YouSaid · the spoken record

Lulu Meservey

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-09-24
most recent: 2024-09-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That one could do, but it meant so much because it was stranger in a strange land, and he was this random person who had never met me and had given me this little kindness and stopped to chat with me. It was enough of an impression that I still remember it one, two decades later.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of my childhood was in Norway, and I lived in Oslo. Growing up, we always had very little money just a function of being immigrants moving from place to place and not speaking the language. And so I was in public school just learning Norwegian and no one was really talking to me. I was not the popular kid in school, as you might imagine. And I held open a door. It was just in a community center type thing. For an older man who was coming down the hall and it took a while, it was one of those awkward gaps where I should have just kept walking because now I'm standing there and he's taking another eight seconds. He walked through the door and then he thanked me in Norwegian. I got to say you're welcome in Norwegian. And then he reached into his pocket and he gave me a 10 kroner coin and he patted it into my hand and said, you're a nice girl. And it wasn't the most extravagant act of kind of.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Telling them they actually are because they've chosen the wrong medium, and the medium is stifling them. They've chosen the medium for the wrong reasons. Our audience is there, which is a decent reason, but not the best reason. People expect this of us and our blog is here. I'm going to put this on our blog. And then they end up looking not as good. So choose the medium that actually works for you and everything else can be shaped around it.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The manifesto and say it or put it in every medium and see which one is the natural medium for you compare your writing to you on a video and a recording saying it to you creating a series of short posts about it or turning it into memes to you delivering it in person even if it's just over the dinner table and see which of those is the strongest because different founders and different people have different modes of communication where you can be awesome in one and not in the other Guern for example I got to hang out with him and had a great time he does not feel comfortable in a podcast setting because that's not his setting he feels incredibly comfortable writing but even then he feels comfortable writing posts he doesn't want to write a book he knows his medium and he's excellent at it some people seem less interesting and less competitive”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How YC has the application for getting into it? I didn't apply to YC, although I work with Gary and love him and YC. I actually did the exercise of filling out the application before starting Rastra. Just for my own, do I have answers to these questions? Is it a vanity exercise by starting a company because it feels good to be a founder and I'm free from a big corporate? Is there something deeper that's there? Because I'm bringing people along with me. And I owe it to them to know that I don't have bullshit reasons that I lied to myself about. I did that exercise and I think what we're talking about here with these questions that you have to answer in a manifesto to know that there's a reason your company should exist is an exercise that founders should do as well just to be truthful to themselves.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invest in you or work with you, work for you, or be a partner to you, what type of human being am I putting myself next to? Do you stand for what I stand for? Is your vision of the world similar to my vision? If you believe that you will only succeed in vision A of the world, but I happen to believe vision B, then we're incompatible and that's okay, but it's good to know that upfront. I don't want to find that out the hard way after we've signed stuff.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only have a manifesto, but to have a company. The other which is related is why can only you do this. And these things, you can write it down or not and write it down, but you have to have an answer. The answer has to exist. Why are you the right person to do this right now? The next question would be, how are you approaching this or how are you approaching it differently? Maybe it's a new problem you're approaching it with an old way, or maybe it's the same problem, but you're approaching it in a new way. But what is your approach? How are you going about it? If you're going to get us to Mars, how are you getting us to Mars? And you don't have to share trade secrets or expose any part of the master plan that you don't want to, but people need to be convinced that the plan exists. And then the next one is what are your principles and values? What do you believe? And if I”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First one is what gives you a right to exist? There is already 40,000 companies doing something like you and then there's 15 companies doing what sounds exactly like what you're doing and then there's three other companies that are literally doing exactly what you're doing, at least to the outside eyes. Why don't you just go join them? What gives you a right to exist and to take up space on this earth and to take up any of our time? The most important thing is what is missing in the world today that only you can fill. And a lot of companies are never able to answer that question. And it makes it hard to invest in that company. If I'm going to bet my career on you, I'm going to go leave Google to bet everything on you. Your equity will be the financial security for my kids and my grandkids. And you're telling me that you can't name something that would go missing in the world if you were to vanish tomorrow. It's dereliction. That question has to be answered for you to”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hang out and talk or whatever, but don't need anyone, including me, become sovereign, become independent. You should be able to have anybody quit, leave, go to a competitor, and you will be able to keep going. Because not only can you do every job, but you have the basic understanding of every function to be able to carry on and replace that person if you need to. And in comms, the basic understanding of the function is solo because it's been so uninteresting and been so miserable that people don't want to touch it, that only now are people learning through experience that it is hard for me to walk away from work that I'm doing and have everything carry on just as well. And for the sake of founders, I would want them to not depend on anybody, not even me.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that people should ask me is what do I need to do such that I'm not going to need you anymore. People often come to me because they're frustrated with the way the comms works, which I share that frustration. I get it. It's hard to find people that you gel with and who get in or are really in it with you. I have maybe 10 clients. It's hard to find these connections. Something needs to be done. They want a launch or they're foreseeing a crisis or they're in a crisis or they're just having a hard time getting people to understand, especially with AI. There's just so much misunderstanding out there. There's a lot to be done to write the perception and to do fact checking and all of that. What I think is a productive line of thought is what are we going to do together such that you could keep me around if you'd like to. And let's”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's not enough to go around. And there are many, many founders who have never worked with a single one that is magnificently good at what they do and sharp and matches their energy and really cares and has the intensity and will fight for them and doesn't have the principal agents problem and is not saving context for a future job and is just willing to give it everything. It's so hard to find, which is why when I was looking for a hire for Rostra, we looked really far outside a traditional comms people. We had a former nun. We had a rabbi. We had someone from the CIA, someone from the White House, we had a diplomat, we had several founders, we had medical doctors, someone like that who learns can do a better job than the average comps person. So the industry has really gotten a bad name, unfortunately.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Historically, there's been a near monopoly by traditional media. The only way you could get any message out at scale is to either be incredibly fabulously wealthy already so that someone would just write about you without you even having to do anything, or you'd have to go around begging somebody to cover you, somebody who already had a platform would need to loan it to you with their agenda and their lens. And going around begging people to cover you sucks. It's miserable. It's demeaning. It doesn't work. The results aren't good. And so again, I think in today's world, you could do it, but don't rely on it. That leads to a life of no joy. I think historically, it's been so miserable that people still associated with that and it feels horrible. Secondly, the talent density and cons is not awesome. There are really, really outstanding people.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I help them to propagate the message to be able to get there. Then lastly for roster itself as a company, TBD, we don't know. We're less than six months old, so we're playing it by year.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture and move people towards that. There's a lot of founders already doing it. They're setting examples that are more powerful than what I'm able to do. But together, I think we can really push this change and accelerate it. And we don't make money off of that, but it's better for tech. And I think what's better for tech is better for the world. So we should do that. And then the second thing we want for Rastra is we want to have grown up with founders that we really admire and enjoy working with. Every great, great founder today who's at the top of their game came from somewhere many years ago. And I wasn't in comms and I didn't know how to do comms and I wasn't around. But I would love to one day be someone who was by a founder side and help them through that journey and have some really incredible companies be doing incredible things in the world where in some small way.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, change how founders think about how they communicate to the world. Everybody thinks it's important and everybody hates it. I'm rounding up to everybody, but it's got to be over 90% of the people I talk to. In the coming years, if you graduate or if you finish YC and you know two things and one of them is build something people want.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with what we're not trying to do. We're not here to be revenue maxing. I drive my three kids around in a minivan. My husband and I live a normal life. Any additional money we make from here just sits somewhere or gets given to someone. Our lifestyle isn't about to change. Same with Sergei and same with our other team members. We like having freedom. There's merit in being free just to be free. There's an intrinsic quality to freedom where exercising it just makes you more fulfilled as a person. And a lot of times you're limited in being able to exercise freedom because of wanting to maximize revenue. And we always choose the former. We'll always choose freedom and doing what we want. We'll turn down great money all the time because we simply want to do something else. And so the thing we want to do is to number”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could have seen it in the original. The rostra was the place where you would go make a political speech. It was where the eulogy for Caesar was given. It was where they turned the sentiment of the people of Rome to either vote for you instead of me or to hate versus love Mark Anthony. Really history was made from there. So we called it that even though Sergei and I debated this for a while because it is kind of a mouthful, not long, but two R's in a word. ChatGPT couldn't even tell you like two R's in a word is a lot of R's in a word impossible for like half the people on this globe to pronounce correctly, but we like it.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the name too. It is quite nerdy and we debated it quite a bit. A roastra is a speaker's platform and specifically the rostra was the speaker's platform that stood in ancient Rome, both in the republic and in the empire era. It straddled those two eras. So it was there at this pivotal moment in history when Rome really was the center of the world. And this rostra was the center of Rome in terms of ideas being spread you could look at the entire globe and ideas and power would come back to focus on the rostra. It stood nearby by the Roman Senate. It was called the rostra because a rostrum is the battle ram of a ship. It was built on top of the rostra rostrums of captured enemy battle rams. It went so hard.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of HR Best Employee Awards, whatever else. It feels ephemeral. You have an opportunity now to be part of this group's journey now because in a couple years they'll have to go join the military and disband. And that might not be here forever, capturing something special about this moment creates a sense of urgency. I have to go to this concert because they might not tour again next year. And same with a company. We're at our Series A now. You have still a chance to get in on the ground floor. Next year, this opportunity will be gone.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are into it for the personalities, not the songs and dances, the same way that a lot of fans of fighting and UFC and MMA got into it by watching Ultimate Fighter and getting into the personas and the drama on Ultimate Fighter. And then by the time the finale happened, which was a big fight, they were hooked on MMA. They formed these communities around things. And you're creating your own community so you know this. Being part of a community makes the thing so much more sticky. People who are in a community of Tesla owners, they can't get rid of their Tesla. It'd be humiliating. What are you going to go do? Join the Volkswagen community instead. You have all the sweaters. You have the friends. You have the meetups. You're in it. And the communities even have bribalries against other communities. So being a member of this thing larger than yourself becomes a part of your identity. This is really important for startups, where if you're not just an employee of a company, but a member of a movement, that becomes part of your identity, makes you so much more loyal than any amount of...”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're this idle blend of different types of personas. And the things that make K pop so addictive, I'll summarize a couple of them. One is it's about the personalities and the individuals that form the band. If you notice, anything from one direction to NSYNC to Spice Girls all the way back, there's always different personas. There's the sporty spice and ginger spice and whatever other spice. There's the cute one and the bad boy. The different personas glue people because it creates friction and drama and diversity inside of this group. So instead of one thing, you get five things. So it's like in the Starburst package, you and I have the added enjoyment of debating over orange versus yellow, making it about the personalities and the interplay and the relationships brings so much more flavor and interest to the groups beyond just the songs and the dances. And a lot of fans.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That K pop is such a major industry for South Korea that there is a whole engine around producing K-pop. It's like a national industrial manufacturing complex, but for K-pop stars. It's like how Spartans trained fighters. If it matters to this nation, you will figure out a way to systematically train kids to do this and do it well. And the same way that Spartans would choose the most promising youngsters and put them in these schools and then pair them up with older mentors. They're doing this with promising K-pop celebrities. Give you a good looking and or good singer and or good dancer and or some secret charisma factor. You get to go into these training academies and then you have to be selected from there and then you're put into a group and the groups are curated top down so that”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've only recently recovered from my research for that piece. It is so addictive, Patrick, do not go down this hole. It'll alter your life for like years. It's like I was taking meth to do research and then had to kick it after the research was done. It is designed to be incredibly addictive. All the things I wrote about how they hook you completely worked on me in the process. I was watching K-pop music videos at 1 a.m. as a grown woman like what am I doing? The reason I got into it is actually my little sister who's a lot cooler and with it than I am. She was telling me about K-pop just exploding on all her friends were into it and she was living in LA at the time. People would come to work and just talk about K-pop. And I was fascinated by this because I'd heard a little bit of K-pop and their music was just okay in my opinion. Like, what is going on here? I went into the rabbit hole and I found.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're leaving Google to work for this word that their family can't even pronounce in a company they've never heard of. And you have to make those costs worth it to them. And prospect theory tells us this. People fear downside more than they want upside. It's a lot easier to tell them this current state that we're all living in is unacceptable. And now we're so close to something a lot better. That's easier to tell them. And you can say truthfully than to say things are fine now, but they could be even better.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, True Believer was very good. And there's a lot in common between mass political movements and just regular mass movements of believing in anything. The one key similarity between a political movement and what a company is trying to achieve is people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their life and you want to get them to think about that more and more and more until they just freaking can't stand it anymore. They can't stand it. They're not going to live like this another day. They're going to change their whole career path and come work with you. They're going to abandon this other thing they've been using and use this thing instead. Every time somebody joins your movement, joins your company, buys your product, there's a cost to them. Maybe there's a cost of $200 they have to buy the thing. There's a switching cost. They have to do something differently. There's a learning cost. They have to learn how to use your thing. There's a cost to them explaining to their family.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're willing to fight for your company, and you're willing to fight for this better world that you're trying to help shape because it's worth it. I think for that reason, Steve Jobs is a model because people will sort of flippantly talk about times that he was an asshole to somebody. Imagine having the strength to know that a lot of people think that you're an asshole. That would be hard for me. In history, this is not a direct inspiration, but it's ideas that I find inspiring. My co-founder recommended to me, Eric Koffer, who has written about how mass political movements happen.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of founders who have done this extraordinarily well. It's pretty cliche to say Steve Jobs, but I'll say it for a different reason, which is that by all accounts, he knew what his reputation was, the unfavorable parts of it. And he knew what people would say about him. It didn't matter because he had priorities. And making new friends and being liked universally was not one of those priorities. Excellence was one of the priorities. He is somebody who was able to put his own potentially hurt feelings aside in order to pursue the thing that was the most important. Running a company doesn't always feel good. And if you stand for something and you're making something that is different, and it might be a threat to incumbents and it might make people uncomfortable, you're going to have people be upset at you and you need to decide upfront that that's worth it.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lying down, you'll be accountable for everything you claim as a fact, then it just raises the cost and the barrier for people trying to do that in the future. For founders, the biggest thing is if you're going to be tackled, you might consider running into the tackle and using your own force and momentum to drive them back and change where you stand on the field.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“going going ideally it never stops in a crisis or in a normal situation if someone is coming to tackle you it's often a mistake to run from it either you've done something wrong and it's time to confront it and you got to deal with that at some point or you haven't and why would you let somebody besmirch your name and slander you and crap on your company and get away with it because two things will happen one is that your employees will respect you less and the morale will go down two is that you are unfavorably shaping incentives for other people to attack you in the future unfavorable to yourself you're showing the world that you can attack me for something i haven't done and get away with it and more people will come out and try this is another lesson from counterinsurgency whereas if you establish that if you hit us we hit you back twice as hard or if you hit us we're not going to take it”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me put it in an analogy. A common mistake is playing American football instead of rugby. And I'll tell you why. So founders should be playing rugby. The difference between football and rugby, and I played rugby in college. So I have a soft spot. But bias aside, I still think it's the right approach. With American football, once you get tackled, the play ends. So you'll do everything to avoid being tackled. You see players run and look backwards around and lose yards all over the field just to avoid the tackle. Whereas in rugby, the play is more continuous and you might run into the tackle because you know that the play isn't going to stop and that your teammates are there and you're going to keep going. And because it's continuous, you will take the tackle often, run into it, use the force of your momentum to get as many yards as possible and then have your teammates pick up the ball and help you. And running a company, especially through a crisis, but in any situation is more like rug because the plays don't stop. You're just going, going.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because things fall apart. So for you to be a strong leader and for you to be the embodiment of how everybody else should be acting during this crisis is absolutely crucial. Sometimes it's tempting to be like, I can let my emotions take over because I've got advisors around me. Well, no, people aren't looking to your advisors for how to act. They're looking to you for how to act.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counterinsurgency, one of the big lessons is the importance of winning over the local population, the importance of winning over the tribal elders and the leaders in the community and getting to them, because they'll propagate the message for you and they'll do it coming from them, which is way better than coming from you because you're self-interested and you're probably an outsider. So one is paying attention to those people, going to one person who's considered an authority in a certain community is better than going to 200 or in the age of social media, maybe a thousand other people. Another thing is the importance of the leadership and the personality is paramount. So people have to trust you as an individual and trust you as a person in order to trust the organization that you lead. Charismatic leader is so important that one of the strategies in counterinsurgency is to get the leader.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same type of thing that the marine poor would do, they do theirs better and more involved. I do a basic version, which is let's take a crisis scenario and it hits, and then your senior team is in a room. And now what do you do? Because people will realize in the moment that there are cracks in their plan. It'll be tiny things. You're my boss and it's 5 a.m. And I'm not sure whether to wake you. So I wait until 6 because that seems reasonable and now we've lost an hour because I didn't make the right call. These small things that you don't think of, All of that needs to be in place and thought of when the time comes so that everything that you can do on autopilot has to be done on autopilot because all of your organizational, operational, and mental capacity has to be spent on dealing with the crisis.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do something that minimizes legal risk, like stay quiet and issue a really bland statement and go undercover for a while and don't apologize even if you messed up. But that actually could shred your reputation longer term, which could be way more expensive, both financially in terms of people will boycott you and not buy your product or not trust your company or not accept the job offer. And on a moral level, you've just paid a really expensive price for something that could have been a temporary pain. Those are the biggest things in the crisis. I would say pragmatically, try to fight the crisis before it happens. If there is dry tinder lying around you, do something about it before the hot summer day comes, before the campers come by. If you know that their skeletons in the closet, deal with them, address them. Have a crisis plan in place. I still do. These tabletop warroom exercises.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If no, fight it. And the reason I say don't listen to your lawyers is not that I'm not a legal process enjoyer, but I do respect legal opinions and the law. However, what I mean is a lot of times the lawyers are optimizing for one thing. They're optimizing for minimized legal risk at all other costs. And this is the same thing where during COVID, it was like minimize COVID transition at all other costs. We're going to close schools. Kids are going to fall behind. People are going to have mental health crises. You're not going to be able to bury your grandmother. That's fine. Minimize transmission. That's not the right way to make decisions. And if you're a CEO, that's not the right way to make decisions because you need the whole picture. So if you're the CEO and the founder, minimizing legal risk is one consideration. Another consideration is principles and being true to yourself and doing what's right and courageous. Another consideration is your reputation long term. You might”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts with the ground truth of did you mess up if you did apologize and if you didn't don't apologize it's so simple and people get it so wrong they'll start apologizing or not apologizing based on all sorts of other garbage factors who's mad at me am i getting ratioed that's how they decide whether to apologize or not who gives a did you do something wrong or did you not don't compromise yourself don't sell out like that So that's the biggest thing is don't listen to what people tell you about what you should do to change the situation. Either you're wrong or you're not. At the end of the day, you got to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know that you stood for something you have principles. And if we all just go about caving and apologizing, if we didn't mean it, this world would just fall apart. What is the ground truth? Did you do something wrong? Number two, if yes, apologize whole.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't listen to your lawyers and never apologize if you didn't do something wrong and if you don't mean it because you'll regret it later. If you talk to founders who apologize for something at the time, the woman who was kicked out of the wing, for example, she went back later and said she wished she hadn't done that whole routine, they always regret it because you compromise yourself. And you do compromise yourself for nothing because an apology doesn't appease people, especially if you didn't do anything wrong and it's insincere. One, they can tell if you don't mean it, but two, if you didn't do anything wrong, then by definition, there's nothing to apologize for. So apologizing isn't going to change the situation. So do not apologize for something you didn't do wrong. If you did something wrong, apologize wholeheartedly. This is the Ben Horowitz if you're going to eat shit. Don't nibble. I subscribe to that.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mimetic. But if you can fit yourself into a macro narrative or show the relationship between you and what's happening out into the world, then investors have, number one, a way to understand why this matters. And number two, a way to look great to the rest of their firm and the rest of the industry when they invest in you because they're trying to signal to other founders and to other people about the quality of investments they make and they need a way to explain why this all matters.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, maybe your thing fits into a thesis of American dynamism. Maybe your thing fits into a point of view around U.S.-China competition. Maybe your thing fits into a point of view about what's going to happen to AI over the next three and five years. So it has to fit into some larger worldview. And then you have to convince people about the worldview. And if they worldview is plausible, then your product or your company is the only natural explanation. If you agree with this premise, then you're going to want this, obviously. It's easier than saying, here, I have a company, let me pitch you on my company, because number one, you're so clearly self-interested that that self-interest is undermining your pitch the whole time you're making it. And two is investors are pretty memetic. This is not meant to be a dunk on investors, but it's human nature. It's not just VCs or memetic.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine, but be authentic about it and be just an authentically good and charming salesperson. It's valuable to have a founder who can sell their thing too. The worst mistake is a founder is one thing and then for the purpose of fundraising, they try to make themselves another thing and they can't pull off the other thing. Practically no one ever can. So it looks like you're nothing. So you don't have the new thing and then you also don't have the old thing. You're not hot tea. You're not iced tea. You're just lukewarm tea and you've got nothing and nobody and you have no natural constituency. That is probably the biggest mistake. The other things that make fundraising seem to go really well. There's normal stuff having connections and having a good product, really the basics. But within the realm of what is easily controllable, what makes it go well is if you can describe your thing, your company, your product, in the context of a macro narrative.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's supposed to be a security researcher, whatever persona or vibe it is, just lean into that. I have seen a founder that can't make eye content. I've never seen him do it. I don't know if he's capable. It was like maybe a rare medical condition, like can't make eye contact, speaks in a full monotone, looks down, mumbles, and that's what he's.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who do it best are unapologetically who they are. They don't fit into one specific persona. They don't have to be charming and amazing salesmen. Sometimes it's better if they're not. You don't want someone who stands up and is like, hello, sharks vibe.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What kind of personal following do they have? Who follows them? And then how many of the who, then what's the publication they work for? Do they work for publication? Maybe they have their own substack, and that is great too. But if they work for a publication, then who's their editor? You might have a great reporter with a not so great editor that becomes an unforeseen problem. And then the publication itself, who is it read by, how big is its reach? How well is it perceived? There are some publications that are read by a ton of people but are not seen as prestigious. So USA Today is one of the biggest circulations, but it's not seen as prestigious compared to the financial times, which has a smaller readership, but it's seen as a higher bar. So qualitative judgment there. And then lastly, do they have a paywall and do you care about that? Sometimes I've gone to publications that are smaller or have less name recognition because for that thing we didn't want a paywall.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different reporters, but I think it's the same criteria. Traditionally, you would start with what's the outlet, what's the beat, and who's the reporter? I think now it's flipped because we've gone from institutions to individuals. So start with who are the people who are knowledgeable in this space and love it. They're excited about it. They're not here just to hold you accountable and to get maximum metrics to send to their boss. They genuinely love it for cognition, for example. And same for SSI, we chose Ashley Vance because he is intellectually curious about AI. He's not the only one. He's just an example, but he just geeks out and he loves it. You want somebody who will match your energy and reflect your energy back as you're talking to them. And then they will research it through the lens of somebody who loves this thing. Who are the people who love it and know about it? You'll come up with a list of maybe 30. There's many people. But within those people now look at”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Selection is probably the number one thing in people stress a lot about the pitch and the prep and what do I say in the interview. If you choose the right reporter, what you say in the interview matters a lot less.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He talks about blending the novel with the familiar and that being a magic formula, finding a way to describe what you're doing that is simple, crisp, and familiar, but novel is a big part of it, teeing up your allies is a big part of it. You can't just put something out into the world. And if you say it, they will listen and hope that all your friends will rally to you. It takes some time. And in the case of cognition, it took between a month and two months to brief some people and prep some people and get people ready. There are people who are latently happy to support you, but they might not know how and they might not be ready to do it. And you can help them help you. And then there's the normal logistic stuff of the site should look how you want it to look and your post should sound how you want it to sound. The video should be what you want it to be. If you're going to do press, choose the right reporter.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't fully predict now if we zoom in on the half percent that I would attribute to skill, what goes into that half percent? It's having a very clear story about what this is. So everything and every person is a thousand things. You could describe yourself in a thousand ways if you were forced to. There's enough material there. Every product or company can be described in a thousand different ways. taste and discretion and creativity in describing it in the single best way and choosing the number one best one out of the thousand is where a lot of that skill lies this founder mode essay pg's essay that went viral over the weekend i think more than half of that was a great name it was simple it was familiar people understood it but it was also new and so derek thompson at the atlantic has written a whole book about what makes things go viral”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stand for when we work at the companies on launches, I recommend they write a manifesto. I don't want to live in a world where everybody's writing a manifesto for everything all the time, but it is good as a forcing mechanism, if nothing else, to write down what you stand for and what you value and then come out either with those words or something that reflects those words. Launches do matter and they matter more than they did before. And if you don't launch yourself, somebody will launch you for you at some point. So you got to do it even if just defensively. On launches luck versus skill for the Devon launch 99% was the cognition guys built Devon. They built something genuinely great and new and impressive. Then out of that remaining 1%, I would say half of it is we did a good job. And then half of it was luck. There's always an animal spirits on social media.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every opportunity to make people care that you can have. And the launch is the first of those. Introducing yourself to the world in a proper way is the first of those. The last reason that the launch is so important is now if you don't quickly establish what you're about, you don't have the luxury of quietly building for a long time and then just gradually shaping the perception. Somebody else will just do it for you. There are so many competitors and reporters and independent writers and influencers and gossips and especially in AI. We do a lot of work in AI and the scuttlebutt in AI is intense. It's the biggest water cooler in the world. Everybody's gathered around. And word will get out and it'll be this contorted, distorted version that doesn't represent what you want. And then you'll spend a lot of time trying to put that back and clean up and start over. So come out strong with the thing that you”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launches are more important now than they used to be. So sometimes when you ask people, do launches matter, they'll say, No, do you remember when Airbnb first launched? Remember when Facebook first launched? It doesn't matter. It actually matters a little bit more.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source