Founder Says Traditional PR Is Dead, Talk Directly to the Few Who Matter

Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of the communications firm Rostra who worked with defense startup Anduril, spent days and days trying to name her manifesto. Then she wrote the manifesto itself in about two hours. She called it Go Direct.

Her claim, in Meservey's words, was this: "Traditional PR as we know it is dead." She argues it is dead because it forces a founder to filter a message through strangers, and she advises talking directly to the small number of people whose opinions decide whether the company lives or dies.

By strangers, she means the usual chain of publicist, reporter, editor, and publication. She argues that arrangement makes a founder dependent on other people's goodwill, alignment, and ability to portray an idea faithfully, which she believes very rarely happens for something unconventional, unpopular, or far outside the mainstream.

She says she learned that from necessity. At Anduril, she says, the traditional path was not an option, in part because only a very few reporters were fair to Palmer Luckey at the time. So instead of chasing technology press or startup awards, she says, the team went in person to Marines at Quantico, to Camp Pendleton, to the National Defense University, and to the CIA, walking into their buildings to explain the idea and show the technology.

That is the model she now urges on other founders. Why approach a large publication as a supplicant, she asks, and hope that blasting a message to hundreds of thousands of strangers will accidentally reach the 200 people who matter, when those 200 are often already within direct reach. She argues that each handoff waters down the message and drains its force.

She applies the same logic to hiring. Some artificial intelligence companies that need five top engineers they can already name, she argues, "do not need a mainstream audience." She cites founder Brian Armstrong appearing on a tiny podcast called Pot of Jake, which had roughly 100 listeners, as the kind of direct choice she means. Her rule is to start from where those few people actually get information and go there.

She allows one limit: if a product is uncontroversial and well understood, she says, press coverage can go fairly smoothly. For everyone else, she calls the answer narrative sovereignty, the idea that sovereign people should control their narrative destinies. Nobody will tell the story for a founder, which she describes as frightening and freeing at once, and she argues founders should bring the same seriousness to that story that they bring to product, code, and hiring.