Lulu Cheng Meservey: Go Direct

[Music] hey everyone and welcome to generative now I am Michael mcnano I am a partner at light speed and this week I spoke

with Lulu Chang misseri founder and CEO of rostra rostra has become the go-to communications expert for Silicon Valley founders of companies like ramp SSI

scale andil sunno and the Free Press Lulu puts Founders in charge of controlling their narrative using one simple principle go direct Lulu has years of experience handling coms at

both startups and big companies like Activision Blizzard and substack and it was really great for me to learn from her here today I think you'll all enjoy it Lulu and I dissected her modern Communications playbook for Founders we

get into why a com strategy is just as important as a product strategy why it's okay to be controversial and how good comms gives people the metric to

evaluate You by so check out this conversation with Lulu Chang Missouri hey Lulu hey hello you too thanks for

doing this you are a busy person I feel like you've become like this this central figure um in all of this AI insanity and it's happened very very

quickly I want to hear how that happened uh I don't know how it happened but um I think I think everybody feels that they are busier than average there's like a Dun and Krueger effect where we all feel that we're magnificently busy but you're

probably busier than I am I don't know um I 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 um 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 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 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 I think um sometimes maybe the answer is

me but a lot of times the answer is not me un me um 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 uh whether it's me or not me I'm kind of agnostic but I guess

I guess what I'm saying is like because it's so important um to communicate the value of these products maybe in a way that that that wasn't as important before like there's just a greater need

to understand as a Founder how to do this right like like prodcts I would argue that products in a previous previous era maybe in like the mobile era like almost more marketed themselves

whereas I feel like now I think I think what you're saying is like we need to we need to actually like 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 you have half of a strategy you might 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 um 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 um it's 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 so as you say it's very different from the era of um just make something people want and then they

they can just use it yeah I also think like Founders the founders of the current crop of startups are like just a little bit different than the previous crop right um 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

chesy and and Travis from Uber and these these people that are so sales and marketing driven like they 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 are you seeing that as well I think we are in a bit of a golden era for

technical Founders and it's magnificent uh and we need it but yes um to the extent that many people have a dominant half of the brain we we do have a lot of Founders now whose dominant half is not

the one around storytelling talking to people I think we have a lot of really Stellar autists 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 247 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 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 invested um in

uh in doing nothing but holding back their specific technology yeah totally and like these organizations that you're mentioning that you're alluding to like this is actually their job their job is to 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 um tactic so much more important for

this crop of Founders but like maybe let's go even like a little bit back how did how did you get even here so before this obviously you were Activision Activision of Microsoft substack like

give us give us the quick the quick story yeah so I tell people I don't have a lot of experience in comms which is um 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 I that's worked out pretty well um so I 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 done it feels like everything except coms i' done Finance Tech geopolitical

risk and was advising on the Alibaba IPO um the guy who was running that IPO for Jack Ma I I 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 um but I didn't want to start something new and interesting and I was literally Googling you know what is PR after being the co-founder of this comms firm but did

that for a while and uh then went to substack to lead Communications for them this was in the real uh heat of the Free Speech battles of the past few years um

and I really wanted a piece of that so I went in there and then had joined Activision blizzards board when they were going through period of turmoil and

trying to get the Microsoft acquisition done and then went in-house fulltime 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 um that's now about six or seven months old I I actually if you're

open to it I would love to dig into the the substack part a little bit um because I that's that was a really interesting time I remember it very very well I was uh leading the podcasting

business at Spotify after uh they acquired my company Anor and um you know I think we were going through a lot of those same pains and it was really the first time that that Spotify had been

dealing with not just music and sort of artistry but opinions is that was it the Joe Rogan stuff well it was Joe Rogan but it was it was not just Joe Rogan it was it was

you know we had millions and millions of podcasts on the platform that had gotten that had just gotten there over the past couple of years and and it was during a

time I think where um yeah this was like postco you know there were a lot of different cultural movements happening I think people were very um yeah unhappy with lots of different things and I

think companies tech company substack Spotify meta was a big one I think kind of like figuring out how to navigate this um and on one hand like trying to

strike the balance of you know creating a a safe platform avoiding liability but also wanting to be completely open because openness um 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 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 a startup that was like becoming known for the place where anyone could sort of publish um 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 rude cruel bad um 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 uh so sacred

it 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

the principal stance that they were taking inside the company you know 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 um 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 APR deor 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 andril in the early days of um 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 like people knew they were doing the right thing and in fact it 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 um coinbase has been through the same thing many other companies yeah I think this is a really important Point um and I hadn't even thought about you know your role in this

must have been really really critical probably helping navigate internal coms as well as external coms 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 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 the mission is kind of what drives you to do the the really really hard things in my

experience and and I think like that is becoming Le 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 coms and

Mission yeah internal coms is way more important than external coms yeah um and I've 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 crisis 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're 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 and to treat them as such um

I will say with 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 problem 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 be 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 uh a nothing that no one um 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 they'll become a huge pain in your ass so 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 uh and they're they are mission d driven but two is the

company's mission was so strong and they had had proven it what was it uh the company's mission is to it's it's to free your mind so it's basically for you to own what you're able to say and own

your audience and um 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 what are some other like what's example of a good Mission versus a bad one versus like a fluffy one a bad one was

when we work uh said that their mission was to elevate the world's Consciousness and I have a I have a friend who at the time was pretty senior at wew work and we were having a picnic

with our kids and she found out about the Rebrand and decided to resign like on the spot or she she read about the new Mission and a red flag went up and she decided that was the time to leave

and the reason that was bad just to dig into it um tactically one is it's disconnected from what the company is actually doing so you can't buy like it's a 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 it's just so lofty and generic that it doesn't mean anything um

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 they could have pulled a Wei workor and said you know bu providing better B2B SAS we're elevating the world's Consciousness but they're like we save time and money it's

important it Fosters the startup ecosystem it helps small companies grow into big companies it lifts the economy that's the way in which it matters it's not some madeup 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 open AI 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 you're just gonna keep going keep We're not gonna stop yeah I I think it's a a for the moon land Among

the Stars um you don't want your mission to become outdated 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 multiplanetary species and to get to Mars I am so bullish I think we will be on Mars quite soon um but even so

there's other stuff involved on making us viable uh as a species on Mars and so it's not like the company then shuts down there's there's more to do that is literally the perfect example of aim aim

aim for the moon exactly yeah exactly um okay so so roster's godirect Manifesto going back to you know the sort of the original need for this and why it's so

important now tell us about this this Manifesto and why you believe it so strongly and why this is this is the way and and we'll get into the other way as well I have questions um about why we

shouldn't do things a certain way but I I I would love to just hear it in your own words yeah this is the way four founder Le 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 um that's the reason that rostra only works with Founders and only works with founder Le 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 of the default whereas with a Founder Le company um there'll be more uh 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 like there's zero hesitation he sort of looked around he was like yeah like probably here but like No And and I

think he he was literal about it um 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 rific of that secret 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 the 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

inevit people will say you're a 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 things happen one is your message regresses to the mean right you're you're 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 the 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 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 I actually think that um 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 themsel out there and takes 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 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 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 I'm going to throw my lot in with them CU you have nothing to prove in in the in the trust but verify

framework they cannot verify because there's nothing to verify so if you can't um 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 um 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 in this strategy like 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 post going on podcasts like do 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 um but I say generally there's a role for advisers 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 person or if they have to be doing every poll request personally or like making every

change in the product it's just not viable and the same with coms um the as you have to do more but 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 comes and uh policy comes 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 um we don't want the founder to depend on me I I'm I'm trying to impart and give knowledge so

that if I get hit by bus or whatever then they can go on without me but there's a place for people to um be a sounding board for ideas and guide and support you and then same same with

traditional comms by the way uh 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 refracted 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 what is a reason that somebody would try to get a story published in 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 um let's take well name a company and I

I'll give you the example um andril okay so if you're andrel and you're um trying to persuade

um the military let's say the Air Force to buy the the 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 Comm strategy is to get those people to believe those things things that's it everything

outside of that is wasted motion and a distraction or counter um counterproductive so the first thing is just know what to focus on the entire com strategy in this case is get these

10 people to believe these three things um 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 uh a common example I use is people might be talk talking to readers of GW or users of Hacker News or

listeners of dwar cash 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 um 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 cuz who are those people who are these thousands of people I I don't know who I'm reaching um in the case where your audience is getting their news from press so uh procurement

officers in the Air Force um 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

what I really like about this is I think a lot of Founders view um 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 and

and through this lens you you might again like I think per your point you might settle for you know uh 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 prey approach which again I think most startups do take with press simply

to try to like grow which which personally like I don't really I don't really think works I don't think it's worked in a while if ever maybe like a decade ago um I really really like that because it's very what you're saying is

like very strategic yeah do you ever do you ever um 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 start

where they'll go on Good Morning America and there's this huge viewership and then their website has no Spike and traffic whatsoever um 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 um sometimes being in traditional press

makes a ton of sense for anti- metal and Matt mailing pizzas to people or dropping off pizzas um that actually is a much more effective way to get the attention of the VCS and engineers and

people that he sent the pizza too 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 Comm 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 what do you call these things do you do you have a name for this yet is there have you branded this uh in my

in my head I call it a breakdown or or an after Action Report okay all right so I would love to do some live uh Lulu breakdowns Lulu after action reports

right here on the podcast if you're open to it I'm I'm down all right so let's talk about Tesla Tesla had a big event recently um it was called we robot where

they unveiled uh the new rooc cabs or I don't know what they're calling them Robo taxis um 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 um very very like huge spectacle they had drones flying around doing you know light shows and stuff but a lot of the a lot of the

chatter on on the internet was around how some of this stuff felt felt really staged and and having been there I can say yeah like I think some of the robots uh looked like programmed like the dancers I think that was just that was

happening um 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 uh controlling it which by the way they

were still impressive to be clear but this this created a very diverse reaction of opinions on the internet and so yeah Lulu hit us hit us with the

after Action Report with an unveil or 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 was a Porsche it was racing

sing a Porsche and then the Cyber truck 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 red and then it crosses the line and then it goes up to here and that 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 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 previewed 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 um the robots are going to be serving you

drinks and at the moment there's a person in the loop here um 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 um then you at least go from here to oh it's more impressive that 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 that could do my dishes it could you know vacuum the floor um and so even just that like unveiling new movements and new like

physical capabilities totally agree mindblowing right you can tell people by which metric to evaluate you so if you're saying this is the future the

future's here here's robot then people are picturing um 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 dextrous they 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

Poss possibly do you're you're changing the metrics and the Baseline so that you're overperforming um 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 e-commerce company you're going to measure us on gmv um 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 like even

years later analysts would use that metric to see if Ali Baba 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 not not it wasn't like some Grand strategy uh and I wish I wish I knew you back then because it it probably would have been even more effective but um

this is what we did with Anor we said we decided that the important metric for us which 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 oh that's how they're measuring progress and as long as that number keeps going up they're making progress that's really 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 um 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 wellknown 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 um 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 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 get were getting higher and higher in a good way and lo and behold people have people are celebrating this as like one of the most

Mo greatest accompl accomplishments in humanity it is which it is which it is truly is and there's there's there's previous videos of Elon saying I don't know if this is going to work

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 and then 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 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 The Little Chopsticks with the hook like watch for it 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 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 um so apple is one I've been thinking a lot about in terms of expectations um I have the new phone the 16 you know they announced this forever ago they announced iOS 18 forever ago

they're really touting Apple intelligence you know their own their own AI their own models um this phone doesn't even have it yet and literally

on the box it says featuring Apple intelligence like that that feels like a let down right yeah yeah it's a little different when you're a public company

because um your shareholders and the institutional investors and um there's just a lot of pressure from different directions so for for t for Tesla there is that pressure for SpaceX they have

the liberty of um 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 um restrict your range of options or or force you into something with apple one thing I'll say is I I don't know enough about their strategy

there um I would never count them out but one thing I have noticed is a lot of smaller startups try to lar as Apple where Apple does these big unveils and Apple has these media days and apple

keeps things under wraps and then come 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 works 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 um because they're apple right um 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 com standpoint from a messaging standpoint it's got to be really really hard right now like to

walk that line and and 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 um is an advantage that smaller startups again smaller than

Apple which is a lot of people should be fully exploiting yeah for sure how have you felt about all the excitement um around you know speaking of Robotics and

automation around whmo um have have you ridden in a wh Mo and like how did you feel about that matched with everything you've seen online my last wh Mo ride my

co-founder Sergey and I got stuck and we got we got stuck in this like Bermuda Triangle for Whos because then another weo pulled up and also got stuck and we

were just a a little island of stuck Whos and we got out and had to walk so the the recent he buys isn't helping me but overall I think weo is still way

underrated they have had a fleet of working mostly uh Robo taxis for years

now and they haven't talked about it as much as I would think frankly um but but the other thing too

is uh there's a saying that um Pioneers get the arrows 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 perceive D accident or even minor traffic jam like the kind of thing that human drivers do every day all the time

is 100x I I actually think the data says about 100x more impactful on our Collective psyche so um 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 um let's get the Lulu breakdown on meta there there are a bunch of things to talk about here Orion llama but maybe we

could just talk about Bas Zuck and the 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 C if the founder is more swaggy and confident the company is seen in a better light and it's easier to recruit 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 the companies 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 um So Meta has clearly been on a fantastic positive feedback loop for past couple years and I think

it's a couple things one is the that reinforcing effect of the company doing really well two is I think Mark Zuckerberg is 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 um 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 corpo bot 10,000 for many years actually helps because that was so unappealing to

a lot of people that to see lower expectations lower exctly started here he came from here um whereas if he had come from here to here it would be less

of a a stunning U Improvement and so um one is just he's he's found his own voice and personality and become more confident and expressing that two is I 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 um 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 that nannies and Hall

monitors that seem to be roaming the halls of Facebook um in Prior years and the one thing I would watch out for is

sometimes you can get um 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

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 Bas tell them and then you're like yeah I'm GNA do more

post like this this is great um 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 40inch chain you're like Tain 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

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

is it a problem when the person almost becomes like more newsworthy than the actual brand and Company um cuz 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 upsid 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 and the risk hedging strategy is to invest in like the S&P 500 um so if 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 cisin being the founders like if you just stuck in a couple random business school graduates who are very clever and professional and great

managers that company would not have the same Aon and recruiting magnetism as it does today truly um because of those two

people carry within them Alpha um to outperform where stripe with would otherwise be and um and Palmer is the

same way for enderal um Alex Wang the same way for scale um our friend Mikey witho like a random person replacing Mikey wouldn't have the same effect um

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 if investing in an

individual is like investing in the stock market has Zuck peaked like is it time to divest from zuck's Brand as a strategy like should meta back away from

that he's like too he's like to based at this point the the risk is if you get him to back away from it that means you have

re-entered the professional advisor driving the bus mode and that's just not a good mode so so keep found yeah like founder Jumping the Shark Overkill

making mistakes being occasionally cringe 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 um 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 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 andrel people want to work for Palmer and for Brian and the founders and and 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 um save yourself the occasional Gaff and embarrassment but you would also lose all of this enormous upside I would never make that trade

Lulu uh 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 [Music] 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 lighted VP on YouTube X and Linkedin generative now is produced by Lightspeed in Partnership with pod people I am Michael mcnano and we will

be back next week see you then [Music]