# New Media Rules: Personal Brands, Offensive Strategy, and Outside-In Storytelling

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-06-19

## Transcript

One rule of old media is don't be interested.
Like, that's the worst thing you can do.
There is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you're going to like through the traditional media anymore.
Like, it's just basically not possible.
Old media, you have very restricted channels with very restricted formats.
New media is unlimited formats, unlimited channels.
And the brand is now the person.
The grand wizard of this is Alex Karp.
If you watch his interviews, He never talks about Palantir.
Everybody just naturally thinks inside out, me and my company and my product out into the world.
Don't think that way.
Think in terms of like, what are the most interesting things happening in the world?
And then how do those things relate to us?
Old media is defense-oriented.
New media is offense.
Talk more about why that is.
There's still this anxiety that people have, which is legacy media somehow is like where the respectability is, the prestige is.
I don't believe that anymore.
And I think it's very important for people to kind of get that out of their system.
For decades, most public communication flowed through a small number of institutions.
Television networks, newspapers, magazines, and a handful of gatekeepers determined which stories were told and who got to tell them.
That world is changing.
Today, founders, creators, investors, and operators can communicate directly with audiences through social media platforms, newsletters, podcasts, and video.
The result is a new set of rules for how ideas spread, how brands are built, and how influence works.
Recorded live at the New Media Sunnit.
This conversation explores the rise of direct communication, the decline of traditional gatekeepers, and what founders can learn from the people who have successfully built audiences in the internet era.
So first, I just want to say it's Gabby's birthday today.
Welcome to Gabby's firm.
I'm so excited to the next one in five for many reasons.
But one is that Ben had four seats to game six and wasn't going to make it today.
And so we're so lucky that we get to have Ben here.
And Mark, not a huge basketball guy, but he did tweet about how Jalen Brunson, he had a comment that he operates purely on instinct, not on introspection.
And Mark appreciates that.
Retard Max saying, obviously working.
Exactly.
Many people are saying across industries.
And so I actually think that's a pretty interesting segue because one of the rules of new media, Mark, that we were talking about with the CEO last week in our growth portfolio is authenticity and sort of...
being able to have the same conversations on camera that you would have in person behind closed doors.
Why don't you talk about that a bit more and why that's so important to really nail in terms of nailing your voice and how to build that presence?
Because a lot of mistakes that founders will make is trying to be too buttoned up, trying to be too media trained, et cetera.
As we uncover the rules of new media, why don't you start there?
Yeah, so I had this really formative experience when I was younger.
So in the 90s, when Ben and I were coming up, you know, pre-blogs, pre-YouTube, all this stuff.
And so in those days, the assumption was 100% of what you did, if you were running a company or doing anything, was you were going to have to work through established media, legacy media.
And then everybody would get, of course, media trained in how to do it.
And most painful experience in the world.
Oh, yeah.
So for people who haven't been through media training, it's actually...
Watch yourself on TV.
Yeah, so, okay, so here's how media training works.
I don't really still do it, but do they still do it?
You guys still do it?
Okay, yeah.
Okay, so free will have been through it.
Yeah, so it's like you get put in front of a camera in your face, and then somebody like who you think is your friend, they do the full 60 minutes interview with you for like an hour, and then they literally make you sit there and watch it, which is just like the meanest thing you could do to somebody.
And critique you, and you're looking at yourself, fuck it up, and they're going, you see how you fucked that up?
And you're like, wow, I'm really uncomfortable now.
I'm never going on TV.
Exactly.
And you're like, can we just fast?
No, you can't fast forward.
We're going to watch the entire thing.
And then maybe we'll watch it again.
And so it is very revealing.
And you discover all kinds of things about your personal affect, by the way, also.
You discover all the things you do, all the extra words.
How much you hate your voice.
Yes, exactly.
How much you hate how you look.
I mean, it's incredible.
It's incredible.
And so if your ego survives the beating, you go on to a successful career.
And so that's what you did.
But it was always so weird because it's like the result.
It just always struck me as just like the result is, wow, you see important people with important things to say.
On TV or whatever, they just seem like plastic people.
They just seem like it's all very fake and staged.
And then, by the way, you know, this is the old days because all the anchor people or interviewers are all like, oh, I'm using anchorman voice.
And then you get a CEO up there who just says, like, the most innocuous things possible.
And a lot of CEOs in those days, and by the way, still, they rank their success in doing an interview or giving a speech based on minimum controversy, right?
So I've worked with lots of CEOs.
They come on stage.
They're very proud of themselves because they didn't make any news, right?
Sort of like that.
And so...
Yeah, that is the key.
All news is bad news.
So we hire, at the time, was considered the best media trainer who was a guy who had previously been a producer of 60 Minutes.
Lee Zeldin.
Lee Zeldin, who'd been a producer.
He was actually quite a well-known guy at the time.
He had been Lowell Bergman's producer.
Lowell Bergman became...
Lowell Bergman?
No.
Well, I mean, Mike Wallace, it was that whole complex.
He's like, we're not doing any of the classic media training that we do.
He said, we're going to do the thing that everybody always underrates, which is, we're going to get you to basically just say all the things in public that you would say if you were sitting having lunch with a friend.
Right.
And I remember the back of my head like just blew open because it's just like, OK.
And then immediately you're like, OK, why are we paying this guy?
Then it's like, because that's like very obvious advice.
And then it's like nobody else will give you that advice.
And what's going on?
He said the following.
He said, if you are on stage or in an interview and you were talking about something and you don't know that topic inside out already, what the hell are you doing there?
So the only thing that you should ever be talking about is something, you know, intimately.
If you know it intimately, you should be able to talk about it in a viscerally interesting.
way that really relays your thoughts on the thing.
And you ought to be able to come across as a very interesting person because, you know, it's just like if you're sitting across the table talking to a friend.
And so he's like, my training is 100% to try to get you to not do all the other stuff and basically be able to do that.
And then the other part, because you assume the media is adversarial, the other part was then, I forget what he called, the pivot or whatever, which was basically just the thing of like, you never answer their questions, you always answer your own questions, which is great.
Which, by the way, makes it a little unnatural, right?
It does.
It's the Jedi Knight thing that made that whole approach work, which is it's just, okay, you're talking nationally.
Well, one of the ways you talk nationally is you just refuse to answer the bad questions, and then you just substitute in your good questions.
Anyway, so he went through the whole thing, and so then, you know, we've been watching the evolution of the whole new media landscape for 30 years, and it's just like, wow, if you watch what Palmer Luckey does, or if you watch what Alex Karp does, or...
you watch what Elon does or you watch what any of the great communicators do, that's what they're doing.
You know, I say put Jensen in that rank lately.
It's just like, wow.
And by the way, this is the rise of the long-form podcast, the three-hour conversation.
And then just, by the way, the sort of re-rise of the idea of just interesting people having interesting conversations, which was very radical at one point, which is now a common thing.
And so I think that remains the actual advice.
And of course, Eric, to your point, what that gets across is authenticity, which is like, okay, in addition to what's being said, do I actually, as the audience, do I actually feel like I'm meeting the real person?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very good points.
We've been talking about how old media is defense-oriented, new media is offense.
We're talking more about why that is and what that playbook looks like.
One of the things we were talking about, Mark, also in that meeting is the importance of outside in and situating sort of your story within the context of what's happening externally.
Yeah, so the press, in my view, and reporters get furious at me when I say this, which is why I know that I'm correct.
The traditional press, legacy press, defined itself as having two functions, right?
One was impartial journalism, objective journalism.
sometimes called the voice from nowhere, which meant presenting both sides of something.
By the way, under the assumption that everything has two sides.
And by the way, not more than two sides.
And so there was always something a little bit weird about that.
But at least the idea of showing an issue, explaining it, articulating it, letting different spokespeople for the different points of view actually say it.
The second mission was to speak truth to power.
Yeah, that was the one that got in the way of the first.
That's the one that got in the way of the first one.
So speak truth to power.
And that became, the way they ended up describing that was it was afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
Right.
And of course, at this point, we know what that means.
Yeah.
Well, it devolved into power to truth.
So it's like the press's way of intimidating you into not saying what you thought.
Yeah.
Right.
Because it's a line between actually objective and then activist, right?
Somebody with an agenda.
And so I think my view is what happened over time is that second one just swamped the first one and then it just became the thing.
And then as a consequence, the very nature of the interaction changed.
I mean, the short version is I did tons of traditional media between 1994 and 2017.
And every once in a while, there's a hit piece or a bad faith thing or whatever.
But I don't know, 90% of the time, I felt like it had been a good idea to do it.
And I felt I'd been given a chance to tell my thing.
By the way, for almost that entire run, most people in the country and in the press thought starters were kind of cool.
And tech was kind of cool and kind of fun.
And it was kind of good for America that there were these tech companies.
And the products were kind of fun to use.
I kind of remember those days.
Yeah, it's in the ancient mists of the past.
Everything was exciting.
A lot of reporters and editors, and they genuinely viewed as like, oh, we need to explain this to our readers and our viewers and really, really have this come across.
And then, as we like to say, like in 2017, things changed.
And basically since then, my view is that sort of second mode of being, which is the sort of agenda-driven, you know, kind of really took over.
And I think probably will never, never actually unwind.
And so it's just the practical reality, as we always tell our founders, like there is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you're going to like through the traditional media anymore.
Like it's just basically not possible.
every once in a while.
You can land a story, but you can't run a strategy.
Yeah, people point to individual success and all this, you're like, okay, that's the exception that proves the rule.
There's 99 others that are not like that.
And so there just needs to be a new approach.
Then I think the new approach comes in two parts.
It comes in, you know, as we all call it now, go direct, which is you have to tell your own story and increasingly through your own channels and through the channels of allies.
And then the other thing is, you know, new voices and new media.
And because the legacy press has gone so bananas, obviously there's this just massive opportunity that's opened up.
for the creation of new media.
And it's just like the examples, many of whom are in this room, are just spectacular, I think, with what's happening.
It's actually really funny.
It used to be, even in the golden age media, like if you wanted to watch a smart person talk about something for an hour, it was Charlie Rose.
And when I was a kid in the 80s, it was Charlie Rose at midnight.
There was something called the CBS Overnight, CBS News Overnight.
And he was literally at midnight.
And this was like, you know, pre the VCR, and he'd stay up until midnight.
to watch a smart conversation.
And to go from that to what we have today in the podcast world and the Substack world is just such an incredible advance and going incredibly well.
So I think the new media world is just supremely, you know, just incredibly high quality, doing incredibly well.
But there's still this anxiety that people have, which is the legacy media somehow is like where the, I don't know, I mean, it sounds so silly to say anymore, but like the respectability or the prestige is.
And I don't believe that anymore.
And I think it's very important for people to kind of get that out of their system because the world has changed.
To your point, so we were just in Washington, and so we were with, like, all the kind of Washington people, senators and whatnot.
And I was asking them, you know, what does everybody in Washington read?
And it's the Mark Halperin newsletter, which is new media.
So it's— fully expected, Axios, The Washington Post, and so forth.
Because, by the way, the one holdout from, you know, kind of people in the firm on, like, old media as well, except for Washington.
They all read this old, you know, stuff.
And not even that is true.
So I think Mark's right.
Mark, you mentioned going direct.
We're certainly in the era now of going direct.
It feels like it's table stakes for founders.
But I've talked to a lot of founders who feel that now they have sort of a second job of being the spokesperson for their company on top of running the business day to day.
And you can even think of a lot of great founders who spent their lives or careers in a lab or staring at a computer, and this is not what they've been trained in.
So I'm curious both of your advice for founders who maybe are uninterested in doing this or they don't know where to start.
Do they have to get good at it or are there other paths for them to get their company the attention it serves?
Yeah.
So I think this is tricky.
So if you just go, okay, old media, and how did that work in new media?
So old media, you had like very restricted channels with very restricted formats, and the brands were the companies.
So like that's basically the setup.
So yes, you could talk to the New York Times or...
CNN or whatever if you wanted to get the word out.
But then you were forced into like a quote or a very short interview or something like that.
And then you were representing a brand that wasn't you.
And that's just kind of how it worked.
And so the whole media strategy basically was just get your name out there without tainting the company to the point where like it could never recover.
which is kind of how you got into this very defensive posture, because you can never take back anything.
That was like a big rule in old media.
Then you get to new media, and new media is so the opposite in that it's unlimited formats, unlimited channels, and the brand is now the person.
So it's not like, were people talking about...
Like when every Democrat came out and was mad about SpaceX, they weren't.
They were mad about Elon because he's a brand.
And the same thing, like, is it Palantir or is it Alex?
And is it Andrel or is it Palmer?
And that's just over and over again.
So the companies that are winning in marketing, the brand is the person.
And...
I guess like if you had another founder or somebody who is a really permanent fixture and not the CEO, you could imagine that person kind of getting that person off to be the brand.
But it's going to be a person.
Like, I don't think there's a way around that.
And then the rule of new media is it has to be interesting because otherwise it's going to get drowned out.
And so you have to be, it has to be a person and that person has to be interesting, which is why old media is so dangerous because The one rule of old media is don't be interested.
Like, that's the worst thing you can do.
You'll F everything up.
And so I don't think a company can get away without it.
Now, like, if you look at, like, us as a firm, like, technically, I'm really the CEO, but, like, Mark is more the brand, I would say, in terms of he just does way more media than I do.
And that works, but it works because it's Andreessen Horowitz and nobody knows the fucking difference on the outside.
It's fine.
And you can set up your company that way where they don't have to know how you run.
Like, that's fine.
But it's got to be somebody who's there kind of forever with the organization.
It can't be like the vice president of marketing who's here for a three-year run and then is gone.
Like, that'll never work.
And there is another example.
Yeah.
One of my favorite things that happens about once a week is when somebody congratulates me on writing Ben's book.
Which he always takes full credit for.
I do, I do.
I really poured all my blood, sweat, and tears into that.
I'm so glad that somebody finally read it.
So, you know, so I think there's actually a technological explanation for what Ben said that is actually, I think, quite important.
You know, up until basically, what was it, Ben, like the 1930s or something, like companies were not, they didn't have corporate brands.
You had, it was the Ford, you had people, it was the Ford Motor Company.
Thomas Edison, yeah.
It was the Edison Electric Company, right?
So it was just like, you know, name on the, it was literally name on the door.
It just, it never even, I mean, I'm positive it never occurred to Henry Ford to name his company anything other than the Ford Motor Company.
Well, he did have a company before the Ford Motor Company, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which was like.
I think, I can't remember.
Somebody's got to look it up.
I think it became like Cadillac or something.
It was actually like a car company that lasted.
But he got, he was CTO.
He wasn't CEO.
And he got in such a furious fight because he was a hothead, Henry Ford, with the CEO that he quit his own company.
A lot of those are Chrysler.
Like Chrysler was a, where there's guys, you know, a lot of those, a lot of the cars are the car companies.
Oh, yeah, they're all named after themselves.
And I think actually maybe it was like Ford and then, When he quit, they renamed it.
That could be it.
Yeah, yeah.
So it was like naming the door.
Yeah.
And it was just kind of taken as a given because, like, that's the guys running the company.
That's what you do.
And then I think what happened is in the 30s, 40s, you started getting these, you know, international business machines, General Electric.
General Motors.
General Motors.
You started getting these abstract names, and then you got the consumer brand thing, you know, with like Procter & Gamble, so you had like Tide and Colgate and, you know, Crest Toothpaste and Coca-Cola and all these things.
The nifty-fifty, the conglomerate era, yeah.
You're right, which led to the conglomerates, which were basically just piling up as many brands as you could.
And I think what happened was, in retrospect, I think that was because of the rise of centralized media, specifically.
Because before the 1930s, like, media was very decentralized.
Like, every town had like 15 newspapers.
There were like tiny little radio stations everywhere.
And then, you know, starting...
the 30s or 40s, media centralized hard, you know, in a way that was very, you know, unprecedented historically, and probably once in a, you know, it's probably once in a thousand year thing that that happened.
And then the thing with centralized media was just, it's like drinking everything through an incredibly narrow straw because there's just like, by definition, if there's three TV networks and there's 24 hours in the day, there's just only ever, like how much time are you ever going to get?
Or if there's the front page of, you know, three big newspapers, how many column inches are you ever going to get?
And so the message from any company had to get distilled down to the absolute minimum to be able to get through those very narrow straws.
And I think that was the corporate brand phenomenon, which is to get the thing down to like an atomic unit of a brand.
to be able to get it through that straw.
And then everybody became convinced that that was just universally the way the world worked, but I think that only actually made sense.
So company as an abstract brand or corporate brand, I think that only made sense in the centralized media world.
And I think what we're seeing, as the centralized media world is now unwinding and collapsing, I think mechanically that's why this new approach is working and is necessary because...
That's why, because in the new world, I mean, you know, the many examples of this, but it's just like, you know, do people running for president have to go on Joe Rogan, right?
And, you know, up until 2024, the answer was absolutely not.
After 2024, the answer is 100% they have to, right?
Like a big part, you know, for keeping politics out of it, a big part of all the Democratic retrospectives of what happened in 24 was that Kamala didn't go on Rogan.
100% of the people who work in that world now think that the next person is going to have to go on Rogan.
And to go on Rogan means you're going to have to be on Rogan for three hours and you're going to have to talk about anything.
And so if you think about what that means, right, for the bar, for the person who's going to run, you know, for whatever party, you know, for both parties or any party, like that's the new bar.
You have to be able to do that.
You have to be interesting.
And then it goes right back to your question.
You have to be the person who can do that.
And if you're not the person who can do that, like.
Well, you got to, it's a big marketing deficit.
Let's just put it that way.
Like you, you just put a ceiling on your whole opportunity, I think.
The line from Succession, of course, I can't avoid, can't not use based on your question, as Shiv said, if you can't ride two elephants at the same time, what are you doing in the circus?
I would love to hear how you apply this thinking to your own work.
Ben, you mentioned earlier, or you mentioned before that, You and Mark spend a lot of time discussing how and when to respond to things publicly and also when to not say anything.
And so I'm curious what those discussions are like for you both.
How do you decide when to fight back versus stay quiet?
And maybe if there are times that you wish you did things differently.
Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting with that because anytime somebody...
says something negative about us, we want to respond.
It's just like, but you have to determine whether, like, that's going to improve your position or they're just feeding you bait to get you to basically highlight their stupid opinion.
It'll always improve your situation if I'm back.
Yeah, he always 100% wants to go back at them.
You know, you have to have some discipline.
Otherwise, you just will spend your whole life responding.
Like, the bigger you get, the more people come at you.
So, you know, it's kind of like the degenerate version is like dealing with the people who comment on Twitter.
Or X, sorry.
So if you start answering the X replies of people who have 50 followers, by the way, my father always did that.
Then, like, it's just like a colossal waste of time, and you're...
amplifying somebody who has no audience.
So like, what are you doing?
And then those people shouldn't even be talking to you.
Like they didn't do anything in life to have the right to talk to you.
But there you are talking to them and wasting your time.
So like that's the extreme degenerate case.
However, like if somebody comes out with something and it hits and it's going after you, that's actually a real opportunity to boost the brand to.
come across with your own point of view, your own position, and this could be something in the media or just, you know, something somebody does in new media, that actually turns into real opportunities.
So a lot of, you know, I would say a reasonable portion of the brand that we built was just responding to people attacking us.
So that, I always saw that every time that happened as, great, let's go.
Like one of my favorite things I ever wrote was, Instagram.
We got into like this kerfuffle over Instagram with the New York Times.
We had a conflict, whatever.
It was a thing.
But then I responded and it was like the biggest, at that time, the biggest post I ever wrote.
And everybody was like, yeah, fuck the New York Times.
And so it was, it kind of took us from here to here in one shot just because everybody loves a fight.
So fights are good for brand building.
But you've got to pick the right fight to not just build somebody else's brand.
To that end, when I, you know, picked into battles, when I first joined, I would bring up these negative tweets we were getting and say, hey, you know, these Anons are saying bad things about us.
And you guys would be like, who cares?
Like, this is, in fact, part of our success means we're going to have more and more people who are saying negative things.
Well, specifically, they were saying things based on the things that we were funding.
And they were like, you know, it's just the whole moment of the slopp.
You're funding slopp.
You're funding slopp.
It's like, bro.
Like, it's great that we're funding things.
Yes.
Like, even if you think that, what is better in this world than the transfer of wealth from people who have a lot of money to people who have ideas and want to build something?
Like, even if we're wrong about everything, like, that's still good for humanity.
So, like, shut up, you hater.
Yes.
Idiots.
Haterate.
So, yeah, and then, you know, my response was no.
That's a great thing to get criticized for as we're funding startups and supporting those startups.
That's fantastic.
There's a kind of point within that that is also kind of an important change in new media, which is you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral.
You don't want to be lukewarm because then you're uninteresting.
So you're only, you can't be interesting and not have people both hate you and love you just because there's too much, no matter what you do, there's too much jealousy and just haterate in the world to not have it be that.
Because as soon as you get big, that's what happens.
There's nobody, I used to, when people used to get upset about like things that were written about us, it's like nobody writes a puff piece on like Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or like it's never going to happen again.
Like it's over.
When you get to a certain size, people hate you.
And that's good because that means you did it.
You did something important.
You made a mark on the world.
People care about what you're doing.
And you have to take it that way.
If you take it like, oh, I got to stop doing that so people like me, you'll ruin your marketing.
Yeah.
Mark, you've sometimes said the term, they have all the right enemies.
So it's picking the right people to hate you that galvanizes the people to love you.
What about building the right...
marketing and media team in the age of new media?
What have you guys learned or what advice do you have for CEOs in terms of making sure you get the right personnel?
What's the principle you think about building that team?
Well, the first principle is if you're trained in old media, it's very, very, very hard to do new media.
So you have to be a very exceptional person to make that transition because it's like if you spent 10 years doing old media, There are laws of physics.
There are rules of the game.
There's things that you do every single time in terms of, you know, like, you know, from vetting reporters to rude Q&As to this and that.
Like, everything about it is opposite world.
And so there are very few people who can go, okay, I'm getting out of opposite world and I'm going into a new media world.
So you just have to be careful about it.
for the new media side of what you're doing to hire too much experience in not new media.
It looks like marketing, but it's not the same.
It's a completely new skill set.
So I would say, like, that's probably the thing that I'd worry about the most.
And then, you know, like with Eric, what we looked for when we brought you on, for example, is...
The best thing on new media is have you done it?
Have you kind of built some brand on something and some audience?
Do you know how to build an audience?
Because that's the core, core thing.
And if you can't do that, then, you know, it doesn't matter if you've got this skill and that skill and the other skill.
You have to be able to deliver it end to end.
Yeah.
And in terms of people we've brought on, you know, like Alex Dinko or Henry or Brent, you know, they...
They were product managers or founders or investors, but they were obsessed with the discourse.
They were listening to the podcast.
They were writing themselves.
You could tell them the proof of work, even though they weren't doing anything.
Yeah, so storytelling on your new media team, that's such a good point.
So the reason why Alex is so good is he's a world-class storyteller.
So forget, just take marketing out of it for a second.
Can you put together a story that somebody wants to read or listen to or whatever?
And that's a real skill.
And like the elite level of that is way higher than the average level of that.
And the people who can't do it, by the way, can never do it like that.
And many people from kind of old marketing world don't have that skill because, you know, you always would rely on whatever the principal, the CEO, somebody for that story.
But if you can build a team that's got multiple storytellers that are good, that's a huge power boost.
By the way, there's a really big disconnect.
It goes back to the authenticity point.
There's a really big disconnect in how people in the kind of media sort of think about this because every reporter listening to what we're saying would be like, oh, there's only two things.
There's journalism and there's propaganda.
And the mainstream press, traditional press does journalism.
And if you're doing any kind of like direct anything, it's propaganda.
And, you know, it's quote, unquote, it's just marketing.
It's just trying to, you know, kind of sell something.
And like I would say, that's a division distinction that we 100% don't agree with.
And, you know, there's a critique aspect of it, which is I don't think the press does much.
you know, what even they would describe as objective journalism anymore.
But the positive side of it is, I think it goes right back.
One of the reasons you want to be authentic is because you want to actually have people understand who you are.
You want to have people actually understand what you do.
And you want people to actually understand the context within which you're doing what you're doing.
So you want to actually explain yourself and you want to explain the world.
And like when we talk about storytelling, like it's very much not like storytelling, like a made up story.
It's storytelling of like, here's what's actually happening.
In an interesting way, with tension, with the beginning and an end, you know, that somebody is interested in falling the whole way.
Yeah, that's right.
And so as a consequence, and we really look for this, is like when, you know, when Ben and I get like stuff in the street, like when we're just like, we routinely get told like, wow, I, you know, I watched the podcast, I saw this interview, I read that post, this or that from the firm.
And 100% of the time, they're like, wow, like that was great.
I really understand what that topic is about.
Right.
And that's a very...
honest and legitimate and, you know, positive and worthwhile reaction to very honest, positive, legitimate, you know, action on our part.
And I just think, again, maybe the other way to put this is this isn't just something people should do.
This is like, I think, a responsibility for people in our world and people in tech now to do, which is like the changes that are happening.
I mean, of all times, the changes that are happening in tech right now are profound.
And they're really hard to understand from the outside and they're really complicated.
And there's huge amounts of noise in the environment.
And so actually explaining.
honestly, right, what's actually going on.
And I'll just brag on our team.
We put a SpaceX post up today, which although it has my name on it, I had nothing to do with writing.
I cannot take any credit for it.
And I mean, the feedback we're already getting is the best thing anybody's ever written on SpaceX.
And I think that's true.
And it literally is, it lays out like the actual truth.
And I'm really proud of that.
That's awesome.
I want to close with some, going deeper on some advice for founders.
on going direct.
Gabby, I'll start with you.
What are some mistakes that you see CEOs making and things to avoid?
I would say there's two mistakes that I commonly saw working with founders and they're sort of related.
The first one is it can be very easy to do this too.
It's a trap to fall into because the timeline feels so addicting, but a lot of founders really over-index on distribution and tactics before actually getting the message right.
And distribution is really just a multiplier on the message.
And so if the message is wrong, now you've amplified something that is either irrelevant for your business or not the thing that your audience needs to hear.
Or like, as we've talked about, maybe worst of all, it's uninteresting.
And now you've told everybody that you care about that you're not very interesting.
So in practice, a lot of founders would come to us and say, you know, how do we go viral?
Or how do we get on Joe Rogan?
And if you actually think about it, you could get on Joe Rogan and then not say the right thing.
And this is maybe the worst thing ever.
And this is important because it applies not just to old media, but to new media, right?
Like you could go on Bloomberg or Fox and get the message wrong.
And you could also do the same thing with new media or going direct.
And so the first mistake is not actually spending the time to get the message right.
And that's the highest leverage, most important thing to get right.
And then from there, I guess the next mistake is actually just figuring out how to do that.
And the way that I saw that is you can get the message wrong if you focus too much on the inputs as opposed to the outputs or the outcomes that you want to drive towards.
And this is sort of paradoxical because the companies that are very successful struggle with this the most because there are a lot of interesting things that you could say about your company, right?
There's like so many milestones.
The mission is really compelling.
There's like a lot of different things that you would want to say, but depending on what you're trying to achieve, the thing that you want to say should probably be different, right?
Just because everything is true doesn't mean it's all relevant or strategic for your business.
And so instead of starting with the inputs of here's this huge mess of everything that we could say, let's just say it all right now and hope people remember potentially the thing that we think is most interesting, but we haven't identified that thing.
Start with the outcome, right?
Do we want to sell to a certain type of enterprise customer?
Do we want to hire a certain type of engineer who believes a certain thing about us and our role in the market?
So now you can kind of work backwards from there.
Like we know who these people are.
We know what they believe.
We know what they probably believe or need to believe about us.
And we know what feels in the discourse urgent and timely and personal to them.
And then we can work backwards and get the message right.
And so then going back to point one, you pair that with really powerful distribution and then you have a really winning strategy.
And by the way, so a really important point in what Gabby said is that really determines how you have to put the team together because If you put together a team that you can't have a conversation with where you're listening on your message and what you're saying, then you've kind of done yourself a disservice.
You need the team to help make the story great before they go, because it's real easy to go, okay, market this empty box.
There are a few marketers who could probably do that, but it's hard.
You really want the team to be invested in the message.
And then all the variations you need to distribute that message are going to be really good and on point.
But if the team is kind of doesn't have an opinion on message, that's very difficult.
Mark, one of the things we said in that meeting with the growth portfolio company the other week was what you admire about people like, you know, Alex Karp or Palmer or Elon or others is the ability to not just focus on what they're doing, but also go outside in.
and talk about what's happening in the world and how do they situate their worldview, their company, their product, et cetera.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that principle and how do people get good at it?
Yeah, so the most kind of common VC story, self-marketing story is, oh, I met this great founder and we went on a walk and then I called him eight times and I thought he was great and I eventually convinced him to take money.
The most common startup story is, oh, we're a brand new company, we're all fired up, we're ready to go, it's going to be great, we're going to have a new product, we hope you try it.
And I mean, those stories just make you want to stab yourself in the neck, right?
I mean, like, it's just like, oh, my God.
Like, they're just the lamest story in the world.
By the way, details.
One of the keys on this is, like, good storytellers have great details.
Details matter a lot.
And so the one thing about Mark's thing that makes it, like, so horrible is, like, no details, just like, blah, blah, blah.
I'm so great.
You know, I talked to a founder.
He really liked me.
You'll probably really like me too.
Like, who cares?
And it's almost this thing where they come across as like, it's like fake humble, right?
Because it's like, oh, I'm just...
They say, I'm humbly, I'm humbled by...
That's the most fake humble thing in the world.
I'm humbled by...
You're not even remotely humbled.
And so, yeah, and so it's just the worst.
And, you know, there's a whole bunch of critiques.
It's sort of, yeah, it's fake bragging.
It's boring.
It's, you know, it's egocentric to no purpose.
And, you know, it's passive-aggressive.
And then it's just indistinguishable.
Like, there's just a thousand.
I mean, it's every single startup.
It's every single.
Everybody can gaze at their navel, right?
Everybody can do that.
Like, there's nobody who can't do that.
So that's not a...
differentiated story.
Yeah, and so that's like the default kind of narrative that people fall into.
And then it also, like, it feels, I think it actually feels like doing anything bigger than that is, like, arrogant, because it's just like, who are we to, like, go tell some bigger thing, and I don't even know what the bigger thing would be, and, like, are the people who tell a bigger thing full of themselves and trying to make themselves look even bigger?
And so there's just this, like, really reluctance to kind of expand the, you know, kind of expand the telescope out.
But what I always tell people is, like, the exact opposite of all of that is true, which is, like, the story of you and your startup is not inherently an interesting story, but there is almost certainly an interesting story that involves your startup, and that story is, and this is sort of the cheat code of it, the story is something else in the world that's happening that is incredibly interesting that your company relates to.
And then, yeah, by the way, the grand wizard of this is Alex Karp.
If you watch his interviews, he never talks about Palantir.
The only thing he ever says about Palantir, Mark pointed this out to me, is ontology and orchestration, two words that nobody knows what they mean.
And, like, nobody knows what Palantir does as a result, but it doesn't matter because it's like, you know, like, the future of the U.S.
military, Palantir.
Like, superintelligence, Palantir.
Like, whatever the story is that's, like, really good, like, Alex will go tell that story.
Neurodivergence.
I mean, like...
He's just like, whatever is interesting, he'll just start talking about.
And then because he's the founder of Palantir, the CEO of Palantir, like that just works.
And I say it like kind of to see, but like, it's really a good strategy.
Now he takes it to the very extreme, but like that's the right idea to find the most interesting story that you can.
you can plug your company into and then tell that story.
Yeah, because what happens is then when something happens, right, when something happens in the world, something happens involving the U.S.
military, AI in the military, this or that, geopolitics in China, like he's like the first phone call, right?
Because he's like, he's the guy who's like been out there talking about that.
By the way, Ryan Peterson is in the audience.
He's done a phenomenal job of that.
He's incredibly good at that.
Exactly, yes, yes, yes.
Right, the difference between talking about freight versus talking about the global supply chain is completely collapsing during COVID and we're all going to starve to death.
Right.
And then, therefore, he's the guy who literally goes in 60 minutes to explain to the world that, in fact, yes, we all are about to starve to death.
From the helicopter, right?
Yes, from the helicopter, yes.
Look at all those ships that are never landing.
Your children are about to starve.
Buy Flexport.
So it works incredibly well.
And then the other thing...
You don't even have to say by Flexport.
It just happens.
It's implicit.
It's implicit.
And then the other thing, especially for enterprise, anything involving enterprise sales, which is certainly Flexport, but also Palantir, it's just like a big part of it is, are you important enough to like meet with the CEO of your customer?
Like, are you important enough to get in the room with the decision maker?
Are you important enough to meet with the secretary of war?
Are you important enough to like be in the White House?
Are you important enough to be with Fortune 500 CEOs?
And, you know, I just, I have a, you know, I have a little startup that's doing interesting things, does not do that, but I am attached to, and you have seen me talk about, like, the big important things that are happening in the world and how they relate and that you have, you know, potentially an answer to it.
Like, that's absolute catnip.
Like, everybody wants that.
And so, yeah, so the way I describe this is just, you know, the trick kind of is, don't, everybody just naturally thinks inside out, me and my company and my product out into the world.
Don't think that way.
Think in terms of, like, what are the most interesting things happening in the world?
And then how do those things relate to us?
And by the way, this is where CEOs go off the rails because they're so focused on what they're doing that all they want to do is tell their story and they're not even paying attention to what's going on in the world, which is understandable because you're trying to build something.
But to do the marketing exercise, investing and understanding.
what's happening out there is just critically important.
You can't do it without that.
This, by the way, happens also in investor relations.
So every company, you know, every public company by law does these, you know, S1, K1, Q, whatever, Q, they do all these things and they like fully have a year, you know, spend all this time and all this effort.
And these documents, these filings fully explain everything the company does and they have every possible, you know, hedge and mea culpa and just like these incredible descriptions of people and then the annual letters.
and all this stuff.
What percentage of the investors in, you know, Palantir have read the S1, K1, right?
Like, you know, 0.0001%.
What percentage have seen Alex, you know, on YouTube doing his thing?
Yeah, exactly.
100%.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the amount of time that goes into that document, right?
And so you just take that time and just understand enough about the world to put together a good story.
On that note, we'll end with this idea that...
The skill set is not only something you're born with or not.
It can be developed and learned and cultivated.
Mark, you were saying the other day that when you look back at Alex Karp's old interviews, they're very different.
And so when you look at Alex or Palmer or Elon or Ryan or Amjad, who came here earlier, you look back at their old tweets or their old interviews, and they're nowhere close to where they were.
Oh, yeah, it's a skill set for sure.
And there are people who are gifted and then people who are less.
If you look at Donald Trump's interviews in the 80s, They're very old media interviews.
He's actually restrained.
And then, you know, like he did figure out new media and he's always like super entertaining and interesting, which is kind of the magic of his popularity.
So even like at that level, you can develop it.
Well, on that note, it's a great place to wrap.
Please give a round of applause for Gabby, Ben and Mark.
Thank you.
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