Talk Directly to the 200 People Who Matter

Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of the communications firm Rostra, toiled for weeks over what to call her manifesto, then wrote it in about two hours. She landed on two words: Go Direct.

Her core claim is that traditional public relations is dead, and that is good news. The old model forced a founder to filter a message through someone else's prism, and to depend on strangers for goodwill, alignment, and accurate retelling.

She calls the alternative narrative sovereignty. Meservey puts it this way: “We are sovereign human beings. We should be in control of our narrative destinies.”

By narrative sovereignty, she means founders must apply the same seriousness to their story as to their product, code, and hiring. At the start, she argues, a founder has little evidence and only a word backed by personal reputation. No outside spokesman can carry that as convincingly as the founder.

She learned it from necessity while handling communications for early Anduril, the defense technology company. Trying to interest a mainstream reporter in Palmer Luckey, the startup founder building Anduril after leaving Facebook amid controversy over his political giving, was nearly impossible. So instead of chasing TechCrunch features or startup awards, Meservey says, they went straight to the people whose minds they needed to change, speaking at Quantico to Marines, at Camp Pendleton, at the National Defense University, and to the CIA, and showing them the technology in person.

The conversation framed the old bet as hoping a story read by 500,000 strangers might happen to reach the 200 people who actually matter. Meservey's answer is to contact those few people directly and tell them plainly, since many are already a text message away.

Going through the press also weakens the message, she argues. The founder's conviction loses force at each handoff, from publicist to reporter to editor to reader.

For founders who need only a few specific people, mass media makes little sense, and that is starkest now in artificial intelligence, she says. A company that needs five top machine learning engineers it can already name makes little sense chasing a morning television audience. As a general example of going where peers listen, she points to Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong appearing on a tiny podcast called Pot of Jake, with about 100 listeners. Work backward from where influential people get their information, she advises, and just go there.