest of you introducing yourself is talking about why your thing is good. What you don't want is to talk about your thing is good, good, good. And then

the whole time they have the counter argument in their mind that they're distracted by and then they drop the counter argument. And then you end on the counter argument against you, like get all the bad stuff out of the way. And then go on offense with the thing you want to talk about. I think one funny way to round this out, I have one last thought after this next piece, but we're getting there towards the end, is a case, a recent Google case, Lulu, you brought it up. You were saying, you know, the Gemini disaster is sort of, it's like the legacy really to be, it begins with Maven, that DNA was in the company. You have a huge, I would say comms crisis moment for Google where the tool that they really need the entire world to think is just the next generation of artificial intelligence.

They need to win against Microsoft and every other incumbent or insurgent is just seen as hopelessly clownish and also, in my opinion, racist. But it spans the gamut there. You either see it as it didn't work or you see it as it was racist. It didn't. Something went horribly wrong. Your founder, not founder, your founder is not running comms anymore. Your new CEO has to defend this somehow. You broke down recently.

You just analyzed, I saw you today on Twitter analyzing Sundar's response. Could you kind of coach us through sort of what happened and what should have happened from a comms perspective? Okay. So I think the biggest problem is that this isn't a comms issue. It's a leadership failure. And there's a failure somewhere between moral compass and common sense. I don't think it's for lack of technical excellence. In fact, 1.5, which was released that same week, seemed to be excellent and just got totally overshadowed by all of this noise. And I feel horrible. Imagine being a researcher on that team who works for six months on this and then have other people's decisions distorted, you know, distort that new

cycle beyond recognition. I think it's a leadership failure in what are we here to do? And what is our product goal? And who are we making this for? And even in the communication, it was all about, it went wrong, because people were offended. Basically, it didn't work, because people got mad. And them optimizing for nobody being offended was the problem in the first place, and why it didn't work. And so I think it's not that the email was bad. I think a lot of hardworking people probably had to stay late and do their best on this, but it's that there's no way to write an email that fixes a situation where the wrong business decisions are being made. So I don't think that there's a way to save that through communications. Yeah.

But I do. Can I say one thing, though? That email was clearly written by a committee and vetted through lawyers and finally signed off by a professional CEO like a Palmer. Lucky would never have sent that email. Like his hand physically wouldn't press the send button on an email like that. A founder led company doesn't talk that way. People don't talk that way. You have to get to a size of bureaucracy where it's like a committee

writing for professional CEO to be able to release an email like that. This is the government. This is the government point is that it's like, it's the right response was probably like a two sentence email that was like, guys, we screwed up. This was this was a total failure of moral judgment on our part. We're going to do better. More to come. Sundar. That was the that was probably the best possible thing if they needed to do it at all. But when you say nothing, everyone competes to say as much as possible

without saying nothing. It's not possible to write a very short and concise nothing. You have to include all constituencies in your nothingness. And that email was just that. It was like a bunch of people sitting around a table competing for who could say the most sentences that had no meaning whatsoever. They open without even, they could not even say what went wrong. You could not even say specifically like what the problem was because nobody agrees on what the problem was. And that kind of goes back to like that, that is very much, I agree that it's a leadership problem or appears to be a leadership problem. And that would be like, sort of, uh, what was your point? Uh, Lulu, it was, um, uh, inner circle comes first. Like the messaging is not happening internally. Who is running Google? What is

the purpose of Google? What is the strategy of Google? And if you don't have all of those things coming from the top, then when something breaks down, how could you possibly expect anybody to message correctly? Nobody, there is no correct answer. It's a total disaster. And it started in that, the call is coming from inside the house. The clunky email is coming from inside the house. Can I emphasize one thing just on that? This is not, I just want to double down on, this is not just bad comms.

I think Google probably has a wildly talented comms team. I'm friends with a former head of comms at Google who is a very smart and savvy person. But like if you hand them this situation and say, fix it with words, it doesn't work. But the other thing I want to emphasize too, to Trey's point about how Shannon uses these tools, and she is one of the best in the business. Like, very, very good. Well, we've turned it into embarrassing Shannon now when she hears this. But going direct for a founder does not mean don't have comm support and do everything yourself and go pop off on Twitter. I think some people hear going direct and they're

like, I need to fire my comms team and tweet more like, no, you should find the best head of comms that you can. You should find your own Shannon. You should like, there are many companies with outstanding heads of comms that are doing so much amazing work for them that the founders would say, like, we could never do this without this person. And they work with the media and they participate with mainstream media articles. I'm not saying don't have comms. And they work with the media and they participate with mainstream media articles. I'm not saying don't have comms people or never work with the media. It's be selective, be selective about which media to work with and when and what you're trying to get out of it and be selective about which people you entrust with your story, which is a very sacred

responsibility. And then lastly, that doesn't take you out of the loop. Like even if you find the very, very best comms person who can establish the very best press relationships, you're not off the hook. Like it still comes down to you. Last one. And it was a point that you briefly touched on at the very top of the conversation. You said Palmer always says, you know, the strategy doesn't change, even if it's, even if everything's friendly. I think it was Palmer always says, you know, if everything changes tomorrow, the culture changes tomorrow, we're the same. Is that true? Like if the culture radically changes, I'm wondering, I guess, this entire conversation is geared towards, you know, how to navigate hostility.

this entire conversation is geared towards, you know, how to navigate hostility. I think that's sort of the rough assumption is that like the, the, there's like a lot of hostile elements in the press. Social media is uniquely a hostile environment you're building now inside of this environment. This is a great guide for, for navigating that. But like at what point, you know, is there a peacetime transition? I mean, do you change at all? Do you change your strategy at all? If things are good, like, do you kind of ease the chip off your shoulder maybe a little bit or what? I mean, how do you think about peacetime? No, you cannot ease off. The reality is, is like the only version of peacetime is the company is failing and no one cares about you anymore. As long as the company is succeeding,

someone is always going to be swinging for your head. And I think we've seen this with Elon. It's like Elon has built the world's only relevant electric car company, if we're being honest. And he gets attacked by the environmentalists left. And they just hate him because he's successful. And they just want everyone to be only moderately successful. And I don't think that's how the world moves.

And I think as long as Anduril is doing good work and we're moving the needle for our national security ecosystem, people are going to be coming after us. And so, no, you never let off the gas. Yeah. Can I say it a different way? I do concur. But there's a book called Once an Eagle. I think Patrick Collison has it on his reading list. A lot of military leaders have it on their reading list. It was recommended to me by Admiral Jens DeBritus. And it's a tome. The very first page of it has an inscription that says, a year that is believed to's a it's a tome the very first page of it has an inscription that says a year that is believed to be a peace year is either a pre-war year or a post-war year and i think that's

the case with companies like if you're a startup there's never peace time like in theory um in theory if there were peace time maybe you would do something differently but in practice i've literally never seen a startup with a single year that could be called a peacetime year. And then the other thing I'll just draw a distinction between is you can change your tactics without changing your strategy. So your principles should never change. Your core message should never change. What you exist to do shouldn't change. But the way you communicate that can definitely change. You might go to press more or less, use Twitter can definitely change. You might go to press more or less, use Twitter more or less. You might go LinkedIn. If you're hiring, you might, there's

companies where I don't like TikTok, but there's companies where I've told the founder, you got to be on TikTok because of this thing that you're doing. That's how you're going to make money. And so the tactics I think should change freely, but the strategy, no. Trey, Lulu, it has been absolutely real. Thank you guys for joining me and catch us here on Friday. Later. Thank you.

Bye.