Does startup PR even matter anymore?

0:04This week on Great Chat, we ask ourselves, in an era of going direct, does startup PR even matter anymore? Do LLMs mean we need to care about press coverage? Again, I'm Angela, and I'm joined by Matt, Helen, and Ashley this week. But first, this podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech used by over 200 ,000 companies to simplify their finances. We're huge Mercury fans here at Great Chat, and we use it to run this podcast. A few of us are also current customers for our funds and startups. Not to mention the dozens of founders we backed as VCs, angels, and scouts that run their businesses on Mercury.

0:43If you're launching a startup or fun, visit Mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes or less. The onboarding couldn't be more intuitive or delightful. Quick note, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. For more details, check our show notes. Hi, guys. Hey. Hey. Okay, Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry. What?

1:09it was a sidebar what are those two names doing together in a sentence are they going to space together is that what's happening i didn't even know he was not married to his wife they're colonizing mars actually okay i just i just assume if katie perry is involved there's a space exploration underway that's my brand association with her now she's she's you know really just holding it down for women in STEM. Love her. Love her for that. She's our icon, our icon. I know. I love women in STEM, men in politics. Move over Mira Marati. Katy Perry is our lead. Put some respect on my girl Mira's name, okay?

1:47Come on. But that is really funny. Speaking of celebrities, did you see the, I mean, like, did you see the astronomer response from Buenath was so iconic. Yes, it was hard not to see it. I feel like it was genius. I agree with literally 100 % of the commentary, but like 100 % of the commentary was exactly the same. And I felt like all these people on Twitter, their bios are how they're contrarian. And I just sort of had this question of what do you do in these moments where something is genuinely great and everyone says the same thing. Totally. I think it's like the only moment of unanimous, like internet wide applause consensus that we have seen.

2:32Part of it is I think it was just like so of this era, right? Like there's a scandal. And instead of apologizing for it again and again and again, and doing the usual dance, they did do sort of the like statementy stuff. And then there was the co-founder and new CEO sort of plotting the path forward a little bit. But then they very quickly moved to their like, let's lean into the meme. And I think like people liked that and it felt very of the zeitgeist. But yeah, it's just like wild to see wild to see an entire entire internet rally behind what was a good video, but I'm not going to say it was like, great.

3:10I think the genius, like the thing that I really appreciated was like how quickly they were able to get internal approvals on that, right, without some key functions and like get that out the door. Because I think I've seen so many great campaigns die just internally, just, you know, the roadblock just being yourself. And so I think that was like the most impressive thing for me. But yeah. This is, I don't know who called Ryan Reynolds, but this is kind of his jam, right? Because remember the Peloton wife, there was that like terrible Peloton commercial where like the husband got his wife a Peloton for Christmas and it looked like she was being forced to work out and people hated it and there was this big backlash and then he did an aviation gin ad with her with her friends and it was like this perfect response while the the story was still happening so I feel like if they have a sweet spot this this falls beautifully into it and then the other reason I like this aside from it just being like a well executed 2025 moment was the people I felt most bad for in this scandal were the employees, right?

4:14Like how much would it suck to work at Astronomer and like you're, you're put on the map as a brand because of this like scandal between your CEO and your chief, uh, or chief people officer, which is a wild combo. And, and so to like have this moment where you get to laugh at it and everyone's celebrating you, like employee morale must have through the roof with this. Like whatever it cost was worth it. For sure. In other like cultural news, but, um, but on the terrible end of the spectrum, did you guys see the, the leak of that app tea where like, um, you, women can go and like rate like former boyfriends, dates, et cetera.

4:57Yeah. So what, what actually leaked like the, the content or I saw people's selfies and I didn't quite understand oh no i saw people's selfies and i saw people's driver's licenses yeah i think it was a lot of profile like information like verification it was all of their verification so like people's house at like home addresses driver's licenses like really sensitive data got leaked it's a real bummer i saw some speculation i have no idea if this is true that like t was vibe coded and so this could be like another yeah this is why we need to build some real software sometimes. So aside from the terrible, like, abuse of people's private information, some people decided to take that information and create, like, basically a ranking of, like, the hottest people on T and then the least hot.

5:54There was, like, a leaderboard, and which is awful too right so you can go to this site don't do it listeners um and and like you know you'll get two photos side by side and you basically click on who's hotter and the only reason I bring this up because it's like shitty and doesn't really deserve attention is that the thing that was fascinating to me was people were so outraged and they were tying it to this moment in time right like oh this is such a sign of the times it's such a sign of like how the genders are divided and like antagonism between men and women and then of course like uh not to age us but like we have seen this show before right like hot or not was i think it was like a like a preteen facebook it was it was literally the original facebook was hot or not right like they took the the photos in the facebook for like the harvard dorms and you did that yeah so it's like a circle It's like you start, that's the original idea.

6:52And then you, you know, create the metaverse and you get really, and then you like, it's human nature. It's great. This is just going to like keep repeating over time. But then it's fascinating to watch like a new generation of internet users, like experiences for the first time and like how strongly they react to it. And I like, I don't know, I feel like the cynical old person who's like, yes, given given some headshots and like, you know, Wi-Fi. This is unfortunately inevitable. Gen Z, they're just like us. You know, it really humanizes. Oh, my gosh. They would disagree, probably, but they are.

7:33Does that mean it's time for Yip Yap next? Like, are we going to go back to having these anonymous? I was just thinking that. Or secret? Oh, same thing. It was the same thing like five years apart. Oh my gosh. Secret. So I think secret took off more in the tech world and it was the bane of my existence. So secret was an anonymous social network where you were connected. I think you had to give it your contacts. And so it would show you like secrets, which were text based from people you were connected to, but then also people they were connected to. So you can like, there was like a kind of a broader social graph.

8:09I remember it was a big deal at the time because the founders took like three million off the table, like the Series A. And that was a very scandalous. What era was secret? It rings a bell, but I just can't remember. Oh, I know. I know exactly what it was, Helen. It was 2014 because it was while Box was on file to go public. Maybe some people from your former employer were spreading all these insane rumors that Box was going to get acquired by HP. And I was like getting called by reporters who were like, well, I saw. Was this before or after blind? Because I feel like why waste secret? Why waste a social platform on like tech news?

8:49There's like 100 websites for that. I think this was like it just took off within tech as far as I can tell. But like people were pretty. And there were some there were some very I think it actually did quite a bit of damage before it was shut down. Well, Yik Yak was a little after that. It was a couple of years later because I remember some folks from Dropbox went to go work there. And I think that my takeaway from what that was was like the equivalent of like teens writing anonymous horrible things on the back of like bathroom stalls. And so the like 30 year old tech employees were doing the same thing.

9:25Like the content was so bad on secret. it so yeah i guess like we have like the hot or not uh format for bad behavior and then we have this sort of like anonymous text-based like put any rumor you unsubstantiated rumor you want out there and people can't resist it and now we just have x that's the inspiration they can't resist i do think that what's interesting though is that they can't resist it at the beginning right it feels a bit like it follows the clubhouse curve of like very very very hot and then burn out really fast where like none of this we've seen this pattern repeat itself now multiple times targeting multiple different audiences but nobody's figured out how to turn like that very very hot consumer thing into a long lasting thing because it turns out that i think probably most consumers are down to be a little bit like awful but once they read enough bad stuff about themselves they're like way less interested in engaging with something so it doesn't have like a long term yeah it's like not necessarily to me it doesn't feel super investable it feels like you know if you could if if there's another one that comes out after this we can short it together yeah I love it uh okay on to some good news like Figma IPO I mean we're recording this on a Tuesday so by the time someone is listening um I had like Figma might be a public company and I think we were sharing in the group chat like 30x oversubscribes and it seems like it's going to be a big one.

10:52Yeah, I love this. I love this for every founder who's been told like, you know, there's a behavior that's sticky and people will not change or this isn't venture backable because, you know, it's just not big enough of a market. And I think that Figma was told all of those things in the beginning. And, you know, they figured out their second act. They rode like, you know, waves of behavior change. And yeah, it's just super exciting, I think, for everyone involved. I did see that it was like the information covered, like who who are the big winners on this IPO. And the commentary was that it was the same the same old people.

11:31But that's tech. Turns out they're good at their jobs. Actually, I hope I don't get this wrong, but I think that Figma was the first deal that Mamoon did when he went to Florida. Right. I did read that. I did read that. Part of his like big, I don't want to call it a comeback, but his big like next act. This was the first investment he did. There was a woman on the BD team at Facebook who was a very early angel investor in Figma. So she's going to do really well. So I'm excited for her too. And Helen, it wasn't just like them overcoming skepticism in the early days. Like they had the$20 billion Adobe acquisition fell through.

12:09And then I don't think they did it from a place of duress, but I think they did around mostly to create some liquidity for employees after like that big moment. Well, the breakup fee was significant. And I think that they were really smart about the breakup. A billion dollars. Yeah, they use that injection very wisely. And, you know, they, they like, supercharged. And actually, if you look at the market and market share between Figma and Adobe, like at the time of the acquisition, and and now like, there's a shift. And so I think for some folks, they saw the Adobe acquisition, it's like a big win for Adobe, like, okay, this is like, how they kind of move and cross over into the next generation of designers.

12:49But now I kind of feel like, I don't know, Figma could absolutely then introduce desktop tools or whatever, you know, like times change so quickly. That was like kind of another takeaway. Figma to me is so exciting for so many reasons. One, I'm obsessed with their product, too. I'm obsessed with their founder story. Three, I think that like on multiple different counts, it shows just how like insane and to some degree like resilient you have to be in this industry. So like not only did Figma go through significant ups and downs, particularly at the beginning, like for the first couple of years, it was all over the place, but also from like an investment perspective.

13:27And I think a lot of people don't like a lot of people, especially like our operators, probably don't think about it from this perspective. But like the I remember, like the story is basically that the partner who led the investment at Greylock ended up like getting exited from the firm after investing in Figma. And Figma is going to be one of the like Figma you see plastered all over Greylock's portfolio, all over the place. The ultimate revenge. And the well, I mean, kind of, but like you like do you still get to hold on to any of that? Like that's actually like such a bummer because it didn't look like it was going to do well at first.

14:04And it ended up being like what like probably the fund returner for that fund. I mean, I don't know. I totally remember that period. Like I think I was maybe I was at Plaid, but I bumped into like a former Facebook designer like on Second Street. And I was like, hey, what are you doing around here? And he's like, oh, I'm working out of the Figma offices. I'm just helping the founders, you know, sort of like avoid the VC vultures. And like, so his combo is more, and he's a designer and, you know, founders are designers. And sort of like to that point, we hadn't really seen design founders like be really business savvy and like, you know, sort of think a little bit more aggressively about that.

14:39So, you know. I mean, Airbnb would like a word. Well, Airbnb had that incredibly aggressive CFO or someone on the strategy side. CBO or something. You might be right. Right. They definitely also had a really, really great general counsel. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that those roles are important. But the founders remain to this day very aggressive and very smart. So, again, designer founders, invest more. New thesis. Speaking of some successes, like Vanta had a big raise recently. And I was paying attention to this because my partner was an angel investor in Vanta. And so I'm like, oh, this is what multiples look like when a company gets to a round valued at$4.15 billion.

15:27But another company where, you know, I think maybe wasn't the sexiest company early on. I mean, Sock 2 compliance is not necessarily like a buzzword-y category. But just, man, like Christina is a phenomenal CEO. just seems like she runs such a tight ship she has such a strong leadership team and yeah yeah i worked with her at dropbox she was like the pm on dropbox paper did anyone use that it was notion ahead of time it was it was fab um pour one out for dropbox paper but yeah it couldn't have happened to a better person and um i think we were looking at the comms around the the announcement and i remember one thing that i threw in the group chat that week was like Like, I thought it was interesting that in her, one of her announcements or a couple of them, usually when you announce a big round, like you thank all of your investors.

16:20But I didn't really see a mention of investors. I think maybe on Twitter she tagged a bunch of investors. But like, I don't know, just right now, I think there's been some talk about the social contract. And I think like all of these social contracts are kind of being reevaluated right now. So for a big fundraising announcement to really be focused on customers and team members, which I think is the right thing. But I was just sort of like a different moment. But then I'm just excited that there was a company that like had a value is in between. I feel like in the world of startups, you go from like one billion to 20 billion.

16:53Like you don't see many four billion dollar like fundraiser rounds. So it's good to see like a natural progression of a valuation happening. This is the Goldilocks of fundraisers. It's just right. It's not too hot. It's not too cold. I also and I know we're not like supposed to talk about this and this like masculine energy moment. But I was like fucking awesome to see like a woman CEO like build a company of this scale. With a corporate color that's purple. With a corporate color that's purple. And then that combined with like Mira Morati's, you know, two billion dollar seed fundraise. I'm like, counterintuitively, 2025 might be a great year for fundraising.

17:38Everyone always hones in on that stat of like women founders only get like 2 % of capital or whatever. And here are some people who, you know, may be making a big dent in that. But Helen, back to how the story was announced. Another interesting thing is I saw it in my LinkedIn feed. I saw it in my Twitter feed. I'm also like friends with some people who work there. So that was probably why it showed up everywhere. But it wasn't until like day two or three that I saw there was a Forbes piece timed with the announcement. And that got me thinking about this question of like, does like startup PR even matter, right?

18:15Like there was a time when that media, like that press article would be the most important artifact and asset around a fundraise. And companies used to bend over backwards to try to like line up those moments and have the perfect like exclusive hook to have enough leverage to get a publication to write a bigger piece. And then the Holy Grail, of course, was the cover story. And you just like really don't see that these days. no i feel like ashley your thesis about like go direct has been playing out a whole lot lately i take full credit for that thesis it was you yeah it was you i'm sorry i'm not saying it's just you there have been plenty of people who plenty of brilliant people have been saying this um but but i do think like in in my life personally you are one of the people who has been speaking uh most frequently and most loudly about this.

19:11And I think especially watching Eric Thurenberg and A16C's latest podcast, I saw a lot of like really interesting points in there. Like, do you have any, did you see that? I, yeah, I actually listened to the whole thing. And one funny, funny, I mean, of course it's, it's not like Joe Rogan long, but it was well over an hour. And the most annoying thing about a podcast featuring Mark Andreessen is you cannot put it on, um, on accelerated speed because he already talks so quickly. Like he talks at 2X speed naturally. And so like when Ben's talking, it's like normal when Eric's talking, it's normal.

19:49Then Mark, it's like, whoa. Um, so, uh, so I actually had to listen to the whole like hour and a half. Um, it was interesting. It was like very, I would say like 95 % of it was like a history lesson slash like very ideological, right? I will give A16Z credit for probably being like the loudest advocate of and like early advocate of like go direct in a way that is quite antagonistic with media, whereas I feel like I'm much more on the pragmatic end of the spectrum where it's like about and versus or. I mean, there were some points that like I both agreed with, but also would have framed differently.

20:27Mark does most of the talking and he pinpoints 2017 and Trump's election. It's kind of the moment that the relationship between the tech ecosystem and tech press changed and became more antagonistic and really like sort of puts that blame on media, which I thought was interesting because as someone who very much lived through that, And I'd be interested in your points of view, too. Like, it didn't feel like that was media led, like the self-reflection and the interrogation, especially after Trump's victory and then Cambridge Analytica and then Me Too. It actually felt like the whole industry was just grappling with unintended consequences and bad behavior versus like the media was attacking and we were sort of on the other side of it.

21:15Well, yeah, I think looking back, there was a confluence of a lot of events. So it's really hard to sort of pinpoint and say it was specifically tech-led or anything like that. Because, yeah, my brain went to Me Too as well. I mean, think about who benefited from sort of the reckoning of traditional media and how it works. It was probably the people who were getting canceled. I think that was like the height of cancel culture, right? And so, you know, who wins and who loses when certain events happen? And I think that that's kind of always like a good question to ask. And I think that like the go direct thing, I mean, we've been headed toward that path for a very long time.

21:57And, you know, my take now is, you know, similar to yours, Ashley, of course, it's the and. But increasingly, like what founders are asking is like, how do I optimize like my results in an AI search, right? And how different is that from from SEO? And so I think that's where, you know, traditional media can really shine. But as we were sort of looking and, you know, talking about this topic earlier this week, like, yeah, I think that some some platforms are like Grok, for example, does a really great job, of course, of pulling in a lot of the conversation on Twitter that is unverified. It relies on community notes for it to check, you know, sort of the accuracy of a lot of things.

22:42And a lot of the accounts like are anonymous that is pushing this information. So that gives me the sort of like, oh, my gosh, that seemed like a mess to clean up. The old days of just very simple, you know, if it's from The New York Times, it's credible. Like that's that we don't live in that world anymore. I think there are a lot of people who believe The New York Times equals disinformation. information um and so yeah it's it's a mess and i think people who are aggressive and have a plan like they're gonna do well in this moment because i think it's all up for grabs and that's the most interesting part i think right now like with the with the whole scramble well it was funny because um uh ben horowitz took like the last 10 minutes so it's like mark sort of uh unveiling his like grand narrative and theory around media and at the end he was like well ben's the one who gives our startup's advice.

23:32I don't do that. And so Ben talked a little bit about what advice he gives the startups. And it was much more pragmatic. It was like, yeah, 10 years ago, if you were a startup, you could really rely on media to tell your story. That was the best bang for your buck. It's 100 % the strategy that we used at Box. I mean, yes, Aaron Levy is a good tweeter, but everything was press-lit. We would pre-brief 20 reporters for a feature update. It was insane. By the time I went to Glossier in 2018. That like was like was a whole new world. And actually a big part of the reason I went there was because they were a company that was already very good at having built out those like owned channels and direct connections with customers, which just gives you so much more flexibility and storytelling.

24:17And so, yeah, Ben said like. But Glossier was consumer, right? So I would say that like there are different scales of like how quickly this is evolving, Because on the B2B side, especially if you're specific on an industry, these trade publications still very much work in like a previous era of what we're talking about, where like, you know, I think it still moves at the same pace. And there isn't like the who's the equivalent, you know, influencer in oil and gas that's like sounding off on Twitter that I need them to like, you know, tweet my thought leadership thing. I both agree. I think like consumer was ahead of B2B, but I think we're actually seeing like the consumerization of how like B2B companies go to market.

24:55And especially with AI, because so much of AI adoption is still happening at the individual level versus like through the CIO or IT department. Right. We've talked before about these like curiosity budgets and like people are even willing to spend their own money to like use these tools because it makes them so much more effective. And in fact, they might not even want their employer to know that they're like vibe coding or or using everything. So I do think that I won't pretend that I like had this timeline in mind when I went to Glossier, but I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that like every company needs a blend of like own strategy, owned content.

25:33But I think you're shooting yourself in the foot of the founder, as a founder, if you like don't interact with the media on principle, because if you are successful, they will eventually cover you. And Helen, to your point, like Muckrack put out a report. I think it was last week. Muckrack is this like PR monitoring database company. 95 % of the links that AI references are non-paid, which makes sense. And then of those, 27 % are journalistic content. So when you query something in Claude or ChatGPT, like you'll see the little like reference links. And then for something more recent, it's like 50 percent journalistic content.

26:19So this does matter, like how you show up and press, especially as more and more like search moves over to this new like chat interface. If you believe that that chat GPT and these other LLMs are going to continue to eat like some of Google's lunch, like it absolutely does matter how you show up and press. The other one, the other like sort of on par source was like other like corporate blogs and sources, but that are not directly tied to like the product or the query, which I which I thought was interesting. Yeah, corporate blogs, bring them back. One thing that I thought was interesting. So, you know, my venture partner at True and their 20 year old firm.

27:00So their their websites 20 years old. Right. And so, you know, we did a bunch of queries within all the major sort of AI platforms. And like the website content actually ranked really high as like the source of truth. And I think that that's just a function of like it's a 20 year old site. That's what it's like credible. Right. So I think that that's also really interesting because we sort of went away from the owned content for a while and thinking about how do you sort of like hack the SEO game by like, you know, doing these like blog posts and so that you're keying on a few keywords. And now maybe we'll get back to like quality content on corporate blogs.

27:42Take that shit off LinkedIn. Put it back on your blog. One thing I haven't seen is I wonder if AI will have a bias against AI written content. Like I'm sure it can tell. And I wonder if like human, you know, human originated content will rank higher than like AI swap. It hasn't happened in my LinkedIn feed yet. I feel like the algorithm is prioritizing. Not the LinkedIn algorithm, but like chat GPT or quad or grok like that. That's what I'm wondering. Oh, yeah. LinkedIn loves the slop. I saw Mike Heller, who's like a former Dropbox, Dropboxer. He's now a partner at Floodgate posted something about like Cluey and how the way that they played it was like really smart.

28:32Like they had a bunch of crazy, you know, they've been tweeting a lot. And then Business Insider covered the tweets. And now because Business Insider is like a trusted news source within the, you know, these AI platforms, when you ask it a question, it's like citing Business Insider. And so it's like, you can't actually manipulate the results of this and how quickly that is moving. And that's like, something very interesting to think about, right? Right. So it's like, is the new game be controversial on your own channel so that the earned channels will cover it so that the search, you know, now picks it up as a source?