Very much a dark arc. You know, you'd have to hire these agencies would take you out to coffee. They Beller you they promise you things. Maybe they make an introduction here and there. It just felt like very not how entrepreneurs were building in tech. This world appears exact opposite. It was more like lobbying in DC or something. Right? Today, we're talking about how to build an attention flywheel with NFX general partner, James Currier, Invijay Chadda, the founder of PR Agency VSC.
DSC has worked with many NSX unicorn companies, including Mammoth Biosciences, Poshmark, and outdoorsy to build attention and momentum from their earliest days. Let's dive in. Welcome to the podcast Thank you for having me, James. Always a pleasure to speak with you. You and I have been investing together and working together for many, many years now.
And both live here in the Bay Area, and you have always had an expertise in helping startups get attention by helping them position themselves, helping them make sure that investors potential employees and other journalists knew about them so that they could continue to grow their network and grow their business. And you've been extremely helpful many of the NFX portfolio companies, the NFX skill. And so thanks for taking time to talk with us today.
No. We often turn to you when we're trying to help our founders figure out what to do in the area of communications or PRs that's been public relations and that sort of thing. I'd love to just let everybody know your background and how you got into this and how long you've been doing it. You do. Yeah. Thanks, James. So background for me is, first, I grew up at West Virginia as one of the few, seek families there and eventually made my way to, upenn in Philly where I dabbled in a lot of things.
Really sort of always loved the idea of promotions, I guess. We were the ones on campus that were throwing parties. We were into that world. Nightlife, I later found out life that people like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban were all night club promoters in college. So I don't know about why Nightclub promoting and then entrepreneurship or VC have so many connections, but you know what it is? It's about getting people to pay attention and care. And then a call to action to drive intent.
So, I mean, really, we've always been in that realm of trying to understand our audience, get them to go somewhere ultimately for something positive and fun. Right? I mean, really, that was the nature of it. And I never was the engineering coding mind, but I had a lot of friends like that in college And we started a company at senior year, which is trying to create an online network of resources for finding out about what to do in a city.
So, you know, 98, if you remember, there was only something called City Search, and they had, like, very generic listings. Like, here's the time it's open or but, you know, with something like a club, One night could be, you know, gay night, one night could be Indian night, one night could be salsa dancing. Like, you just it had to be more dynamic, and we realized that it needed like a dynamic format. So we started a company in college.
We started to actually pay attention to who was coming on campus to speak in I remember one guy came on campus who sold the company to Pete it, the newspaper company, and he created some software for doing event listings. My partner at the time to haul said, hey, man. We gotta go to this thing. We could, you know, let we gotta skip happy hour and go see this guy speak. So he went to his talk. It's pretty interesting. Pretty impressed. Asked him to be our advisor.
That guy ended up being Elon Musk before he started x.com. And that was just an example of just like the mentality of, finding people that are doing interesting things, asking them if they'll help you. We got tremendous help from a lot of these web 1 founders on the East Coast, but what we realized was that it was really hard to get attention and venture capital because we didn't have any credibility.
And the people that got attention got ten times as much venture capital and often got 10 times better executive to joining their companies. And we felt like there's this crazy, like, inequity between who got attention and who Flint. And it was always like, these are the same products. Why is one more buzzy than the other? And then how do you do that? Do you buy that? Like, what is the way? And it was very much a dark art know, you'd have to hire these agencies who would take you out to coffee.
They tell you they promise you things. Maybe they make an introduction here and there. It just felt like very nice how entrepreneurs were building in tech. This world of PR is exact opposite. It was more like lobbying in DC or something. Right? And so was always fascinated with the people that got the most attention, usually got everything flowing to them, and it pissed me off. And so after we sold that company, I kind of just grinded away and figuring out how to, like, talk to journalists.
I took time off. I went to the Smithsonian. I worked on a project of seek heritage, and it was just a different thing than being a startup. I show you remember the burnout you trying to be an entrepreneur. So I went into the world of nonprofit and art, and I started, like, emailing journalists. I'm like, can I just email them? Like, almost like accounting. Can you buy your taxes without an accountant? I don't know. Is it illegal? Like, like, a ding?
Starting to emailing people and start, yeah, hey, it's just like sales. It's just like pitching an investor. You gotta, hey, I read your blog post on this thing. I'm interested. I think I have a story. And when I started, like, actually just searching the internet, You could search how to write a press release. And then I started, like, learning more. Like, you know, it's about, like, making that person career better.
How can I make this journalist more successful with the story they're about to write? How can I give them that Pulitzer prize winning article and sort of visualizing, like, what would be the best headline of the thing I'm pitching that would make everybody super happy and super interested instead of like me selling my product? And so started to think differently, hey, let me think about what's happening in the world instead of just happening with my business. Right?
So for example, let's say it was nightlife, right, instead of saying, hey, My company, Urban Groove, launches in 15 cities. The real story is maybe is the village voice being threatened by new internet start ups. Question mark. And then I pitched that as the subject line because it sounds controversial. It actually James sounds a little negative, but they love that stuff. So, like, let's write the headline that we want.
We actually think is gonna be the most viral, not the one that's about marketing schlock, if that goes started doing that for one of my friend, Naha, with this new company in mobile. He's like, hey. Why don't you just help me with some PR stuff? You seem to be like enjoying this. And then I'm gonna go back and get my MBA. Maybe I'll start on the company.
So I crashed on his couch in San Francisco, started pitching reporters on some of the great deals he was closing with, like, artists using SMS text messaging, and we just got an enormous response So this is James after web 1. So the dot com busted occurred. San Francisco is cleared out. Kind of reminds me of San Francisco a little bit like right now.
You know, air on office chairs were for sale on Craigslist and journalists hated tech founders and hated PR people because they thought they were sold a bill of goods in 99 about eyeballs and zillion dollar valuation every journalist would say to me, do not pitch me unless you tell me your revenue. And this was, like, 2002. And so is it perfect time to come in and reset on, like, what matters now. And I bring this up because this is kinda like what's happening right now in 2023.
It's a bit of a reset about what matters and what doesn't matter. And so that's how I started my Currier. And my friend doll, he's like, look, I can't pay you a big retainer. I got a tiny amount of money. I was like, alright. Cool. But here's the deal. Every time you do a newsletter to all the people you meet at conferences, Pete a little logo at the bottom that says public relations by BSC, the hyperlinks to me. And he's like, alright.
Deal. So he started blasting these newsletters out of all the press he's getting from And we just started getting free marketing. So we just get more and more mobile startups came to us. The next big one was a company called Advob, and Omar SAR work, He said, hey. I want that help. I tried to invest. He said Sequoia won't let you, but if you get me this many stories in the 1st year, I'll give you equity. So I was on a clock and we did it.
And the rest was history, and that was our one of our biggest first time we actually took equity in one of these companies. Then, you know, we've kind of progressed over the last 20 years now. And the basic concept is that there should be a level playing field of a great founder and attention. And it shouldn't be about where you grew up or, like, sort of those kind of dark art aspects.
It's about giving someone a playbook and having them focus on what matters most to the people they're reaching and then let them create supportive repeatability with that and focus on things that get awareness and don't focus on things that don't. Got it. And so that was the beginning of your company VSC, which is named after you. That's your initials. Right? That's correct. And how many people are at that firm now? We're forty people. And where do you have offices?
So we are now work from anywhere. So there's clusters of us. So Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, but then we have people in North Carolina, Austin, Denmark. So we're kind of all over. And so you work with seed stage startups than series a stage startups. You know? That's right. And then what sectors? You know, what we say, we say everything that's interesting. So we're gonna go after things we think that are transformative, but also there's gonna be some zeitgeist around.
So we always talk about this. Like, Snowflake would be a tough client for us, right, because they're super successful, but they're really hard to get people to write about if they're not talking about how much money they're making. So some of those are harder, but, like, generally like B2B, AI, automation, biotech, whatever we think is interesting. We're gonna go after it. And I guess that qualifications mostly venture backed companies. Right.
So venture backed companies, and you interview a lot of companies to potentially represent them, but most of them, you don't. Some of them you choose and you choose them often because you either love the founders or mostly because you feel as if it's some part of a zeitgeist in the next 2 or 3 years this company is gonna be a little bit easier to get press 4. Is that right? Yeah. We call it the 3 Pete and C, which is people product pedigree capital.
So one, am I gonna enjoy working with these people? 2, is the product give me goosebumps? Something amazing about this that I'm gonna tell somebody else. I would tell somebody else anyway even if I wasn't gonna pay I think pedigree is like, Beller have any lift when I talk to people as an unknown founder? Like, did you used to work Pete? Are some of your investors these people? Did you solve a problem that was seen before.
And by pedigree, you mean, did they work at Google or Facebook or Pinterest something that the journalists will know? Exactly. Or it could be, hey. I built my first startup at the age of Beller, right, or, you know, I built my last startup at the age of eighty nine. So it's something interesting that I think we can get a lot of attention around, which is just based on some sort of experience you have in the past. But you're right. Like, I mean, company names help.
You know, the universities don't. Everybody goes to a lot of schools. I think it's also more about, like, it could even be your background. It could be where you're from. It could be being unique in some way based on your ethnicity. So there's all these things we look to say, like, is the story gonna be stronger here? Are we gonna get any lift from this? I guess you'd say organically.
Yeah. I just bring it up because I think the word pedigree is so loaded, and I think that cheasing out what you mean by that, I just think, is important because what you're saying is you might not have gone to the top school. You might not have been born rich. You might have been born an immigrant that can be turned into something that's pretty interesting because at the foundation, a lot of these journalists really care about who they're reporting about. That is absolutely right.
It's not just the thing to report. You're right. That may not be the right word. It may be like sort of origin story. Right? Is your origin story stronger? So, okay. We're gonna be P P OC. That'll be a thing. And then the last thing is, you know, think capital, like, we are very specific to only pick companies where we think they're gonna have the resources to push this thing all the way through. I was a bootstrap founder. It's hard.
And also with the journalist, I want to tell them about a company that they're gonna know will still be around next year when I talk to them again. While we do focus early, we're very picky. About those type of companies where we think there's gonna be an ability to have a extended storytelling runway. Right.
So often that charismatic founder who's good at fundraising might be a better client for you because you can accelerate them, but they're kinda moving forward anyway because of their personality, and they're Yeah. I think so. I think if you look at those 4 buckets, James, each of those provides a different type of Flint. Right? So if you have an amazing first of its kind product, but the founders not known.
They don't have any well known investors, and maybe they don't have much, like, maybe they're just making money and they're just cash from them, then it's great. It's a little bit of an equation. You just have to see what you're working with and then sort of make a determination. That's right. So as C stage founders evaluate themselves, and their sort of marketability and why am I not getting press? Why are other people being talked about?
Maybe looking at P POC is a good way for them to start thinking about it. And then building some P POC. Absolutely. You know, we say sometimes we say if you don't have something, then try to hack it. Right? If you don't have a well known person in your cap table, add them as an advisor, right? So there are ways to kind of work it even if you're not born with it, of course, right, and add it as you go. Yeah. Okay. So this is great because we want this to be very tack for the seed stage startups.
Right? We're really going after the world class founders who are trying to figure out how to get their attention for the practical things they need to learn. So when you think about out of the Pete fund as you work with. What do you think that they need most? We talked about P POC. That helps to give a foundation. What other things? Yeah. So, you know, I think it's really there's four things that matter. One is fundraising. So you're always fundraising as a seed stage founder.
You know, the next round matters. 2 is recruiting. So good publicity could drive very high quality candidates your way. 3 is customers. So certainly like what do you want to call it consumers, but certainly B2B side, just closing one deal out of a good communications program pays for the program itself. And then lastly, I think is positioning. So positioning is one of those sort of vague concepts but it does matter. Like, are you an ecommerce company?
Are you an AI company that focuses on ecommerce? That could determine your valuation It could determine the type of partners and recruiting that you attract. It could determine the next investor because of their thesis. And as we know, with categories, they become hot and cold. Right? And so the savvy founders also know how to subtly pivot when needed to the category that is going to be where they're going to get their next outcome from. And so those are the 4 keys for the seed stage founder.
Got it. And talk about positioning some more. Do you help founders think that through or how do they figure out their position? What type of thinking works for a founder when they think about position? The number one thing I've found with how to help with positioning is when the founder is talking to their investor and their customer, right? So the investor could be helpful because they can say, hey, look, like you, and you've said this to me before.
I say, hey, if this is an for, therapy is gonna be this kind of evaluation in the public market. If this is an expert diagnostics, it's gonna be this evaluation. So you're like VSC, we need to focus on this one, not that one. In the end of the day, the public market comps are different. Right? And so that's something literally you and I have talked about. So that is a clear example of how positioning could change the number of zeros on the valuation of a company. Right?
1, 2, I think talk to the customer because sometimes founders smoke us too much on their fundraising speak. And put that out to journalists and customers, and it falls flat. And so ultimately, when you're trying to get that deal closed, it's about what they want. Right? So if it's an enterprise customer, for example, there are line items for things. Right? So, like, for example, there's a line item for PR. For a lot of companies.
But if I said I wanna do strategic storytelling, they'd be like, I don't even know what that is. CFOs, like, I've never paid for that. What the hell are you talking about? So that's an example of a crappy positioning if it were me selling. Right? I wanna sell into the line item that exists, right, digital transformation that took a long time eventually, there's a line item now that companies for that, and you wanna basically go after the biggest dollars.
So do you wanna be an experimental thing in AI, or do you wanna be in the digital transformation it where so and so company spends a $100,000,000 a year. So talk to the investor, talk to the customers. They should determine the positioning. And when we say these words like positioning and strategy, mean, don't we just mean the words? Yeah. We mean the words and the plan. Right? So positioning is the words. You know, my favorite one we did recently was, well, not recently, but outdoorsy.
Hey, We're the Airbnb for RVs. Right? Simple. Everybody gets it. My dad gets that. Right? There are founders, by the way, that would have fought back on like Omar and admah would say, Vidya, I never wanna be associated with another company. We're never the Google of mobile ads. We are admah, and we'll never be that. YouTube is not the Google of I was like, okay. That's fair.
Okay. There's gonna be founders that don't like this, but in terms of the quickest understanding in the market, I like the x for a while And I think it works when you know that the analogy you're making is a company that would never be in your business anyway. That's the best ones. Right? Like, if you're gonna be the, Tesla of Cheetos, it's like, great. I know Tesla's not making Cheetos, although Elon Musk would probably make Cheetos, but, like, that's the positioning's words.
It's like 3 words, in some cases. Right. Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of hand waving, particularly from business school people and other folks about strategy and positioning and whatnot, but I think one of the things I've seen you do that you really work with founders on, what three words are you picking? It's a much more simple sort of exercise when you think about that way. And most people see too much complexity, and you just need to pick the words.
And the words you use for your investors might be different than the words you use for your customers, and then you have to figure out how that blends together on your homepage on your website. So or on the landing page for your customers, which might be different from the home page. The home page might be for the VCs and the landing pages where they're onboarding your customers might say something quite Exactly. They're getting out of it.
And James, just like pedigree is a weird word where it doesn't always matter where you're from and actually could hurt you based on too much pedigree. Same thing with marketing James.
When founders think about who they wanna hire internally, they should be hiring people that focus on their scale of the business from the c to the a and the c to the b. It should not be hiring people that just come from a big brand because those big brand people, they have a different world, but they also will throw a lot of this stuff in there. It doesn't matter. Right? They're gonna do like these, you know, 20 hour exercises on who are we. It's like, look, you don't have time for that.
20 hours that could be closing deals. So It really matters the type of marketing guidance you get at the right stage. And generally, the further along you go in the stage, the more bullshit marketing sort of creeps out of there. Right? People are doing these random experiments and research things in brand surveys, early stage startups. Like, let's make it simple to understand and make people want our product or service.
Yeah. Pick the three words and then get that, white hot center of the customers and then Pete the thing growing. And so given that for seed stage companies, what are some of the things they can do to be better storytellers? Yeah. I'd say, you know, I think the first thing is, like, you gotta think about media relations when you talk to a journalist as a dialogue and not a monologue.
So what I mean by that is just like going on a date, you're not gonna just spew your, like, you know, your CV to somebody. That would be very boring. And the person that you're talking to at that date would walk a journalist is a relationship. So it's first research them, understand who you're talking to, whether whoever your storytelling with, their business is an investor. What is their style? What do they follow on social media? What are they into?
Work your story around their interests, and you'll be a better storyteller. Number 1. Number 2, I think think about the headline you want for the article before you go into the meeting or before you tell the story because then you can visualize what this could manifest into. Could be bigger than you. If a story is bigger than one company.
It's probably gonna be a better story because it's gonna be something that more people will trust and believe in and see as shift in the world and not just marketing. I think another thing is, like, founders, I think she just have more patience with the storytelling process.
Many early stage companies because of the sense of urgency, they expect that if they're gonna do something in communications or talk to journalists or work with the PR firm that they need immediate results, the bigger the outlet, the longer time it will take often to be getting coverage. And there's always like an anomaly to that, but, like, patience really matters. I think another thing is avoiding Morgan. To me, jargon is a sign of inexperience.
So communicating in a way that the average nontechnical person can understand and get excited about is mastering communications. Right? You know, the last thing I think is just sort of like understand that storytelling is not just PR. It's how you use social media. It's how you build the Discord community. It's how you run your newsletter. It's how you talk on your website. The more human people are, in all of those formats, James, the more successful they're gonna be.
So, like, even on our website, VSC, we say something like 90% of the stuff you read on the on our competitors' websites is Morgan y bullshit. Just thought we'd save the time and get to our case studies. Right? And so that's just how I talk. You know, you know, how I talk. People love that because people connect with that. There may be a whole group of people that don't like that, I'm not for them. Right? And so founders should also know that can be authentic, understand your audience.
What is your audience style talking? Right? Cause my style is not like everybody's. There's big companies you have to sell to. It could be Roche. It could be Genentech. It could be, you know, FedEx. Understand how they operate, talk. Look at their site style. If you're trying to sell to them, you wanna match the same personality also too, because you'll get the deal faster. Right? There are people that don't get contracts because a quote, cultural differences or misalignment of culture now.
And so, like, everything's on the internet. You can search it. You can see it. I could see what the journalists write. I could see what influencers tweet about. I could see what VCs post. I should be able to go into a meeting being in a dialogue more than a monologue. Got it. And you brought up something just now, which I wanted to ask about 2 things. Number 1, journalist. Do journalists still matter? Do journalists still exist? What is going on? We got the social media explosion.
We've got everyone saying the mainstream media this and that. We've got all these media outlets behind pay walls, people can't see them. How's that changing and what should a seed stage start to think about that? It's a great question.
This is a question that even my team asked in our off-site So I'd say that as we call it traditional media is going through a transformation, and that has started even further down to the local newspaper in your town that's losing ad revenue to Facebook or Craigslist all the way up to the mainstream media and Twitter, which is now owned by one person or so. You know? And so one thing I will always tell founders is it's always gonna change. It'll never be one thing.
As it relates to journalism, I think journalism is becoming more important than ever because the journalists are the ones that are exposing all the cracks in the system. And they're the ones who are basically playing a big role in how we think about the world moving forward and looking at the people that are in charge now and basically, you know, like questioning authority. And pushing back.
So and you're seeing that people that believe that content marketing as their only weapon are sometimes having to do both and having to do all three. So I'd say like the first thing is like, I look at it differently and say, send a thing about media anymore. Think about influence. Who are the people that influence your business?
Could be an investor who does one tweet and only has fifty people that follow on with those fifty people matter, or it didn't email for you, by the way, a private email that you wrote for them. All the way to a journalist. And then there's people on TikTok and LinkedIn that have followings. There's people on Twitter.
There's analysts And so all of these, you have to create a personalized grouping of the people that influence your business and then figure out a way to get in their good side and have them hopefully talk about you. Right? And so I look at it that way now, and I'd say there's actually 10 x the number of people then when you think of it that way, and just the journalists that, you know, have the paywalls and some of those things. Got it.
And so, you know, influence was pretty static until the internet came along with newspapers and magazines and televisions, and there weren't that many channels. And the internet comes along, and there's all these other types of influencers. So that was a big change. And now we're getting to a point where the number of people has gone way up.
So maybe in your sector, there was there used to be 25 journalists who matter And now there's 7 journalists that matter, but there's 300 influencers of that. And so you've got just a different math problem about how you move to get the word out about what you're up to. That's exactly right. I think the one other thing I'd bring up is that if there's a new industry that's coming up, there actually may be a net gain of journalists as Beller.
Because of the topic being so Morgan, the two areas that are growing mostly are in biotech and climate. So you're seeing a net addition of journalists at publications because there's so much interest. And there's, I mean, for climate change, for example, it's everybody. So I think it's gonna always shift You know? But you're right.
I think with the paywall thing, that's also something that's super annoying to anybody that wants to get the max awareness, you know, think over time, there's gonna be some probably good technology to unlock these sites with one pay. You know, like, Apple was trying to do it, but someone's gonna solve this because it's silly. Frankly, we should all be getting all the top 20 outlets for one credit card payment. And then lastly, like the rise of substack. Right?
So a lot of journalists have left traditional media. They're making money through Patreon or sub stack, and they may have ten thousand people on there, but that audience is more important than being in the Wall Street Journal. Right, for that particular business. And so we also are constantly looking at these sub stacks and seeing who matters who's getting engagement. We look at the data from each company. Hey. We got that launch for you. What happened? Where the traffic come from?
Okay. Now we start circling these ones. These ones matter more than these ones now. So we're always, like, kinda running our own internal numbers on where we're the value because it chain this is, like, literally changing all the time. Somebody who's even influential becomes less influential. And so because they do too many posts or something, so I think that's just that there are new categories we gotta look at. But I think the 2 I'm excited about are TikTok and Substack.
And I think TikTok for enterprise companies is gonna have its moment in 2023. We're gonna see more companies in B2B start making building their brand and just because the raw eyeballs of people shifting there is insane. I mean, I get my news information from TikTok now. You know, I'm like, I keep up on the SPF scandal because of this one person on TikTok, who just puts out the best content. She's always doing it. So you know, there's always a new social platform. Right?
It was Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok. There'll be another one. So there will be that shift always that we have to sort of apply around. Got it. And so when you're working with founders of the seed stage, what's that process you do to help them figure out where to spend their time? Yeah. So the first thing I always ask them is what are your goals? So I wanna know your goals for the next 6 months 12 months. And usually they'll tell me, okay. We need to Pete out the door.
Okay. That's not a goal. That is a tactic. What is the goal? Okay. Sorry. The goal is that we need to start getting customers. Okay. Good. Thank you. Customers. The goal is we need to we need to be positioned in the market for what? Position the market for raising money. Okay. So raising money is the next one. We'll have to be doing positioning work to get there. So really, like, it's goal setting number 1.
I'm surprised how often I will talk to founders that already have programs going on with other PR firms or whatever. I'm like, what is your PR firm's goal right now? They're like, oh, I don't know. It's to get a couple stories a month, but for why? You know, it keep us in the news. For what reason? Right? So, like, it's good to just start there with the goal, and you want, like, 1 or 2 goals. You don't want 5. Right? Seed stage can't do it.
And what you're saying is they're generally 4 goals, 4 goals, which is to hire more employees to get more customers, to raise more money, or to get more It's like to build the cycle. Yeah. I think that's pretty much it. I mean, that's it. And so usually it comes down to probably 2 or 3 of those max. Okay. And so at first, you set up their goals and then you say, let's go through a positioning exercise. So you pick the words. Yeah. Right? And then we put those words on the website.
We put those words in various media that you're putting out there. Yeah. So actually goals number 1, number 2 audience. Who do we need to reach to get to the desired audience that will achieve that goal? Right? Is it customers? What are those customers reading? If it's investors, what are the investors reading? So first is audience. Then we get into sort of, like, roadmap and messaging. So messaging is like, how do we wanna ourselves for that audience to achieve that goal.
And then roadmap is like, what do we got? What do we got in the hopper? We got a funding announcement sitting here. You know, we wanna dust off and announce We have a new product that we're launching. Do we just bring on this amazing data scientist who we could position who just came from Omri or something? Like, we gotta look at their cupboard. And if it's empty, we gotta fill it with Thanks. Right? This happens all the time. I meet great founders. They have no news.
And I'm like, man, I love you in this company, but I do not wanna strike out because we have nothing to talk about right And that's actually when, you know, VCs will send us the deals. They know that there's something in the cupboard. They may not have everything else figured out. They do got a couple things right in the cupboard. Maybe so we just funded these people they're ready to go, or this company's almost ready to launch time to come on board. So let's check the cupboard and fill it.
And then I think that positioning, as you mentioned, we do go to, like, an exercise. We have like a spreadsheet. We fill it out with the founders on a Zoom, and we think through what is your perfect email subject Flint? What is your perfect three words. What is the news you're gonna do? What are three things about your technology that is a differentiation? What is it interesting about your team that will solve this problem? Why should anybody care about your company?
Like, if all the things someone's pitching that day, why do you matter? What are you working on that matters in the big picture? Right? That's the exercise we do, James. And that's actually pretty awesome. Like, that's where the neurons fire, and we come up with the cool words and the little ditties, things like that. What's interesting about this process though, BJ, isn't it that once they see the words and what they need to do in order to be interesting or to be relevant?
Then they realize they need to change something about their product. They need to change something about their go to market. They need to change what they're doing or who they're hiring in order to actually be successful at this. It's amazing how sometimes as they say the tail wags the dog. If you start to see something that sounds so good, you may work backward around delivering that.
One of my favorite clients once called the PR Engineering, you know, once he started to see the press coverage coming in on certain things, he said, Vijay, I think we're gonna sit dedicating, like, one engineer to the PR team. If you guys just keep coming up on ideas, we'll keep making stuff, right, because it's the tip of spear, it may not be our core business, but if it keeps us getting all this unaided free attention that drives everything else, like, let's keep investing.
So, yes, you're right. It's the exercise forces want to think clearly and about why they matter into whom and what they have. And do they even have enough, right, and is it even differentiated enough? I find that's the tough one is that what they think is their differentiation is not their differentiation. We kind of work with them on finding the right thing. Like, I'll give you an example. Sometimes I'll say, well, what are the top 3 things about the product?
And some founder will say, well, the first thing is it's easy to use. Easy to use. It's very smooth. And, like, you know, people like it. I'm like, that is not differentiation. That is marketing schlock. Like, is it that it's the first one that is on iOS? Is it the first one that's using GPT? You know, so, like, we try to, like, work with them to eliminate marketing from PR. That's it. By the way, big lesson I've learned. Marketing and PR are different. Right? They're very different.
How you talk to journalists and how you talk to a customer has to be delineated in an exercise. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you basically say to them, what's your goals? Who do we need to reach? What message do we need to reach them with? This positioning idea and what the message is, the differentiation, why it matter. That sort of then you gotta think about channels because I think a lot of people think, oh, I wanna be on TechCrunch. Oh, yeah.
Okay. Well, that, you know, you're talking about the channels. Like, we haven't even gotten. That's like step number 4. Exactly. That's exactly right. The beauty of PR is very visible. You know what you want the end thing to look like, but you just don't know how to, like, create the sausage to get Right? And sometimes you go through the process and realize you're not ready for that. Anyway, right, or you go through it and realize, hey. I'm totally ready for that. Nice dude. It should do it.
I think the one thing people don't talk enough about is how many pitches get turned down or ignored because of the process not being good. So if you don't make the sausage right, you get declined and guess what happens? You blame your PR firm. You blame your VC for not making the right Flint. Say, oh, screw that journalist. Like, they just don't care about it. They don't believe in our companies. They don't believe in people like us. It's like, no. You're a pitch sucked. Okay?
You had 5 seconds to grab them, and you missed it. Cause just didn't do all the things Like, and so we don't talk enough about how many things get rejected in this world. Right? You know, founders always say, oh, I had to take 50 meetings to get That's like kind of with media. I mean, even with the best pitches, sometimes one out of fifties massive win, right? But, you know, what you don't wanna do is pitch the right person with a shitty pitch.
Then they don't wanna talk to you when you have a better pitch. So the first step out the door should be good. I mean, classic examples, like, we spend a lot of time with Mammoth on getting that story right with you in the beginning. Mammoth Bioscience. Mammoth Bios has with Trevor early positioning, getting that correct. There were decisions that were made on are we gonna be like this we gonna be more for that in CRISPR? How do we get out the door? When do we Pete out the door?
And it ended up leading to a great design, like the format and the process has led to repeatable publicity, and it just got stronger and stronger and better and better, of course, credit to their team for amazing science and team, but the communication design was great as well from the beginning. And it led to basically like people wanting to talk to them. Yeah. And the more people talk about a company, the more other people talk about that company because it becomes a loadstone.
It becomes a an anchor or reference that they can now explain other concepts to people based on that company. And so there's this concept of preferred attachment in any network where any node in the network, which gets ahead, gets further ahead because people preferentially attached to that node. And so it it builds up the snowball effect essentially. Absolutely. And that's why we say that is, like, when PR goes right. When the best things flow to the top player, then it worked. Right?
And it could be attention. It could be talent. It could be inclusion. It could be people saying I need to partner with them because they're so well known. I want some of that halo effect. That's when things get really cool. Know? I remember when a good friend of mine who was a journalist got hired by the LA James, and I said, well, what's to beat? And she said, Google. I have to write at least one article a week about Google, and then I can do everything else I want.
And I just blew my mind that Google had so much preferred attachment that in order for the LA James have more people read their stuff, they needed to be talking about Google or Apple or Elon Musk, and that's what gets the eyeballs. And then you can have other articles as well that sort of tag along, but that's really drives, viewership is these well known nodes, and you wanna become one of those well known nodes as fast as you can so it accrues and snowballs around you. Exactly.
And now preferential attachment could be hacked in a positive way. So if you're building a startup and the biggest elephant in the room is a company everybody hates, then you can go after all the beat writers that cover it. So classic example is Uber. So we had a company, you know, Rakesh Food from Fizz, but he had a company called Flywheel. Our entire PR it was preferential attachment.
We found every beat writer that covered Uber, and then we even further filtered the ones that wrote negative things about Uber because we were the tack the alternative to Uber, and then we went just to those people with stories, and we got amazing stories because we're trashing Uber at every moment. And so preferential attachment is a huge part of punching up as well. If it's not you that has a preference investment yet, you should latch on to somebody else that does Airbnb for RVs, right?
We're basically surfing their brand reputation that 20,000,000, 30,000,000 of dollars of comms that they've already done for a decade to give this startup would add no capital attention in the New York Times. Got it. And so say again punching up. Explain that. So punching up basically means connect your self to something bigger than you that is already getting attention. Like, you know, GPT right now, you know, if I'm building something in GPT, I'm probably gonna get people that wanna respond.
Right? Oh, I built a new PR company using GPT. By the way, that'd be cool. So I was gonna PR Wix didn't wanna write about that. Right? So I'm I'm latching on to something that everybody's talking about, and I have a unique position around it, then I Beller something around it. Got it. No. I think it's a super useful concept to call out for the founders. It's like a David versus Goliath. You know, how do you fit into you know, Elon's plans, how do you counter Twitter?
Everyone's talking about Twitter, or how do you assist Twitter or make Twitter better than suddenly you're punching up into the conversation that's already happening, even though you're Here's a good example, one. This is one of my favorites. We had a company in Israel called Pete diagnostics, okay, Israeli company doing blood testing.
Now, obviously, they came out after the Theranos debacle And so what we did, they and they basically, what they had done, James, is they basically figured out how to do what Theranos was claiming to say. They finally figured it out. So, again, as I bid you, how do we get in this conversation? We don't really wanna be associated with them because people won't like it. And when we're like, we're saying, we're like, listen, we should be Theranos done right.
That's our angle And then tactically, every time Elizabeth James has a court date, we know that there's gonna be 16 journalists at City Hall covering it. So let's make all of our product launches the same day as the court Pete. Okay? And then let's pitch a story instead of bad blood email subject line said good blood question mark. Okay. So punching up is fun. It can be a lot of fun, and I don't like to see companies get taken down legacy problems.
You just have to be aware of what people talking about and be in the conversation. Now you mentioned, you know, your product launches. You know, one of the things I think some C founders have been frustrated with is that very hard to get anyone to write about them unless they're raising money. Why is that? What's going on? It's a really good question. You know, I'll tell you what, I think it's software versus hardware first of all. I think it's too easy to make a soft product.
And I think journalists are like, why am I writing about these things? You probably just did this in a weekend. Oh, you got a new feature. Great. Oh, you got a new thing. It's too easy. If you think about hardware, you get coverage on hardware. Because it's really hard to do. And it actually, you can't just make new hardware every year. I mean, actually Beller year you can, not every month. Right?
So when Apple does something, everybody pays attention, even Samsung does things you pay attention because we know journalists know that that's harder. Software has become so agile that it's like, I think it's been Pete have been pushing these PR things so much that the editors are like, look, honestly, if this isn't like dramatically different than the thing before, let's not do it.
And then what you find is people like Mark Benioff literally have to brand the name of the software throw a big party in town, call it Einstein, like, brand it. You have to do so much things for a software product to get people to pay attention if you're an existing company. Right? If you're a company that's launching for the first time, then you are getting coverage for your product, but you're really getting coverage for the company also that just wasn't covered before.
So the novelty of just coming out to market is why you got the product coverage, but it's very hard to get ongoing coverage unless there's a dramatic change and, like, a step up if that makes sense in terms of what you do. And you see them sometimes, like, I'd say maybe 1 out of 10, you'll see a a story that's about a company that's a software company that's something dramatically ticket.
So given that when these early stage companies try to get attention, they say, well, have you done something really remarkable? You're the first to do something, or Have you raised money?
So often what happens is all the product stuff gets folded in or the partnership stuff and the other stuff Flint the cupboard is say that's interesting about the company Pete folded into the funding announcement, or it's, you know, has to be accompanied with the funding announcement in order to get any attention. Is that a pattern you're seeing? I am. So I didn't answer your first, sorry, the other part of the question, which is why is funding announcements get covered? Right?
So I think this is just goes back to that when money changes hands, Pete have to write about it. It's like a transaction. So it's almost like the ledger. Like, there's something that journalists can convince their editors that something really happened here. Something happened something moved from point a of someone's money to someone's point b. And for some reason, it's more important than revenue. Right? If you go out and say, hey.
By the way, I wanna do a story about hitting a 100,000,000 in revenue. You will not get covered and say, hey. I wanna do a story about raising 15,000,000 in funding. Oh, you got a story. Right? It's hilarious, but, so it's not just customer money coming in. It's these venture capital organizations or corporations that put money in. So it's a transaction match with social status around validation. Correct.
But what's interesting is even revenue doesn't confers much validation as somebody who's supposedly really smart investing their money. Correct. And I'll tell you why I don't think revenue is covered because it's hard to verify. Don't think it's because it's, like, not a good sign. When the money moves from one organization to another, that's a verifiable moment. If revenue is generated, no one's opening up their books to the journalists to show them the money coming in.
Like, I'm not a private company, of course, public, maybe. So I think it's also like people just make stuff in the journal. So, like, look, I don't believe you. Your revenue run Pete, oh, growth percentages, that's another one. It's like, maybe you'll get it covered, but mostly nobody believes it at the seed stage. I grew I grew 400% this year. They're like, yeah, from $2000 last year. What do I care? Exactly. So I'd say the funding announcement gets undue amount of attention.
It's a kind of annoying. I think I feel like I really some of the companies look at SBF, by the way. Okay? This guy from FTX. It's almost like he raised more money just to get more press. Like, it's almost like most of the press coverage for a while was just I got a 1,000,000,000 more. I got 2,000,000,000 more. I got 3,000,000,000 more. And then, yeah, he got these altruism stories, but those were only because people were wondering, how the hell is he getting all this money? Right?
So, the announcement of money was part of his storytelling. He abused that. Right? Like, you don't wanna see a founder doing it just for the attention's sake, but it does in, by the way. I'll tell you, like, we do this often where we say, founder says, hey. I've raised 20, Vijay. I could take another 20 now and announce it 40, or we could just announced this extra 20 later when I close a little more. I'm like, oh, do the later. We'll get two stories. Right?
So it does play a role a little bit if you know it works. Yeah. And so how can you help CSA startups beyond these funding announcements? How does it like VSC? What's your strategy to help move the needle past just another funding announcement? Yeah. So I'd say funding announcement is the first thing. I think the second thing, I we call it ITD. So it's innovation thought leadership and data. So there are things about products that are interesting and should be announced when they come out.
We've seen it all the time. We've seen it with Mammoth. We've seen it with Fireflies. People make pretty cool products that are interesting and visual in some James. Sometimes not visual. Sometimes we try to make them visual, even for software. Thought leadership is an interesting one. It's one of the weirdest words. I have a lot of problems with this word because I think it's overused, but at the core of it, it's Do you have ideas that the consensus disagrees with?
Do you have an insight that nobody's talking about that really matters? If you are one of those people, thought leadership could be very powerful in terms of how you communicate on social media, maybe writing guest pieces. I think The bar is gonna be so much higher now, James, for thought leadership because of GPT. There's gonna be tons of mediocre shit out there, and it's gonna be the truly creative interesting stuff that breaks through. So give you a good example.
1 of my other companies, one of the violent ideas we have is like, you know, running a biotech company in a bear market. I'm interested in reading that. Like, I wanna know how what do you do that? And so I think that's one way to do good thought leadership is think about things that truly people are curious about. If it makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable to write it, then it's a good idea. I mean, if it feels like selling somebody, it's probably you have to think twice.
Second thing I'd say about thought leadership is objection handling. This is a big one, which is company comes to be seed stage founder after we do the fun thing or somebody says, Hey, I'm out the door. I'm out there. Thank you. Getting attention. Great. But when we're talking to so and so big pharma, they still don't believe X Y Z we say. Where they're still think it's this way, and we think it's that way.
So we're saying, okay, objection handling has to be solved and thought leadership could be the way to do Pete are three reasons why it's actually this way and not that way. Right? And so that is a pretty important now. And I've even done it where we've taken those blogs We've written, and then we put them on LinkedIn, and then we run them as an ad just to those customers so they see it so that we can see if we can actually start shifting their perception in some way.
Around a way that they thought and changing how they think. And then the last thing I think is data. So it's like companies are starting to collect a ton of data. Could they become data PR machines for a new industry, right, could outdoorsy tell us about RV trends in America? Because now they have all the data. Why shouldn't they just be doing that for their PR all the time?
So, I mean, that comes with a company having enough data, and it's not always at the seed stage, but there are other companies like many in your portfolio that their entire business is data. It's contract negotiation or it's this thing or it's hiring data. So we also think that that's a big key to sustainable PR. And again, that goes back to my old days working on Advob. We do these mobile metric reports about, you know, iOS first Android in Indonesia. This is that it worked.
And I think you could look at anything. Look at generative AI right now. You could look at new categories and say whoever starts having the data about which applications start doing well and not. Probably get press coverage. So that's the last part of that. Yeah. Interesting. And so when you think about developing thought leadership, what percentage of the founders you work with can actually be thought leaders.
Number 1, do they need to be real thought leader, or can you kind of manufacture their thought leadership simply based on what product they're selling in the market? It's not common that the founder and first time meeting them is like an amazing thought leader. It has opinions. Many can be coached into thinking in the right way. I call it a PR grade.
So usually if I do one announcement with a a founder and it works, I start to see like a glimmer in their they start to understand the game of how it works, and they actually start coming to me with more ideas. Like, if it works, if it doesn't work, they're like, hey, man. It didn't work. But if it works, they're like, hey, I have another idea. I have another idea. And because engineers actually think this way, I think. They see something that works and they wanna scale it. Right?
So I think first of all, founders can learn and grow into becoming good thought leaders. I think they can outsource some of that. I think when you really wanna create havoc and disruption, it's gonna be from your core of your heart, not from a third party consultant who's gonna do that. And that comes and you see this, by the way, mixed results too.
Sometimes the people that are most disruptive can also be taken down because they were not that nice on social media, and they were too, like, out there, or they're too big of a brand I see this Morgan. You see companies that it's almost like, why are you on social media all day and not building your business? Right? It could become a Frankenstein situation. But generally, I think founders can become better than they were. If there is 0, they get to a 5.
If they're 5, they can get to an 8, and then there's natural tense. You know, there's just raw tens that you just want to show them the tools and the techniques. They get there. Sometimes they do it already before they even add a PR from. They're like, look, I already have an audience on social. I know how to reach my people. Now I want VSE to do some other things for me, but this part, I got it like I already did. And that's, by the way, more of a a type founder. Yeah. And it's interesting.
What you're highlighting here is that different founders might have different strengths and different mediums. The medium that you're going on is sort of the 4th question. Right? After the goals and after, you know, the positioning and who you're trying to reach. Your 4th thing is what's the medium, and you're saying some people are naturally gifted tweeting. Some are naturally gifted at long form. Some are naturally gifted at video. Some actually gives you a short form video.
And do you work with them to try to figure out what they're best at? We do work with them to see what they're best at, and we always tell them nobody should get in the way between you and your customer in terms of how you communicate and where you communicate. That, you should know. Like, frankly, you probably shouldn't even be getting funding unless you know how to do that. It's with 1 or 2 Right? Like, for example, like, if you're in crypto, you should already know how to use Discord.
You should already know how to build a community. If you're gonna get a certain amount of funding to keep growing it, and we will never advise them there because that is their core customer relationship channel, and they should understand that. What we can do is figure out how do we broaden your audience in the best way, and that's authentic to you. Right? So the authenticity part is, James, what you're handing on, which is some people are really uncomfortable with being spokespeople sometimes.
So Pete are very uncomfortable writing. This is the big one. The difference between video and writing. I cannot sit down and write, but if you put me on a camera, I just go off. Right? You actually, I think, could do both. But, like, if you don't work with the comfortable method of the founder, nothing will ever get achieved. You could spend hours writing stuff. And then by the time they get to editing it, it's already old. That's the thing that happens all the time, by the way.
And so we try to find a medium. And by the way, the good news is there's so many great like, low production mediums now. You can just do a selfie. Actually, we have one of our clients in biotech. We're like, hey. We just do a TikTok Beller day for you, you know, because you are the best spokesperson for your company. And when I hear you talk, I want to follow you more than any infographic that can be created or press release.
What's interesting is I think most founders don't realize it's okay not to be good at all the mediums. Yes. They beat themselves up about not being a great writer about not being great on video or not being this or that. And they just need to realize that some people are better on different mediums to just pick your sport, basically. Pick your sport and optimize Morgan high volume on the platform. Don't do a piece de resistance. Don't try to fix your weaknesses. Emphasize your strength.
Yes. And let VSP or somebody else help you do enough on the other medium so that you show up everywhere. Yes. Exactly. And, like, what we try to do, like, a content session every month. When you're even running out of ideas, get the 3 or 4 brain trust people on there to pop out the 6 or 7 with you on the call, and then you have your schedule for the next month. Right? So even when you run out of ideas, that could be salt. Ideation is just a process. Right?
And it shouldn't just be saved for when you think you have an Flint. Everybody that's successful at this. Like you, by the way, have a team, a timeline, and a structure, it actually forces you to figure out something to say sometimes, but it it's about that the consistency always wins, James, is what we've found is, like, even if it's not the coolest idea are the best quote that day or the best tweet. The people that are there that often neurologically, you remember them. It's top of mind.
It's branding. Right? So founders that are out there more often maybe with less stuff tend to get more recall. Interesting. So what frustrates you in working with CJ is what are they doing wrong? When you're pulling your hair out, what are those moments like? What are they doing? The mistakes they're making?
You know, one thing I will say is that we pick founders often by the investors that are supporting the company because it's a signal to us of how much that investor cares about storytelling much that investor is picking somebody that's going to be efficient or think about the right things. And sometimes there's just a lot of venture capital out there.
A lot of companies getting funded, and the founders not getting that other layer of guidance that we think helps us give us ourselves a 3 or 4 x better output. So first thing I do is I look at the company, like, how are we getting this referral? First of Morgan then I wanna see their hunger, right, in terms of storytelling. How much are they believers in PR? By the way, first time founders don't know.
They just don't know what they don't know, and I've never had a negative feeling about first time founder because everything's in education. I didn't know anything. Right? I mean, I've had to do this for 20 years to figure it out. Like, a lot of these founders could figure out what I do in, like, 6 months. They become better at that than me. So I think I have a lot of empathy for the first time founder.
I try to figure out their goal and make sure whatever happens, it's targeted at that goal because then they're gonna be Currier. And it it could be that the result was this or this, but at least it was on target. And then we try to convince them out of doing things that are time wasters because some other investor or some friend or some employee said, hey. We need to be doing this. A lot of what I try to do is say no to them.
I know it's kinda tough but saying no is probably one of the biggest superpowers of having a good partner in communications. This is weird to say, hey, I'm paying this person to tell me not to do this. Because time is money. That founder spending it with us is not spending it building their products. What we do has to be something that's 80% chance of working. Right. So there might be a podcast that asks them to be on and they should say no. Yeah.
We should look at the followers and say, why are we doing this maybe we chop this one up and turn it into an ad, and that could be how we use it. Yeah. And we should be creative about content. But if it's not moving the needle forward in the audience, you Pete, classic examples, events, right, conferences. You probably remember these like, hey. I got invited to speak of this thing in Boston. Man, that is a big investment of time, not money. I'm gonna go fly out there, go there.
Is it really, like, what am I speaking on who's on my panel? How long is that panel? Who's in the audience? So, like, that, I think time plays a big role in what we decide yes on that one as well. Yeah. You know, in terms of mistakes that founders make, I mean, I think one of the things that I've seen them make is they've focus so much on what it looks like as we've discussed. Like, I just want my first article in TechCrunch and rather than looking at the whole lineup to get it right.
I mean, another thing is mean, just recently, I mean, TechCrunch really isn't announcing seed stage investments anymore. They're really focused on sort of, you know, 10000000 or more 20,000,000 or more rounds because there's just so many rounds. There's so many venture firms now. There's so many startups that TechCrunch has really stopped looking at that earliest stage. And so you can't even get that coverage anymore. Doesn't happen.
Yeah. I mean, look, the markets do change, I will say, a $10,000,000 round in TechCrunch this year. Would have been only possible for a $100,000,000 round last year, right, because the market's shifting, but you're right. The expectations have to change for the founder and then they gotta look for wherever else their audience is. Right? So maybe it's in a a publication like fast company or fortune or Forbes or it's business insider, or maybe it is a paywall.
But you know that the people that subscribe are gonna be a good group of people to get. So it does change. And I think also, like, we try to push them to maximize social media as a very, like, sophisticated strategy. Make the announcements on there sometimes with the right community behind it, pushing it at the same time. You may get to that target audience you want as a creative hacker or work around instead of using the journalists to do it.
So there are different things that could work But again, that dollar amount also depends on that other factors. What's the team like? How interesting are they? Right? What vertical is it? I have as generative AI at 3,000,000, maybe Pete covered say. Right? If it's SAS Accounting, probably not. So I think that also plays a role. We look at the sort of why now, like, literally. I by the way, I saw one that's like, so and so gets funding to fix what FTX got wrong. I'm like, okay. Perfect timing.
You know, I'm like, that thing would have probably got covered at, like, 2,000,000 in fund Right. Right. There's those other factors do matter. I think the other thing I'd say is, like, we try to tell them storytelling is more than media relations. Pete this thing right so you can help you with your recruiting, your fundraising, your pitching, and then if you think about storytelling, it's actually for everything you do, and media relations is one part.
So often at the seed stage, they don't have that. They just don't they may have a deck they did to raise money from someone like you, but then they don't have the tightest story Pete everybody else to care. So we kinda work with them on that as well. Maybe sometimes up until the point where they have some bigger news to then drop. Got it. When there's a seed stage company, is there a funding amount below which they shouldn't hire a PR firm?
And at what point should they hire a PR firm and then if they should, how do they choose 1? I'd say that it's hard to say the number. Maybe sub 5, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't hire one yet. I think when you get up to 7, you can see coverage at this 5 to 7. Again, other factors too. I mean, sub 5, no. Don't do it. Why do you decide when you hire a firm? I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is back to the goals thing. Right?
If it's like, I just want one story and then I'm done, then find a consultant or find a small agency or maybe even your fund has someone who could just flip a story to launch or to do funding. I see a fair number of founders would just want something out there. Something, maybe for recruiting or just plant the flag.
Cool. When you have bigger goals of like customers and raising attention for the next round of funding, Those are what I call more like consistent communication programs where you're going to want to really be a market for months trying things and pushing stories to get attention and building relationships with the media. That's the other thing I Beller them to say, I, if you're gonna be in this at the long haul, you should know everybody that matters.
And even if that means that we're we organize a dinner, around climate tech or something and you get to meet seven people that matter, when you will have the news, you will then have the relationship. So I think those things also do matter, but ultimately it's more of like, do you have a story ready to Beller? Right? And I think is it a product that's lost? Do you need a call to action now for this thing? Then we have to figure out a way to some attention.
If you're just building, you know, I did a funding announcement, but I'm gonna go back to build for the next year, then cool. You don't wanna invest in like a full time comps thing there. Because that happens, by the way. We see this a lot. Somebody gets funding, but then you go into lab for a year. Okay. And so what you're saying is that if you have a real story to tell, you raise 5,000,000 or more.
That's the time to hire a PR firm and get that story out there, have a strategy, and then commit to the long term to know the right people because it's that network is gonna be the influence to get you to the right people. Right. And have 2 things in the cupboard. If it's not a funding announcement, then it should be data and some new hire. Grab 2 things.
You know, you don't want just one thing if you're gonna go through all the process on bringing an agency, but in your mind, at least have 2 things out of the 3 or 6. And should you hire a person to be on staff to help you with communications and PR? What point does that make sense? Excellent question. So it depends on scale. I think at the seed stage, you may be fine as the founder reviewing content.
I think a junior marketing person in house or someone on the team that says could do PR half time to just review deadlines, approve budgets, edit, press releases is super valuable. And sometimes I'll have a founder come and say, hey. I'm waiting to make a senior marketing hire to work with you. And I'm like, oh, no. No. No. No. Like, how senior do you have this person? I just need someone who's gonna get shit done on your side.
I do not need someone who's gonna go through that huge branding exercise right Like, you're ready to go. You need someone to just offload your work. So then we try to give them LinkedIn. It's like, hey, this is an example of someone who's great at my other Flint. Just great. Look at this person's background. They've been in marketing for a year, right, but they're just super young and smart and fast learners, blah blah.
So, like, Pete try to find them the right person even, but it's usually just the offloading of the work, James, I'd say, than it is like some huge strategic in house value. Got it. Really, the founder needs to do that and maybe with 1 or 2 strategic thinkers, either investors or they're ahead of their PR firm that they're working with. It's really, really talented at that. And most people aren't really good at it. They wanna be good at it. It sounds like a good lifestyle.
A good oh, I'm a really creative person, but my experience, VJ, is that very few people are actually good at thinking about positioning the words and strategy around this stuff. And they over complicate it, and they don't get it right. And All the time. I would say that my big hot take I would say today also is more investors should spend time with the PR teams and the founders and come up with those great ideas. Like, I think that is the magic.
Like, when you and I do something for a company, we we actually talk about it before we even look at it. And you're actually pitching me as if I'm the journalist on what the story is, and then we kind of align on what could be the best thing for them. And then we talk to them actually. And that's like super powerful.
And then having that reset once every 6 months or some big things happening with the company, bringing some of the investors in that are frankly mostly the ones that are either good storytellers former operators is amazing. So, like, we love it. We actually demand it, in some cases, with the founders, say, hey. Look, you know, some of the best people you have in this company are in the Pete table. Why are we not capping them? How do we get them? Right?
Like, I have another company we're launching in the consumer space. I looked at the captain. I'm like, man, these are some of the best people in the valley. These are some of the best storytellers. Like, how are we should get their feedback to? Because they have brilliant people. So I think the founders have more smart people around them than they think Morgan. And then just bringing those people in at the right moments once a quarter, once a year, could actually add so much more creativity.
And also those people know the endgame. They know the business goal. They're already aligned. And so that they're already thinking about the idea based on that goal. So I think that's one area that's underutilized. Yeah. And so how much does a PR firm typically cost? How does it work? You hire them for a year for 6 months? Yeah. So $5000 a month? Or 15, 20? Yeah. I'd say, like, you know, for if it's in tech and you want good quality, I think you're talking 12,500 up to, like, 25 more or less.
That's the level. Anything less than that per month and minimum 6 months is what I'd say. If you just have a funding announcement, That is a probably consulting person's job for 3 months, and maybe you could get it done somewhere between 75 110 k a month with one simple goal. I want a story for this thing. Help me write it. And that probably is the market for that. Yes. So and what do you get with the agency versus consultant?
Pete all the messaging ideas, the positioning work, probably a bigger database of reporters to work with, and you're trying to get that, like, longer play of relationship building versus, like, I wanna just get this one thing out the door. You've now got a fund. You're actually investing in a bunch of the companies that you see. Right? We've got a fund.
We've got amazing LPs like yourself in it, and our belief is just that I believe founders want everybody in their cap table to operate with a sense of urgency and provide value beyond the check. That's just my belief. If I'm gonna take money from anybody Morgan next round, I would do, I wouldn't just want money. I'd want money that has value attached to it.
And so because we think that communications work is one of the core four parts of the seed stage, like, you know, fundraising awareness, recruiting, James, like, we think that we should play a different role. Right? Like, for 150 years, people have just been cutting a check to PR firms And I think if there's some skin in the game, it's different. It's just there's different conversations. And there's a lot of ups and downs too. In this thing where you want someone who's in it for the long run.
That's why we did it. Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. You know, one thing that I've noticed is that if I can get the founders to write their own launch article that they want to appear in Forbes or Wall Street Journal or whatever. If I can get them to write that, that they expect to come out 8 or 9 months from now, it's really focusing for them. It's a really good exercise for actually how to run your business. It's not doing PR.
It's actually laying out how third parties are gonna see you in relation to competitors and how much you raised and what your mission and your positioning is. All that can come out in that launch article. And if they write it before they're ready, they'll actually drive the business in a much better way. And so the PR exercise isn't necessarily PR. It's almost like you're training yourself as a founder to be driven and directed toward the goal of the mission, the outcome. That's super helpful.
It's a perfect point. So this is what Jeff Bezos was doing at Amazon when division leads would come to him with a new idea he'd asked them to write the press article about the idea. And in the process of them writing it, they would sometimes realize it's not actually that interesting of an idea. They wouldn't do it. So it didn't just crystalize a good idea. It actually shut down a lot of bad ones because once you start to visualize it, you realize it wasn't that exciting. Got it.
Yeah. So bringing in the idea of doing PR early early is actually a very helpful thing in terms of company building. That's right. So last point on this I had several founders that would edit these press releases like ad nauseam, like, man, Vidgets, we need to know another tournament. Morgan, we're at the 23rd at it. Like, do you think a journalist is gonna read this? He says, no. It's not about the journalist. I said, really? He's like, this has not become my positioning exercise.
This is about my team. This is how we wanna talk about ourselves. You have actually forced us to figure out who we wanna be and how we wanna say things. So I want you to be patient with us and help me at redline this thing because really now I'm just thinking about my team with this thing. And I know you get the story, but This is now, I'm finally gonna get a moment to think about how I wanna write about ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, Vijay, this has been amazing. So great to see you, buddy.
I look forward to all the work we're going to do in the future. And, I hope that as many people as can listen to this so that they can accelerate in their communications and their PR going forward. Well done. Thank you, James. Thank you, NFX. Looking forward to a great 2023 ahead.