Lulu Cheng Meservey: The New Rules of Founder Comms (Encore)
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Hey everyone and welcome to Generative Now. I am Michael McNano. I am a partner at Lightspeed and this week we're revisiting one of my favorite conversations. It's one with Lulu Chang-Masurvi, founder and CEO of Rostra. Rostra is the go-to communications expert for Silicon Valley founders of companies like Ramp, SSI, Scale, Andrel, and Suno. Lulu puts founders in charge of controlling the narrative using one simple principle, go direct.

This was a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

I don't know how it happened, but I think everybody feels that they are busier than average. There's like a Dunning-Kruger effect where we all feel that we're magnificently busy, but you're probably busier than I am. I don't know. I will say that with AI, and we can just get right into it, one of the big problems with AI is actually not on the technical side. One of the big problems is societal adoption and societal acceptance. So if you're able to build the thing, that's hard and we got to do it.

But that doesn't necessarily mean people will use the thing or that the people who govern other people will let them use the thing. So I actually think that for AI, public perception, benevolent propaganda is more important than for any other technology I can think of right now, other than maybe nuclear. Maybe for me to translate that, I think what you're saying is there's more demand for

for someone like you than there was maybe in a previous wave of technology because it's so important that we land the messaging. It is important. So I would agree with you on the second part. It's super important that we absolutely land and nail the messaging. I would disagree with you on the first part of the answer being me. I think sometimes maybe the answer is me, but a lot of times the answer is me.

Not me, on me. Founders just do it themselves. So what I preach is going direct and controlling the story. And it's really important in AI because it's so esoteric and so technical that filtering it down through a bunch of people isn't going to get the job done. But it doesn't necessarily require me. In fact, one of the things that I've been saying more and more lately is...

I'm one person. Our shop is three people. We've got like a dozen clients. We're not planning to scale and people shouldn't wait for it. In fact, this is something that you can just go and do yourself. And a lot of people would honestly do a better job than having me around. So yes, we should do it. Whether it's me or not me, I'm kind of agnostic.

But I guess what I'm saying is because it's so important to communicate the value of these products, maybe in a way that wasn't as important before, there's just a greater need to understand as a founder how to do this. I would argue that products in a previous era, maybe in the mobile era, almost more marketed themselves.

Whereas I feel like now, I think what you're saying is like, we need to actually tell people how to adopt this stuff. And we maybe didn't have to do that as much previously. Yeah, if you are a founder and you don't have a strategy for getting people to adopt this and for winning over the public and for winning over regulators eventually, it's as bad as not having a product strategy.

Because you have half of a strategy. You might make the thing and there's no guarantee whatsoever that it'll ever get used. So absolutely. And then the other thing about AI is people don't understand it. It's esoteric. A lot of it is super confidential where you can't share openly. And it's incredibly...

under incredible focus by regulators right now. So there's all of these hoops that you have to jump through in order for your thing to get widely adopted. So as you say, it's very different from the era of just make something people want and then they can just use it. Yeah, I also think like founders, the founders of the current crop of

of startups are like just a little bit different than the previous crop, right? Just to get really specific. I mean, a lot of the founders that are building some of the most valuable startups right now, they're engineers, they're researchers. Yeah. You know, if you think back to like the mobile era, these are people like Brian Chesky and Travis from Uber and these people that are so sales and marketing driven, like they inherently know how to like tell the story and get on the stage and like make everyone fall in love with it.

I'm definitely noticing that a lot of these companies, like that's not a natural instinct of a lot of these founders. Are you seeing that as well? I think we are in a bit of a golden era for technical founders and it's magnificent and we need it. But yes, to the extent that many people have a dominant half of the brain, we do have a lot of founders now whose dominant half is not the one around storytelling and talking to people. I think we have a lot of people

really stellar artists building great things for society where it takes extra effort to be, um,

reading the room and talking to the room and they can totally do it. It just takes more effort. Like it takes me more effort to do the other side. And this is unusual about the era that we're in. There are people who are full-time 24 seven trying to take down AI or fight AI or hamper AI progress. There are entire institutes and nonprofits and organizations around getting AI to not succeed.

So the previous generation of founders, they had haters and doubters and all this normal stuff, but they didn't have an enormously well-funded complex of people fully vested in doing nothing but holding back their specific technology.

Yeah, totally. And like these organizations that you're mentioning or that you're alluding to, like this is actually their job. Their job is to communicate, to lobby, to advocate. They know how to speak publicly. They know how to land messages. And so I think, you know, I think to the original point, it just makes I think it makes this type of conversation.

tactics so much more important for this crop of founders. But maybe let's go even a little bit back. How did you get even here? So before this, obviously, you were Activision, Activision and Microsoft, Substack.

Like, give us the quick story. Yeah, so I tell people I don't have a lot of experience in comms, which is a true admission and also somewhat of a benefit. Like, I'm unencumbered by knowing what a press release is supposed to do. I don't know, and I never want to know. I happily live my life not finding out, and that's worked out pretty well. So I certainly have...

gaps and I'm just learning on the job. But the first time I ever got exposure to comms was maybe eight years ago, seven years ago, when I'd done, it feels like everything except comms. I'd done finance, tech, geopolitical risk, and was advising on the Alibaba IPO. The guy who was running that IPO for Jack Ma, I usually say he professionally eloped with me and we went off and started this comms firm. I'd never done comms a day in my life.

But I did want to start something new and interesting. And I was literally Googling, what is PR after being the co-founder of this comms firm, but did that for a while and then went to Substack to lead communications for them. This was in the real heat of the free speech battles of the past few years, where

And I really wanted a piece of that. So I went in there and then had joined Activision Blizzard's board when they were going through a period of turmoil and trying to get the Microsoft acquisition done.

And then went in-house full time as their CCO and head of corporate affairs. Then after the merger was complete, I ended up leaving Microsoft and starting my own firm, which is called Rastra, along with my co-founder, Sergey, and a couple other people. That's now about six or seven months old.

I actually, if you're open to it, I would love to dig into the Substack part a little bit because that was a really interesting time. I remember it very, very well. I was leading the podcasting business at Spotify after they acquired my company, Anchor. And, you know, I think we were going through a lot of those same pains. And it was really the first time that Spotify had been dealing with not just music and sort of artistry, but opinions, right?

Was it Joe Rogan? Was it the Joe Rogan stuff? Well, it was Joe Rogan, but it was not just Joe Rogan. We had millions and millions of podcasts on the platform that had just gotten there over the past couple of years. And it was during a time, I think, where...

Yeah, this was like post-COVID, you know, there were a lot of different cultural movements happening. I think people were very, yeah, unhappy with lots of different things. And I think companies, tech companies, Substack, Spotify, Meta was a big one. I think kind of like figuring out how to navigate this. And on one hand, like trying to strike the balance of, you know, creating a safe platform, avoiding liability, but also wanting to be completely open because, you

So openness, you know, besides free speech and like a right and that it's actually good for business because it leads to more content, which leads to more, you know, more consumers. So I don't know. I'd love to hear about some of that at Substack because it was probably fascinating for a startup to be going through that startup that was like becoming known for the place where anyone can sort of publish. What was that like?

It shouldn't be as controversial as it was. You know, a place where if you write something, it gets to stay written and you get to write what you want and nobody tells you what to write. It sounds so simple. Like, I understand there were things on that platform and many others that hurt people's feelings that were offensive, nasty, rude, cruel, bad.

But the principle of not having a tech CEO get to decide what the rest of us read and think, which Chris Best, as CEO of Substack, refused to do, is so sacred. It should be to all of us. It's part of the fabric of the founding of this country, and it still should remain so today. As part of the reason I went over there is I so admired and respected the principal stance that they were taking.

Inside the company, there were times as the spokesperson of the company, I would step up and say something that I knew was just going to land like a lead balloon and have days and days. I remember coming back from, at the time, coming back from a maternity leave. There was one night where the baby was sleeping actually pretty well at that point, but I was up because I was just getting floods of angry messages about you have blood on your hands and how dare you people allow this thing and that thing.

It's really unpleasant and stressful. But if you can maintain internal morale and esprit de corps and a sense of we're doing the right thing and the world doesn't understand it yet, you can withstand just about everything. And this is the same with Anderle in the early days of...

of working with the military being wildly unpopular in Silicon Valley, there was no angst inside the company about, are we doing the right thing? And let's have a listening session. We need to talk it out. People knew they were doing the right thing. And in fact, it helped morale knowing that the world didn't understand it yet and we're going to show it to them. It put a chip on everybody's shoulder. Coinbase has been through the same thing, many other companies.

Yeah, I think this is a really important point. And I hadn't even thought about, you know, your role in this must have been really, really critical, probably helping navigate internal comms as well as external comms. I think it's really important. I've always felt this way as a former founder, like to have a mission, like you need to have a mission that the entire company gets rallied around and aligned behind because that mission will guide you not only through moments like these where like maybe people outside the company are trying to take you down, but also like

the times where maybe the business metrics aren't looking so great right or like maybe like you said employee morale is kind of low you know the mission is kind of what drives you to do the really really hard things in my experience and i think like that is becoming

like at a time where there's such a frenzy, there's so much capital, there's so much opportunity on the table. I think it's easy to like skip over that part and just be like, oh, we have a huge opportunity to, you know, generate billions of dollars. Like, is that something you're helping companies with? Like helping them think through internal stuff as well and internal comms and mission? Yeah, internal comms is way more important than external comms. Yeah. And I've said this a lot, which is external comms,

It's important and an external crisis is inconvenient, but an internal crisis is existential. When you see companies fall apart and unravel and CEOs get unseated, it's because of internal crises, not external. And so internal should always come first. Even if you're not in a crisis, just everyday kind of small announcements. Tell your employees before you tell the world they deserve it. They've signed up.

to join you on this crazy ride. They've left whatever Google compensation package on the table to come with you. They deserve to be on the inside and to treat them as such. I will say with a mission, a lot of companies get mission wrong where they'll say, we're mission driven, we're mission driven. And then the mission is some generic, universally popular pablum. Like we're going to bring joy to the world and make it a better place. That's...

First of all, it's saying nothing, so it's not memorable. But the second thing is the purpose of a mission is to attract the right people and filter out the wrong people.

and you want to start an employee revolt or employee FUD, you want to stop it before it even starts, and that starts with the filtering process, your mission is the filter. And if your mission is a nothing that no one would possibly disagree with, then the filter breaks down. And then you have people on the inside of the company who are ticking time bombs where one day they'll become disenchanted and they'll become a huge pain in your ass. So with Substack, for example,

Part of the reason that people held strong, even during really stressful times, one is Substack employees are just based and amazing. And they are mission driven. But two is the company's mission was so strong and they had proven it. What was it? The company's mission is to free your mind. So it's basically for you to own what you're able to say and own your audience. And...

in doing so bring more culture and more expression into the world. And people who went to go work there wanted that. And people who didn't like it or thought it was icky that you weren't censoring enough just would never go work there in the first place. Just wouldn't go there. Yeah. What are some other, like, what's another example of a good mission versus a bad one versus like a fluffy bullshit one? A bad one was when we work in,

said that their mission was to elevate the world's consciousness. And I have a friend who at the time was pretty senior at WeWork and we were having a picnic with our kids and she found out about the rebrand and decided to resign on the spot. Or she read about the new mission and a red flag went up and she decided that was the time to...

And the reason that was bad just to dig into it tactically, one is it's disconnected from what the company is actually doing. So you can't buy it. It's a shared office based startup and it's going to elevate the world's consciousness. So already it's not believable and doesn't make sense. And then two is just so bad.

lofty and generic that it doesn't mean anything. A good mission, I'm biased. I think Substack has a good mission. Ramp's mission is very good because it's clear and it's not trying to be something it's not. Save customers time and money. That's what we do. If you're into doing that,

This is the place you should be. Come join this company. Yeah, they could have pulled a WeWork and said, you know, by providing better B2B SaaS, we're elevating the world's consciousness. But they're just like, we save time and money. It's important. It fosters the startup ecosystem. It helps small companies go into big companies. It lifts the economy. That's the way in which it matters. It's not some made up thing. Got it. Or for scale, it is accelerate. It's to accelerate AI by removing the bottleneck around data. Like very clear, like, yes, accelerating AI is very lofty.

But there's a specific way that they're trying to do it. They're not competing with NVIDIA. They're not competing with OpenAI or their customers. Like, this is their lane. Yeah. Should it be quantified or, like, measurable? Or actually, should it be so ambitious that, like, you can almost never reach it? Because then you're just going to keep going. Yeah, keep going. We're not going to stop. Yeah. I think it's an aim for the moon, land among the stars. You don't want your mission to become outdated, right?

So it should be aspirational enough that even if you achieve it, there's more to do. So for example, SpaceX to make humanity a multi-planetary species and to get to Mars,

I am so bullish. I think we will be on Mars quite soon. But even so, there's other stuff involved on making us viable as a species on Mars. And so it's not like the company then shuts down. There's more to do. That is literally the perfect example of aim for the moon. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so...

So Rostra's Go Direct manifesto, going back to the original need for this and why it's so important now. Tell us about this manifesto and why you believe it so strongly and why this is the way. And we'll get into the other way as well. I have questions about why we shouldn't do things a certain way. But I would love to just hear it in your own words. Yeah. This is the way for founder-led companies.

If the company is not led by the original founder, I don't know if this is the way or if it'll work. So that's the reason that Rostra only works with founders and only works with founder-led companies. I think it's possible to succeed with a professional CEO like Microsoft is doing quite well, but I don't think that is the norm or the default. Whereas with a founder-led company, they'll be more willing to take risks.

They'll be more willing to put their own reputation on the line. They'll be more willing to take a bullet for the company. I asked Dylan Field once if he would take a literal bullet for the company. And the only reason he thought about it was to consider where on his body the bullet should go. There's zero hesitation. He sort of looked around. He's like, yeah, like probably here. But like, no. And I think he was literal about it. So four founder led companies.

You're bringing something new into the world that doesn't exist yet. So you have some secret knowledge that nobody else knows about right now. And the reification of that secret knowledge is going to be the growth of this enterprise that you're building. So in order for you to get the world on board, not even the whole world, just the parts of it that you need, that your people, you have to find them and track them to you and build a movement around this change that you want to see.

In order for that to happen, you have to be able to articulate in your own words, the conviction you have, the passion you have, the insight you have, whatever special knowledge you have, whatever special idea you have. And inevitably, people will say you're a moron and it makes no sense and you're insane and you're going to have to defend that. And so the more you filter it through third parties, a couple of things happen. One is your message regresses to the mean.

You're telling it to someone whose job is to do press releases and they've done 80,000 before. They're going to use their template from the last 50 press releases and plug your stuff into it like a Mad Libs and you're going to sound like the last 50 companies they worked with. And then secondly...

The person is not going to have your level of conviction or passion or belief or insight. So they're not going to be able to advocate for it on offense, and they're not going to be able to defend it on defense the way that you can. And then thirdly, just on principle, don't be a coward. You're going to potentially be embarrassed. You're going to get haters. You're going to get dunked on. That's part of this journey of you fighting for the company, because if you're not going to lend your own credibility for the company, who else should do that?

And so I actually think that part of being a founder is being willing to take the bullets, whether they're real or reputational, hopefully just reputational for the company. Yeah. And it probably makes, you know, going back to the conversation about the mission, like it actually probably strengthens that mission, right? When the founder like does put themselves out there and takes the metaphorical bullet, you know, the rest of the team sees that and they're like, oh,

This person's for real. Like, we're actually doing this. Yeah. Well, at the beginning, there is no rest of the team, right? At the beginning, it's you against the world or y'all against the world. And you have to recruit the rest of the team. And you've got potentially no product. At some point, maybe no money, no customers, no well-recognized brand. And again, you're asking someone who's really talented to leave behind their job offers at a fang company or a

Cisco or whatever, and come join you instead. And they're going to have to do it on the strength of your word and your conviction. They're just going to have to look you in the eyes and think this person can pull it off and I'm going to throw my lot in with them because you have nothing to prove. In the trust but verify framework, they cannot verify because there's nothing to verify. So if you can't

As a founder, if you can't express what that idea is in a way that resonates with other people, and if you can't get outside of your own head to explain it to someone who's not you,

in very few words, then you're not going to be able to build a team. You're not going to be able to raise money. You're not going to be able to get your early customers. And in that first kind of primordial soup phase of a company, when the founder is doing everything, you're not going to be able to do almost every job that you have to do. Yeah. So in this strategy, is there even a role for traditional press and PR? Like,

Or am I just doing everything from my ex account, you know, from my company's blog posts, going on podcasts? Like, do I utilize traditional channels at all? Yeah, there's a role for it. I mean, it depends on the company. So if you're selling to government, for example, there's a bigger role.

But I say generally there's a role for advisors and for help. So taking accountability and being the leader doesn't mean you have to do it alone. Like, for example, a technical founder has to know how their product works and maybe they build V1, but they're not going to be able to scale the company if they have to be fixing every bug personally or if they have to be doing every pull request personally or like making every change in the product. It's just not viable. And the same with comms.

As you have to do more, you know, you go from having one-on-one conversations to persuade someone to join the company, which is all you. But as you're dealing with more outbound and incoming product comms and policy comms, you can't personally do all of it. So you should have people to help you and you should have advisors, even for going direct.

Now, I work in a way where we don't want the founder to depend on me. I'm trying to impart and give knowledge so that if I get hit by a bus or whatever, then they can go on without me. But there's a place for people to be a sounding board for ideas and guidance for you.

And then same with traditional comms, by the way, as there's a place for media, but it can't be your whole strategy. Like if your entire strategy is I'm going to be so much of a supplicant to professional reporters that I'll beg them enough to take my story and then refract it through their worldview and then run it by their editor and then put it into the section of their paper that makes sense. You don't have a story, right? You need to be able to have your own unfiltered version of it.

So what is a reason that somebody would try to get a story published in a more traditional outlet? So working backwards, the purpose of all comms is to persuade people to do things by convincing them that certain things are true. So if you are, let's take, well, name a company and I'll give you the example.

Andrel. Okay, so if you're Andrel and you're trying to persuade the military, let's say the Air Force-

to buy the new thing that you're making, then first you have to understand who are the people in the Air Force who make that decision. And then you have to understand they will make that decision only if they believe the following things. Now, the goal of the calm strategy is to get those people to believe those things. That's it. Everything outside of that is wasted motion and a distraction or counterproductive. So the first thing is just know what to focus on. The entire calm strategy in this case is get these 10 people

to believe these three things. In order to get anyone to believe anything, they have to hear the actual message and the message has to be good, but it has to show up in a place where they actually get their information. So a common example I use is people might be talking to readers of Guern or users of Hacker News or listeners of DoorCash,

but instead they're going on an NPR podcast. And you might as well have not done that at all. Now, I love AI founders and I like chatting with you. And so we're doing this podcast. But if it were, I don't know, say some random podcast that had

a thousand X more listeners than you have. It still would not be useful for me to go on that instead, because who are those people? Who are these thousands of people? I don't know who I'm reaching. In the case where your audience is getting their news from press, so procurement officers in the Air Force are much more likely to be reading Washington Post than engineers you're trying to recruit in Silicon Valley. In that case, show up in the Washington Post.

What I really like about this is I think a lot of founders view press as a marketing strategy and as an opportunity for distribution. What I like about what you're saying is, no, no, no. Pick out the exact specific people that you need to persuade and think of press as just one tool for persuading those people. And through this lens...

You might, again, like I think for your point, you might settle for a blog or a podcast that is a very, very, very tiny niche audience as long as it reaches those specific people you're trying to connect with.

rather than just sort of like this blast, spray and pray approach, which again, I think most startups do take with press, simply to try to like grow, which personally, like I don't really think works. I don't think it's worked in a while, if ever, maybe like a decade ago. I really, really like that because what you're saying is like very strategic.

Yeah. Do you ever hear from startups where they'll get this big article in the New York Times or something and then they're confused because it didn't do anything for them? Like I've heard from startups where they'll go on Good Morning America and there's this huge viewership and then their website has no spike in traffic whatsoever. So it's really about working backwards. You are reverse engineering how to get the opinions

into the heads of the people who are going to take the actions that you need for your business to grow. So for Enderal, sometimes being in traditional press makes a ton of sense. For Antimetal and mailing pizzas to people or dropping off pizzas, that actually is a much more effective way to get the attention of the VCs and engineers and the people that he sent the pizzas to. Yeah, makes total sense.

So one of the things that you've been doing on your X account, which I really like, and I've heard other people do as well, is you've been sort of critiquing, you know, calm strategies or, you know, the approach that a company will take when they have a big announcement. You know what I'm talking about? What do you call these things? Do you have a name for this yet? Have you branded this? In my head, I call it a breakdown or an action report. Okay.

Okay. All right. So I would love to do some live Lulu breakdowns, Lulu after action reports right here on the podcast if you're open to it. I'm down. All right. So let's talk about Tesla. Tesla had a big event recently. It was called WeRobot where they unveiled the new robo cabs or I don't know what they're calling them, robo taxis.

They unveiled like a bus, a new type of like robo bus, and they unveiled sort of the next iteration of their humanoid robots. I was actually at the event. It was super cool. Very, very like huge spectacle. They had drones flying around doing, you know, light shows and stuff.

But a lot of the chatter on the internet was around how some of this stuff felt really staged. And having been there, I can say, yeah, like I think some of the robots looked like programs, like the dancers. I think that was just, that was happening and they were dancing. But then some other things like the bartenders, you know, you got a sense that maybe there was a person in another room controlling it, which by the way, they were still impressive to be clear. But this created a very...

diverse reaction of opinions on the internet. And so, yeah, Lulu, hit us with the after action report. With an unveil or a big moment like this, you always want...

to have people's excitement go from here to here and not the other way around. So peak Tesla marketing, when they did this really well, was the Cybertruck ad where it's racing, it was a Porsche, it was racing a Porsche, and then the Cybertruck wins. And then as it's crossing the line, you see it's towing another Porsche and it's still won. And that was like,

the whole thing is already freaking cool. And then it just gets even more rad. And then it crosses the line and then it goes up to here. And that's exactly how you want to do it. The event, I think it was awesome. I'm so bullish on this stuff. Really well done. Congrats to the team.

However, they reversed the order where it was like, you're there and the live event is happening and there's this much hype. And then later as the details come out, the hype drops to here. And then you leave people with the trajectory going in the wrong direction. And this was sort of the trajectory of the stock as well. And what they could have done is...

that the robots are in this state right now and here's what we're working on and here's what to expect from us in the future and then have the robots in some way outperform what... Oh, that's interesting. Right, and have the robots do something unexpected. So, for example, if they were to say,

Right now, the robots are going to be serving you drinks. And at the moment, there's a person in the loop here. A year from now, you'll see it without the person in the loop. This is a preview for you to see the movement and the stability of it. And then if they were to bring out the robots dancing and say, by the way, that part was fully them, there's no person. Then you at least go from here to, oh, it's more impressive than I thought, and then reverse the trajectory. So I thought that would be the biggest critique of the event.

Yeah, that's actually a really good idea because to be clear, and like I said, the event was awesome and the movements were incredible. I mean, these things like you can definitely see one of these things being in your home. Like you're like, oh man, that could do my dishes. It could, you know, vacuum the floor. And so even just that, like unveiling new movements and new like physical capabilities, totally agree, mind-blowing. Right.

Right. You can tell people by which metric to evaluate you. So if you're saying this is the future, the future is here, here's robots, then people are picturing the most perfect robot possible. And then they're docking points for every movement or every action or every capability that your robot can't perform.

Whereas if you tell them, here's the baseline for robots, up until this point, they've been herky-jerky, they haven't been dexterous, whatever. And we're pushing it to here where now they're able to do these things. And then you give people a surprise on top of that. People are always left wondering what else could possibly do. You're changing the metrics and the baseline so that you're overperforming. Example of this actually is from Alibaba from a long time ago before they went public.

they decided to make their metric GMV. Like there's a lot of ways to evaluate the success of a company. And for them, they said, we're an e-commerce company. You're going to measure us on GMV, the value of the merchandise sold on the platform, this best metric for us. And then they just told people how to measure them. And then they did. Even years later, analysts would use that metric to see if Alibaba is doing well. And they got to choose that. So as a new startup, you...

to some extent get to choose what metrics people measure you by and they could have laid that out more clearly. We did this for Anchor and it worked. It wasn't like some grand strategy. And I wish I knew you back then because it probably would have been even more effective. But this is what we did with Anchor. We said, we decided that the important metric for us was the percent of all new podcasts in the world powered by Anchor. And we told people that

And it made it important. It made it important for the, oh, that's how they're measuring progress. And as long as that number keeps going up, they're making progress. That's really, really interesting. That's great. Because if you hadn't said that, people might have looked at overall total, compared you to the much larger players and say that you're behind or whatever, but you've given them the metric. And so I think that's a big thing for Tesla. Elon has so many haters and detractors that the last thing you need to be doing is giving them fuel to say, I told you so. This guy doesn't keep his

promises, he's tricking you. And with them, trust in the CEO is more important than it is for a lot of other companies because it's so aspirational and because this guy is so well-known and so polarizing that anything you can do to tell them, these are the metrics, here's the baseline, and then outperform that, you'll help yourself.

So the opposite of this, which maybe wasn't planned, well, I know it was the objective, but I don't think they realized this would happen, was the SpaceX launch, right? And nobody knew that that was actually going to happen on the first try. And then it did. Then they caught the rocket. And I think to your point, everyone's expectations just keep getting, we're getting higher and higher in a good way.

And lo and behold, people are celebrating this as one of the greatest accomplishments in humanity. It is. Which it is. It truly is.

And there's previous videos of Elon saying, I don't know if this is going to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably won't. This is insane. Whatever. We're going to try it anyway. Let's just try. And then when it does work, number one, it makes it look that much more incredible, which it was. And then number two, in retrospect, when you look at those videos afterwards, you realize just how much of an accomplishment it was, even for the team that was working on it. It wasn't just a surprise for us.

So the robo-taxi event version of that would have been to say, watch, we're going to land this thing on the little chopsticks with the hook. Like, watch for it. We think it's going to happen. And then, well, in this case, it happened. But if it had not, then people would have said that the mission was a failure, even if it hit so many other milestones. Yeah, that's really, really cool. That makes sense. What about Apple? So Apple is one I've been thinking a lot about in terms of

I have the new phone, the 16. They announced this forever ago. They announced iOS 18 forever ago. They're really touting Apple intelligence, their own AI, their own models. This phone doesn't even have it yet. And literally on the box, it says, "Featuring Apple intelligence." That feels like a letdown, right? Yeah. It's a little different when you're a public company.

Because your shareholders and the institutional investors and there's just a lot of pressure from different directions. So for Tesla, there is that pressure. For SpaceX, they have the liberty of not having to worry about it. But for a public company, there's tremendous pressure to be like, what are you doing with AI? And when's the next big thing? And that can...

unfortunately restrict your range of options or force you into something. With Apple, one thing I'll say is I don't know enough about their strategy there. I would never count them out. But one thing I have noticed is a lot of smaller startups try to LARP as Apple, where Apple does these big unveils and Apple has these media days and Apple keeps things under wraps and then comes out all of a sudden with a bang and never says anything in advance of it. And we're going to do the exact same thing. Well,

maybe that works for you, maybe not. But the fact that it worked for Apple is actually not an indicator of whether it worked for you at all. Like consider these uncorrelated events where it worked for Apple and it may or may not work for you, totally independent of whether it worked for one of the largest iconic brands in the world that's a household name. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I am thinking a lot about them right now because it does feel like everyone naturally has such high expectations for Apple because they're Apple, right? Yeah.

But they're also clearly playing from behind right now. And none of us really know if they're going to meet the expectations we typically have for them or let us down. And so I just have to imagine from a calm standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, it's going to be really, really hard right now to walk that line.

And I don't know what I would do if I were in their shoes. Yeah. But it's good for all of the companies that are smaller than Apple, which is the vast majority of companies, because you get to outperform and you get to come from behind. Everybody loves an underdog story anyway. And so being able to just move with speed and have the founder out there talking about what you're doing is an advantage that smaller startups, again, smaller than Apple, which is a lot of people, should be fully exploiting. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

how have you felt about all the excitement um around you know speaking of robotics and automation around waymo um have you ridden in a waymo and like how did you feel about that matched with everything you've seen online my last waymo ride my co-founder sergey and i got stuck

And we got stuck in this like Bermuda Triangle for Waymos because then another Waymo pulled up and also got stuck. And we were just a little island of stuck Waymos and we got out and had to walk. So the recency bias isn't helping me. But overall, I think Waymo is still way underrated. Like they have had a fleet of working mostly robo taxis.

for years now, and they haven't talked about it as much as I would think, frankly. But the other thing too is there's a saying that pioneers get the arrow, settlers get the land. And so if you're the first to do something, you can bear the brunt of the regulatory scrutiny where one

accident or even perceived accident or even minor traffic jam, like the kind of thing that human drivers do every day all the time is 100x. I actually think the data says about 100x more impactful on our collective psyche. So I can also see the reasons for them to want to be more under the radar as they grow. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about meta. Yeah.

Let's get the Lulu breakdown on meta. There are a bunch of things to talk about here. Orion, Llama. But maybe we could just talk about based Zuck and the Zuck makeover. And I mean, it does seem to be coinciding with a lot of new innovations from the company, stock price,

what's going on here? Who's in charge of the strategy? And like, break it down for us. Yeah. Well, first, there's a symbiotic relationship between the founder and the company, right? Where if the company is doing better, the founder has more mojo. And if the founder is more swaggy and confident, the company is seen in a better light and it's easier to recruit and it becomes this positive feedback loop.

You can also get a positive feedback loop going in a bad direction. So a negative positive feedback loop where the company is under crisis. So the founder goes into hiding and then the founder loses status and becomes harder to recruit. And the company goes into a funk because teams lose candidates.

So Meta has clearly been on a fantastic positive feedback loop for the past couple of years. And I think it's a couple of things. One is that reinforcing effect of the company doing really well. Two is I think Mark Zuckerberg is finding his own instincts and learning to trust his own instincts and his real personality. People who know him well say that he's always been this way, including being cheeky and pissing people off at times. But this is his personality. It's coming out and people are embracing it.

It almost, now you would never do this intentionally, but the fact that he was CorpoBot 10,000 for many years actually helps because that was so unappealing to a lot of people that to see this. Lower expectations. Yes, exactly. He started here, he came from here. Whereas if he had come from here to here, it'd be less of a stunning improvement. And so one is just, he's found his own

and personality and become more confident and expressing that too is I think he does have a better team around him now than he did in years past. Part of that is through his own confidence where he has attracted people who are able to work with him better. But the team that he has around him right now, which there is a team and they do deserve some credit, is much better than the

I don't know, nannies and hall monitors that seem to be roaming the halls of Facebook in prior years. And the one thing I would watch out for is sometimes you can get

sycophants around you or people just glazing you too much. And then it becomes really hard to know when you're overdoing it. It's a little bit like audience capture where a blogger writes a certain post, you know, wokeness has gone too far and everyone's like, yes, base, tell them. And then you're like, yeah, I'm going to do more posts like this. This is great. It's possible to

wear one chain and everyone loves the chain. And then you get a thicker chain. And before you know it, you have a 40 inch chain. Yes. Uh, so, so I don't think that we've reached that point, but that is a thing that is totally, um, liable to happen to founders. And it's just hard to know when you're hitting that point, but if people around you aren't telling you, so it's something just to watch out for. I'm sure his team is being mindful of it, but yes. Um,

big turnaround and a lot of it is driven by him personally. Well, I do think there's probably a little bit of a risk in that though, right? I mean, is it a problem when the person almost becomes like more newsworthy than the actual brand and company? Because then you're like, I feel like then there's sort of consolidated risk in this human being. And like,

Humans are unpredictable, right? And they become uncool over time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's also consolidated upside. So think of it as investing in a single stock versus a basket. If you're investing in a single stock and that stock happens to be Tesla or it's a great stock, then you will way outperform the market. And if it's a bad stock, then you'll way underperform. And the risk hedging strategy is to invest in like the S&P 500. Yeah.

So if you're a founder-led company, then you're more like the single stock where the founder is the single stock investment that determines the trajectory of the company and the reputation of the company. If you've got a great founder, they can really lift up the company. So for example, Stripe gets a lot of alpha from the Collisons being the founders. Like if you just stuck in a couple random business school graduates who are very clever and professional and great managers, you're

that company would not have the same A-line and recruiting magnetism as it does today, truly, because of those two people carry within them alpha to outperform where Stripe would otherwise be. And Palmer is the same way for Enderal. Alex Wang, the same way for Scale. Our friend Mikey with Suno, like a random person replacing Mikey wouldn't have the same effect.

But it can also obviously go the other way. So I think it really depends on if you have a great founder who is principled and trustworthy and strong and has a vision, you want to bet on that person and you actually want that person's reputation to be the reputation of the company.

So if investing in an individual is like investing in the stock market, has Zuck peaked? Is it time to divest from Zuck's brand as a strategy? Should Meta back away from that? He's too based at this point.

The risk is if you get him to back away from it, that means you have reentered the professional advisors driving the bus mode. And that's just not a good mode. So you got to keep going. Yeah. Like founder jumping the shark, overkill, making mistakes, being occasionally cringe is.

is still better than baseline safe and boring all the time. Like people will ask me, hey, you advocate for going direct, but look at Elon, he gets into so much trouble and all this controversy and there's all this downside of going direct. But if you look at it as a package,

Elon, with the screw-ups and with the controversy and all the distractions and the SEC investigation, all of that as a package is still so much better than an unknown, safe, behind-the-scenes founder. Because you're looking at the downsides, but then the upsides, he has leverage. He has the ability to correct stories when he needs to. He has recruiting ability like none other. I mean, Tesla and SpaceX, the whole like...

Elon family of companies ability to attract talent is insane. And it's because people want to work for Elon. It's the same as Andrew. People want to work for Palmer and for Brian and the founders. And now they have really impressive executives too, but like those are the people that attract. And if you were to take that away and have them go quiet, yeah, you would save yourself the occasional gaffe and embarrassment, but you would also lose all of this enormous upside. I would never make that trade.

Lulu, this was awesome. As I predicted, it would be. Thank you so much. I learned a ton. I'm sure the audience did as well. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to Generative Now. If you liked what you heard, please do us a favor and rate and review the podcast. That really does help. And of course, subscribe so you get notified every time we drop new episodes. If you want to learn more, follow Lightspeed at Lightspeed VP on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn. Generative Now is produced by Lightspeed in partnership with Pod People. I'm Michael McNano, and we will be back next week. See you then.