Go Direct

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. On Founders Journal, I act as your startup Sherpa, finding the gold hidden in the internet, the best content for entrepreneurs so you don't have to spend the time looking for it or reading through it as well. On today's episode, I'm going to read through what is called the Go Direct Manifesto by Lulu Misservey. Lulu was the chief communications officer of Activision Blizzard. She was the head of comms at Substack, and now she's going off on her own to start her own modern comms business. On this episode, you're going to understand why it is so important to build your own audience and your own narrative as a founder on the internet today. So let's hop into it. Go Direct: The Manifesto. Number 1: Traditional PR is dead. For too long, founders have yielded control over their narratives to media and middlemen. Before the internet, it was by necessity. The way to reach large audiences was through the media, and the way to get media coverage was through professional publicists. Today, most of the planet is directly reachable through social media or email. There's no longer a need to go through traditional gatekeepers of information and brokers of reputation, especially as their own credibility has plummeted. Just one thing I want to point out here is this is the beauty of social media. Social media has basically acted as an aggregator of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. So all of a sudden, consumers have access to the same hundreds of millions or billions of people that companies used to have, either through paper routes or through the cable set-top box or, you know, through the radio frequencies that people would have access to. So the distribution, the access to distribution has been fully democratized. The old PR playbook of relying on third parties with misaligned interests is obsolete. But while the world has changed, comms norms have not. Still encased in amber are the old habits: prioritizing media over social media, fishing for clicks instead of fostering communities, and avoiding risk by recycling worn-out tactics. Corporate communications itself is now an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee. If press releases read like they were written by a baker's dozen of middle managers, that's because they were. Their only discernible purpose seems to be to avoid upsetting anyone and jeopardizing the future job prospects of those middle managers. The resulting stories are bland and generic, With passion reduced to pablum, traditional comms is an anachronism. So what Lulu is basically saying here is like, it sounds so cheesy or cliché, but it's true. We live in a period of time defined by authenticity, and the purest form of authenticity for a company is the lived experience and views and thoughts of its leader. It's funny that I'm recording this episode now and that Lulu wrote this manifesto today, because what's even been interesting to see is we've seen kind of like the humanization of Mark Zuckerberg recently. Like, we've seen Zuckerberg on kind of this roadshow of being a normal human in the marketplace. This has included going on podcasts like Morning Brew's podcast, Morning Brew Daily. It's included going to UFC fights and helping fighters get ready for the fight and being in their corner. And so I think there's a lot of things happening at once that are making companies and specifically CEOs realize that they need to build authentic connections with their communities, with their customers, with their shareholders, you know, with potential partners. I think one reason is they're realizing that, hey, I can just build an audience myself, have ownership over that audience. Like, why do you think Elon Musk bought X or Twitter? Of course, you know, he wants to help democracy in society, but also now he literally owns one of the largest distribution channels on the internet. But at the same time, I think think like most habits that form in society, when we see our celebrities and there's been kind of this celebritization of entrepreneurs, people's behaviors change as well. So I think and I predict that by seeing people like Mark Zuckerberg be more front-facing and talking about things related to their business, but also things related to their personal life, and also not being so PR trained and being real or at least appearing real about their points of view, even if they're a little bit controversial, is something that you're going to see more and more founders doing. Okay. Now, section 2 of the Go Direct Manifesto: Communication is the founder's job. For a decade, we've been told that tech founders are cartoon villains, venture-funded startups are grifts, and new technologies will destroy us all. Maybe there was a time when founders could just focus on building. They were seen by the media establishment as a curiosity, not a threat to the natural hierarchy who needed to be put in their place. But if that time ever existed, it is now long gone. You may not be interested in the discourse, but it is interested in you. And if you bow out, you are forfeiting your license to build a movement and thus build a company. Building a movement is hard, but it must be done, and it must be done by founders. A founder's passion, vision, and conviction can't be simulated by others, least of all the press release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs. The best spokesperson for any endeavor is not the one who has the most polish, the longest tenure, or the quote unquote right credentials. It's the person who holds the secret knowledge upon which the enterprise is built. The person who can not only describe the idea, but in the face of inevitable opposition, fight for it and win. Founders need to take their narrative as seriously as they take their rockets or robots. They would never outsource their product. And when it comes to convincing others to support the mission, the story is the product. Outsourcing comms is as bad as outsourcing code. As evangelists, founders are irreplaceable. So what Lulu is basically saying here is that a lot of founders don't want to be, say, creating content online or building an audience on social media or just going direct to audience, because I think a lot of founders consider it to be a waste of time. Like, it's interesting, like even the idea of being a content creator is frowned upon and kind of poo-pooed by founders, especially technical founders that don't want to have anything to do with creating content. But Lulu is basically saying like, if you want to have a narrative that you own, if you want people to know your business in a certain way, you can't just like hope and pray that it will happen. You need to treat your narrative and your story and the way people perceive your company through you with as much intention as you treat your product. And my personal view is I think like I totally agree with her perspective. I do think it's going to require a large cultural shift because I do think a lot of founders still consider it to be a waste of time. I think they still consider it to be like, build a great product and not hope that they will come, but like focus on building great product and serving your customers. And that will do a lot to create the right narrative, like have people talk in the market for you based on their experience with your business. So I think it's going to require some cultural change. I also think some founders sometimes swing too far on the other side of the pendulum where they create so much content that their product becomes just their story versus the actual product of their business. So there's a happy medium to all of this, but I generally agree with what Lulu's saying. Number 3, go direct or go home. Going direct to the people who matter is how founders retain control over their narratives and preserve their company's uniqueness. Those who are stubborn, unorthodox, and disagreeable should never have their edges filed down for fear of offending entrenched interests. But going direct doesn't mean going it alone. It doesn't mean refusing help or spurning others who can amplify your message. And it certainly doesn't mean just posting more. Going direct means crafting and telling your own story without being dependent on intermediaries. Just as founders might have more natural talents at product management or engineering, some founders will be natural at communicating while others have a harder time. The good news is that going direct and building a movement, while not easy, are skills that can be developed with discipline and time. The bad news is that unlike with engineering or management, communications failures are immediately public and personally humiliating. It's not surprising that many are loath to take on this responsibility. At the same time, founders willing to pick up that gauntlet will find that it gives them a massive edge in recruiting, fundraising, selling, and shaping the information environment needed for their companies to thrive. So what Lulu is just saying here is that communicating and storytelling is a skill, just like product management or engineering is. The only caveat is that when you screw up a product, it's not public for everyone to see. When you screw up your story or how you communicate, it is public for everyone to see. Some people are going to be better at storytelling, just like some people are better at product, but it is a learnable skill. And it's something that people can support you in building up. And then the final piece of the manifesto, number 4, it's time to rebuild the Rostra. At the center of Rome, as it transitioned from a republic to an empire, stood a speaker's platform from which the city's leaders would address the public directly. It was called the Rostra, so named because it stood atop the captured battle rams or rostrums of enemy warships. From here, speeches were given that would sway opinion, change regimes, and alter history. That physical structure has been lost to time, but we now have something much more powerful: a free and open internet with which to build a speaker's platform of limitless scale. All we need is the will to build it. The conventional way of communicating has its allure. Outsource your message. Let some removed third party go through the motions of getting impressions and spare yourself the risks and discomfort that come with putting your own name on the line. But that way is incompatible with greatness. Reject convention. Build your own platform, build your own audience, and build your own narrative. Go direct. And that is Go Direct: The Manifesto by Lulu Misservey, the former chief communications officer of Activision Blizzard as well as Substack. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I will catch you next episode.