10 Rules Every Founder Should Know: Inside Anduril’s Secret Comms Strategy w/ Lulu Cheng Meservey and Trae Stepens
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Review comes strategically. What is the story we want people to know about? Andre.

the people who decided not to work at Andrea, are people who absolutely shouldn't work there. And it's awesome that they don't work there. And today, the company is Better because of who doesn't work there.

When you join andre, you're signing up to build weapons. Everyone's on the same page. And that makes our whole home strategy much easier.

So much more now of the grounds well of people who are fed up of unfair attacks every time they attack you. IT should be unpleasant for them, and they should not want to do IT. IT should create the opposite of job security for them.

IT should create the opposite of proceed for them. You want to be the next day. You want to be the next power tray. Brian mat like that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself, drew, that in order to push your story out into the world.

All right, we've got a special podcast today. I ve got to my favorite people here. I am going to start with tray, my good friend, you guys.

I've seen him before on the podcast. He is a partner of downers fun, a cofounder of ordinal, a defense technology company. Um that we are all extremely excited about and have had the great pleasure of kind of washing from the ground floor. It's been super exciting. One big piece of that that um one huge piece of that I think that we just almost never talk about and not just an underworld but in tech generally is comes and so we also have here today making your grandpa wires ab luu is ervy luis someone um who I followed for a few years now? I think IT was covered when they like awful summer of cove IT whenever was shoved in a clubhouse chat room and um i've been following instance is a few years on going on four years now and he has occupied a very ous interesting place in the discourse where he is talking to founders about really like comes in a .

hostile a .

uniquely hostile moment for tech when the press never been more hostile. I think that lu is the person now today that found is call in the in the crisis or about to release some really important product.

I think that he is definitely the person you should be falling on twitter if you're interested in comes generally and she's founder herself, which means that all three of us have something in common, these special health that is starting companies um but then they were really going to focus the come space and a lot of IT is going to hang on this peace that we published in the rewires uh and that is inside anders calm strategy, ten rules for mission driven founders. This is going to be a kind of complementary piece to that. We're going to go over the ten rules.

But um you really should check that piece out for the for the for the fall break down. This is game more like sort of the highlights and um I an an overview plus the highlights, things that I find interesting in the things that I sort really was curious about expanding on uh and I just want to get to IT. I want to talk about the early days of Andrew and I want to talk about comes and I want to talk about how you guys should be building your comes team um with two people who just sort of saw one of I think the the Better examples of of a successful comm strategy for an early stage start up that was really just kind of like totally underseas by the press.

Before I get started with all that, did I miss anything that I anything wrong? Um you want to add anything, you want to copy my outfit. I would accept any of those things.

I'll complement your outfit and .

writing later. Thank you.

Classic um so that so that you don't have anything to say about my offit.

I mean, you're shoe that's very present in the video .

frame is something else .

I want to my little later yes.

Ah okay, let's break IT down. Um I wanted you guys to take me just before we get into all the rules and sort of navigating the moment, take me back to the beginning like what was being built. This may be, start with tray for this sort of setting, the setting the ground floor here, what was being built and what was the broader sort of tech terrain at the time? Like what was your goal and and what was kind of happening in the valley of that time?

Yeah you know when I joined founder on in two thousand and fourteen um not knowing anything about ventura capital, I started looking at the national security space to see if there was kind of A V two pale teer spaces um kind of liniers out there in the community are Operating um and I meet with hundreds of companies.

Was surprised to find that there wasn't really a next pillon teer spx a wasn't really a whole stuff going on um and so uh with a bunch of people in the founder, some team with a bunch of of my uh former colleagues at balentien and also with former lucky who was the inventor of oculus, we were kind of brain forming what a nationally defense technology company might look like and um to my surprise, the fan team can encourage me go and try to build this crazy company you unlike today where there's you know hundreds of people that are trying to build in like critical strategic industries or defense more specifically um we were kind of you know out there by ourselves Operating and so when we went and started talking to venture funds, um you know they didn't really have any idea what bucket to even put this in. Um a lot of the lp agreements that they had with their investors prohibited investing and defense technologies. And so we were kind of in this weird window where IT was interesting but very, very unique. And so part of the chAllenge for us earlier was communicating to the world why we thought this was important. Um and you know we were in this transition period as a country where we had gone from um you know fifteen years of counter insurgency and counter terrorist Operations um against essentially like rogue states and terrorist organizations um and we were transitioning to this world, which we are starting to think more about great, great power conflict um and so from a timing perspective, I think we like really hit IT in an interesting window but the the story telling part of this was really important because people maybe hadn't fully mentally shifted to that that method process.

right? So there are a handful of maybe problems that you're facing when IT comes to comes right away. And it's A I don't want to see trouble, but there are question in surrounding like how that story is playing when IT comes to raising, possibly when IT comes to hiring and when IT comes to maybe selling to the government, is that may be correctly identifying the things that you guys are thinking about. When you're thinking about comes yeah.

yeah, that's right. There's a bunch different audiences that you want to speak to at first. These audiences were definitely the critical ones.

Like what do the people that are buying our products think about us? And what do you potential recruits in the market think about us? You can going to like break down the market of potential recruits for Andrew and a Normal dirigible. Just anything else where you have like on the one side, like all of these really patriotic people that if they're not already working for plentier SpaceX, maybe they did in the past um and that crew was very easy to communicate with. Um it's not a giant you know chunk of of engineers, but there are like a noble set of people that really want to work in national security is easier to recruit them.

And then you know the people on the other side that are like they're never going to work on na security, these are like the activists that google that are protesting project may be in whatever and like we really don't need to communicate to them at all. You're never know when them over. But in the bulk of those people are in the middle of that gosh curve that it's like the people that could probably be convinced that this is worth doing. But you need to tell them why you need to tell like you need to explain the problem to them. You need to explain how we're thinking about ethics um and that was something that lulu h in our team, uh, did a awesome job of helping us think through and getting the messaging out that we needed to get out to lay the groundwork for what turning into like a big industry around defense sec that all started from that early communication strategy at android.

yes. Before we get into the strategy, your company strategy and how you were talking about IT, how do you think about the problem is kind of tray kind of roughly summarized IT as as you remember IT or when you kind of first looked under the hood to speak.

what did you see? okay. Well, so three things that i've probably should set up front a long time. How stunning your up IT looks is number one fray was basically running and conspiratorial and still kind of is um and and palmer brian, a lot of um a lot of other people but primarily the group of founders like I got to help um shane prior who runs cons today is amazing but the reason all of this works is because the founders are in the middle of like when and it's not always glamorous like when people want somebody to yell at, they go yell at tray.

And so this is happening because trade palmer, those guys are willing to step up and on IT and that makes a big, big difference. And I think we will touch more on that leader. But that's number one is like they're running the constraint gy.

And number two right now, defense take a super hot, uh, I think trace right has caught at a great time that could stopping the case any time. Uh, and so the beauty of what we're talking about is these are things that are true regardless whether the thing you're doing is popular or not. Um the fact that defensive was not popular and now is has not changed.

Uh and just come strategy and palmers says we could wake up to and something has happened in the world that makes defense that no longer the cool thing but we're going to keep going. So that's the second thing to know. And then the third thing is um try you said at the time you were looking for the export or the next talent here.

There are so many companies now they want to be the next end of like founders come to me, they want to be the next end or or they want to be the next trade, palmer, brian, whatever. And you don't get to that place without going through what you guys went through the early days. And I think um I hope that we can talk about that a little bit.

Just IT wasn't fine. People were mean to tray. People were meaning to all the guys. I got kicked out of the uber, but that's David .

I had over on my list of things to talk about .

I what I about IT I I want to talk about this.

I mean this for me when you talk about the comes problem that you're facing. Um I think that you guys are maybe I would love to hear a little more about that moment. I mean, there's like the google mavy of IT all and there is the uber store. Just tell tell the uber story. I want to to .

do our story OK. So try to know this at the time. I think you and palmer found out, like six years later, when I wrote the peace.

But IT was after we had done, I don't know, we had done a day of demo s or something. And I was going back to the airport. I taking in uber to L X.

And I called josh on the phone as saying, it's so called, be up here with these guys like attack is really working. We could see IT is helping, I think I said border agents, something. The uber driver got super weird.

He hit his phone and pretended that the navigation didn't work, and then he told me to turn off my phone, which, when someone gets weird, you to want to to turn off your phone. And then he pulled off the highway on the next exit, and you made me get out. He said, I can't be around people like you. So like I just my luggage and got out of the uber on the side of a highway and called the new one. And that was, you know, a certain symptomatic, and I don't know, you know, this one trade, but I emailed I think you know who this is, but I emailed um a very high profile defend slash technology writer to meet with you because you guys would have gotten along great and he wouldn't because you were too close to palmer and he hated palmer and then he stopped talking to me for suggestion that he meet with you uh so IT was IT was really ugly oh and an actor at your birthday party a live guilt and he said I could share the publicly um but he said that when he invested in you guys he would get all of these angry text messages and he got one that said he he made a fascist investment because of supporting .

angle the the cultural moment was uniquely hostile to anything that was contrary at that moment when you guys were founding the company. And then within that, like anything that would have been a little bit weird would have been controversial. Palmer had just gone through a whole thing at facebook where um mean people just were really hostile to him based on very overly like, and I would say like common political beliefs. And then you guys are building a defense technology company and defense is it's it's a war, its military.

I was actually just talking to someone who works at google um who in google is kind of like, uh, you have to interview for the teams that you want to sort of like move to and he was in the process of this and he's himself his former military and the interviews all went really well until that came out that kind of stopped and then a few months later while drinking um there are a bar group make group thing and someone is relate casually to him like a man we really love you. But I just I couldn't get into the whole military thing. Um there really is that kind of a bias.

And that bias exists really. I don't want I don't want to judge the entire industry. But IT is uncertainly. Then he was very common to um to encounter people who really just hated this kind of work and hated people who work with this kind of work. So that's the chAllenge.

And now when you think about building a company intact, which is considered by the rest of the world, is like one of the most like hippy dip pie in the sky places that we would never touched defense um you know, what do you do like how do you sold these chAllenges? How do you how do you have an an effective comm strategy in such a hostile environment? Notches from from the press but from the other technologies, other VC, other engineers and obviously the work H R people. But um you you're never going to reach them.

How do you reach the rest of them? Um we've got your rules here and we can maybe just listen really quick before we focus on a few if that's cool with you. So you have um and will start with this first one actually, then we'll go to the rest. But the very first one to start with the ends. Can you kind of Walkers through what you're thinking is a with that because IT sounds simple, but I do think it's important.

Yeah well in in honor of uh Andrew in the missionary based IT off of n ways and means which is a classic military framework but you start with the ends in a sense of you first have to know what you're trying to accomplish. Not not for coms. People get lost when they start setting up com schools in a vacuum.

Here I want to go by. I want impressions. I want my what's the succession quote like, I want my twitter to be off instead, if you start with the business goals that we want to recruit this many of this type of people, and we want increase revenue by this, then you can sort of the reverse engineer the same strategy to make that happen.

So tray was talking about, you have to know whom to ignore. Basically, matt rim is really good at that, by the way, he's really good at like these people don't matter. And so having that near manual focus on the only people who matter hopes with something that is not kind of generally popular.

So something that might not be mainstream, popular, could be wilderness popular with the people that you actually care about. So the people that Angel, uh, was talking to really, really loved IT. The people who working at google at the time, maybe not. So I mean, a IT was during the time of the protest over a google being part of project maven, which, by the way, I think is like google maven activists walked so that google german I activists could run. I mean, that's trade, but is just a different set of people.

When you say start with the ends, you mean like start with how you want to be perceived. Is that no?

What close? Start with what business goals you're trying to reach and then figure out how you need to be perceived by which people in order for those goals to be met.

So in this case, the goals were recruit the best tech talent and get contract and get contracts in which case you have to be perceived as being competent, fast and cheaper by people making, uh profusion decisions and you have to be perceived as uh exciting, interesting mission drive in solving hard problems by a tech talent. And now you know who needs to perceive you in what way in order for them to make the decisions that help you meet your mission. And once you know that you have the equation, you can build that.

What do you think would have been the exactly wrong strategy at this point? The the kind of thing that people tend to do or would have the .

impulse to do become a nationally beloved brand that is like the number went impulse where we want to be the apple of this or the nike of this and um tray I want to hear what you think my my opinion is like that impulse would have let angle to try to please everybody and make sure nobody gets mad and just be popular and beloved IT and try to go mainstream in a world what did everything down? And probably a lot of the people inside the company today who came for that mission, even the Chris bro, is like really a senior, really important people might not have found IT as compelling if I had been deluded to so popular.

Yeah, I think I think that's through the other version of becoming a national beloved brand um and I mean this more in the government beloved brand context rather than the general audience beloved brand context is to say a lot of things and not say anything at all.

This is like if you go and look at the marketing power of other companies that do a lot of government work, uh, there is just nothing like they they say if they sit on panels, they blog post like you could go to the website of lucky marn boeing general dynamic ratio north of grammer in copy and pace text from one and like closure eyes, and then open your eyes had on a black page and be like, which one of the five company said this? You'd have no idea. You'd have no idea.

They, they're completely and distinguish. And the government loves this. They love the lack of identity of any kind.

Um because it's low risk. There's you have no you have no exposure to criticism. You're just saying boring, flashed platitudes. And I think it's really tempting when you start a company like andero to say, like man, we should just be as boring as possible because we want to annoy anyone, we don't to fend anyone. And IT turns out that like you have to say things to stand out. And our strategy from the beginning is like, look, we're going to say things IT won't always be popular, but we're going to be integrated. We're going to be in integrate .

with .

what we believe is true. I have one also, by the way, that really the of my but like the creative, innovative um people in the government actually turned out to love that like that they they became activated when they heard that messaging. They got really excited by and a lot of them became really awesome champions of venture.

I had this thing uh it's it's a little bit of a departure from detectors for a moment um or from defensive technology just for a moment. Uh, I guess I write science fiction. I wrote science fiction um for years now running .

more non fiction me to give me to see red.

I didn't .

m so frustrated ted.

I still you for that to take away from too busy to working.

But forge are our Martin of sight. I i've .

got book too ready to go. Just need the right person to packed to the whole thing up. Now i've a bigger audience looking to buy the book a topic for another day.

The is just, I was really committed to this idea myself as A A science fiction rider, a fiction writer and um and so for years I kind of danced around my opinions online and I didn't I wanted to give them but didn't. I didn't want to like effect my brand or something and IT wasn't ironically IT was not unto I started saying things that I had an audience at all like that. People didn't care what I had to say until I said something, which is something that he feels like almost too obvious to share.

And yet nobody seems to understand this and it's a less than the people keep having to learn. And IT is a lesson that I think anyone who's ever succeeded at saying something has learned at some point, unless you just know can help yourself and you just run yourself costly. But I do think it's like a weirdly under explore. An important point is, is that you have to say something .

something that came um the lucks guy say this a lot and Scott rubin over there I think came up with that is you can be a thought later if you want of thoughts and a lot of people approach IT as I just want to be a thought later and hear things, but it's not anything, not where they are novel. The the last thing that I can think about this topic on the topic being really specific about your goals and kind of ignoring what's not your goals is. The people who decided not to work at enrol because of that are people who absolutely shouldn't work there, and it's awesome that they don't work there. And today, the company is Better because of who doesn't work there.

yes. Um I want to be a lot here so I want to move on uh to I mean, I want to lear, uh, go direct we kind of all noted at this point um this is I think your positions like you just don't need to go to the york times like you you have a you have a mack phone potentially I guess for this one I do have a question um with someone like palmer was very easy. There are a lot of people not.

The job was easy, but like this part, going direct was easy. There are people who care what palmer has to say. I do know that a lot of founder struggle with like, sure, I can go direct but you know I don't have my twitter followers or um know I don't have a podcast or something.

How do you recommend how would either if you recommend navigating that? Like if you didn't have a palmer like he's like the hole, right? If you don't a hole on the board, what do you do for going to rect?

IT takes less time than people think to build an audience. I mean, first of all, if its a problem that you don't have an audience, then that's a problem you don't want to have a year from now or five years from now. So you should go build one today so that you don't have the problem later.

But secondly, IT doesn't take as long as as much as people think so. Um mike, you and I worked together quite a bit or we like we tried a quite a bit once I got to subside before that I don't know. You notice I have like a thousand followers on twitter or two hundred I don't know, was like something, uh, something small in matter.

And then at subject, when we started getting attacked at first, specially by the new york times, and then for a while, everybody, I decided I should probably go and build an audience, because this is gonna be leveraged. This is how we fight back. And IT took like six months cut, you know, he was, is frustrating.

And look at crane and embarrassing. And you have to put in work in time. But under a year you can build an audience if you .

just work on IT. Yeah, this was, this was like the first I saw the combat of P R strategy where like the P R lead for a company was just telling the press of like they were ready. It's basically and IT was uh enjoyable certainly as a person who was at that time on sub stack and now minor investor in sub stack, um definitely loved IT.

Uh you have actually like an insurgent, not an incoming. You have increased pressure and area. Can you like you like broke out an equation for this one and I was a very you don't have to see that in like in cell space is not in so what is you don't see that in word sale spaces um can you break the equation down and kind of just Walkers through what you .

were thinking about there? IT was IT record that if my site just called me in.

What is this simulation? Um okay. So it's the same. It's incomes as in physics, a pressure equals for solar service area. So it's this if given an amount of force, if you spread IT over a lot of surface area, there's very little pressure versus if you concentrate the surface area um there's tremendous pressure. That's why like a middle can poke through where as a sheet of paper has a hard, hard to time.

And the way to use that incomes is if you are on office, you want to concentrate the pressure because you want to break through. So let's say that um if you do have to get adversarial, let's say that a bunch of people come after you, mike, and they're tacking you well as opposed to making IT you versus the world. You might want to pick one of them and just hammer away at that person and break them apart from the path.

Use them as a symbol of what's wrong for all the rest of them is easier than being like me versus everybody. Um whether if you're on defense, then you wanted defuse the pressure, you want to defuse the um force that that there's less pressure on you. So if someone is attacking you and that in this case, you would say you would train IT as they're attacking independent creators, they're attacking writers, they are attacking pod casters, they're attacking entrepreneurs and people who want to have a foot hold in media and make IT about you're standing up for this cause and you're standing up for this community as opposed you being isolated where others won't stand up for you.

And we did this a little bit with with andro, with subject like it's a pretty universal principle. Like if you're attacking andreo, you're attacking people who want to interact to make amErica strongly, you're attacking people who actually want to collaborate with the government. Why are you attacking that? That's an equivalent good thing.

Or if you're attacking subject, you're attacking independent thought, you're attacking independent creators, your writers and journalists. And so why would you do that? Um I think this is this is like A A very, very important principal for every founder.

And every company is like if you are being attacked, you need to find a way to defuse that pressure. So that is not you naked and alone taking errors. And then if you are offence, you want to concentrate .

as much as possible. Yeah this is interesting because IT IT seems to be an equation that the press itself follows. Um you know often times when ah they want to take down on entire company that's offending them for some reason.

It's like you find some some one weird thing that has gone wrong, one really bad story, and you sort of frame that as the entire machine, right? We ve seen this with everything from uber, two more recently in the self driving cars. Are you you a bunch of fake accidents? Uh, you have potentially a lot of life saved because you're taking drunk drivers off the road and things like this.

You have one accident and that becomes what the company is. Um so it's like you're out of adopting from the people who are attacking in using those tools in your favor. Now it's .

universal. Yeah I remember I remember a lot of like trade will have stories about fielding at tax, but there was a lot of that um in the early days, you know still sporadic ally now but defense that is hot now where people would attack you trade like a hamond um people would need talk about you specifically as a person. Ideally that should be spread out across like the whole industry. Uh, why are you tacking one individual for this? But that's that's what people would do.

I need some examples of trading attacks personally. I mean.

there there there are a lot. I mean, I think in you know twenty seventeen, twenty twenty one or whatever was a different window in the last two or three years, but know people would would think of national security or border security or whatever as being like foundationless antigen balize store racist. They're something like that and so people would come at me and be like you're being like an american exceptional alist or something like that um and and I think like obviously, this is shifted because people are starting to realize that the geopolitical into history did not actually occur and they're still like bad people that want to do bad things. Innocent people in the world um and someone has to stand up for them otherwise they're just going to get walked over.

Um and so I think it's like less popular to think that we've reached into history then I was just even a few years ago um but I think you know to do this point, one of the one of the things that I think I learned is that I spent so much time just being angry at how stupid the mainstream media was or I perceived that they are stupid and I think like I I mostly just pity them at this point like their incentive structure kinds sets them up that they have to tell a specific story um in order to feel like validated in their day to day career um and I think they've convinced themselves like that they're actually doing the right thing um but it's it's like lesson less interesting to humanity, like they're just becoming irrelevant by not actually telling real stories and just focusing on like political hit hit pieces um and so I think part of like telling your own story uh is what religious said about increasing service area. It's like you have to point out of people that the whole and send a package that they're trying to deliver is like foundation 和 ally philosophically broken um and uh doing that you kind of immunized them because in some where is like， well, i'm not going to come at you if you actually come back with like a Better story than what i'm delivering a because that increases risk to them. And so I just kind of comes everyone down.

I think in in also like what IT comes to where you're delivering this story to go back to the go direct piece, a kind of I think I think i'm going to be able to related these next to will you crack me i'm wrong but after nail the narrative of which is your next one, which is like repeating the arrive over over again and you can hit IT again if if you want to but I want to get to just you uh, inner circle comes first and win over the tribal leaders and this I think comes down to like this is really how you're disseminating the story that you want to tell us.

A founder, my read of this is like inner circle is you that your team and you're going to ort of disseminate that that story sort of internally and in tribal leaders that's more broad, right? That's like you're heading up. You're heading up the leaders in in the industry outside outside of your company and you maybe just like speak to that first, second and i've got to a connection .

I want to make yeah, there's a there's a quote from a famous general that says, when I see a problem, I trace IT in concentric circles going back eventually to my own desk. And that's what inspired this metaphor of concentric circles. And you have to start in word and go outward for a couple of reasons. If you don't start with the people who are closest to the company, and then you skip them and go straight to the public, the people who are close to the company might not know what is going on.

They might be confused and they might put out a message that contradicts with yours and now you've lost an enormous about a trust or they might see you speaking to the to the public in a way that um you haven't already briefed on and now they confused and now they feel like maybe they are not really quite of this mission. So it's just super, super critical to start with the inner circles and go out. So usually if you are trying announce something or trying to do a rebrand or whatever, you start with the make sure pounders are on the same page, get the executive team, get employees and then go to investors, then go to key customers, then go to influencers and go outward from there. And so you just want to sequence IT the right way um and talking to work on IT. Well on that for a moment you want to go on .

yeah I would like to well on that actually because there's a really important story that came out of this in the early days of Andrea where um you know these other big tech companies, google was not the only one by the way, but they were the most famous related to this project maven. A activism was basically the employ basis saying we don't want to do work with the department of defense or we don't want to do work with the federal government at all um and the reason that those things became so explosive was because the company, the executives, the sale team, whatever they were trying to sell, the government and uh, the rest of the team, maybe the engineering team, maybe the project managers, whatever, they didn't know that this was happening. And so when that happened and they found out that they were under contract, they got past ride fully or roughly, you know, they felt like I was not what they signed up for.

And so you know, at Andrea, we had kind of message just in a software like IT just seems so obvious like yes, you're joining a defense company were obviously selling to the government but we hadn't like gotten super aggressive with IT necessarily um and then um in talking to a journalist, I kind of made this dumb mistake where he kept poking me and finally I said, look, when you join Andrew, you're signing up to build weapons like that's what you're doing. There is no there is no illusions. Everyone that comes in the door knows this is the case and I got a lot of trouble for this like and even in our network um people eternally didn't really blink and I because IT turns out IT was right, they all knew what they were doing. But before like oh crap like that's us a really spicy common ended up being like the headline of the story I was he was unfortunate.

First technology company builds weapons.

Yeah exactly. And so now we just say this is like a thing we say internally, we just tell people like, look, if you join andre, you're joining to build weapons. That's what this is. And so everyone's on the same page and that makes our whole home strategy much easier because we're not like walking on egg shells to make sure that like surprising people internally, like everyone knows where they were very clear. And I think that's really important.

And you've never had an employee like clutch their perils right when they find out that end of this building. So and soap because that's what they signed up for when they walk in the door.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows.

What do you think that press reaction even was? It's not as if defense technology companies had never existed before. Um like where do the surprise actually come from? Or was IT more just the daring maybe overlay between the what tech in general has had become at that point? Like i'm think of like the crunches and we're it's like the very like google sort of language that that was like very like pendine and happy and like it's like smiling faces everywhere is like the combination of that thing with defense that prove them crazy because obviously they know the defensive technology company is no.

I I don't actually think I was either. thanks. I think he was. You know, you and I I know we've talked about this before. Sana, I used to read wire magazine from cover to cover like I would sit on the know on the metro and dc on my way in the work, and I would just page by page, just read through my magazine.

I would learn about all this really cool stuff that was going on in the world and read about founders who were starting great companies. And I was finished, and I put him back on my backpack, and I think, wow, this is a great, there is so much exciting stuff going on in the world. And somehow, somewhere you can use even wire magazine is like a microcosm.

Me of this, this is just not the way the media interacts anymore. There's no no one is interested in writing positive, like stories about potential things that can happen in the future is all just like scare mongering. And so I think what happened is the media is like, okay, there's a defense technology company.

There's probably some version of this that we could tell about strategic deterrence. There's probably some anger we could tell about getting our men and women out of harm's way, doing dull, dirty or dangerous jobs. There's probably some story that we could tell about like advancing the city.

D R. So um IT makes IT almost impossible for every series to compete. Therefore, they won't compete at all um but instead IT was like, okay, but determining story is way more interesting.

And so the only story that we can tell is the one that hopes the scarious possible outcomes in this world. And so that's just what they have to do. There is no alternative.

There's no one with the interest of the courage to write something other than that story. And so you just have to go into these engages with that mind where you're just like, I know what they're going to do. They're onna try to make this some superlative tive pessimistic thing. And so like what is the message they need to hear to get them to the point where they at least except that there is an there is an alternate feature that's possible.

But IT is, you made such a good point. The terminated story is all they want to tell. And the reason is because it's such a good story.

Like terminal is a great movie. Terminal two is an amazing movie, is riveting, is dramatic. It's exciting.

It's like bad as most watchmakers involved. Like we love the terminator, the dis topia myths and the anti tech myth. Are there easier stories to tell? There's so much natural tension. There's so much natural drama I sometimes go back and forth on, like how much of the motivation behind the negativity is even political. So much as like these are just fun stories to tell when someone's doing really evil shit, like how do you I would love your thoughts on this like how do you combat such like a lush, powerful narratives that are that are dark? How do how do you fight back against that?

But part of the answer is, uh, also an answer to your question like about why do stories turn out this way and I think it's a question of incentives. So dick thomson has been very thoughtful in this um more than me but my um more rudimentary analysis is everybody responds to incentives and the incentives right now in media are pretty mess up. It's really, really hard to be a writer.

There are some awesome, hard working, principled, honest, ethical journeys who are being taken advantage of yeah but even in in traditional newsrooms are being taken advantage by the business mode or they are not being treated as they should be. I wish they would all go in. But there is an incentive to uh get readership um you know get as much engagement leadership as possible so that you can get that job security.

There is an incentive to um lacon to the flashes click st thing so that your article um becomes you know on like one of the ones on the leader board of the site. And so that results in things like this, which I was just pulling up. I don't know if you can see on my phone wired you go to the search bar, the defauts search in the search bar is racial justice.

I don't know. trade. You've notice that from your favorite publication, the defauts is racial justice.

I Z I. I wire back. Can someone faking safe wired?

White pill, why pill is IT. But uh, I I don't think it's even the fault to validate these individual journalists is like the the industry is under so much pressure from a messed up business model that people are just reaching for these other things that are sort of a corruption of um what they probably would like to do at a lot of case. So that's what is just like the incentives or mess up.

And then in answer to an answer to what you just asked, how do you compare that one is you you have to shape the incentives. So knowing that everybody acts on incentives, you have to shape the incentives for the people um who might attack you to make IT harder to attack you unless appealing IT should be difficult and annoying every time they should. They you IT should be unpleasant for them, and they should not want to do IT.

IT should create the opposite of job security for them. IT should create the opposite of prestige for them. And so one way to do that is to set A A norm. This is you established deterrence set a norm that when people tell lies about you, misrepresent you, you're not going to take IT. And public companies do this in a way like public companies will say they're priming the market, right?

You want to get investors use to this is how you behave so that they know if something is Normal or unusual and you want press and your audience to know this is how you respond to attacks um and it's just Normal. What you don't want to do is never do IT and then suddenly pop up because then people will be like, what? What are you scared like? What's going on? Are you in Prices? Why are you overreacting? Are you being defensive? You wanna just build your own riaa.

You need all I think this is an important point. I want to talk about this little bit because, uh, the media the media ecosystem has changed in such a way as there are now a lot of allies for founders, entrepreneurs, people working in tech um who they can go to for help, kind of getting their own story out and fighting back against stuff like this.

You talk about deterrence um I think a lot about my own journey as a sort of like communicating type person line you know in tech like I on the seam of founders fun. I want a media company um but a few years ago, five years ago, nobody knew who I was and at least not online. Nobody know who I was.

I didn't have any real power against these people. And IT was frightening. A and interestingly enough, like when I had far less influence, I got attacked far more often by the press, specifically like tech journalists. The'd loved to dog on me back then as my follower account increased and as the the friends that we all have sort of online, don't know, proliferated when the recently inly way more voices in tech that we're sort of just, I think, outward pro business, pro technology critical of the industry. But just like pro r existence um as we became more dominant, we did establish broad deterrence. And I think now it's like not even necessarily and correct me if i'm wrong with my sense is is maybe not even necessarily about um you do not have to build this from scratch like you can plug into a network of people who are sort of interested in this. What do you think about that?

I have said the founders before who don't have their own audience, the sentence write something that hopefully my sala and a and I don't know that's exactly we are talking about. But there is so much more now of a ground sill of people who are fed up of unfair attacks and who feel like, you know, are talking about defusing the pressure when it's attack on you instead of IT being, i'm being called something bad. IT is now they're doing IT.

Again, this thing that we all hate, you're spreading across this huge surface area, and then you get sort of one thousand points of light to rise up. You, you may not be the biggest account in that uprising, what voice is, but people like you and other people with big followings also care about the issue. And so I think it's really easy now for founders. I I don't want to make IT sound overly easy, uh, but it's much easier than I was before for proud ers to tap into that and find a community of people we like to sport them yeah.

if is natural base of support at least which kind of brings me to one of your your points, which does bring me to one of your points win over your tribal elders. Can you break that down for me?

Yeah well I said in the piece one of the first things that we did with Andrew was tray and I just spent like what a week kind of galement ting around dc and putting on blazers and meeting with people um and that was trying to find who are the tribal elders or who are the influences that when you talk to them, they're gonna go and talk to ten other people. What you want is amplifiers.

The way that you spread a message is to find ten of those and then have them go out until ten people and have them go od people as supposed to you trying to tell everybody at the same time. So IT works in a couple of ways. One is it's more credible coming from someone else than you like you talking about yourself is self serving on its face um whereas when you pick these influencers and brief them and get them on board, then IT becomes more organic and IT spreads without you, which is a lot Better.

And then two is they actually know whom to talk to you more than you would like. We put together a list of, I don't know, fifty names. If we had to put together two thousand, I wouldn't have known whom to put on there like right away, like today.

Trace could probably do off the top of his head. But in the beginning, IT IT was unclear who those right names would be. But we could start with people who definitely wear IT, and then they knew the right people to talk to you, because I was just in their orbit.

I mean, trying. You can doing that basically all along, like you are constantly hosting. Basically, people don't even see ninety nine percent of the home strategy. There's like a few public moments, but most of IT is grounding day in a day out trays like hosting five percent dinners or closed door events that nobody ever hears about. But I think that's where a lot of the real work gets done.

It's not I think that one of the most difficult things for people when he comes to calm is like especially in tech, IT is historically not been taken seriously. And a lot of the kind of work is it's like work with air quotes around IT, like you just set a five person dinner. And I think a lot of sort of more engineering time, people might roll their eyes because they don't understand the value of like friends, like strong friends.

We are willing to fight for you publicly who are plugged into situations where they can influence culture. And they don't understand maybe maybe they don't understand how how powerful that is. Do you hate? Sorry, trying. And I want to skip everybody I do you want to because law's been in comes forever like in my right fare that like IT hasn't really been taken seriously. Maybe that's the problem that a lot of founder have and they just like foments ally don't value comes and then until they need IT and .

then they don't have IT yeah I think comes and P R um have been done poorly for so long that people dismiss the entire thing um that there are a lot of fenders who just here comes and they already don't want to deal with IT. And I don't blame them because the vast majority of comes that we see and hear about this stuff that they don't relate to and don't want IT sort of like honeywell one thousand nine ninety seven type press release calling a reporters and beg them to write a story. So I don't blame people like when you hear cons and P, R, does that make you excited?

Probably not. yeah. I think one of the the big differences, and this was a push that lulu made for us early on, is that a lot of people think about their strategy is like how you manage inbound media inquiries and who is like moving pieces of paper around and writing press releases and you coming up with like talking points for internal all hands meetings and things like that.

Whether we view comes strategically IT was like, what is what is the story we want people to know about, Andrea, so that if somebody tries to frame in a different way, if there are not have to fight through explaining why, what they're saying is different than what we've transparently told the world. Like one example is this document um this was like the manifesto for Andrea, like we told everyone why we started the history of the industry, why it's change today. What IT is that you need to do to actually fix defense and anyone who writes a story about Andrew, if they if they say something other than what we tell them right here, they have to explain why they're saying that the thing that they believe is true about the company is not in our manifesto just makes IT a .

harder yeah you use this word fight and you know I think we kind of heat is like this combat of environment. It's this hostile environment. Were fighting um the U. S. A question sort of off camera that or raise the point I was pretty you were talking about how IT feels inside of IT all and you really wanted to kind of touch a bit on that like IT .

is this I don't know what .

is that you're sort of at war right here, a state of like information war um you anna, kind of impact that .

yeah when you're in IT, when you're the founder and it's your company, you you are seeing everything that's being said by everybody all the time. All of the attacks are personal, either they're directly or there about the company. And that's personal because it's you, our company.

And so there's like intense fog bar. It's very stressful, feels bad um a lot of at times comes uh feels like a totally waste time. And I think when people think of traditional comes, I think traditional comes is a waste time is a waste time. It's useless. It's dad is totally obsolete.

But um the thing you have to do for the company like you have to just suck IT up and do IT is counter tudie IT feels bad IT feels like you're exposing yourself more your um acutely sensitive to all of the negativity that comes with IT that is just part of the journey and I think of the praise like a mental of mine would say everybody wants to go to have and nobody wants to die. You want to be the next day or you want to be the next paleo tray brian mat like that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself through that in order to push your story out into the world and to find those true believer s you want to find the people who are going to feel your story in their spine and want to come join you.

And there's just no way to do that through um you know through our curtain through other people and you can't delegate IT. So just one thing to labor, this is the father away you get from the founders. The more things get diluted the the mission, the mission, the vision, the knowledge homer has knowledge in his head that is like secret knowledge that other people don't have and trade has a piece of that piece that I like put together.

That's the leadership of end of a bunch of other people, couldn't create this company, couldn't run this company. And when you convey that to another person, you lose a little bit in the fidelity, and then you lose a little bit. And the traditional way of doing that is you brief another person who breathe, another person.

They pitched a reporter, the reporter maybe, right? And then they write IT, uh, in a way that they're editor wants for their audience and is nearly unrecognized. Ords turned into a total problem. And so to keep that message Spike and concentrated in interesting, you have to just keep IT as close to the founders as humanly possible, which means the founder has to do some of this themselves. And sometimes that sucks, but there's just literally not the way right.

Well, even I mean this is this is the point you've thought this point up now it's like almost every point comes back to this. This is is the founders it's the founders mission LED sort of strategy for coms um the company LED by founders like you ve in the top of this conversation said um trade does the comes like palmer does the comes they are the people who are running comes not the comes professionals. Part of that is just I mean, like every piece that we've talked about is like they have to be sort of intricate wove in into all of IT, every piece of the strategy. Probably another part is every single one of these people has a unique um tool said right like how do you think about uh I do want to get trace sense on on this first well how IT all belt and then I want to know how we identify the strength of a founder sort out of to to pursue A A strategy like this site there all sort of unique but but maybe tray first yeah I will .

say that android does have ahead of comes her name shane or she's really, really good what he does. And I think that the the primary thing that you want your like you know organizational heads doing working with the founders is reminding them of what's true about the strategy. And you I think I said this in a tweet after the paradise article.

The most dating thing that I learned from lulu that i'm still irritated by every day is that you have to say the thing, and then you have to say again, and then you have to again, you to again, you have to again, you again. And i'm hearing myself say at every time. And I think this is really stupid. I'm saying the same thing I said one hundred times and lulu would constant remind me, yes, but it's the first time they heard IT. And so you have to keep saying IT until they believe that that was their idea and it's .

cool to see this like by the way, I said that to trade like probably one hundred times before, it's something .

yeah yeah very .

annoying um but like IT turns out that like IT works, like you go into these environments, like you walk into the penguin and there are people saying literal senses that we created at andero as if IT was their own idea um and channon has a really unique ability internally to say, here is the strategy. Here is what we want people to think in hero, the individual units of work that we are going to do to execute on getting people to think those things and then keeping us on message, like saying, okay, true, you're going to go to this interview.

You have to say this, and you have to say again, and you have to say again and you have to say again, I want you to say at four times in the interview um and and I think having someone is making sure that you're doing your role as the storyteller for the business is incredibly important. Um but he also is something that we have to own personally like uh to take a responsibility for IT. And I think this is where the evaluating founders piece comes in aside from andero like when in with my founders one had on I mean with companies, I I want to see that the person can tell a compelling story um because telling a copel c story isn't just about getting the media off your back IT turns out that same skill set is required to recruit talent, that same skills that is required to raise capital.

That same skill set is like in this is why a lot of times when you look like deep tech companies with like highly intellectual academic founders, they don't work because the founder isn't actually good at this core storytelling peace. They're just scientists. And and I think that I cannot be understated how important someone like palmer is um because he's not only a total free genius like mad scientist uh that knows something about everything in a way that I D never thought was even humanly possible um but he also is a brilliant story teller and he can sit down for fifteen minutes within engineer it's like running an entire word inside of a major tech company and convincing to come join Andrea and that is like it's like an unBeatable superpower and so that is an important thing if anyone is listening.

This podcast is a founder and they don't think there are a good storyteller. You need to find a good storyteller, otherwise you're screw man. It's not gonna work.

What how does that work exactly? I mean, do you you you bring someone into kind of do IT for you or that doesn't feel IT feels sort of counter to the message of of this strategy? Like I I think that a lot of what you guys are both saying is you need the founder.

Obviously, change is running the strategy, but you are the thing that she's like, he needs you. So is there a way that you identify may be different strength that you have? How do you navigate um how do you as a shame and navigate a team without a palmer?

Yeah I I think first of i'm not suggested that you should hire like a professional person to do for you. I'm suggesting that you need a founder level person along inside you in the business. Now the reason I say founder like person is like Jenny.

I've was not the founder of apple, but he is a brilliant story's teller. And that was an important part of what made apples kind of like reverse work. And so I think that you you could do this at a very senior level, but IT has to be A A founder minded person and I think bu have opinions on this as well. And he and shanto work close the other half for a long time.

Um but I think shannon views each of us, each of the cofounder ers as a different tool like you know she's going to work to build a house um maybe palmer is a hammer, maybe i'm a shovel, maybe brian is a drill and he knows how to implement those tools to complete the construction of the house, but we're all different. And so if there's like an opportunity that's a palmer shaped opportunity in palmer, for whatever reason is available, you don't just swap in tray. You don't just swap in brian.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to say this palmer shaped opportunity is no longer an opportunity because palemon is not available. So I I think like she's figured out in the right environment, these tools can be really useful. In the wrong environment, it's a it's a explosion waiting to happen.

We have I mean, the of the strategy moves on IT. We have taking more risk, turning flood to fuel and staying the course I feel like risk and flood to feel or kind of they feel related .

to me in that I .

think people are naturally not just founders, but anybody online is is naturally and understandably very scared of horrible things that are being said about them um but the risky thing to do is to find some way to own that and um and maybe find the true thing inside of IT and leaning into a strength where you didn't maybe previously understand that you had one. Um I an example of this for asset founder fun is horican.

Um you know you're getting attacked all the time for these controversial opinions and you know saying these things that are you know well outside the over ten window according to a very narrow minded group of people only and every bird sort of looking around and realizing like that that is awesome. That is us. That is what we do and that should be who we are.

And how do you how do you attack someone at that point when you turn the virtual into that the only their best weapon when you turn them into like a badge of honor is that maybe you might just like I think that's roughly what you're talking about there. Maybe how do people think about that? How do you think about that process?

Yeah, there's a lot in the piece that says the world is going to treat you like an insurgent and you win by acting like one. And it's related to that where there's a start of you're threatening something if the world were perfect, you wouldn't need to exist like why would Andrew need to exist if everything was going rate and if there was peace on earth than the us was already strong, as strong as I could be.

Um the people that you are threatening and the institutions that you are threatened are going to try to fight and you should use that. You can either be injured by IT or you can use IT like that. Energy is not going to go away. So oriented.

So that is helping you and tactical ally, the way you do that is, number one, you start with the circles, make sure that your employees are OK, make sure that your employees expect that there will be opposition and criticism of what you're doing and actually actually find them. You want to build a culture where every time hit his on you um the employees laugh off. They joke about that.

They mean about IT or they say like it's working, we're really getting to them. That's the kind of culture you want to be, where it's like a band of underdogs. And people understand that there here to do something really hard, that a lot of people don't want you to succeed, that.

And then um beyond that you also want to make IT so that is what you said. The thing that could be a weakness is now a string um invert like the charly monger invert uh take the take the weakness either if it's a true weakness like fix IT or where does a major onor make a part of the thing and owe IT. And then lastly, as you're going out and talking to people and introducing your company for um for the first time, I think you wanted set the expectation that there are people who don't want this to happen or there are people who don't like this and we believe this anyway. Like you start with the counter argument and then the rest of you introducing yourself is talking about why your thing is good when you don't want is to talk about your thing is good, good, good. And then the whole time they have to count on argument in their mind that they're distractible y and then they drop the counter argument, and then you end on the counter argument against you, like, get all the bad stuff out of the wake and then go on our fence with the thing you wanted talk about.

I think one funny way around this out. I have one last thought after this next piece, but we're get there towards the end. Um is a case, a recent google case. Little, you brought IT up you were saying, you know the german I disaster is sort of it's like the legacy really IT begins with maven that DNA was in the company.

Um you have a huge, I would say comes crisis moment for google where the the tool that they really need the entire world think is just the next generation of artificial intelligence and they need to win against microsoft in every other income or insurgent um is just seen as hopelessly clowning h and also in my opinion, racist. But there's IT spends the game at there like you either see IT as IT didn't work or you see IT as IT was racist, like IT didn't. Something went horribly wrong.

Um your founder not founder, your founder should not running comes anymore. Your new C E. O has to defend this somehow. Um you broke down recently. You just analyze I saw you today on twitter analyzing um uh sundar response. Uh could you kind of coaches through sort of what happened and what what should have happened from a comes perspective?

okay. So I think the biggest problem is that this isn't a comms issue. There's it's a leadership failure um and there's a failure somewhere between moral compass and common sense.

I don't think it's for a lack of technical excEllence. In fact, one point five, which was released that same week, seem to be excEllent. Just got holy overshadow wed by all of this noise and I feel horrible.

Imagine being a researcher on that team who works for six months on this and then have other people's decisions distorted, you know, distort that new cycle bedd recognition. I think it's a leadership failure. And what are we here to do and what is our product to goal and who are we making this for? And even in the communication, IT was all about IT won't t wrong, because people were offended.

Basically, IT didn't work, because people got mad. And then optimizing for nobody being offended was the problem in the first place and was why I didn't work. And so I think it's not that the email was bad.

I think a lot of hardworking people probably had to stay late and do their best on this. But is that there's no way to write an email that fixes a situation where the wrong business decisions are being made. Um so I don't think that there is a way to save that through communications.

Yeah.

but I just can I say one thing though that email was clearly written by a committee, invited through lawyers and finally signed up by a professional C E O like A A palmer. Lucky would never have sent that email like his his hand physically wouldn't press the send button on an email like that. Uh, a founder like company doesn't talk that way.

People don't talk that way. You have to get to a size of bureaucracy. Works like a committee writing for professional CEO to be able to release an email like that.

This this is the government. This is the government. Point is it's like it's the right response was probably like a two and email that was like, guys, we screw up.

This was A A total failure of moral judgment on our part. We're going to do Better, more to come soon are that, that was probably the best possible that if they need to do IT at all. But when you say nothing, everyone competes to say as much as possible without saying nothing.

It's not possible to write a very sure can concise nothing. You have to include all constituencies in your nothing inness um and that email was just that I was like a bunch of people sitting around a table competing for who could say the most senses that had no meaning whatsoever. They open without even .

they could not even say what went wrong. You could not even say specifically like what the problem was because nobody agrees on what the problem was. And um that kind of goes back to like that that is very much I agree that it's a leadership problem, appears to be a leadership problem and that would be like sort of what was your point uh luu IT was um uh inner circle comes first.

Like the messaging is not happening internally. Who is running google? What is the purpose of google? What is the strategy of google? And if you don't have all of those things coming from the top and when something breaks down, how could you possibly expect anybody to message correctly? Um nobody there is there is no correct answer, is a total disaster. IT arted started in the the call is coming from inside the house. The clinic email .

is coming from inside the house. Can I emphasize one thing just on that? Um this is not I I just wanted double down on this is not just bad cons.

Um I think google probably has a wildly talented context. Um I am friends with the former head cons of google who is a very smart savy person. But like if you hand them this situation and say fix IT with words IT doesn't work.

But the other thing I want to empires to to trace point about um about how shanon uses these tools and she's SHE SHE is one of the best in the business is like very, very good. Well we turned IT IT to uh embarrassed and now when he hears um going direct for founder does not mean don't have calm support and do everything yourself and go pop off on twitter. I think um some people here going direct and they're like, I need to fire my cos team and tweet more like, no, you should find the best head accounts that you can.

You should find your own hand. You should like there are many companies with outstanding heads of comes that are doing so much amazing work for them that the founders would say that we could never do this without this person um and they work with the media and they participate with mainstreet media articles are not saying don't have comes people or never work with the media. It's be selective, be selective about which media to work with and when and what you're trying to get out of IT and be selective about which people you entrust with your story, which is a very sacred responsibility.

And then lastly, that doesn't take you out of the loop. Like even if you find the very very best coms person who um can establish the very best press relationships, you're not off the book. Like IT still comes down to .

you last one and IT was a point that you briefly touched on at the very top of the conversation.

You said.

palmer O I says, know, the strategy doesn't change even if it's even if everything's friendly I think IT was palmer. We says, no, if everything changes tomorrow, the culture changes tomorrow, we're the same um is that true like if the culture erratically changes are wondering, I guess this entire conversation is gear towards know how to navigate hostility.

Um I think that sort of the rough assumption is that like there's a like a lot of host elements and the press social media is uniquely a hostile environment you're building now inside of this environment. Um this is a great guide first for navigating that. But at what point you know is there a peacetime transition?

I mean, do you change IT all? Do you change your strategy? All of things are good.

Like do you kind of ease the chip off your shoulder? May be a little bitter or what? I mean, how do you how do you think about peacetime?

No, there is. You cannot ease off. The really the reality is, is like the only version of peacetime, the company is fAiling and no one cares about you anymore. As long as the company is succeeding, someone is always going to be swing for your head. And I think we have seen this with with elon.

It's like elon has built the world's only relevant electro c car company before being honest um and he gets attacked by the environmentalists left and they just hate him because he's successful and they just want everyone to be only moderately successful. And I don't think that's how the world moves. And I think as long as Andrea is doing good work and we're moving the needle for our national security ecosystem, people are going to be coming after us. And so no, you never let off the gas.

Look in. great.

I, I, I, I, I do concur. But there is a book called once in eagle. I think patra liston hasn't on his reading list. A lot of military leaders have IT. All the reading list is recommended to me by admin st, and it's at home.

The very first page of IT has an description that says a year that is believed to be a peace year is either a pre war or a post warrior. And I think that's the case with companies like if you are a start up, there's never piece time like in theory um in theory, if the work peace time, maybe you would do something differently. But in practice, i've literally never seen a startup with a single year that could be called a peace time year.

And then the other thing I will destroy distinction between is um you can change your tactics without changing your strategy. So your principles should never change, your core message should never change, what you exist to do shouldn't change, but the way you communicate that can definitely change. You might go to press more or less, use twitter more or less.

You might go linked in if you're hiring, you might. There's companies where I don't like tiktok, but there's companies where i've told the founder you you got to be on tiktok because of this thing that you're doing. That's how you going to make money. And so the tactics, I think, should change truly. But the strategy.

you know, tray luu, this has been absolutely real. Thank you guys for joining me and catches here on friday later.

Thank you. bye.