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Pirate Wires
10 Rules Every Founder Should Know: Inside Anduril’s Secret Comms Strategy w/ Lulu Cheng Meservey and Trae Stepens
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- [00:00]
Trey
We view comms strategically. What is the story we want people to know about Anduril.
- [00:07]
Lulu Mi
The people who decided not to work at Anduril are people who absolutely shouldn't have worked there. And it's awesome that they don't work there. And today the company is better because of who doesn't work there.
- [00:17]
Trey
When you join Anduril, you're signing up to build weapons. Everyone's on the same page. And that makes our whole comm strategy much easier.
- [00:24]
Lulu Mi
So much more now of a groundswell of people who are fed up of unfair attacks. Every time they attack you, it should be unpleasant for them and they should not want to do it. It should create the opposite of job security for them. It should create the opposite of prestige for them. You want to be the next Dan Derral. You want to be the next Palmer, Trey, Brian, Matt. Like, that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself through that in order to push your story out into the world.
- [00:57]
Mike Solana
All right, we've got a special podcast today. I've got two of my favorite people here. I'm going to start with Trey, my good friend. You guys have seen him before on the podcast. He is a partner at Founders Fund and a co founder of Anduril, a defense technology company that we are all extremely excited about and have had the great pleasure of kind of watching from the ground floor. It's been super exciting. One big piece of that. That one huge piece of it that I think that we just almost never talk about, and not just at Anduril, but in tech generally is comms. And so we also have here today making her grand pirate wires debut. Lulu Mi. Lulu is someone who I have followed for a few years now. I think it was Covid when the like awful summer of COVID when everyone was shoved in a clubhouse chat room. And I've been following her since then, as of a few years going on four years now. And she has occupied a very interesting place in the discourse where she is talking to founders about really like comms in a hostile, a uniquely hostile moment for tech when the press has never been more hostile. I think that Lulu is the person now today that founders call when they're in the middle of a crisis or about to release some sort of really important product. I think that she is definitely the person you should be following on Twitter if you're interested in comms generally. And she's a founder herself, which means that all three of us have something in common. We know the special hell that is starting companies but today we're really going to focus on the comms piece and a lot of it is going to hinge on this piece that we published in Pirate Wires and that is inside Andre's comm strategy. 10 rules for mission Driven Founders. This is going to be a kind of complimentary piece to that. We're going to go over the 10 rules, but you really should check that piece out for the, for the, for the full breakdown. This is going to be more like sort of the highlights and kind of an overview, plus the highlights of things that I find interesting, the things that I sort of really was curious about expanding on. And I just want to get to it. I want to talk about the early days of Andre and I want to talk about comms and I want to talk about how you guys should be building your comms team with two people who just sort of saw one of, I think, the better examples of, of a successful comm strategy for an early stage startup that was really just kind of like totally under siege by the press. Before I get started with all of that, did I miss anything? Did I get anything wrong? Do you want to add anything? Do you want to compliment my outfit? I will accept any of those things.
- [03:22]
Lulu Mi
I'll compliment your outfit in writing later.
- [03:25]
Mike Solana
Thank you.
- [03:27]
Trey
Classic.
- [03:29]
Mike Solana
So that's. So Trey, you don't have anything to say about my outfit?
- [03:33]
Trey
I mean, your, your shoe that's very present in the video frame is something else that's really cool I want to get you.
- [03:40]
Lulu Mi
We can co sign my compliment later. It's okay.
- [03:43]
Trey
Yes.
- [03:44]
Mike Solana
Okay, let's break it down. I want you guys to take me just before we get into all the rules and sort of navigating the moment, take me back to the beginning. Like what was being built. This. Maybe we'll start with Trey for this. Just sort of setting. Setting the. Setting the ground floor here. What was being built and what was the broader sort of tech terrain at the time? Like what was your goal and what was kind of happening in the Valley at that time?
- [04:09]
Trey
Yeah, you know, when I joined Founderson in 2014, not knowing anything about venture capital, I started looking at the national security space to see if there was kind of a, you know, V2 palantir, SpaceX kind of lineage out there in the community already operating. And I met with hundreds of companies and was surprised to find that there wasn't really a next Ballantia SpaceX. There wasn't really a whole lot of stuff going on. And so with a bunch of people on the foundersun team with a Bunch of my former colleagues at Palantir, and also with Palmer Luckey, who was the inventor of Oculus, we were kind of brainstorming what a next generation defense technology company might look like. And to my surprise, the Founders fund team kind of encouraged me to go and try to build this crazy company. So, you know, unlike today, where there's, you know, hundreds of people that are trying to build in like, critical strategic industries or defense more specifically, we were kind of, you know, out there by ourselves operating. And so when we went and started talking to venture funds, you know, they didn't really have any idea what bucket to even put this in. A lot of the LP agreements that they had with their investors prohibited investing in defense tech technologies. And so we were kind of in this weird window where it was interesting but very, very unique. And so part of the challenge for us early on was communicating to the world why we thought this was important. And we were in this transition period as a country where we had gone from 15 years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations against essentially rogue states and terrorist organizations. And we were transitioning to this world in which we were starting to think more about great power conflict. And so from a timing perspective, I think we like, really hit it in an interesting window. But the storytelling part of this was really important because people maybe hadn't fully mentally shifted to that new thought process.
- [06:17]
Mike Solana
Right. So there are a handful of maybe problems that you're facing when it comes to comms right away. And it's, I don't want to say trouble, but there are questions surrounding, like, how that story is playing when it comes to raising, possibly when it comes to hiring and when it comes to maybe selling to the government. Is that maybe correctly identifying the things that you guys were thinking about when you were thinking about comms?
- [06:41]
Trey
Yeah, yeah, that's right. There's a bunch of different audiences that you want to speak to. At first, those audiences were definitely the critical ones. Like, what are the people that are buying our products think about us? And what do potential recruits in the market think about us? You can kind of like break down the market of potential recruits for Android and a normal distribution just like anything else where you have like, on the one side, like all of these really patriotic people that if they're not already working for Palantir or Space X, maybe they did in the past. And that crew was very easy to communicate with. It's not a giant chunk of engineers, but they're like a knowable set of people that really want to work in national security. Easy to recruit them. And then you have the people on the other side that are like, they're never going to work on national security. These are like the activists at Google that were protesting Project Maven, whatever. And, like, we really don't need to communicate to them at all. They're. You're never going to win them over. But then the bulk of those people are in the middle of that Gaussian curve that it's like the people that could probably be convinced that this is worth doing, but you need to tell them why. You need to tell, like, you need to explain the problem to them. You need to explain how we're thinking about ethics. And that was something that Lulu and her team did an awesome job of helping us think through and getting the messaging out that we needed to get out to lay the groundwork for what ended up turning into, like, a big industry around defense tech. That all started from that early communication strategy at Anduril.
- [08:06]
Mike Solana
Yes. Before we get into the strategy, Lulu, your comm strategy and how you were thinking about it, how do you think about the problem? Did sort of Trey kind of roughly summarize it as. As you remember it or what? When you kind of first looked under the hood, so to speak, what did you see?
- [08:23]
Lulu Mi
Okay, well, so three things that I probably should have said up front alongside how stunning your outfit looks is, number one, Trey was basically running comms for Anvil and still kind of is. And Palmer, Brian, a lot of other people, but primarily the group of founders, like, I got to help. Shannon Pryor, who runs comms today, is amazing. But the reason all of this works is because the founders are in the middle of it. And it's not always glamorous. When people want somebody to yell at, they go yell at Trey. And so a lot of this is happening because Trey, Palmer, those guys are willing to step up and own it. And that makes a big, big difference. And I think we'll touch more on that later. But that's. Number one is like, they're running the comm strategy. And number two, right now, defense tech is super hot. I think Trey's right. You guys caught it at a great time. That could stop being the case any time. And so the beauty of what we're talking about is it these are things that are true regardless of whether the thing you're doing is popular or not. The fact that defense tech was not popular and now is. Has not changed Indel's comp strategy. And Palmer says, we could wake up tomorrow and something has happened in the world that makes defense tech no longer the cool thing. But we're going to keep going. So that's the second thing to know. And then the third thing is, Trey, you said at the time you were looking for the next SpaceX or next Palantir. There are so many companies now that want to be the next Andrew. Like, founders come to me. They want to be the next Andrew or that they want to be the next Trey or Palmer or Brian, whatever. And you don't get to that place without going through what you guys went through in the early days. And I think, I hope that we can talk about that a little bit. Just, it's. It wasn't fun. People were mean to Trey. People were mean to all of you guys. I got kicked out of the Uber, but that's part of what.
- [10:22]
Mike Solana
Damn it. I had Uber on my list of things to talk about. I do.
- [10:26]
Lulu Mi
We'll talk about it.
- [10:27]
Mike Solana
I was. I want to talk about this now. I mean, this for me. When you talk about the comms problem that you're facing, I think that you guys are. Maybe. I would love to hear a little more about that moment. I mean, there's like the Google maven of it all and there is the Uber store. Lula, just tell the. Just tell the Uber story. I want to hear the Uber story.
- [10:43]
Lulu Mi
Okay, so Trey didn't know this at the time. I think you and Palmer found out like six years later when I wrote the piece. But it was after we had done. I don't know, we had done a day of demos or something. And I was going back to the airport, I was taking an Uber to lax and. And I called Josh on the phone saying, it's so cool to be out here with these guys. The tech is really working. We can see it. It's helping. I think I said border agents, something. The Uber driver got super weird. He hid his phone and pretended that the navigation didn't work. And then he told me to turn off my phone, which, when someone gets weird, you don't want to turn off your phone. And then he pulled off the highway on the next exit and he made me get out. And he said, I can't be around people like you. So, like, I took my luggage and got out of the Uber on the side of the highway and called a new one. And that was, you know, sort of symptomatic. And I don't know if you know this one, Trey, but I emailed. I think you know who this is. But I emailed a very high profile defense slash technology Writer to meet with you because you guys would have gotten along great and he wouldn't because you were too close to Palmer and he hated Palmer. And then he stopped talking to me for suggesting that he meet with you. Uh, so it was, it was really ugly. Oh, and then at your, at your birthday party a lot. Gil told. And he said I could share this publicly, but he said that when he invested in you guys, he would get all of these angry text messages and he got one that said he, he made a fascist investment because of supporting Andrew.
- [12:16]
Mike Solana
We were coming out of the. The, the cultural moment was uniquely hostile to anything that was contrarian at that moment when you guys were founding the company. And then within that like anything that would have been a little bit weird would have been controversial. Palmer had just gone through a whole thing at Facebook where I mean, people just were really hostile to him based on very overtly like, and I would say like common political beliefs. And then your guys are building a defense technology company and defense is, you know, it's, it's, it's like war. It's military. I was actually just talking to someone who works at Google, who in Google you have to kind of like, you have to interview for the teams that you want to sort of like move to. And he was in the process of this and he's himself, he's former military. And the interviews all went really well until that came out. They kind of stopped. And then a few months later, while drinking, they were at a bar, a group, big group thing. And someone just relayed casually to him, like, oh man, we really loved you. But I just, I couldn't get into the whole military thing. There really is that kind of a bias. And that bias exists. Really. I don't want to, I don't want to judge the entire industry, but it is certainly then it was very common to, to encounter people who really just hated this kind of work and hated people who worked with this kind of work. So that's the challenge. And now when you think about building a company in tech, which is considered by the rest of the world is like one of the most like hippie dippy pie in the sky, places that would never touch defense, you know, what do you do? Like, how do you solve these challenges? How do you, how do you have an, an effective comm strategy in such a hostile environment? Not just from, from the press, but from like other technologists, other VCs, other engineers, and obviously the woke HR people. But again, you're never going to reach them. How do you reach the Rest of them. We've got your rules here and we can maybe just list them really quick before we focus on a few, if that's cool with you. So you have and. Well, I'll start with this first one actually, and then we'll go through the rest. But the very first one is start with the ends. Can you kind of walk us through what your thinking is with that? Because it sounds simple, but I do think it's important.
- [14:31]
Lulu Mi
Yeah. Well, in honor of Andrew and the mission, I based it off of Ends Ways and means, which is a classic military framework. But you start with the ends in a sense of you first have to know what you're trying to accomplish. Not for comms. People get lost when they start setting up comms goals in a vacuum. You know, I want to go viral. I want impressions, I want my what's the succession quote like, I want my Twitter to be off the hook. Instead, if you start with the business goals of we want to recruit this many of this type of people and we want to increase revenue by this, then you can sort of reverse engineer the comm strategy to make that happen. So Trey was talking about you have to know whom to ignore, basically. Matt Grimm is really good at that, by the way. He's really good at like, these people don't matter. And so having that near maniacal focus on the only people who matter helps with something that is not kind of generically popular. So something that might not be mainstream popular could be wildly popular with the people that you actually care about. And so the people that Andrew was talking to really, really loved it. The people who were working at Google at the time, maybe not. So, I mean, it was during the time of the protests over Google being part of Project Maven, which by the way, I think is like Google maven activists walked so that Google Gemini activists could run. I mean, that's true there, but it's just a different set of people.
- [15:57]
Mike Solana
When you say start with the ends, you mean like start with how you want to be perceived. Is that.
- [16:03]
Lulu Mi
No. What close? Yeah. Start with what business goals you're trying to reach and then figure out how you need to be perceived by which people in order for those goals to be met. So in this case, the goals were recruit the best tech talent and get contract in, get contracts, in which case you have to be perceived as being competent, fast and cheaper by people making procurement decisions. And you have to be perceived as exciting, interesting, mission driven, solving hard problems by tech talent. And now you know who needs to perceive you in what way. In order for them to make the decisions that help you meet your mission. And once you know that you have the equation you can build out.
- [16:46]
Mike Solana
What do you think would have been the exactly wrong strategy at this point?
- [16:49]
Trey
The.
- [16:50]
Mike Solana
The kind of thing that people tend to do or would have the impulse
- [16:53]
Lulu Mi
to do, become a nationally beloved brand. That is like the number one impulse where we want to be the apple of this or the Nike of this. And Trey, I'd love to hear what you think. My opinion is, like, that impulse would have led Anduril to try to please everybody and make sure nobody gets mad and just be popular and beloved and try to go mainstream. And it would have watered everything down. And probably a lot of the people inside the company today who came for that mission, even the Chris Rose, like, really senior, really important people, might not have found it as compelling if it had been diluted to suit popular tastes.
- [17:31]
Trey
Yeah, I think. I think that's true. The other version of becoming a nationally beloved brand, and I mean this more in the government beloved brand context rather than the general audience beloved brand context, is to say a lot of things and not say anything at all. This is like, if you go and look at the marketing posture of other companies that do a lot of government work there, it's just nothing like they. They say stuff, they sit on panels, they write blog posts. Like, you could go to the website of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and copy and paste text from one and like, close your eyes and then open your eyes on a blank page and be like, which one of the five companies said this? You'd have no idea. You'd have no idea. They're completely indistinguishable. And the government loves this. They love the lack of identity of any kind because it's low risk. There's. You have no. You have no exposure to criticism. You're just saying boring, flaccid platitudes. And I think it's really tempting when you start a company like Anduril to say, like, man, we should just be as boring as possible because we don't want to. We don't want to annoy anyone. We don't want to offend anyone. And it turns out that, like, you have to say things to stand out. And our strategy from the beginning is like, look, we're going to say things. It won't always be popular, but we're going to be integrity. We're going to be in integrity with what we believe is true.
- [19:00]
Mike Solana
I have also, by the way, the.
- [19:02]
Lulu Mi
Really, the. Sorry, Mike, but like, the creative, innovative people in the government actually turned out to love that. Like, they. They became activated when they heard that messaging. They got really excited by it. A lot of them became really awesome champions of Andro.
- [19:20]
Mike Solana
I had this thing. It's. It's a little bit of a departure from tech just for a moment or from defense technology Just for a moment, I guess. I write science fiction. I wrote science fiction for years. Now I'm writing more nonfiction.
- [19:35]
Trey
Give me book two. Give me book.
- [19:38]
Mike Solana
Actually read Citizen Sim.
- [19:40]
Trey
So frustrated. I still hate you for that, by the way.
- [19:42]
Mike Solana
Got it. I mean, I need an agent to take it away from me. I'm too busy to be working on
- [19:45]
Lulu Mi
the book right now. George R.R. martin of Sci Fi.
- [19:49]
Mike Solana
I've got book two ready to go. Just need the right person to package the whole thing up now that I've got a big old audience looking to buy the book. A topic for another day. The point is just I was really committed to this idea of myself as a science fiction writer or a fiction writer. And. And so for years, I kind of danced around my opinions online. And I didn't. I kind of wanted to give them, but didn't. I didn't want it to sort of like affect my brand or something.
- [20:15]
Lulu Mi
And.
- [20:16]
Mike Solana
And it wasn't ironically, it was not until I started saying things that I had an audience at all, like, that people didn't care what I had to say until I said something, which is something that it feels like almost too obvious to share. And yet nobody seems to understand this. And it's a lesson that people keep having to learn. And it is a lesson that I think anyone who's ever succeeded at saying something has learned at some point. Unless you just know, can't help yourself, and you just run your mouth constantly. But I. I do think it's like a weirdly underexplored and important point is, is that you have to say something.
- [20:49]
Lulu Mi
Something that came. The. The Lux guys say this a lot. And Scott Rubin over there, I think came up with it is you can't be a thought leader if you don't have thoughts. And a lot of people approach it as, I just want to be a thought leader and here's things, but it's not anything noteworthy or novel. The. The. The last thing that I can think of on this topic, on the topic of being really specific about your goals and kind of ignoring what's not your goals, is the people who decided not to work at Anduril because of that are people who Absolutely shouldn't have worked there. And it's awesome that they don't work there. And today the company is better because of who doesn't work there.
- [21:25]
Mike Solana
Yes, I want to. I want to. We had a lot here, so I want to move on to. I mean, I. I don't like to. I'm not going to believe Beleaguer. Go direct. We kind of all know it at this point. This is a. I think your positions, like, you just don't need to go to the New York Times. Like, you have. You have a. You have a megaphone, potentially, I guess, for this one. I do have a question. You know, with someone like Palmer, it was very easy. There are a lot of people who. Not the job was easy, but, like, this part, going direct was easy. There are people who care what Palmer has to say. I do know that a lot of founders struggle with, like, sure, I can go direct, but, you know, I don't have any Twitter followers or, you know, I don't have a podcast or something. How. How do you recommend. How would either of you recommend navigating that? Like, if you didn't have a Palmer, like, he's like the Hulk, Right. If you don't have a Hulk on the board, what do you do for going direct?
- [22:16]
Lulu Mi
It takes less time than people think to build an audience. I mean, first of all, if it's a problem that you don't have an audience, then that's a problem you don't want to have a year from now or five years from now. So you should go build one today so that you don't have that problem later. But secondly, it doesn't take as long or as much as people think. So, Mike, you and I worked together quite a bit, or we, like, we chatted quite a bit once I got to Substack. Before that, I don't know if you noticed I had, like a thousand followers on Twitter or 200. I don't know. It was like something. Something small. It didn't matter. And then at Substack, when we started getting attacked at first, specifically by the New York Times, and then for a while, everybody, I decided I should probably go and build an audience, because this is going to be leverage and this is how we fight back. And it took, like six months. You know, it was. It was frustrating and a little sort of cringy and embarrassing, and you have to put in work and time. But under a year, you can build an audience if you just work on it.
- [23:15]
Mike Solana
Yeah, this was. This was like the first I saw of the Combative PR strategy where, like, the PR lead for a company was just telling the press to, like, they were idiots, basically. And it was enjoyable, certainly as a person who was at that time on Substack and now minor investor in Substack, definitely loved it. You have act like an insurgent, not an incumbent. You have increased pressure and decrease area. Can you, like. You, like, broke out an equation for this one? I'm like, was very. You don't often see that in, like, in cell space. Not in cell. What is it in. You don't often see that in word cell spaces. Can you break the equation down and kind of just like walk us through what you were thinking about there?
- [24:03]
Lulu Mi
Was it recorded that my Salana just called me an ins.
- [24:07]
Trey
He did, he did, yes. We're still laughing right now.
- [24:13]
Lulu Mi
What is this simulation? Okay, so it's the same. It's in cons as in physics. Pressure equals force over surface area. So it's this. Given an amount of force, if you spread it over a lot of surface area, there's very little pressure versus if you concentrate the surface area, there's tremendous pressure. That's why a needle can poke through, whereas a sheet of paper has a harder time. And the way to use that in comms is if you are on offense, you want to concentrate the pressure because you want to break through. So let's say that if you do have to get adversarial, let's say that a bunch of people come after you, Mike, and they're attacking you. Well, as opposed to making it you versus the world, you might want to pick one of them and just hammer away at that person. Break them apart from the path. Use them as a symbol of what's wrong for all the rest of them. It's easier than being like me versus everybody. Whereas if you're on defense, then you want to diffuse the pressure. You want to diffuse the force so that there's less pressure on you. So if someone is attacking you, and that's in this case, you would say you would frame it as they're attacking independent creators, they're attacking writers, they're attacking podcasters, they're attacking entrepreneurs and people who want to have a foothold in media and make it about, you're standing up for this cause and you're standing up for this community, as opposed to you being isolated where others won't stand up for you. And. And we did this a little bit with. With Enduro, with Substack. Like, it's a pretty universal principle. Like, if you're attacking Enduril, you're attacking people who want to innovate to make America stronger. You're attacking people who actually want to collaborate with the government. Why are you attacking that? That's unequivocally good thing. Or if you're attacking substack, you're attacking independent thought, you're attacking independent creators, you're attacking writers and journalists. And so why would you do that? I think this is like a very, very important principle for every founder in every company is like if you are being attacked, you need to find a way to diffuse so that it's not you naked and alone taking arrows. And then if you're on offense, you want to concentrate it as much as possible.
- [26:16]
Mike Solana
Yeah, this is interesting because seems to be an equation that the press itself follows. You know, oftentimes when they want to take down an entire company, that's offending them for some reason. It's like you find some, some one weird thing that has gone wrong, one really bad story, and you sort of frame that as the entire machine. Right? We've seen this with everything from Uber to more recently, the self driving car stuff, right? You have one, you have a bunch of fake accidents, you have potentially a lot of life saved because you're taking drunk drivers off the road and things like this. You have one accident and that becomes what the company is. So it's like you're sort of adopting from the people who are attacking and using those tools in your favor.
- [27:01]
Lulu Mi
No, it's universal. Yeah, I remember, I remember a lot of like, Trey will have stories about fielding attacks, but there was a lot of that in the early days, you know, still sporadically now. But defense tech is hot now, where people would attack you, Trey, like ad hominem people would, you know, talk about you specifically as a person. Ideally, that should be spread out across like the whole industry. Why are you attacking one individual for this? But that's what, you know, that's what people would do.
- [27:38]
Mike Solana
Wait, I need some examples of trade being attacked. Personally.
- [27:43]
Trey
I mean, there were a lot, I mean, I think in, you know, 2017 to 2021 or whatever was a different window than the last two or three years. But you know, people would think of national security or border security or whatever as being like foundationally anti globalist or racist or something like that. And so people would come at me and be like, you know, you're, you're being like an American exceptionalist or something like that. And, and I think like, obviously this has shifted because people are starting to realize that the geopolitical end of history did not actually occur. And there's still like bad people that want to do bad things to innocent people in the world and someone has to stand up for them, otherwise they're just going to get walked over. And so I think it's like less popular to think that we've reached an end of history than it was just even a few years ago. But I think to Lulu's point, one of the things that I think I learned is that I spent so much time just being angry at how stupid the mainstream media was or I perceived that they were stupid. And I think I mostly just pity them at this point. Like their incentive structure kind of sets them up that they have to tell a specific story in order to feel like validated in their day to day career. And I think they've convinced themselves intellectually that they're actually doing the right thing. But it's less and less interesting to humanity. They're just becoming irrelevant by not actually telling real stories and just focusing on political hit pieces. And so I think part of telling your own story is what Lulu just said about increasing surface area. It's like you have to point out to people that the whole incentive package that they're trying to deliver is foundationally, philosophically broken. And doing that, you kind of immunize them because in some ways they're like, well, I'm not going to come at you if you actually come back with like a better story than what I'm delivering because that increases risk to them. And so it just kind of calms everyone down, I think.
- [29:59]
Mike Solana
And also like when it comes to where you're delivering this story to go back to the go direct piece, it kind of, I think, I think I'm going to be able to relate it to these next two. Lulu, you correct me if I'm wrong, but after nail the narrative, which is your next one, which is sort of like repeating the narrative over and over again and you can hit it again if, if, if you want to. But I want to get to just. You had inner circle comes first and win over the tribal leaders. And this I think comes down to like, this is really how you're disseminating the story that you want to tell. As a founder, my read of this is like inner circle is, you know, that's your team and you're getting them to sort of disseminate that information, that story sort of internally. And then tribal leaders, that's more broad, right? That's like you're hitting up, you're hitting up the leaders In. In the industry, outside of. Out.
- [30:42]
Trey
Out.
- [30:43]
Mike Solana
Outside of your company. Can you maybe just like, speak to that for a second? And I've got a. A connection I want to make.
- [30:48]
Lulu Mi
Yeah, there's. There's a quote from a famous general that says, when I see a problem, I trace it in concentric circles, going back eventually to my own desk. And that's what inspired this metaphor of concentric circles. And you have to start inward and go outward for a couple reasons. If you don't start with the people who are closest to the company and then you skip them and go straight to the public, the people who are close to the company might not know what is going on. They might be confused, and they might put out a message that contradicts with yours, and now you've lost an enormous amount of trust. Or they might see you speaking to the. To the public in a way that you haven't already briefed them on, and now they're confused, and now they feel like maybe they're not really part of this mission. So it's just super, super critical to start with the inner circles and go out. So usually if you are trying to announce something or trying to do a rebrand or whatever you're doing, start with the. Make sure the founders are on the same page, get the executive team, get employees, and then go to investors, then go to key customers, then go to influencers, and go outward from there. And so you just want to sequence it the right way. And then talking to. Well, do you want to dwell on that for a moment or do you want me to go on to.
- [31:57]
Trey
I would like to dwell on that, actually, because there's a really important story that came out of this in the early days of Anduril, where these other big tech companies, Google was not the only one, by the way, but they were the most famous. Related to this project. Maven activism was basically the employee base is saying, we don't want to do work with the Department of Defense, or we don't want to do work with the federal government at all. And the reason that those things became so explosive was because the company, the executives, the sales team, whatever, they were trying to sell to the government and the rest of the team, maybe the engineering team, maybe the project managers, whatever, they didn't know that this was happening. And so when it happened and they found out that they were under contract, they got pissed. Rightfully or wrongfully, you know, they felt like it was not what they signed up for. And so, you know, at Anduril, we. We had kind of messaged this in a. In a soft way. Like, it just seemed so obvious, like, yeah, if you're joining a defense tech company or we're obviously selling to the government, but we hadn't, like, gotten super aggressive or explicit with it necessarily. And then in talking to a journalist, I kind of made this dumb mistake where he kept poking me. And finally I said, look, when you join Anduril, you're signing up to build weapons. That's what you're doing. There's no illusions. Everyone that comes in the door knows that this is the case. And I got in a lot of trouble for this. Even in our network, people internally didn't really blinking eye because it turns out it was right. They all knew what they were doing, but people were like, oh, crap. Like, that's a really spicy comment. Ended up being like the headline of this story. It was. It was unfortunate.
- [33:38]
Mike Solana
Defense technology company builds weapons.
- [33:40]
Trey
Yeah, exactly. And so, and so now we, we just say, this is like a thing we say internally. We just tell people, like, look, if you join and you're trying to build weapons, that's what this is. And so everyone's on the same page. And that makes our whole comm strategy much easier because we're not like, walking on eggsh to make sure that we're not, like, surprising people internally. It's like, everyone knows we're very clear, and I think that's really important.
- [34:07]
Lulu Mi
And you've never had an employee, like, clutch their pearls right when they find out that Andrew is building so and so because that's what they signed up for when they walk in the door.
- [34:17]
Trey
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows.
- [34:19]
Mike Solana
What do you think that press reaction even was? It's not as if defense technology companies had never existed before. Like, where did the surprise actually come from? Or was it more just the jarring maybe overlay between the. What tech in general has had become at that point? Like the. I'm thinking of like, the crunchies and we're going to. It's like the very, like, Google sort of language that was like very like, benign and happy and like, it's like smiley faces everywhere. Is it like the combination of that thing with defense that drove them crazy because obviously they know what a defense technology company is.
- [34:58]
Trey
No, I don't actually think it was either of those things. I think it was, you know, you and I, I know we've talked about this before, Solana. I used to read Wired magazine from COVID to cover. Like, I would sit on the, you know, on the metro in D.C. on my way into work And I would just, page by page, just read through Wired magazine. I would learn about all this really cool stuff that was going on in the world and read about founders who were starting great companies. And I would finish and I'd put it back in my backpack and I think, wow, this is great. There's so much exciting stuff going on in the world. And somehow, some way, and you can use even Wire magazine as like a microcosm of this. This is just not the way the media interacts anymore. There's no, no one is interested in writing positive, like stories about potential things that can happen in the future. It's all just like scaremongering. And so I think what happened is the media is like, okay, there's a defense technology company. There's probably some version of this that we could tell about strategic deterrence. There's probably some angle we could tell about getting our men and women out of harm's way doing dull, dirty or dangerous jobs. There's probably some story that we could tell about advancing the state of the art so that it makes it almost impossible for our adversaries to compete. Therefore, they won't compete at all. But instead it was like, okay, but the Terminator story is way more interesting. And, and so the only story that we can tell is the one that hypes the scariest possible outcomes in this world. And so that's just what they have to do. There's no alternative. There's no one with the interest or the courage to write something other than that story. And so you just have to go into these engagements with that in mind where you're just like, I know what they're going to do. They're going to try to make this some super negative, pessimistic thing. And so like, what is the message they need to hear to get them to the point where they at least accept that there is a, there is an alternate future that's possible.
- [36:54]
Mike Solana
But it is. You made such a good point. The Terminator story is all they want to tell. And the reason is because it's such a good story. Like, Terminator is a Great movie. Terminator 2 is an amazing movie. It's riveting, it's dramatic, it's exciting. It's like badass. Arnold Schwarzenegger is involved. Like, we love the Terminator, the dystopian myths and the anti tech myths are, they're easier stories to tell. There's so much natural tension. There's so much natural drama. I sometimes go back and forth on like, how much of the Motivation behind the negativity is even political so much as, like, these are just fun stories to tell when someone's doing really evil shit. Like, how do you. Lula, I would love your thoughts on this. Like, how do you combat such, like, lush, powerful narratives that are, that are dark? How do you, how do you fight back against that?
- [37:47]
Lulu Mi
Well, part of the answer is also an answer to your question, Mike, about why do stories turn out this way? And I think it's a question of incentives. So Derek Thompson has been very thoughtful on this more than me. But my more rudimentary analysis is everybody responds to incentives. And the incentives right now in media are pretty messed up. It's really, really hard to be a writer. There are some awesome, hard working, principled, honest, ethical journalists who are being taken advantage of. Yeah. But even in traditional newsrooms are being taken advantage of by the business model. They're not being treated as they should be. I wish they would all go independent. But there is an incentive to get readership, you know, get as much engagement readership as possible so that you can get that job security. There's an incentive to latch onto the flashiest, clickiest thing so that your article becomes, you know, like one of the ones on the leaderboard of the site. And so that results in things like this, which I was just pulling up, I don't know if you can see on my phone, Wired, you go to the search bar. The default search in the search bar is racial justice. I don't know, Trey, if you've noticed that from your favorite publication, the default is racial justice.
- [39:07]
Mike Solana
Crazy.
- [39:07]
Trey
And so, like, by the way, I want Wired back. Can someone freaking save Wired?
- [39:13]
Mike Solana
You got to subscribe to the white poll. We're on it.
- [39:18]
Lulu Mi
White pill. White pill is it. But I don't think it's even the fault of a lot of these individual journalists is like the, the industry is under so much pressure from a messed up business model that people are just reaching for these other things that are sort of a corruption of what they probably would like to do in a lot of cases. So that's one, it's just like the incentives are messed up. And then in answer two, in answer to what you just asked, how do you combat that? One is you have to reshape the incentives. So knowing that everybody acts on incentives, you have to shape the incentives for the people who might attack you to make it harder to attack you and less appealing. It should be difficult and annoying. Every time they attack you, it should be unpleasant for them and they should not want to do it. It should create the opposite of job security for them. It create the opposite of prestige for them. And so one way to do that is to set a norm. This is establish deterrence. Set a norm that when people tell lies about you, misrepresent you, you're not going to take it. And public companies do this in a way like public companies will say they're priming the market. Right? You want to get investors used to, this is how you behave so that they know if something is normal or unusual. And you want press and your audience to know this is how you respond to attacks. And it's just normal. What you don't want to do is never do it and then suddenly pop off because then people will be like, what are you scared? Like, what's going on? Are you in crisis? Why are you overreacting? Are you being defensive? You want to just build your own rhythm?
- [40:53]
Mike Solana
You need ally. I think this is an important point. I want to talk about this a little bit because the immediate. The media ecosystem has changed in such a way as there are now a lot of allies for founders, entrepreneurs, people working in tech who they can go to for help kind of getting their own story out and fighting back against stuff like this. You talk about deterrence. I think a lot about my own journey as a sort of like communicating type person online, you know, in tech. Like, I am the CMO at Founders Fund. I run a media company. Um, but a few years ago, five years ago, nobody knew who I was and at least not online, nobody knew who I was. I didn't have any real power against these people. And it was frightening. And interestingly enough, like, when I had far less influence, I got attacked far more often by the press. Specifically, like tech journalists. They loved to dunk on me back then as my follower count increased and as the. The friends that we all have sort of online, I don't know, proliferated when there were some way more voices in tech that were sort of just, I think outwardly pro business, pro technology, critical of the industry, but just like pro our existence. As we became more dominant, we did establish broad deterrence. And I think now it's like, not even necessarily, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is it's maybe not even necessarily about. You don't have to build this from scratch. Like you can plug into a network of people who are sort of interested in this. What do you think about that?
- [42:24]
Lulu Mi
I have said to founders before who don't have their own audience, the sentence write something that hopefully Mike Solana will retweet. And I don't know if that's exactly what you're talking about, but there is so much more now of a groundswell of people who are fed up of unfair attacks and who feel like talking about diffusing the pressure when it's attack on you, instead of it being. I'm being called something bad, it is now they're doing it again. This thing that we all hate. You're spreading it across this huge surface area and then you get sort of 1000 points of light to rise up. You. You may not be the biggest account in that uprising of voices, but people like you and other people with big followings also care about the issue. And so I think it's really easy now for founders. I don't want to make it sound overly easy, but it's much easier than it was before for founders to tap into that and find a community of people willing to support them.
- [43:19]
Mike Solana
Yeah, they have this natural base of support, at least. Which kind of brings me to one of your points or which does bring me to one of your points on win over your tribal elders. Can you break that down for me?
- [43:32]
Lulu Mi
Yeah. Well, I said in the piece, one of the first things that we did with Andrew was Trey and I just spent like what, a week kind of gallivanting around D.C. and putting on blazers and meeting with people. And that was trying to find who are the tribal elders or who are the influencers that when you talk to them, they're going to go and talk to 10 other people. What you want is amplifiers. And the way that you spread a message is to find 10 of those and then have them go out and tell 10 people. And have them go out and tell 10 people, as opposed to you trying to tell everybody at the same time. So it works in a couple of ways. One is it's more credible coming from someone else than you. Like you talking about yourself is self serving on its face. Whereas when you pick these influencers and brief them and get them on board, then it becomes more organic and it spreads without you, which is a lot better. And then two is they actually know whom to talk to more than you would like. We put together a list of, I don't know, 50 names. If we had to put together 2,000 names, I wouldn't have known whom to put on there, like right away. Like today. Trace could probably do it off the top of his head. But in the beginning, it was unclear who those right names would be. But we could start with people who definitely worried and then they knew the right people to talk to because it was just in their orbit. I mean Trey, you've been doing that basically all along. Like you're constantly posting stuff. Basically people don't even see 99% of the comm strategy. There's like a few public moments, but most of it is just grinding day in and day out. Trey is like hosting five person dinners or closed door events that nobody ever hears about. But I think that's where a lot of the real, real work gets done.
- [45:08]
Mike Solana
It's not. I think that one of the most difficult things for people when it comes to comms is like especially in tech, it. It is historically not been taken seriously. And a lot of the kind of work is it's like work with air quotes around it. Like you just said a five person dinner. And I think a lot of sort of more engineering type people might roll their eyes because they don't understand the value of like friends, like strong friends who are willing to fight for you publicly, who are plugged into situations where they can influence cult and they don't understand maybe, maybe they don't understand how, how powerful that is. Do you? I hate. Sorry Trey, I don't want to skip over you, but I do want to because Lulu's been in comms forever. Like am I right there? That like it hasn't really been taken seriously? Maybe that's the problem that a lot of founders have is they just like fundamentally don't value comms and then until they need it and then they don't have it.
- [45:59]
Lulu Mi
Yeah, I think comms and PR have been done poorly for so long that people dismiss the entire thing that there are a lot of founders who just hear comms and they already don't want to deal with it. And I don't blame them because the vast majority of comms that we see and hear about is stuff that they don't relate to and don't want. It's sort of like Honeywell 1997 type press release, calling up reporters and begging them to write a story. So I don't blame people. Like when you hear comms and priorities, does it make you excited? Probably not.
- [46:35]
Trey
Yeah. I think one of the big differences, and this was a push that Lulu made for us early on, is that a lot of people think about their comm strategy is like how you manage inbound media inquiries and who's like moving pieces of paper around and writing press releases and coming up with talking points for internal all hands meetings and things like that. Whereas we viewed comms Strategically, it was like, what is the story we want people to know about Anduril so that if somebody tries to frame it in a different way, they're gonna have to fight through explaining why what they're saying is different than what we've transparently told the world. Like, one example is this document. This was like the manifesto for AnWorld. Like, we told everyone why we started the history of the industry, why it's changed today, what it is that you need to do to actually fix defense. And anyone who writes a story about Anduril, if they. If they say something other than what we tell them right here, they have to explain why they're saying that the thing that they believe is true about the company is not in our manifesto. Just makes it harder.
- [47:45]
Mike Solana
Yeah, you're using this word fight. And, you know, it's. I think we kind of keep. Is like this combative environment. It's this hostile environment we're fighting. Lulu, you asked a question sort of off camera that. Or raised a point that I thought was pretty interesting. You were talking about how it feels inside of it all, and you really wanted to kind of touch a bit on that. Like, it is this. I don't know what it. What is it? What is it? You're sort of at war, right? You're in a state of, like, information war. Do you want to kind of unpack that?
- [48:18]
Lulu Mi
Yeah. I mean, when you're in it, when. When you're the founder and it's your company, you are seeing everything that's being said by everybody all the time. All of the attacks are personal. Either they're directly personal or they're about the company. And that's personal because it's your company. And so there's like, intense fog of war. It's very stressful. Feels bad. A lot of times, comms feels like a total waste of time. And I think when people think of traditional comms, I think traditional comms is a waste of time. It's a waste of time. It's useless. It's dead. It's totally obsolete. But the thing you have to do for the company, like, you have to just suck it up and do it, is counterintuitive. It feels bad. It feels like you're exposing yourself more. You're acutely sensitive to all of the negativity that comes with it. That. That is just part of the journey. And I think of the phrase, like a mentor of mine would say, everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die. You want to be the next Dandel. You want to Be the next Palmer, Trey, Brian, Matt. Like that doesn't come without going through this. And so you have to put yourself through that in order to push your story out into the world and to find those true believers. You want to find the people who are going to feel your story in their spine and want to come join you. And there's just no way to do that through, you know, through a curtain, through other people. And you can't delegate it. So just one thing to belabor this is the farther away you get from the founders, the more things get diluted. The mission, the passion, the vision, the knowledge. Palmer has knowledge in his head that is like secret knowledge that other people don't have. And Trey has a piece of that, Matt has a piece of that put together. That's the leadership of Andrew. A bunch of other people couldn't create this company, couldn't run this company. And when you convey that to another person, you lose a little bit in the fidelity and then you lose a little bit. And the traditional way of doing it is you brief another person who briefs another person. They pitch a reporter, the reporter maybe writes, and then they write it in a way that their editor wants for their audience and it's nearly unrecognizable or it's turned into total pablum. And so to keep that message spiky and concentrated and interesting, you have to just keep it as close to the founders as humanly possible, which means the founder has to do some of this themselves. And sometimes that sucks, but there's just literally no other way, right?
- [50:40]
Mike Solana
Well, even, I mean, this is, this is the point. You've brought this point up now. It's like almost every point comes back to this. This is, it's the founders, it's the founders mission led sort of strategy for comms. The comms is led by founders like that. You even at the top of this conversation said, Trey does the comms like Palmer does the comms. They are the people who are running comms, not the comms professionals. Part of that is just, I mean, it's like every piece that we've talked about, it's like they have to be sort of intricately woven into all of it, every piece of the strategy. Probably another part is every single one of these people has a unique tool set. Right? Like, how do you think about. I do want to get Trey's sense on, on this, first of all, how it all felt. And then I want to know how we identify the strengths of a founder. Sort of, sort of to, to pursue a Strategy like this, I think they're all sort of unique, but maybe Trey first on.
- [51:34]
Trey
Yeah, Well, I will say that Anduril does have a head of comms. Her name is Shannon Pryor. She's really, really good at what she does. And I think that the primary thing that you want your organizational heads doing, working with the founders, is reminding them of what's true about the strategy. And I think I said this in a tweet after the Pirate Wires article. The most irritating thing that I learned from Lulu that I'm still irritated by every day, is that you have to say the thing and then you have to say it again. And then you have to say it again. You have to say it again. You have to say it again, you have to say it again. And I'm hearing myself say it every time, and I think this is really stupid. I'm saying the same thing I've said 100 times, and Lulu would constantly remind me, yes, but it's the first time they heard it. And so you have to keep saying it until they believe that it was their idea. And it's cool to see this.
- [52:29]
Lulu Mi
Like, by the way, I said that to trey probably 100 times before it sent me.
- [52:36]
Trey
Yeah. Receiving the message, very annoying. But it turns out that it works. You go into these environments, you walk into the Pentagon, and there are people saying literal sentences that we created at Anduril as if it was their own idea. Shannon has a really unique ability internally to say, here is the strategy, here's what we want people to think, and here are the individual units of work that we are going to do to execute on getting people to think those things and then keeping us on message, like saying, okay, Trey, you're going to go do this interview. You have to say this, and you have to say it again. And you have to say it again. And you have to say it again. I want you to say it four times in the interview. And, and I think having someone that's making sure that you're doing your role as the storyteller for the business is incredibly important. But it also is something that we have to own personally to take a responsibility for it. And I think this is where the Evaluating Founders piece comes in. Aside from Anduril, like, when with my Founders Fund hat on, I'm meeting with companies, I want to see that the person can tell a compelling story. Because telling a compelling story isn't just about getting the media off your back. It turns out that same skill set is required to recruit talent. And that same skill set is required to raise capital. That same skill set is like. And this is why a lot of times when you look at like deep tech companies with like highly intellectual academic founders, they don't work because the founder isn't actually good at this core storytelling piece. They're just scientists. And I think that it cannot be understated how important someone like Palmer is, because he's not only a total freak genius, like mad scientist that knows something about everything in a way that I never thought was even humanly possible, but he also is a brilliant storyteller. And he can sit down for 15 minutes with an engineer that's like running an entire org inside of a major tech company and convince him to come join. And, and that is like, it's like an unbeatable superpower. And so that is an important thing. If anyone that's listening to this podcast is a founder and they don't think they're a good storyteller, you need to find a good storyteller, otherwise you're screwed, man. It's not going to work.
- [54:59]
Mike Solana
Well, how does that work exactly? I mean, do you, you, you bring someone in to kind of do it for you or. That doesn't feel, it feels sort of counter to the message of, of this strategy? Like, I think that a lot of what you guys are both saying is you need the founder. Obviously Shannon's running the strategy, but you are the thing that she's like, she needs you. So is there a way that you identify maybe different strengths that you have or how do you navigate, how do you as a Shannon navigate a team without a Palmer?
- [55:29]
Trey
Yeah, I think. Well, first off, I'm not suggesting that you should hire like a professional comms person to do it for you. I'm suggesting that you need a founder level person alongside you in the business. Now the reason I say founder like person, is it like Joni, I've was not the founder of Apple, but he's a brilliant storyteller and that was an important part of what made Apple's kind of like rebirth work. And so I think that you could do this at a very senior level, but it has to be a founder minded person. And I think Lulu will have opinions on this as well. And she and Shannon work really close, closely together and have for a long time. But I think Shannon views each of us, each of the co founders, as a different tool. Like, you know, she's going to work to build the house. Maybe Palmer is a hammer, maybe I'm a shovel, maybe Brian is a drill and she knows how to implement those tools to complete the construction of the house. But we're all different. And so if there's like an opportunity, that's a Palmer shaped opportunity and Palmer, for whatever reason isn't available. You don't just swap in Trey. You don't just swap in Brian. Sometimes the right thing to do is to say this Palmer shaped opportunity is no longer an opportunity because Palmer is not available. So I think like she's figured out in the right environment these tools can be really useful. In the wrong environment, it's a, it's an explosion waiting to happen.
- [56:56]
Mike Solana
We have, I mean, the sort of, the strategy moves on. We have, you know, taking more risk, turning FUD to fuel and staying the course. I feel like risk and FUD to fuel are kind of, they feel related to me in that I think people are naturally, not just founders, but anybody online is naturally and understandably very scared of horrible things that are being said about them. But the risky thing to do is to find some way to own that and maybe find the true thing inside of it and lean into a strength where you didn't maybe previously understand that you had one. An example of this for us at Founders Fund is Hereticon. You know, you're getting attacked all the time for, you know, these controversial opinions and, you know, saying these things that are, you know, well outside the Overton window according to a very, you know, narrow minded group of people only. And I remember sort of looking around and realizing like, that's that is awesome. That is us. That is what we do and that should be who we are. And how do you, how do you attack someone at that point, when you turn the vitriol into that the only their best weapon when you turn it into like a badge of honor is that maybe. Am I just like. I think that's roughly what you're talking about there. Maybe. How do people think about that? How do you think about that process?
- [58:17]
Lulu Mi
Yeah, there's a line in the piece that says the world is going to treat you like an insurgent and you win by acting like one. And it's related to that where as a startup you're threatening something. If the world were perfect, you wouldn't need to exist. Like, why would Andrew need to exist if everything was going great and there was peace on earth and the US was already, already strong, as strong as it could be. The people that you are threatening and the institutions that you are threatening are going to try to fight you and you should use that. You can either be injured by it or you can Use it like that. Energy is not going to go away. So orient it so that it's helping you. And tactically, the way you do that is number one. You know, start with the inner circles. Make sure that your employees are okay. Make sure that your employees expect that there will be opposition and criticism of what you're doing. And that should actually fire them up more. Like, you want to build a culture where every time there's a hit piece on you, the employees laugh it off, they joke about it, they meme about it, or they say, like, it's working, we're really getting to them. That's the kind of culture you want to be where it's like a band of underdogs and people understand that they're here to do something really hard that a lot of people don't want you to succeed at. And then beyond that, you also want to make it so that it's what you said. The thing that could be a weakness is now a strength invert, like the Charlie Munger invert. Take the weakness, either if it's a true weakness, like fix it or wear it as a badge of honor, make it part of the thing and own it. And then lastly, as you're going out and talking to people and introducing your company for the first time, I think you want to set the expectation that there are people who don't want this to happen or there are people who don't like this, and we believe this. Anyway, you start with the counter argument and then the rest of you introducing yourself is talking about why your thing is good. What you don't want is to talk about your thing is good, good, good. And then the whole time they have the counter argument in their mind that they're distracted by, and then they drop the counterargument and then you end on the counter argument against you. Like, get all the bad stuff out of the way and then go on offense with the thing you want to talk about.
- [60:31]
Mike Solana
I think one funny way to round this out, I have one last thought after this next piece, but we're getting there. Towards the end is a case, a recent Google case. Lulu, you brought it up. You were saying, you know, the Gemini disaster is sort of. It's like the legacy really. It begins with Maven that DNA was in the company. You have a huge, I would say, comms crisis moment for Google, where the tool that they really need the entire world to think is just the next generation of artificial intelligence. You know, they need to win against Microsoft and every other incumbent or insurgent is just Seen as hopelessly clownish and also in my opinion, racist. But it, you there's, it spans the gamut there. Like you either see it as it didn't work or you see it as it was racist. Like it didn't. Something went horribly wrong. Your founder. Not founder. Your founder is not running comms anymore. Your new CEO has to defend this somehow. You broke down recently. You just analyzed. I saw you today on Twitter analyzing Sundar's response. Could you kind of coach us through sort of what happened and what, what should have happened from a comms perspective?
- [61:49]
Lulu Mi
Okay, so I think the, the biggest problem is that this isn't a comms issue. There's. It's a leadership failure. And there's a failure somewhere between moral compass and common sense. I don't think it's for lack of technical excellence. In fact, 1.5, which was released that same week, seemed to be excellent. Just got totally overshadowed by all of this noise. And I feel horrible. Imagine being a researcher on that team who works for six months on this and then have other people's decisions distorted. You know, distort that news cycle beyond recognition. I think it's a leadership failure. And what are we here to do and what is our product goal and who are we making this for? And even in the communication it was all about, it went wrong because people were offended. Basically it didn't work because people got mad and them optimizing for nobody being offended was the problem in the first place and why it didn't work. And so I think, think it's not that the email was bad. I think a lot of hard working people probably had to stay late and do their best on this. But it's that there's no way to write an email that fixes a situation where the wrong business decisions are being made. So I don't think that there's a way to save that through communications.
- [63:08]
Mike Solana
Yeah.
- [63:09]
Lulu Mi
But I do. Can I say one thing though? That email was clearly written by a committee and vetted through lawyers and finally signed off by a professional CEO like a Palmer. Lucky would never have sent that email. Like his hand physically wouldn't press the send button on an email like that. A founder led company doesn't talk that way. People don't talk that way. You have to get to a size of bureaucracy where it's like a committee writing. For professional CEO to be able to release an email like that.
- [63:40]
Trey
This is, this is the government. This is the government. Point is that it's like it's the right response was probably like A two sentence email that was like, guys, we screwed up. This was a total failure of moral judgment on our part. We're going to do better, more to come. Sundar. That was probably the best possible thing if they needed to do it at all. But when you say nothing, everyone competes to say as much as possible without saying nothing. It's not possible to write a very short and concise nothing. You have to include all constituencies in your nothingness. And that email was just that. It was like a bunch of people sitting around a table competing for who could say the most sentences that had no meaning whatsoever.
- [64:25]
Mike Solana
They open without even. They could not even say what went wrong. You could not even say specifically like what the problem was because nobody agrees on what the problem was. And that kind of goes back to like, that. That is very much. I agree that it's a leadership problem or appears to be a leadership problem. And that would be like sort of. What was your point, Lulu? It was inner circle comes first. Like, the messaging is not happening internally. Who is running Google? What is the purpose of Google? What is the strategy of Google? And if you don't have all of those things coming from the top, then when something breaks down, how could you possibly expect anybody to message correctly? Nobody. There is. There is no correct answer. It's a total disaster. And it started, it started in that the call is coming from inside the house.
- [65:15]
Lulu Mi
The clunky email is coming from inside the house. Can I emphasize one thing just on that? Yeah, this is not. I just want to double down on. This is not just bad comms. I think Google probably has a wildly talented comms team. I'm friends with a former head of comms at Google who is a very smart and savvy person. But like, if you hand them this situation and say, fix it with words, it doesn't work. But the other thing I want to emphasize too, to Trey's point about how Shannon uses these tools and she is one of the best in the business. We've turned it into embarrassing Shannon now when she hears this. But going direct for a founder does not mean don't have comms support and do everything yourself and go pop off on Twitter. I think some people here going direct and they're like, I need to fire my comms team and tweet more. No, you should find the best head of comms that you can. You should find your own. Shannon, you should. Like, there are many companies with outstanding heads of comms that are doing so much amazing work for them that the founders would say, like, we could never do this without this person. And they work with the media and they participate with mainstream media articles. I'm not saying don't have comms people or never work with the media. It's be selective. Be selective about which media you work with and when and what you're trying to get out of it. And, and be selective about which people you entrust with your story, which is a very sacred responsibility. And then lastly, that doesn't take you out of the loop. Like, even if you find the very, very best comms person who can establish the very best press relationships, you're not off the hook. Like, it still comes down to you
- [66:58]
Mike Solana
last one, and it was a point that you briefly touched on at the very top of the conversation. You said, Palmer always says, you know, the strategy doesn't change, even if it's, even if everything's friendly. I think it was. Palmer always says, you know, if everything changes tomorrow, the culture changes. Tomorrow we're the same. Is that true? Like, if the culture radically changes? I'm wondering. I guess this entire conversation is geared towards, you know, how to navigate hostility. I think that's sort of the rough assumption is that like the, the, there's like a lot of hostile elements in the press. Social media is uniquely a hostile. You're building now inside of this environment. This is a great guide for, for navigating that. But at what point, you know, is there a peacetime transition? I mean, do you change it all? Do you change your strategy at all if things are good? Like, do you, do you kind of ease the chip off your shoulder maybe a little bit or what? I mean, how do you, how do you think about peacetime?
- [67:53]
Trey
No, there, there is. You cannot ease off the real. The reality is, is like the only version of peacetime is the company is failing and no one cares about, about you anymore. As long as the company is succeeding, someone is always going to be swinging for your head. And I think we've seen this with Elon. It's like Elon has built the world's only relevant electric car company, if we're being honest. And he gets attacked by the environmentalist left and they just hate him because he's successful and they just want everyone to be only moderately successful. And I don't think that's how the world moves. And I think as long as Andrew is doing good work and we're moving the needle for our national security ecosystem, people are going to be coming after us. And so, no, you never let off the gas.
- [68:44]
Lulu Mi
Yeah, I do concur, but There is a book called Once an Eagle. I think Patrick Collinson has it on his reading list. A lot of military leaders have it on their reading list as recommended to me by Admiral Jim Stavridis. And it's a. It's a tome. The very first page of it has an inscription that says, a year that is believed to be a peace year is either a pre war year or a post war year. And I think that's the case with companies. Like, if you're a startup, there's never peace time. Like in theory, in theory, if there were peacetime, maybe you would do something differently. But in practice, I've literally never seen a startup with a single year that could be called a peacetime year. And then the other thing I'll just draw a distinction between is you can change your tactics without changing your strategy. So your principles should never change, your core message should never change. What you exist to do shouldn't change. But the way you communicate, that can definitely change. You might go to press, more or less, use Twitter, more or less. You might go LinkedIn. If you're hiring, you might. There's companies where I don't like TikTok, but there's companies where I've told the founder, you got to be on TikTok because of this thing that you're doing. That's how you're going to make money. And so the tactics, I think, should change freely, but the strategy, no.
- [70:03]
Mike Solana
Trey, Lulu, it has been absolutely real. Thank you guys for joining me. And catch us here on Friday later.
- [70:10]
Lulu Mi
Thank you. Bye.