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

“Of our firm. He's my autism translator. I will talk to and listen to one set of people more and he'll talk to and listen to another set of people more in between us. I think we've got a pretty wide spectrum of text. So the reading the room exercise we do together.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you heard of the illusion of transparency? There's different words for it, but you've probably felt it. Let's say you and I are chatting and you say a thing that completes a thought that's in your head. And I'm completely lost or there's a misunderstanding. I take it wrong. I get my feelings hurt. It's you assuming that the outside world can know what's in your mind and you forgot to complete the thought or you didn't read the room properly because you're too much living inside your own head. And that's easy for anybody else to do. So part of our job actually is reading the room, figuring out what the room is, and then getting inside of it and then reading it and then reporting back to figure out, okay, if you're going to launch, these are the people, this is what they're talking about right now. This is what they care about. This thing that was cool two weeks ago when we started talking about this has actually turned cringe in the meantime. We're not going to go with that anymore. So hyper reading the room is an important skill. And then I have my co-founder, Sergey, and he says, CT.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another person like a crush. You do this so that I don't have to, but I feel better knowing that you're there doing it. That's not our model. Our model is to help the founders look great and be the best version of themselves as a public advocate for their company, not for me to go do everything for them forever. So it's more teach a man to fish less sell a man a fish a month at a time.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collect a fee, and it would probably feel like we had gotten a sinecure and we don't want that. We like when there's a delta between where the world is now and where the world should be with this company succeeding. So for example, working with safe superintelligence, it feels like one of the more important things we could possibly be doing is supporting those guys in any way because what they're doing is so monumental for the world, building a safe superintelligence. It's in the name. And then the third thing we look for is just the structure of the company. So is the founder really in the weeds? Is the founder doing things themselves or are they delegating a lot and how directly are they willing to work with us and work with their audiences and put themselves out there? Sometimes founders will use”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We choose a lot on vibes and chemistry, not just because it makes work more fun. It does, but also because I think vibes is the best measurement we have so far about whether things are going to go well. With early startups especially, you don't have enough data points from the company in order to make an educated judgment about how well things are going to go for the company. And so you look at the founder and you stare them in the eyes and you think, is this someone who's going to make it? We just read vibes a lot. I think you can cultivate an ability to do that. Mine is pretty good. It could probably get a lot better too. But we go by vibes. That's one. Two is we think about how much does this company need us right now. We've talked with really awesome founders of awesome companies who are doing just great. And we could come in and ride those coattails.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beginning of this conversation, I said that the founder has something new and secret to share with the world that people don't already know. And that's the whole point is that it's different. You also can't just blast somebody with something they've never heard of before. You have to give them something in there that's familiar or related to something they already care about. And so I think the formula would be the hook and the hook has to relate to what their cultural erogenous zone is and you have to be in their culture to understand that then the gateway drug or the bridge, the segue, and then the new thing that you want them to understand or think about.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Graydon Carter trifecta is good for news and breaking news. And in an age where you had to break news in order to justify the inches in the columns, that totally makes sense. Today, we're moving more toward opinions and personalities. I don't think that formula is necessary anymore. It's a formula, but even newspapers are moving more toward opinions and editorial. a new way to think about it would be I don't have the catchphrases yet maybe we can make up the catchphrases the way I describe it is that you need to know their cultural orogenous zones what they care about and what they think about then you need a gateway drug so as I'll describe it as an API but you basically need a bridge from what they're currently thinking about and caring about to bridge them to the new thing that you want them to think about and care about at the”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the New York Times, again, you're just screaming into the void. So the medium and the messenger of who they're hearing this from and where they're hearing it is the key for whether it actually reaches them and they'll absorb it.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rare that I actually don't recommend expending much energy on it. If you have the opportunity to convert someone okay, but I wouldn't make it a core part of your strategy to convert people who hate you. If you're going to engage with them at all, you might consider letting them attack you until they overstep in order for you to round up your true allies. That's a good use as a foil. And then there's the swing voters. It's the people who actually could be your people, but they just don't know it yet. Just like in an election, the swing voters are deserving disproportionate amount of attention. That's your audience. And then last, I would say your medium and your hook, you need to reach people where they intellectually hang out. So the type of person who hangs out on Reddit or listening to Joe Rogan or listening to NPR or going to conferences or”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the wrong people is worse than talking to nobody, partly because of the expended time and partly because you might be making new enemies or making unwanted friends that then tie you down in unpredicted ways. So I think of the audiences as here are the people who actually have a say in the future of the company. If my goal is to get more users, then these are the users and I care about them and people who are not users. I literally don't care about them. If I have to make them mad in order to please the users, I will make that choice without hesitation. So there's the people that you really care about. Then there's the haters and every founder has haters. And the bigger founder you are, the more haters you'll have. And there's the company grows, your corpus of haters will grow. Most of these haters are irredeemables, the David Petraeus term for people you can't convert. Every once in a while, you hear wonderfully inspiring stories about, I used to be a hater and then I came around. It's so...”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And wannabes over the years who have tried to ramify themselves, and it's never quite worked because RAMP knows that they're there to save customers time and money. They say it 10 times a day. I've heard them say it probably 10 times in a single meeting and everything is geared towards that, including the comms. Whereas if somebody is just splashing around in the pool, that's not sustainable. You can't splash around forever. You'll also never arrive anywhere. So number one is the founder knows what they're about and they're willing to take on the responsibility being the keeper of the vision and the message. Two is the company has to have clear goals that they're working toward. Three, related to two is you have to know the audience and know your audience is actually a cliche at this point. It's become so much of a truism that it's faded into the ambient background and people don't think about it enough. Maybe we should rebrand it or something so it becomes fresh and salient again. But know your audience is important because if you're talking”
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 trying to accomplish. This is super important because a lot of people will just flail around and do activity. And once they feel activity is done, it gives them the illusion that something has happened when in fact they haven't moved any closer to any specific direction. So communication is a vector, not a scalar. It only matters if there's a direction attached to it. And if you know that your direction is, we have to get more customers or we're going to go raise around at the end of this year or we need to get this thing done with regulators. Whatever the big goals are, all the comms should be pointed in that direction and then everything else is wasted motion. And if you don't have a direction, then everything is wasted motion. So two is having a clear direction. RAMP, which is a fantastic company I'm really proud to work with them. And one of the reasons I'm proud is that they've always been very clear about what they are and what they're not. They have a bunch of competitors and”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to crystallize this better, but I think that there are a few core ingredients. There might be variations on the recipe. Whenever you post a recipe online, there's somebody who's like, I doubled the butter and it was good for me. Maybe you could double the butter, but the core ingredients are, number one, it starts with the founder and they have to have a clear vision and they have to be willing and eager to take on that responsibility. You can't do it in a self-loathing way where you hate every second of it. You have to appreciate what it means for the company and be willing to lean into it. I think that Alex at scale is a good example of this. He is a founder's founder. He gets into the weeds. He does what other people would call micromanaging and he cares so much. And he does that with comms as well. He has never shied away from taking a bullet on behalf of scale. He's willing to do that. So that's one. Two is you need to have a very clear view of what your goals are.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a good example of it. Palmer at Andorl is another great example. Anderl has several founders and they all do a great job. Palmer is more visible. The reason he does a great job similar is Androil has a great comms team, very talented people at every level. They do what they're supposed to do. And then there's the Palmer Alpha, where on top of that, he takes personal accountability and he puts in personal creativity and he puts himself out there for personal risk. There are times when he's being attacked, not the company. And he puts himself out there for that as well. So those are a couple that I think are doing a great job.”
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 a couple of different ways to do this. If you're an earlier founder in a smaller company, you should just straight up do it yourself. But if you are a founder of a larger company, you can't and shouldn't try to do everything yourself all the time, in which case you have people who are helping you. My point is that you shouldn't be dependent on them and outsource it to them because the buck does stop with you and not with your VP of comms. But you can be working with those people and having them help you take on the load. Big company, I think Toby Luca does an incredible job. He takes personal responsibility for the story of Shopify. Everything about the narrative and the way the history is presented and the lore of the company and the lore of him and starting out with his janky online snowboard store, he owns that and he tracks it. There are people who help and that is the way it should be, but he never abnegates that responsibility.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're between two worlds today. I'm not even talking about traditional media versus social media. That's the old world is traditional media transitioning to social media. I think where we are today is social media transitioning to AI-driven hyper-personalized, very prolific where you can't tell human-made from AI made very soon media, whatever the term will be for that. It's a combination of information overload, trust breaking down, AI slop, very persuasive, real and fake versions of things. We're right in the middle of that. And the key technologies are social media, generative AI, and this is not a technology, but influencers and individuals as mediums.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people are LARPing as communicators and as executives. There's never been a real playbook for comms that is analytical, grounded in reasoning and logic and first principles that has intellectual rigor. And there have been some great, great PR and propaganda people throughout history and they've had their own playbooks, but there is no definitive best practice to doing something. It's not like math. People will just look to other people doing it and everybody is kind of a pale shadow of someone who came from before. If you would trace it all the way back, maybe we're all LARPing as Edward Bernays or something. But it becomes one of these things where there's four mice and they like to run on a treadmill and you take them out one by one and put in new mice and then pretty soon all the new mice are imitating the old mice and they don't know why. And I think that's what's been happening in a corporate setting. Probably for a lot of other roles as well, but especially for comms.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The norm is using a ton of middlemen. If you look at a professional company that has all of its layers and structures in place, the CEO tells maybe a CMO or a VP of comms who then tells the person who's in charge of corporate comms, who then tells the person who's in charge of media relations, who then pitches a reporter, and then they'll find a reporter who already wanted to write something similar because they have a narrative already in mind. And then it's beamed through the prism of that reporter's worldview to specific readers of that publication, and then those readers get that version. And you can even hear through the process of me describing this, how contorted it is along the way. Today, there's absolutely no need to do that. Not only do you not need to do that, you shouldn't be relying on that. You can do it every once in a while. You might need to reach policymakers in DC and they do read, let's say, the”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not have it trickle down too far because you lose the thing that's special. There can be too many middlemen such that by the time your message reaches people, it's been watered down beyond recognition and it's not special anymore.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The founder has to be accountable for the story. The founder holds this secret knowledge and this vision that other people don't. If that's not true, you have no business starting a company. Get out of here and go work at IBM. Get a job unless you have that secret knowledge and that secret vision and something to bring to the world that's new, you have no business being a founder. So everybody that has business being a founder knows something everybody else doesn't know. I'm belaboring that point because it's really important to me. But the core thing to internalize is if you have that knowledge, you cannot then transmit it through seven other layers until it becomes something that is fully familiar to people and fits fully into some comfortable narrative that already exists. You have to figure out a way to speak to people directly with your voice, your passion, your vision.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An American person, but there's also often a culture barrier between a tech person and a DC person, or a finance person and a heavy industry person. So just thinking about how words translate through those cultural membranes. And then another thing is that my actual professional experience is a mix of having studied security studies and counterterrorism, having studied geopolitics, having worked in tech, geopolitics, and finance, everything except comms basically. And through that combination, learning and figuring it out. I would not say that I'm perfect, but I think that the bar in the industry is frankly so low that if you have a good mindset and are willing and eager to help founders, it can get you pretty far.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my primary selling point is actually being unencumbered with experience in doing communications. The world comes, I think, is so broken that the more experience you have in it, the more compromised you might be and the harder it is to break away. I have very little experience in comms and experience in other things. What maybe makes me a fit for startups and founders is having been born in this little village that was poor and backwards and rural and communist and to this day doesn't have running water or electricity and to this day doesn't have free access to information and seeing the contrast there and understanding the stakes of what some of these people are working on. That's one. Two is I've lived in a lot of places and I think it helps me picture how words come across if there's a culture barrier. There might be a culture barrier between a Norwegian and a Chinese person or a German.”
2024-09-24 · Invest Like the Best · Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source