Keyana Corliss: [00:00:04] Welcome to Just Checking In.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:00:06] I'm Becky Buckman.
Keyana Corliss: [00:00:07] And I'm Keyana Corliss. Each week we'll use humor, a little irony, and definitely some self-deprecation to dive into the world of high-tech corporate comms.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:00:16] We'll use our expertise and less-than-serious take on the tech news cycle to bring you the best in the business, across comms and media, for one-of-a-kind insights and perspectives you won't hear anywhere else.
Keyana Corliss: [00:00:27] Get ready to laugh.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:00:30] This is...
Keyana Corliss: [00:00:31] ... Just Checking In.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:00:36] So today on the pod, we are thrilled to welcome, as our guest, David Krane, the CEO and Managing Partner of venture capital firm GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. GV, whose sole limited partner is the company Alphabet, you've probably heard of them before, today has more than $10 billion in assets under management, 400 active portfolio companies around the globe, and notable investment outcomes such as Uber, Next, Slack, GitLab, Duo Security, One Medical, you name it. All iconic names I'm betting our listeners have heard before. And David himself has a pretty unique background for a venture firm managing partner, which is one of the reasons we're speaking with him today. He actually started his career in marketing and comms and IR, working at some little unknown tech companies like Qualcomm and Apple before joining Google near the end of 2000. And we're so excited to have him here to talk about his journey and his thoughts about a number of technology and comms-related issues. So welcome, David.
David Krane: [00:01:34] Thank you for having me, my old friend.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:01:37] I know, I know, so David says old friend, because David was employee number 84 at Google and back when I was a journalist, not the comms professional I am today, I think I had a fun time, David invited me down to Mountain View from San Francisco, and I can't remember if I met both Sergey and Larry, but I think it was the story about the chef at the Google cafeteria who used to cook for the Grateful Dead, right?
David Krane: [00:02:04] Correct. If you can even imagine this scenario. There were days in Google's early history where we really had to hustle and work for attention and for press. And so that moment that we met indeed took place in a Google cafe with the Grateful Dead chef. We were introducing Google's first international interfaces, there were ten of them, and what we decided to do was frame a media event over breakfast. And if you recall, we had ten international breakfast foods representing the ten interface languages that we were releasing to our users that day. It was a gimmick, to say the least, but one of the greatest things that came out of it, besides a few articles, was that you and I got to meet each other over 20 years ago.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:02:50] Oh my gosh. All right. Amazing. And I will never forget that because that was pretty funny. Let's pick up on that and tell me, like you mentioned, if you can imagine we had to work for it back then, like you were the comms guy at Google. This was an upstart company. People didn't really know who Larry and Sergey were. A far cry from today. What were the issues back then? Like tell us what that was like and give us some examples of like how you did have to fight for attention and visibility.
David Krane: [00:03:16] There were many issues. Probably chief among them was that Google looked and presented itself like no other consumer website on the internet. In its day, its early days, there were a sea of portal companies dominated by Yahoo!, when you would load one of these web pages, right, you would get about 290 choices. You could look at stock quotes, you could look at news headlines. You could somewhere find a search box and possibly conduct a query. You could look at your horoscope. Google presented itself very differently. Google's homepage was intentionally 12kB in size. It had one single image on it. It had an eccentric button that said, I'm feeling lucky, which was peculiar in its own right.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:04:02] I remember this, yeah.
David Krane: [00:04:03] You remember this! The greatest thing about Google, though, was it was fast and it worked. It was almost always right. And so that's kind of how we cut our teeth initially, but because we looked so different, I remember the skeptical gaze every time I would call a friend in the media. You must be kidding, this is not a real pitch, this is not a real company, this is not a real internet search experience. And then to top it off, these eccentric founders that you're introducing me to are telling me that they're working on a 300 year problem, like what's going on down there at Google?
Rebecca Buckman: [00:04:38] So oh my God. Well, so when did things start to change? I mean, because it's like night and day. Now it's, you know, Larry and Sergey are superstars. We've had, you know, Eric Schmidt was the CEO for a while. We remember him, now they're just part of Fang and they're a big juggernaut, like, when did you sense that the company was sort of catching on from a brand perspective?
David Krane: [00:04:58] Yeah, I mean, what was really wonderful as a storyteller and as the voice of the company in the early days was our product and engineering outpaced every other effort that we had. So when you have a product that is so effective, when you have a culture that really is disciplined and focused on just that product, but its rate of engineering and iteration is so fast, its consumers can live in a zone of surprise and delight permanently because it's always changing. It's only getting better. And then you come in as the storyteller for the company, and your job is assisted meaningfully by the great work that the technical population and the company is doing. When the product kicks ass, the story kicks ass.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:05:43] Oh, I love that. That's going to be in our show notes. You know a sound bite when you hear one or when you make one up, DK. Okay. All right. So how long did you stay in that role? Did you have other jobs at Google proper before going over to then Google Ventures?
David Krane: [00:05:56] I didn't. My job was growing and scaling with the company. I think the piece that you didn't speak to in a pretty broad set of responsibilities was also a lot of care and feeding of the culture, internal communications, and that really precious and expensive hour that we would devote every week to something that's widely known as TGIF, Google's TGIF meeting. It was indeed on Fridays for many, many years, and then it became a thank God it's Thursday meeting. Although we didn't rebrand to TGIT, just a time zone adjust as we opened more and more international offices and added Googlers in many different parts of the world, it was more respectful to not do this in the middle of the night of their weekend, but actually try and do it at a time that they were awake and they could be engaged. But once a week since the beginning of the company, six people and a ping pong table, now, today, hundreds of thousands live streams, all kinds of other accessibility assists, sign language subtitles, AI, it's a meeting that happens every week where the company gets together and invests in its culture, invests in its synchronicity of communications, and leaves a lot of space for unstructured, open Q&A, which, remarkably, has scaled from six people to nearly a couple hundred thousand without much sweat.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:07:13] That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, picking up on that in the whole issue of internal comms, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but when I think about how comms has changed so much over the last, you know, ten, even five years, I think the importance of internal comms is one of those big changes. Maybe speak to that a little bit. Why do you think this is so challenging today? And are you glad you don't have to do that for Alphabet anymore?
David Krane: [00:07:35] It's indeed a complex job and I admire greatly the team. It's now a team of people that focus on that meeting and that opportunity. You know, this is really an answer that transposes on the evolution of computing and consumer technology use. Right? I often refer to my iPhone as a supercomputer in my pocket. I think in this example, I'll refer to it as a publishing department in my pocket. Every single human on the planet has the ability to publish information, whether it's right or wrong, reach an audience, whether it's small or large, and shape opinion and shape facts. And when you are running a startup company, when you're running a large enterprise, I think it's of penultimate importance when you're not just thinking about a half a dozen or two dozen media organizations, you're thinking about 7.5 billion people, substantial majority of them have a publishing department in their pocket and can release information. It is hyper-critical that startups are getting together on a very regular basis to align on values, to align on facts, to align on goals and ambition, and also to take time for dialogue and discussion. As quickly as we're moving, look at the AI world, the AI world is moving at 900mph on a slow day, you have to stop your startup company and spend time communicating and ensuring that we are all working off the same song sheet.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:08:59] I want to get back to kind of your journey and your move into venture. But do companies wait too long to do this today? Because I would think this is, you know, most CEOs are so busy, especially in this environment, just finding product market fit and trying to find big customers. Do they understand the importance of internal comms?
David Krane: [00:09:13] It's varied. When we're involved with companies, it's one of the first conversations that we have, and we have a wonderful blueprint that we can refer to from early Google days that I teach in to startups all the time. As I said before, it's expensive. It is meaningfully expensive to hit the brake, stop production, come together, open a couple beverages and provide some snacks and communicate. These meetings, when a company is small, can be organic. When they get larger it takes true structure and editorial programing and some sense of format. But there are also opportunities, they're great opportunities as quickly as we're running to focus on recognition, to focus on achievement, to focus on mission and purpose and kind of the soul of the company. Why the company exists. The faster you're growing, the more those original discussions and values get challenged by growth. And so it's super important to keep coming back to them time and time again, to make sure we're all locked in, working on the same sets of goals the same way.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:10:10] That's awesome. And I'm sure that's one of your main value adds when you're investing in and advising a company. So speaking of which, tell me how the pivot into venture happened.
David Krane: [00:10:19] The pivot into venture happened much in the way many great moments in my life happened, when I met my wife, when I landed this job, and these things are moments that I never could have predicted. They were really a function of serendipity. I was just past my ninth anniversary at Google. I was honestly beginning to wonder and self-reflect. I'm probably not a lifer here, I've stayed here a lot longer than I've ever stayed at any other prior job, and this place has been obscenely impactful and generous and wonderful to me. But I probably need to at least ask myself, is it time to push myself out of the nest? And a hallmark of sort of the first nine years at Google, there were many, but one that really stands out is one of my favorite things to do was to work on Google's very successful and intentional prosecution of startup M&A. Google's early deal-making was incredibly successful, hugely impactful to the Google that we know today. Doubleclick, YouTube, the list goes on. And I always found myself in a position working on the public communication of these transactions and then subsequently staying close to those founders as they began to fumble and find their way and get integrated into Google. Reading to the end of the story, though, the book always finished the same way, the founders never had a successful integration into Google, and as such became restless and often left and went on to create another great company. We saw this time and time again. Dennis Crowley left after we bought Dodgeball and went on to start Foursquare, one of the most impressive local databases that we've ever seen.
David Krane: [00:11:57] Evan Biz, who started Blogger, which Google bought as well, left Google shortly after and went on to start Twitter, now X, which is now super important to communications professionals and far more. Google never got that transition right and as such I often felt like I was the only one that saw that and recognized that no matter how fiercely I would advocate for those founders. So as such, I happened to have a moment where I ran into Larry and Sergey at a charitable event. We had engaged as much as the three of us felt like engaging that event, and then kind of retreated into a corner and started talking amongst ourselves, and they cast out a very simple statement to me. They said, hey, DK, we have been asking ourselves the question, should we stand up a venture capital business funded by Google, branded Google, that goes out and tries to meet people like us? We're about that far in the thinking, but what occurred to us is you're the founder champion. You're the guy that is just always in our grill, making the case for why we should be spending more attention with and more time with founder A, founder B founder C. Would you have any interest in helping us answer the simple question, should Google have a VCR? And if so, what would it look like to attract the likes of people like me and Larry? And that was all I needed to hear. And literally the next day I shifted into my next project, which is still my current project, celebrating my 15th year working on Google Ventures.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:13:24] Oh my God, that's amazing. So you were the first partner. You were the first guy they had in there.
David Krane: [00:13:28] There were a small group of us that were founding partners of the firm, and they had had this conversation with 3 or 4 others, and they basically threw us in a room and said, hash it out and, you know, do whatever you need to do. Go slow, be patient, be bold. Remember, we're going to be a lot more interested if you can figure out how to a) find product market fit, but then b) scale it. And what can you really do that is unique and Googley when you're coming up with your design thesis? That was all we needed to hear. That was all we needed to hear. And I remember those early design sessions among my founding partners as some of the most exciting, unrestrained, unconstrained, and just delusionally optimistic days of my career. And what came out of that was something, as you cited in the beginning of our conversation, is quite large, is quite scaled, and is pretty well known.
Keyana Corliss: [00:14:24] Besides sharing this podcast, Becky and I have a bunch of things in common. For example, we both love a good train wreck of a PR story, and I'm assuming we both like a good glass of wine. Actually, this podcast was created over a drink, you know, we both share that.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:14:39] True.
Keyana Corliss: [00:14:39] And we're both members of a comms and brand marketing expert community called Mixing Board.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:14:43] Yes. And thank you very much to Mixing Board for working to raise the value of our industry and for producing this podcast.
Keyana Corliss: [00:14:50] So Mixing Board has a very cool, savvy way of tapping the collective networks of their super connected community so that organizations can find the right senior comms and marketing talent fast. If you are hiring for a full-time role, or trying to find the exact right consultant and want the expert guidance for an extremely reasonable price, I could not recommend Mixing Board's talent network more. The way it works is that Mixing Board shares the opportunity with the community - and this community is incredible, you guys, it is a who's who - and ask their members to submit candidates that they think would be perfect for the position. Most of the time, these folks are folks they've worked with or they've directly known for years, and they will quickly share back a super qualified list of candidates and make connections where there's interest. Go to the Talent Network page at MixingBoard.com for more info, and mention Just Checking In for a special rate. The talent that comes out of Mixing Board is incredible. It is a really great way to find top-notch talent. So I encourage you guys all to go.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:15:51] Obviously, GV today is a very different sort of venture firm in that, as I mentioned, it's, you know, I don't know if you want to call it a corporate venture firm, it's kind of an old term, but you know, it has one LP and that's Alphabet. I'm assuming the startups in your portfolio have access to all the magic that is Google. Is that the secret sauce? I mean, when you're pitching and trying to get into a hot deal, how do you differentiate GV? Are those some of the things you talk about or is it other things?
David Krane: [00:16:19] We have incredibly unique and fortunate positioning. I think in a very crowded industry full of VCs, definitions matter. So corporate VC, the way we look at the world is, one), it's a vehicle that invests with strategic intent to further the corporation's goals and KPIs. We are not that. From day one, we set GV up to be a return-driven fund like your firm, like any of our cousins on Sand Hill Road, etc, that's how GV is structured. That has turned out to be a profound advantage because for a host of great entrepreneurs and inventors, maybe Google's goals are not shared by their ambitions. Probably the best example was a founder that I backed a number of years ago, Tony Fadell, who was just coming out of Apple, and he joined forces with another colleague from Apple named Matt Rogers, and together they founded a business called Nest. Best--
Rebecca Buckman: [00:17:10] -- I've heard of that. Yeah, I think I have one in my house, David.
David Krane: [00:17:14] Yeah, exactly. Best we could tell when we heard that pitch initially, it had nothing to do with Google's primary goals. And additionally, these were refugees of a decade of extraordinary achievement at Apple. And if you think about the strategic plate tectonics of the valley, there really was no logical reason why Nest and anything branded Google would have any reason to get along in the same room. That said, as you suggested, we had to pitch ourselves, we had to sell in and we had to differentiate ourselves. What did we do? One of the most extraordinary features of GV is that, as you said, we have a single source of capital and it's one that is risk leaning. I cannot think of another capital source that I've seen in 15 years doing this, that embraces and pushes us to embrace more risk rather than less risk, always. And as such, for a business that was as bold and as complicated and as operationally complex and capitally intense as Nest, there was no better partner to them on the venture side than what we could bring to the table. Additionally, I was able to use a lot of my historical professional skills and I helped the company say hello world and go to market. One of my most favorite things to do as a VC now is to pull from my past and apply it to the present and help companies with, as we all understand, a seminal moment in their journey, which is hello world. Here's who we are and here's why you should care. And the Nest launch was extraordinary. It was unparalleled.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:18:43] Well, I want to dig into that because most partners at VC firms are not intimately involved in hello world. That is left to the marketing folks, to the comms folks. So I would think that's a tremendous value add for you. I mean, how involved do you get? I mean, were you like helping to run that launch or were you just providing input, like tell us what that was like.
David Krane: [00:19:03] Incredibly involved. From helping hire the team in to working on a very regular cadence, reviewing what other resources do we need? It was a unique company. Remember, it's Apple DNA, so they had an in-house creative team, which is an extraordinary advantage. The founders themselves prioritized storytelling and creative as much as they did products and culture and finance. So it was really nice to have embracement from the very top of the company. And I think they also understood, coming from ten years of Apple launches, they had every expectation that a startup that nobody had heard of working on something peculiar as a new, better thermostat, they had their challenges ahead of them. So I was embedded with this company for weeks and weeks and weeks prior to actual hello world, helped bring in the communications agency partner. We used Outkast very, very effectively, helped them stand up a bunch of social media strategies, help worked intimately with partners on the distribution side like Best Buy and others. When we launched the company, we launched in 1700 Best Buy stores on day one, and that in itself is an extraordinary marketing opportunity. Later, when we added other retail, like Home Depot, Amazon, etc., getting these partners rallied and harnessed to do our storytelling and marketing for us was a huge edge and a huge advantage in scaling storytelling. As long as it was our crisp, clear messaging that we set from inside. And it made this small company look like a massive company. So big, in fact, that 2 or 3 months after Nest had said hello world, the patent litigation lawsuit claims came from Honeywell because they were completely disrupted by what Nest was intending to do.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:20:42] Yeah, not a name I hear a lot in VC circles. Honeywell. You know, internal comms is hard, right? This is all more stuff you got to do. You got to devote resources to it. You got to spend time on it. It becomes more strategic to the business. I mean, I still find, maybe this is because at my firm, we back a lot of, I call them BBI companies - Boring But Important - you know that's an old phrase from the Wall Street Journal. A lot of B2B stuff that is not, you know, it's not like Apple and Nest and consumer producty, I still nonetheless feel that many CEOs could maybe have a greater appreciation for the power of storytelling and how it can propel the actual business. Tell me your thoughts on that. Do you think this is an issue, I guess number one, and number two, like what do you tell CEOs to get them to understand this if they don't already?
David Krane: [00:21:28] It is indeed an issue. BBI is fascinating, we see our fair share of BBI companies and often a common thread, I'm sure Becky you can relate to this, is those sorts of companies tend to be started by highly technical founders. Founders that were... they can offer this world many superpowers, many gifts, but being a passionate, engaged storyteller is not one of them. They tend to be more introverted. They tend to be very technical. They tend to understand a technical narrative in their own head, but they don't tend to stop and process and synthesize and say, is the person at the other end of this conversation with me? Are they also understanding and sharing a technical fluency with me? So we find a lot of those companies exciting. They're important. They're extraordinary businesses. They have tremendous return potential. But for us, it's also a way to sell in something I think we do uniquely well, which is help technical founders stand up a story that can be widely understood and received by the world, not just their technical teams. And so we spent a lot of time on that from day one, and it may even start in the initial pitch, and I may even run tests with these founders replaying what they said to me, first and foremost for comprehension, and secondly, to re-synthesize for them how one might say it in a simpler way. I get this feedback, Becky, time and time again, that's what I was trying to say. That's a better way to say what I intended to say.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:23:00] That's amazing.
David Krane: [00:23:01] I'd do this with Larry and Sergey in the early days. They were so clear in their own minds about what they were building, but it took someone to come in and re-synthesize their intent and make a language and a communications framework that was accessible to other people. We see it today in venture all the time. BBI companies are a great example. Health care companies, deeply technical life sciences companies, we are building this kind of drug for X, which should have the potential to address Y. And between X and Y there's all this messy stuff that is the regulatory process, the clinical trial process, the bureaucracy, etc, and simplifying that story to stay focused on opportunity solution is everything. And the sooner you can set that hook and put a company on that path, the more effective they're going to operate on every level of their business.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:23:56] Right, instead of waiting for the series D when they finally figured out, they have to tell a broader story.
David Krane: [00:24:00] Correct. Because until the series D, you've got to win over and impress and earn trust with the regulatory community. You have to hire and recruit and tell your story to someone extremely talented that has 15 job choices in this extraordinary job market. You want to win them. And if you don't explain yourself clearly, why would they go work for you? They may as well go work for the other 14.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:24:22] Yeah, exactly. Any other examples? I mean, preferably outside the GV portfolio, but any other examples of companies you think that did a particularly good job with storytelling early on? I mean, because what I always struggle to back this up with fact, but I do feel like having a coherent story and brand, ultimately, when you exit, can add hundreds of millions of dollars onto your value at the end, because everybody understands what you do and you're just so much more compelling.
David Krane: [00:24:47] There are so many examples. I'll pick on one that I invested in, and I'll highlight one that I didn't invest in. I think Uber had just an extraordinary evolution of its storytelling, and they expressed their key messaging, their value prop in just really, really interesting ways that were very consistent, that were globally understood, that were unambiguously understood by a very wide range of audiences, and the tactics that they used to do their storytelling were very, very simple. You remember, Uber was a business that presented any storyteller with a challenge, like, we're really well known in the cities that we operate in, and that started with one city and then two and then three, but to look at the many hundreds of cities that Uber operates in now and this universal global understanding of what Uber is and why it exists in, frankly, two lines of business. Not just moving people, but also moving burritos. It's extraordinary to me how effective they were. And I think they did a really wonderful job using traditional crisp communications and also building a flywheel of so many people that they were affecting positively to do storytelling for them. I mean, the company became a verb faster than Google became a verb.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:26:15] Yeah, that is the ultimate badge of success, right? Your company name is a verb.
David Krane: [00:26:19] Correct. Then you look at a company that we didn't invest in. We all have those ones that got away or that we missed. We saw it and we passed. Called Figma and Figma within its core product community, extraordinary. And again you get that flywheel of very loyal, very engaged retained users that are doing the storytelling for you. But they were doing it in such a way that it was still somewhat boutique-ish within the design community. Right? And then Figma has this glorious opportunity to walk as close as one could get to a 20 billion-something possible outcome. And then so many more storytellers woke up and started telling the Figma story for them. Financial markets, investors, the business community, etc. and then that deal didn't happen, as we all saw. Yet most people in the government now know what Figma is. Most people on Wall Street know what Figma is now. And Figma, frankly, has never been in a stronger position, but they're working on a totally different platform as they go forward with their storytelling. Super impressive.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:27:25] But is your argument that before the fail, and this is the merger that was going to happen with Adobe, right?
David Krane: [00:27:31] Correct.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:27:32] That before that, did they do a good enough job or after they were thrust into the public domain in, you know, the financial, the Wall Street sense? Did they have to let others tell their story for them, or did they do a good enough job beforehand that everybody already knew?
David Krane: [00:27:46] I think they did a great job being the biggest storyteller and the loudest voice in a small community, which is the design community. And then when this potential business outcome walked right up to them, all of a sudden everybody in the world, unaided, knew who Figma was and what they were about and how significant this company was. And as such, they're now standing on that new platform and they're able to tell a story in a much broader way. It's super exciting to see.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:28:12] Yeah, obviously. Well, so, just to get super tactical for a minute, this is kind of my last question for you, and then we can, if there's any other stuff you want to talk about, I would entertain it because you've obviously got a ton of wisdom to share with our audience. But when you look at the comms landscape today, like going back 25 years to when you were working in the trenches, I mean, it is so different today with the proliferation of so many owned channels with different kinds of social media, with internal comms concerns, which we've discussed. Do you have 1 or 2 pieces of advice for, you know, those people that are gutting it out at either a tech startup or a large tech company today? Is there like a David Krane comms storytelling North Star wisdom that you've earned that you could share with our listeners?
David Krane: [00:28:59] The world has changed so remarkably since you and I first met, and as long as you and I have been practicing on our various sides of the table, to me it is a pretty simple recipe. I think there's no other strategy that's more important than going direct, owning your voice, being very consistent about that. I think it's never before been more important than now that the founders are telling their own stories. Google, for many years, very selectively our founders would tell the story, but they were always selfless and very inclusive about how they thought about an incredibly long tail of spokespeople that could help shoulder and tell the company's story. I think that's a challenging strategy, as scattered and chaotic as the media business is today. So nothing replaces a very committed founder that is very consistently telling a crisp, simple, differentiated story. Full stop.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:30:05] Why is it bad to outsource that?
David Krane: [00:30:07] That's the most credible voice to be the storyteller for a company. Honestly, I think journalists have a fair amount of fatigue hearing from media people as the primary storyteller. I think less and less are you reading coverage today where it says, you know, a third of the body of the story is attributed to 'spokesperson said', that's not really the norm. That used to be the norm. The stories that stand out, the stories that are the most effective, the stories that get the most circulation are the ones where the founder's voice is in the foreground, and they are leading the storytelling and narrative delivery. That can be through traditional media, what's left of it, that can be through voice online, through a podcast, or through some sort of environment like that that's live. That could also be direct from a founder's social media channels. And as we all know, X is most interesting when the senior-most voices are speaking candidly and saying things that are a little sticky and have some controversy and a lot of intrigue, and then the conversation begins. And when it's sterile, watered-down, overlawyered corporate speak, that just goes into the ether and doesn't get any uptake at all.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:31:17] Yes. And that's always been true. And I guess it's up to the comms professional to manage that, to make that going direct and to facilitate that authentic voice in a way that works with the CEO schedule and can maximize his or her time and impact. All right. Awesome. Before I do the sign-off, anything else you want to talk about? I thought this was so interesting.
David Krane: [00:31:38] I don't have anything else, your questions are great. And you know, I could talk about any question for a long time because I'm just fortunate to have the privilege to do what I do. It's really, it's a gift to have found this opportunity, because so much of what I do every day is informed by what I did in Act One. So act two would not be near as fulfilling, I wouldn't be able to pitch and sell myself into deals in the way that I do if I didn't have such experience and success in act one, and it's really formed how much joy and satisfaction and impact I'm able to create in act two.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:32:14] I love that storytelling is Act One. Well you obviously are delivering a ton of value add to your portfolio companies and they're lucky to work with you. So David, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. And I think a lot of great wisdom for our listeners.
David Krane: [00:32:28] Thanks for having me. That was a blast.
Rebecca Buckman: [00:32:32] So if SBS Comms sounds familiar, it's because you might have seen them recently listed as a top five most innovative company in Fast Company's first-ever PR and Brand Strategies category. They're one of the tech industry's hottest agencies that's attracted the attention of companies like American Express, Cloudflare, GitHub, Flexport and more. SBS Comms embraces a modern ethos in technology comms, shedding outdated strategies for progress and results. SBS works across industries and with companies at all stages of growth, from industry leaders to those building tomorrow's consequential breakthroughs, such as Air Company, Runway, Astro Forge, Versal, Light Matter and more. You can learn more about SBS at www.SBSComms.com - that's a lot of comms - or by checking out their very active Instagram account, where they post weekly roundups of media hits at @SBSComms. Just Checking In is produced by Astronomic Audio and underwritten by Mixing Board, a curated community of the most sought-after communications and brand marketing leaders.
Keyana Corliss: [00:33:36] Thanks for listening to Just Checking In. Follow us at @KeyanaCorliss and @RebeccaBuckman.