High Growth Handbook

by Elad Gil

  So those are the places that I would start. And then over time, you start to figure out, I need some PR here. I need some brand. Some people make the mistake of doing just PR in lieu of brand, because they say, “Well, that’s sort of a branding thing.” But the landscape has changed dramatically. A big story in TechCrunch doesn’t do anything for anybody anymore, whereas five years ago, it was a big deal. A company was sort of made or broken based on what TechCrunch thought about it.

  This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  “If you were to start with a blank slate, what would that team look like?”

  —Shannon Stubo Brayton

  PR Basics

  In the early days your company will be too small and have too little timely news to merit a full-time PR person. As the company grows, you will hire one or more PR people in house, and will often augment the in-house work with an agency.

  Here are some simple basics to get you started on PR.

  Get media trained

  Your internal PR team or your agency should start things off by media training you and any other members of your team who will be officially representing the company and/or speaking to press. Media training will include definition of key terms (What does “off the record” mean versus “on background?”), what you can expect during different types of interviews (broadcast, in-person, phone, video, etc.), as well as practice sessions primarily focused on answering tough questions. You should practice the storyline for your company and be able to answer questions about your products, your competitors, and yourself concisely. In general, you and your cofounders will be encouraged to have a founding narrative about the company and a personal explanation for why you are working on your company. Media training will also focus on things like how to answer a question other than the one you were asked (if needed).

  Iterate on the company pitch

  Practice, practice, practice. Imagine that you are an actor in a play. Read through your narrative and practice your storyline. Your PR team or executive team can help you practice objection handling, fielding tough questions, and delivering the core company story. Repeat it until you have a crisp story memorized. At the same time, remember that authenticity is key. Reporters will know if you’re reading from a script and it’ll come across as less genuine, which can sometimes be a credibility killer. If you are on the phone with press, it is okay to have a written document in front of you to remind you of key talking points.

  “On background” versus “off the record” versus “on the record”

  When talking to press, you should specify the nature of the conversation and get agreement from the reporter on the terms. This is typically something your PR person will work out in advance with the reporter, and also reconfirm at the start of the call. If there is not agreement, you should assume everything you say is on the record. The general breakouts are:

  “Off the record”—this usually means the journalist may not write about the conversations or quote you. You can ask in the middle of the conversation to say something off the record, and if the journalist agrees, then say whatever it is you wanted to share.

  “On background”—this usually means the journalist may write something like “sources say that Google is moving into flying cars” without directly quoting you as the source.

  “On the record”—If you are not “off the record” and not “on background” then you are “on the record,” which means you can be quoted specifically and directly attributed for the comments or quote.

  Correcting factual errors

  In order to maintain independence and journalistic integrity, reporters are not always willing to run a story by you before it’s published. If the press has made an error in fact (versus opinion) it is okay to reach out to the journalist when the story runs to correct the factual error. Factual error means things like “they misunderstood a scientific fact” or “they got the name of the product wrong.” Factual error does not mean “they hate my product” or “they didn’t understand its value.”

  Given how hard people work on their companies, CEOs may get emotional or upset about press coverage. Realize that most of the press coverage will be forgotten in the future, and most companies have had a bad story or two (or ten) at some point or another.

  Press agendas

  Most people in the press are hard-working, ethical people trying to do the right thing. Occasionally you will also run across someone who has an agenda. No matter what you tell them, they will write the story the way they want it to fit a predefined narrative and they will massage facts.

  It is a good idea to read a journalist’s previous stories before speaking with them. If they have a long history of writing thoughtless attack pieces, you should decide how much you want to engage or talk with them.

  One upside of working with a PR person internally or an agency externally is that they have great insight into how reporters work, how they’re generally perceived in the industry, and what you can expect when meeting with them.

  Hiring great PR people

  The PR community is a small one. There are only a few dozen truly great PR people in technology at any given time. They all tend to cluster at a handful of companies and all know each other. The best way to find a great PR person is to ask other PR people, agencies, and journalists who they respect the most and who does the best work, and then go after those people. Sometimes, you can also hire a great partner-level person out of a PR agency.

  Press relationship building

  In the early days, it will take an investment of time to build relationships with key members of the press. This may include reaching out with articles unrelated to your company that may interest the journalist, or meeting for coffee to discuss the industry without other agendas. It is important to invest in these relationships and avoid transactional behavior. This will increase the likelihood your company will get covered.

  As your company scales, building these relationships will continue to be important. However, as CEO you should be judicious with your time. Figure out what other members of your executive team you want to be spokespersons, and start to have them take the lead on some of the press relationships.

  Engage PR early

  It often takes 4-10 weeks for a company to coordinate a big PR launch—more if you are just onboarding a new PR agency or your existing agency isn’t up to speed on the new product yet. Don’t wait for the week before the launch to let your PR team or agency know what is coming. Just like design, product communications should be part of the product launch timing from early in the process rather than being an afterthought. Some companies like Amazon go through the exercise of writing the product “headline” at the stage of product conception. For example, when writing a design document, you might think through what the press story on the product will be when it launches. This helps to shape crisp thinking about what you are building and why.

  Press does not equal success

  While getting positive press coverage will get you a lot of attention from friends and family (and maybe some famous people), it is not a reflection of company success. Profitable, scalable revenue is a much more important metric. For most companies, PR is also not a way to get recurring distribution. Don’t confuse press coverage with traction and remember to focus on the core metrics of the company. And do not think that a good press cycle can cover up a bad business decision.

  PR and crisis management

  Every company will have a bad press cycle. In general, companies tend to get built up in the press, and then torn down by the press. However, there are singular events the press will rally behind where the company has screwed up or made a mistake. During these times of crisis management, the company needs to act swiftly and wisely to protect its brand and customer base. Crisis management tends to have the following steps:

  1. Analyze the problem What went wrong? How will this impact the company, its customers, or other stakeholders? How is this likely to be portrayed by the press and
by competitors? What are different things you could/should do about the situation?

  2. Acknowledge the problem In general, once you are in a negative press cycle, it will run its natural course. Rather than fight the press cycle itself, try to expedite its coming to its natural resolution as quickly as possible. A negative press cycle is like falling into a river and getting swept up in the current. You can swim with the current and come to a riverbank quickly, or try to swim against the current, exhaust yourself, and get swept down anyways. If you made a mistake, acknowledge it, lay out a plan of action, and take action. Do not lie.

  3. Take action Do the things you said you were going to do. If you can do them quickly, expedite action so you can get through the crisis quickly.

  HOW TO BUILD THE PR TEAM YOU REALLY NEED

  An interview with

  Erin Fors

  Erin Fors is cofounder and President of Cutline Communications. Erin has nearly two decades of experience in PR, with an emphasis on industry-impacting launches and media strategy. She’s worked closely with giants like Google, WhatsApp, and Yahoo!, as well as startups like Instacart, Yik Yak, Polyvore, and more. She launched Android and Chrome for Google and single-handedly responded to hundreds of press inquiries pre-launch, establishing a reputation for being able to simultaneously charm reporters while offering no comment. In all of her experience, Erin’s dedication and drive have had an undeniable impact on her clients and the technology industry.

  Prior to cofounding Cutline, Erin worked for a range of small and large public relations agencies including Merritt Group, A&R Partners (now A&R Edelman), NCG Porter Novelli, UpStart Communications, and Fleishman-Hillard. Erin has been recognized by both Business Insider and PR Week as an innovator and leader in the PR industry.

  I sat down with Erin to chat about how founders can find and deploy the best PR pros, when they should start, and why any successful communications strategy has to start with a good story.

  Elad Gil:

  A lot of founders ping me with questions around PR and communications, government affairs, crisis management—a bunch of things that all tie together. How should founders and CEOs be thinking about PR, and about partnering with external PR folks?

  Erin Fors:

  Founders first need to understand what communications and PR can accomplish for the company—and also what communications and PR cannot accomplish. Those are two things that we sometimes struggle with explaining to founders the most. And my sense is that’s because they are getting conflicting advice.

  You may have board members or advisers saying, “You need to get a PR firm or person.” And then you read TechCrunch or you follow reporters on Twitter and they’re saying, “PR is stupid. Don’t work with PR firms.” PR people and reporters have this long-standing tension: Reporters think they don’t need us, and we’re being pushed by our clients, particularly on the agency side, to go and get coverage. It can be a vicious cycle.

  To me, the importance of PR and communications more broadly is that it gives the company a voice and helps create credibility, or build on their credibility. PR gives the company a way to communicate their purpose. It also helps humanize the company. And given where we are now as a society and what’s going on in the world, that’s really important. I’ve also seen good PR programs help tremendously with recruiting and morale.

  Elad: You mentioned three things: One is controlling the external narrative and how people perceive the company and potentially its founders or executives. Second is around recruiting, and third is around morale. What do you view as the relative priorities of those things? How much time do you think high-growth companies should be spending on comms and PR, and does it differ by type of company? And how much of the founder’s time should be going to it?

  Erin: It does vary by company. Take a company like Pinterest, which is a place (whether through the app or their website) where people go to feel good. It’s an incredible platform for the world right now. PR for Pinterest is way different than for another company, like Airbnb or Stripe.

  For Pinterest, it’s about getting users. It’s engagement. It’s figuring out how to get current users even more engaged, how to grow your users, and how to scale with all this content that’s coming onto the platform. If you have a consumer tech company where the regulatory or privacy or security concerns are really low, do you need a giant agency or multiple specialty agencies and a big internal PR team? I think you could argue that having a small, focused internal team (or person, depending on the size of the company) with some level of agency support—for example, an agency focused on just media campaigns or launches—could work well and we see that a lot with clients.

  With a company like Airbnb, they have a lot of regulatory and privacy and security issues, because they’re a platform for people who rent out their homes. So for a company like Airbnb, their comms focus, at different parts of the company’s evolution, is likely more on the regulatory side.

  For a company like Stripe, where you get into payments and security, you need more than just an internal team and some level of agency support. You need a stronger, more solid crisis plan. Depending on the focus of the company, you might need regulatory and Capitol Hill communications plans.

  It definitely varies by company. But, generally speaking, most higher-growth companies have an internal PR team and also PR agency support.

  When it comes to founder support, it’s critical that both founders and the broader executive team buys into the overall PR strategy, but they should trust their internal team(s) to execute the day-to-day.

  Elad: Where do you see the ball get dropped, if anywhere, as companies scale up?

  Erin: Ironically, I think it’s lack of communication. I think a company’s intent is always to do the right thing for customers, clients, or users of the platform. But there is a fear of admitting that you’ve done something wrong or that something isn’t working when you need to change course or make a correction.

  This could be any type of change or correction. Maybe you’re an enterprise company and you’re changing the pricing model, but you don’t communicate that clearly to customers. Or you try to sneak in changes to the product, hoping nobody will notice. Or you try to bury something in a terms of service or privacy policy. I’ve seen this fear of backlash and/or a negative press cycle when potentially bad things are happening—but it’s always best to be straightforward and ride it out.

  You can generally recover from those things, but from a PR perspective, it’s extremely frustrating. Because you could be a media darling and have one misstep where you communicate something really poorly, and it really sets you back in terms of the public perception of your company. It can be really hard to rebuild that trust. That’s why authentic communication, never lying, and transparency—to the extent that you can be transparent—are so important.

  I really do think that if companies would just embrace when things break or have to change, they would be much better off. It’s true across industries. You have airlines, for example, that have issues with the way they handle passengers, and they don’t handle it right. They don’t just say, “This was wrong, and we don’t tolerate this.” They’re either quiet, or they put out totally artificial, canned responses, and then there’s this backpedaling that ensues.

  Oftentimes, this isn’t something that’s driven by the PR team. It’s driven by a founder who doesn’t want to put their own personal credibility on the line, like, “I screwed up and I need to fix this.” More often than not, PR will say, “We have to be honest. We have to say that this is what happened.”

  Elad: So, if you’re the CEO running a company, what’s a warning signal that you should quit pushing back on something that the PR team is saying? Is there any rule of thumb? Because, to some extent, especially if you have a founder-CEO, they succeeded in part because they didn’t listen to a lot of people. The most successful companies often select for behavior where a founder just has to be bullheaded or has to ignore experts, because oth
erwise the founder would never have gotten to where they are. How can you tell when it’s time to listen?

  Erin: As an agency partner we often have clients who want to do something we don’t agree with. In those situations, we make our case for why that shouldn’t happen or why they should do it differently. But ultimately they decide to do it their way, and there’s backlash or something happens or it doesn’t go the way they thought it would. And then it’s like, “Oh, okay, I should have listened to you. You were right.” The same is true with founders. People need to fail in order to learn, in life in general and definitely in business.

  I do think that it is really important when a company hires its first internal PR person that that person is in complete lockstep with the founder. Because it is all about trust. Generally companies that don’t have that trust between founders and PR people are the ones that struggle with having a good PR program or comms campaigns.

  Elad: How do you select for that? Do you think there’s a specific style of interview or interview process that would most surface whether the person that you’re interviewing is right for you for an in-house hire?

  Erin: I always say PR is more art than science. A lot of it boils down to chemistry and cultural fit and experience. You could give a PR candidate different scenarios to walk through and see if your thinking aligns when it comes to how they would handle certain situations.