Public Relations

“Too many times I see people like combine a fundraise with a revenue milestone. Do not do that. Those are two separate PR moments that can be made into two big moments, not one.”

“Really, that PR is made for citations, right, around AEO. Like, how many external credible sources are writing about you? Then you'll see your AEO traffic significantly increase, because the more of a not-owned narrative is being talked about positively about …”

“The tech is the thing people focus on, but the utopian stories about tech, when you make tech the thing people focus on, they write it off as PR, and so I think what we want is for the utopian stories about tech, or the optimistic stories about tech, To have i…”

“When you get the PR now, you have to leverage it for the digital ad to make sure that, that it continues to live on, because people see it asynchronously. You know, it used to be like, if everyone, if everyone's watching the Today Show together, we're all gonn…”

“We invoke a dollar land skill and that coaches codecs to push the PR, wait for human and agent reviewers, wait for CI to be green, fix the flakes if there are any Merge upstream if the PR comes into conflict, wait for everything to pass, put it in the merge qu…”

“There's a limit of how much you can rely on PR to grow your business. It's not as systematic as predictable scalable. So, to truly be able to do paid acquisition well, we had to be nationwide. It was really hard back then, to, like, be efficient in Facebook on…”

“There's a lot more focus now on how the output of PR, particularly how earned media, media coverage, journalistic work influences AI and how companies show up in AI search. So there's a booming business and a whole lot of noise about how PR and its outputs aff…”

“One of the more interesting things that PR has been good for, and any tech founder, regardless of the stage they're at, can do this. It's a really useful media training tool. So you can ask AI, you can feed it a bunch of articles from John Smith, who's a journ…”

“And it helps with PR and enterprise clients. But at the end of the day, It has very little to do with what I consider to be real world safety alignment.”

“PR has had this time and place but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost once you get it out because you're just, you know, you need to see it through. You want to…”

“Initially I was saying, you can't in 20, 25 apologize. Like, it's the PR one-on-one is you do not apologize. So you just take it down, and you move on, which I think was the right move”

“The entire test split here is public. So you can do things like just overfit to the patches in the test set. You can do things like, let me add at runtime, pull the PR and just get the answer and just use it.”

“I recommend to people build out a email list of reporters that cover your space and don't sell your product. Don't sell you. Just give them high quality content, make them feel like they're always in the know with their space, because when they do want to writ…”

“You should not approach your marketing initiatives any differently from your PR initiatives, because the real truth of it is like pitching to journalists is a form of inbound marketing. You are trying to create interesting content that draws back people to you…”

“I've seen examples where people start with PR. Doesn't usually work, but once in a while, you can get a spark, and then if you see the spark, then you can figure out how to do it more scalably.”

“I feel like over the years, Google has become more and more conservative about doing things. They care a lot about PR, like public relations. They care a lot about how their image is shown in the media. And I feel that at least in my experience that played so …”

“You have to focus on execution because in the early days, you know, nothing else matters. PR doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter. You know, It just doesn't matter. You have to be focused on execution.”

“And it honestly was the most important lever that helped Tumblr grow in Latin America and that helped Duolingo grow.”

“I think when people think about PR, they think about journalists and they think about like big media. But to me, PR is reaching anyone who has a big audience and getting them to share that with their big audience.”

“Most of the time, PR is not going to get you leads or users. It's just not.”

“Launches, however, do not need to just be about PR. In fact, in many cases, PR is a distraction. And instead you can have not just one big launch, but like a series of launches that allow you to stay top of mind, to create momentum with your users and to show …”

“Compared to fundraising, I think there is more of a case for sort of like a mass reach out when it comes to PR. So with a PR strategy, I think, you know, you may want to pick five or 10 journalists or bloggers who you think are like the key audience for this a…”

“My advice, if you're just starting to dabble in PR at the company is try not to do it, building an in-house team from the get go. And the reason is, is that it takes a minimum number of people. It takes certain network reach for PR to be effective.”

“Now, the caveat I would say is that if you're so early stage that your seed level, please don't invest in PR. It tends to be expensive. And at the seed stage, you're still trying to determine who your product is for, what the product does. So at that point, I …”

“Advertising is focused. At least when I was in the business on making the ad, like making the thing that is communicating about the brand and PR is broader than that. It's transcends the marketing department, although it includes it. And it's about how the com…”

“If you're not telling a story and you haven't strategically thought about how to utilize Media relations within your broader marketing mix, and also how to unfold a story for the press over time, then that's not really strategic. It's just a mention, and you'r…”

“Probably like Six months before launch is a good time to engage PR and many times that's about the time when maybe a year out people are starting to develop their brand before they launch and then they kind of get their act together and then they're ready to l…”

“Too many CEOs think that like marketers can convince PR people and journalists to write about anything. And the reality is journalists don't give a shit about your product unless it is truly doing something innovative or unless it's breaking rules and they'll …”

“And if it's early stage, PR can be very helpful because it makes everything else easier. Right. So it makes hiring easier. It makes fundraising easier. It makes everything easier, but there's almost never a direct correlation where it's like, I did this, the i…”

“I cannot help you if you're lying to me, and I cannot help, I cannot steer the ship, story-wise, if I don't know what to stay away from.”

“If the CMO is a quant person, I think definitely PR should not report into the CMO because it's just a different animal.”

“Take as much care to decide like you're either going to take this function seriously and then actually do it and learn it because the people who are there to help you or actually don't bother because spending two dollars with a half-hearted commitment is a com…”

“In the very early stages, at the beginning, it should be run out of product. Because what you're really informing people about and getting feedback on is the product and its positioning and its world, you know, where it stands in the market. And then if you ge…”

“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,…”

“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 if your shit isn't three times as good or 10 t…”

“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.”

“The more complicated the story or the technology, the higher the need to have an internal person in there sooner.”

“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 o…”

“If you are trying to see the success of it in a spreadsheet, don't bother because you will never, ever be happy.”

“PR should be a really critical input instead of the decision being completely done, wrapped up, and then handed to PR to deal with.”

“As I mentioned, it's not a scalable user acquisition, but it can get you some early adopting users, it can give you, ah, you know, your investors or potential employees a heads up that you exist, and it can help with SEO.”

“So like BD or sales, which you wouldn't outsource early in your company's life, you shouldn't outsource pitching to press in the very early stages of your company.”

“We often say that PR is, I think, 30% the messenger, 70% the message”

“We often say that PR is, I think, 30% the messenger, 70% the message”

“Anybody who mastered the skill of either recruiting or PR or customer acquisition for startups can leverage that skill at a firm, especially as more and more firms are looking to build platforms that add value.”