Master Class in Communications with Square’s Aaron Zamost | Greymatter

I'm so excited for this episode of Grandmatter. We're here with my friend, Aaron Zamost.

Actual friend.

Actual friend. You're actually one of the first friends I made when I moved to the Bay Area, believe it or not. So you're welcome. Yeah, it's been fun. He's the head of communications at Square and he's had a long and storied career there. He led the communication strategy for the company's IPO. And in November of 2015 and prior to joining Square, he worked in public affairs at Google. And I think, fun fact, you're also a lawyer.

Ex lawyer. I was a lawyer and I applied to be a lawyer at Google and was rightfully rejected as having not nearly enough experience to do that. And the lawyers at Google are amazing, but at the time they were looking to scale out the comms team and one thing they were looking for was ex lawyers and policy types. And so I just wanted to work at Google and I said, if you hire me, I'll be an ex lawyer. So no, I'm not a lawyer. Although I love all the lawyers at Square.

So why were they looking for lawyers at that time to join comms?

Yeah, it's a really good question. A lot of our colleagues in the Valley are ex Google comms people who've gone out into other companies and many of them have non traditional comms backgrounds. Elliot Schray was the head of communications and policy at Google at the time and he, I think also has a non traditional communications background, was in policy, and was just looking for people who had different backgrounds and who had good instincts and strategic thinking. And not all of that needs to be learned in the communications field to do communications. So I have friends from Google who were lawyers and policy people and now we're all in the same industry.

I guess the Google experience was actually really formative for you in terms of how you think about comms narratives. And I know that you wrote a very well read blog post on Medium about a year and a half ago, was it? Yeah, about last summer of 2015 called Silicon Valley Time. And I think part of that was inspired by your time at Google. But maybe can you walk us through what your thesis was and how that all came about?

Yeah. So one of the great things about the diverse group of comms people they were hiring was there's a lot of academic nerdy people who had interesting theories and brought them to communications. And I really don't remember the first line in the post that I wrote about the clock is I don't remember who first told me this idea. And the idea was very simple and it was short, which was company stories move in cycles and they move from highs to lows. And the metaphor this person used was that narratives move like a clock, moving from morning and sunshine to evening and darkness and then around again to another day. And actually, a friend of mine told me that the person who he thinks I heard that from is Eric Schmidt, which makes absolutely no sense to me because I have no idea when I would ever have had a conversation with Eric. And so whoever this person is, they were the inspiration for the idea. So I guess I blacked out and had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, apparently. But when I was at Square in 2014, there was a very negative and wrong story about the health of Square's business that was published in the Wall Street Journal. And I gave a talk to the whole company at an all hands about that story because it freaked out a lot of people internally who wondered whether or how much of it was true. And I gave a presentation about that story in the context of, well, startups have a narrative cycle. And I use the clock, and I expanded it from just daytime to nighttime to the different hours going from 12 to 12.

Were you surprised with the reaction?

Yes. I wrote that thinking maybe you would read it. And a lot of people read it. I think the reason it resonated was it speaks to comms people. It spoke to reporters positively and negatively. It spoke to tech people and entrepreneurs who are actually living these cycles. It spoke to marketing people who have similar theories around hype cycles. And it spoke to storytellers. And it was just a broader idea than I think I intended it to be. And so it was cool to see that. And people come up to me and they go, oh, you're the clock guy. And so I'll never live that down.

Well, it is interesting using the construct of time, because time is very predictive. And so this notion that these cycles are actually predictive, because when you're living in it, you feel like, how am I gonna survive this moment? Or what's coming next? Exactly. How do you kind of think about the next step or the next play? And so I think that was a helpful tool for people.

I think one thing that was controversial about the post was the headline says, how the tech press forces a narrative on companies. And so all our reporter friends will love this. Which is, I didn't write the headline, which, as reporters always say, I didn't write the headline. Blame my editor. I didn't do it. I didn't write the headline. And so I don't know if the tech press forces the narrative, but I do think they're pattern matching for narratives. And so force is probably a stronger word, which probably made it a little bit more provocative and more people read it.

Headline writers force the narrative.

Headline writers force the narrative.

You know, you said you did this company All Hands, which actually I think is a really interesting topic I'd like to dig into as well, around how external communications and internal communications need to work together and how you think about that. But before we get into that topic, I'd love to hear a little bit about how based on constructing this clock, you learned to kind of embrace it and lean into it and how that's helped you then with strategy and with making decisions.

Right. Well, one of the things I wrote in the post was an important reaction to bad press is to separate the personal feelings and the emotion from it. Comms is a very interesting job because you don't actually control the output. You don't write the article. You didn't write the headline. If you're not the spokesperson, all you're doing is preparing a spokesperson to deliver the message, which maybe they'll do a good job of, or not. So this the output, which is the story you didn't really do. So you can relive that story a million times in your head about what you could have done differently to get a different result. And I got really upset about this story in the Wall Street Journal because it was wrong, and that made me angry. And that didn't help because it makes you want to do things in response. But often in comms, the best response is no response or a different response, or not a direct response, but an indirect response. And so you have to take the emotion out of it. And once you give yourself to the idea that you don't really control the stories written the narrative about your company, and there's only so much you can do, it actually provides clarity and says, oh, you know, I can take a moment and actually look at this and.

Say, okay, yeah, you can make rational decisions.

That's exactly right. You can make rational decisions when you are not emotional about it.

Right. And having that framework is something that allows you to be rational.

Exactly. And to look and say, yeah, you know, when a startup gets very successful, people start to look for flaws in the story.

Yeah, there's good news and bad news about success.

Totally. Right. And you know what? Those are fair. When companies, not all companies are perfect and not all companies are terrible, there's a Lot of. A lot of gray matter. Look what I did there. I should get a marketing job. But yeah, there's a whole middle ground, and you just have to be okay with that, and that makes you a better comms person. And the best reporters also know that. They say, look, there's a good side, there's a bad side. There's a neither good nor bad side. There's just reality. And so I never get upset anymore about bad coverage. I get upset about coverage that isn't fair or isn't accurate, but a bad or negative story that's fair and accurate, you can't really do anything about that. It's the truth.

So that was a couple years ago that you wrote this piece. How do you think the relationship between tech founders and tech press has shifted in the last few years? Or do you think it's shifted?

I think it's shifted for two reasons. The first being companies now distribute their own content. And so with Medium, so do presidents. That's true.

Yes. That's 100 million people.

That is a much longer topic. We distribute our own content. I mean, you have. Greylock has a podcast. I don't know if people knew who were listening to this podcast by Greylock, but Greylock has a podcast. And that's a great way for Greylock to get its story out or to share information that they find interesting. And so you don't need the press to get out certain stories. And so I think tech founders are looking for ways to get their story out in what they believe is an unfiltered way. And that's great. But also take it with a grain of salt. I'm a comms person. I work for Square. I get paid to share the story of my company in what I believe is the most positive light. And so it's fair to be skeptical and therefore look for other ways. And the press is critically important to telling real stories about companies. But I think, number one, tech founders are looking for ways to tell their stories without needing what they probably believe is a middleman, which is the press, which I don't think is a fully fair characterization, but it's.

I understand it in some ways, I think, like, because there is so many different ways to go direct to your customer or direct to the people you're trying to influence, it in some ways makes the tech press even more important because getting attention in that kind of climate, it's that the bar is higher now to have someone care about your story and have a third party that's getting inundated care about writing about you and having something interesting to say.

I think the second thing that has changed about how tech founders approach the media and their story is because they now have their own means of distribution, they are probably a little bit, I hope, slower to get their story out there and do it in a way that makes sense. So they should do the profile of the founder when it makes sense, and they should talk about this great new product when it comes out and that makes sense. And they should talk about the vision when it's real and it makes sense. And I think people are less likely now to just do press for press sake. When the press used to be the only way to get your story out there felt, I would imagine there's a huge pressure to get your story out, therefore through the press. But now that there are other ways to get your story out, I would hope, and I've seen this in some companies with colleagues and friends of ours who are running comms of these companies that they don't need to do everything because they now have a menu of options and how to talk about their company.

When do you think is the right time for a tech founder to start talking to press?

Well, are you asking when is the right time for a tech founder to hire a comms person? Because those aren't the same?

No, I'm asking because I think actually founders should have direct relationships with reporters and not work directly through comms people. I think at a certain scale it becomes untenable for a founder or a CEO to like manage the press relationships as well. And that's when you hire someone that can help do that. But, you know, the folks that listen to this podcast, most of them are very early stage, right? When is it too early to start engaging with press? Is it ever too early to start engaging with reporters?

Yes, I think there is a time when it's too early. I think you have to have something real to say and you have to be real in how you say it. I mean, reporters are fantastic at smelling out bullshit. They can smell bullshit. And good. They should be able to. That's their job. So if you try to feed them bullshit, they will call you out on it and that will be bad. So engaging the press with bullshit is bad because the press you get is bad. So I would argue that the right time to engage press is when you have an actual story to tell, when you have a product that works and when that product does interesting things, and when you have interesting examples and use cases of it, and when you have learnings or teachings or when your CEO has a vision beyond the product that is actually being used and that that vision is also not bullshit. And so to do that and is important. And so yes, you should absolutely bring people in. And it doesn't just mean to get a story. I think there's a belief that some tech founders have, or some comms people in early stage companies have about the transactional nature of communications, where, well, we'll give you this story and will you write about it? Because that's what I'm a comms person and that's what I'm getting paid for. If I don't get the story, then what am I doing? Everything doesn't have to be a story to just find the reporters who have beats that. Cover your company and you have a thing of interest for them, bring them in, have lunch with them. If they want it on the record, cool. If they're willing to have an off the record on the back of the conversation, great. Just educate them and be a normal person talking about your product and company in a normal way and they will respect you for that. And then if they see a story in it, they'll write it. And if not, at least they're more informed for later when you have a story that might be more interesting to them. Or maybe you get in another story and they call you and say, we had a conversation about X or Y and now I'm writing about X or Y and I'd love to hear more from you about it.

So that effectively starts the clock, right?

Right?

Yes.

You go from midnight, which is nobody knows about you, nobody cares, to one o', clock, which is people sort of know about you and think you're interesting. You get that first tech blog story.

Yep. So you followed up Silicon Valley time with a blog on the law of narrative gravity. So here's. Let's start this. What time of day is it at Uber?

At Uber? Well, the funny thing is, when I wrote the Post in summer 2015, I put Uber at 11:59pm, which is the worst company in the world. And they had just had the God view disaster and a huge row with Sarah Lacey and everything they were doing was interpretive. It was the darkest, darkest times. And now it's been two and a half years. And I think they're probably in the exact same spot. And I don't know if that's because they've circled the clock and landed back at the same spot or if they never moved.

So it's 11:59 at Uber right now.

Or it's 10:00pm which is the company is a mess, right? Yeah. So there's a great quote which is happy families are all like, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So your bad stories, when you're a company going through a dark part of the clock, they're all bad in different ways, but there's always, to me seem to be a progression from broadly bad, that everybody is bad to singularly bad and how you are bad. And so you know, the clock starts with your product isn't very good and then it becomes, well, you're never going to make any money. And then it becomes everything that you're doing is kind of viewed skeptically and wrong. And then it's, well, actually your company is a total disaster internally. And then of course it gets into privacy stuff if you're really lucky and you get the what are they doing with your data stories. And then at the very apex, you're the worst company in the world. And so Uber I think probably has been vacillating between 10pm which is where it is now. People are leaving. There's all these discussions about the company culture and user boycotts and people hating everything they do and assuming that every action that they take had malice aforethought. That's like you're the worst company in the world because everything you do is evil. And so they probably live somewhere in there.

Right. And so that inspired this latest post, which is actually a broader idea around this notion of self fulfilling prophecies or people want to believe certain things about your company. So everything that. Well, I'm paraphrasing. Why don't you describe the law of narrow gravity?

The law of narrow gravity. So I'm a fan of metaphors. If you haven't figured it out, it out. I think a lot of people view communications one dimensionally and I think there's a lot of depth to it and there are ways to explore complicated concepts. And look, communications isn't rocket science, but there are levels to it. And one thing I've always thought about is I've been fascinated by narratives. It actually this post didn't start with Uber. Uber was a small example in this post, but in the two week period that I was writing it, all hell broke loose at Uber. And I kept editing this post, given the news, and I shared it with a couple friends and I said, I have to cut Uber from this, right? Because it's just making everything crazy. And they kept saying, no, you have to keep Uber in it. So the law of narrative gravity is the idea that Narratives have gravitational power. That sort of explained the theory with the theory. But what I mean by that is narratives, once they're real and once people believe a certain thing, they start to interpret facts consistently with the narrative. And that's not a new concept either. Right. That's very similar to confirmation bias and other things.

I mean, we saw this all in the election.

Totally. Everything that Hillary Clinton did that looked a little bit shady was, ugh, those Clintons. Those Clintons, they had a private email server. And you know what? Maybe having a private email server is not a good idea for the Secretary of State. I'm not an expert on this, but those Clintons and their secrecy.

My point is, is that confirmation bias or this notion of law or the narrative gravity is not a new thing that came.

No, not at all. I mean, if you and I both work the same company, and there's just a persistent belief that I show up late to work and Elisa is always here on time, and then I show.

Up, which is true.

Well, we don't work together, and I get to work on time. Thank you.

Yeah, I know.

If there's this idea that Alisa is always on time to work and I am always late, and then for a month straight, I am on time to work, and then one day, both Elisa and I am late because, I don't know, Bart melted down and I am late to work, I would assume they would look at me and go, ugh, Aaron is always late to work. And there must be a good reason that Elisa was late. And maybe your reason was you were also on bart. But the pattern matching is what narrative gravity is. It's the idea that you take a construct or a narrative about something and then you start interpreting information consistently with that. So the Uber example I use in the post is Uber during the JFK protests around Trump's immigration order, I think rightly looked at the long waits that were going to happen for Ubers at JFK and said, oh, no, we do not want to be in the middle of another one of these stories about how Uber surge pricing is making it expensive for people who are stuck at the airport because of immigration protests. We should turn off surge pricing. That's my guess. I don't know. I haven't talked with Uber about their decision for it, but my guess was to.

I think that's what they publicly said.

Oh, really? Was to avoid backlash. But then, because people became aware that Uber was actually still servicing at JFK and the New York taxi drivers had decided not to service passengers there, it looked Like, Uber was strike breaking. And that's. That's crazy. And this is not a press thing. This is people pattern match. Narrative gravity is not just the reporters.

No, this took off on Twitter before.

Exactly. And Lyft was doing the exact same thing. And Lyft didn't get any grief for it whatsoever. There's a huge hashtag, delete Uber campaign. And so narrative gravity is not about the press, although the press is one element of how we report on narratives. But the idea that Uber is terrible feeds on itself. And so now everything that Uber does and they have done, a lot of things have been really bad, but I am sure they get no benefit of the doubt for anything they do that's neutral, which will then only be interpreted negatively.

Right. So what does a comms team do then, in this situation?

Well, the bad press is the symptom, not the cause. I mean, we know that you and I know the comms team over there. They're really excellent people. And you and I know the people who work there, and I worked with many of them at Google, and they know what they're doing, but their problem is not communications. Their problem is the stuff in the company that is making their lives harder. And so, you know, a comms person can make a bad story less bad, but they can't make a bad story good. So the key to getting out of it is stop giving the press fodder for bad stories. And so I would imagine that the Uber comms team has laid the law down internally and said, would you like this negative news cycle to stop? Stop giving the press reasons to write about all the terrible stuff that's going on. We have to change internally, which is why I imagine, so much of what they're doing is based on changing the culture internally, because until that changes, bad press is symptom.

So that's actually a great circular segue to the beginning of the conversation when we were. When I mentioned that I wanted to talk about internal comms and the reflection of communications on a company's culture. How much of how you've seen in your experiences does the communications team reflect back the culture internally in the company? How much does the comms team drive the culture? Like, what's the role in terms of.

The internal comms team or the whole comms team?

Well, so I personally actually think that the distinction between internal and external comms is a bit arbitrary, because I think the people who are gonna tell your company's story are not just the folks who are working with reporters every day. They're Also the engineers who are going home and having drinks with their friends and talking about the cool projects that they're working on or why their company is so great. I think everybody who works at your company is in some ways responsible for the story of that company. And that's why you see when negative things and you see people start leaking, it's because they're not feeling compelled by the culture. They're not feeling like they're a part of it or they don't have ownership of that culture. So I actually think that distinction is a bit arbitrary and sometimes actually detrimental to a company.

Well, I think you're exactly right. And I think, look, the only people who are better at smelling bullshit than reporters are employees. They know what's going on. They're not dumb. They have access to all the information. They know whether something is true or not, and they read a story. That's why I think this Wall Street Journal story was so weird internally, because the company went, wait, what? I have access to all these metrics. This is not reflecting the reality I know, not the reality I'm being told.

Right?

So I would imagine not being inside Uber, that the challenge that they have, it sounds like, given the leaks that you reference, it's people going, I can't make change internally, therefore I'm going to leak because I think public pressure may force my company to change because I don't have the power internally to do so myself.

When you think about your all hands meetings with your employees, or if you're a founder and you're talking about, what's the story that I'm gonna share with my team? Because that team is then gonna go out and make a ton of decisions based on that story, on product recruiting, where they're gonna prioritize their time, and how they're going to think about their own teams that they're managing. That story has to be consistent with what is being shared externally. Do you see a world where it's most advantageous for a startup to think about these things as two separate.

Well, the story is the story, right? So the story you're telling to the employees in your company to motivate them should be the same story you're using to motivate the public to use your product or to investors to give you money or to shareholders to buy your stock. Right. The motivating story that gets people to come into work and work hard and ship is a sense of purpose and a rallying cry about what they're doing that matters. I know. It's so Stupid in the Silicon Valley, cliches about we're here to change the world. I get all of those. But you do need a purpose for why you're doing the job that you do to be happy and motivated. And you want that purpose purpose to be fulfilling and positive. And in the best companies, the internal purpose matches the external purpose. And I think that's one thing. The best example here is Google. What Google did in the early days with search and indexing the entire web around the world said to employees, you are here to basically make the entire world's information accessible to everybody. Which also was an unbelievable message to tell reporters, which was, imagine every book in the universe was online. And so that works. And so the best communication strategies are motivating employees with the purpose which is communicated as part of the news you're putting out in the world. And so at Square, a lot of the internal communications projects that the team works on is how to use the products and features and stories we're telling out in the world to reflect the values we have internally and to show that we're on the right path.

So it's funny you brought up the example of Square having a negative story in the Wall Street Journal that was not true or not accurate. How do you think that your experience with talking to the internal team and making sure people had access to the right information internally helped you stem what could have become a bigger, you know, a narrative pull, like a gravitational pull?

Yeah. Well, it's funny because, I mean, that.

Story was like, in some ways the truth. You're saying the truth was on your side and the culture internally, people were.

Yeah, I mean, that story was. That story was so long ago. It's funny to me that I still talk about it, but it was very formative in how I think about communication, communications, and how I think about internal comms and external comms that led to the post. I write. I basically said. I said squares at 9pm Everything that we do, people think is terrible. And I would argue at the time, at the time, everything today is peachy and wonderful.

We'll talk about post IPO Square.

I'll do my job for a moment and talk about how wonderful my company is. The most important thing that I have learned during difficult press cycles is the thing that matters most importantly externally is the same thing that matters most importantly internally, which is credibility. That's the only thing that matters. And reporters who don't believe you and don't give you the benefit of the doubt won't reflect your. Their stories won't reflect your opinion, their analyses of your products will be skeptical and potentially negative. And internally, if employees don't believe the things that you're telling them, they won't want to work for you. They will go find other jobs and they will leak and say negative things about your company. And so credibility is the only thing that matters. And as I said, employees smell bullshit as well as reporters. And so you have to tell them the truth. And that means being very transparent. That means answering questions. You think spin sounds like crap when you're giving it to the press? It sounds even worse internally. Nobody goes to work every day to get bullshitted by the company they work for. So that means saying, here's the information. I'm here to take any questions that you have.

You bring up a really good point. I think in a steady state, that works. But what happens during the moment a company decides they're going to go public? Because suddenly you can't actually give everybody all the information internally. I don't want to talk necessarily about, like, the ins and outs of quiet period, because it's really clear what you can and can't do in that. But in terms of your internal comms or like, how you kind of bring people along through that process, which can be a pretty stressful. It's exciting, but also stressful. You want to make sure people understand it's a moment, not a destination. How did you think about that on the comm side, Going through it on the square side?

Internally?

Yeah, internally.

So Square was the first of the unicorn class to really go public. Right? So that class of companies founded between 2000, we'll say 8 and 12 of Square, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox, Snapchat's late to that game, but it was probably a part of that class. We were the first unicorn to go out. And so as I imagine it was for or it is for employees at all those other companies. So it was the same of Square, which is employees who've been there a long time are constantly wondering, is my company going public? And when. And for companies in the limelight, which all these unicorns are now, not even just the ones on that list, but basically any large private company there is usually reporting on the IPO process in the press before you can tell the company what is going on. And so in order to prepare for that time in your company's life, you have to have started the work months in advance, managing expectations about what you can and cannot share with the company. So credibility does not mean telling everybody everything. All the Time. Having credibility means being honest with people about what is going on, what you can and can't share. So in the early days of a company, everybody knows what's going on. You know, if you're going to acquire another company, you know what products are coming out, et cetera. Square, a year earlier, did debt financing, and we didn't tell the company about it until it happened. And then at the end of it, when we told the company, we said, as you can imagine, financial events like these require confidentiality. And unfortunately, even though we love sharing everything with you, we could couldn't share this with you. And you have to prime the company for the fact that they're not going to get all the answers. So that way, when they see in the press a bunch of stuff they desperately want to know about and ask you about, they either don't ask because they know you can't tell them, or they ask and when you tell them that, you can't really tell them anything, they understand why. And so I got up at All Hands after the first stories were published about Square Planning to file. It's S1 to go public. And I said, imagine we did this. Do you think, would I be able to talk about it? And the audience sort of laughed. Now, I didn't confirm or deny anything in that, other than saying, let's imagine it was happening. Do you think I'd be able to get up here and give you an answer?

Lawyer Aaron is coming out.

Ex Lawyer Aaron. And so that answer works two ways. Because if nothing is going on, then you're just saying, in the future, when something's going on, I won't be able to talk about it. And if something is going on, I can't talk about it. So you have to instill your culture in the company.

But part of that you were able to do because people trusted you already. And that. And you. Meaning and the executive team. Right. Like people had been had, you'd earned enough credibility to be able to say.

Yeah, that's the whole thing. Credibility is the only thing that matters in communications in any direction.

Yeah.

With the press, with your employees, with your partner or spouse, with investors, with your kids. You know, if you say to your kid, you and I have young kids, if you do that again, we're leaving. And then they do it again and you don't leave, they don't believe you and they will do it again. You have to have credibility. And so that's not a thing that you just get. It's a thing you have to earn and it can take forever to earn and then if you lose it, it's gone. And so the whole point in advance of an ipo, just as you need to be thinking about your external story months before, before you ever start drafting this one internally, you have to be thinking about how do I communicate with employees and when I have stuff I can't share with them, how do I get them to trust us?

How do you manage internal expectations around the press cycle for the ipo? Because I imagine the Squares case, you guys were really the canary in the coal mine. A lot of people were looking at you. You said you were the first of this class to kind of take on an ipo. And of course there's a ton of, you know, fevered speculation about what this is going to mean for all the other tech companies that are private. Will it be a pop or will it not? How do you help people understand how this moment in time is going to fit into the broader.

Right. So I had given the Clock presentation a year earlier and Square was growing a lot, so not everybody had heard it. So when I got up again, I sort of did a mini recap. But more fun for me was when we publicly and for filed the S1, then we could talk about it internally in certain ways, right? There are rules about what you can and can't say, but we could acknowledge that we had done it. And so our Jack, our CEO, Jack Dorsey, got up and did and talked about it. We had an all hands. He talked. Sarah Fire CFO talked, our general counsel spoke and I spoke. And one of my slides was a big picture of a unicorn. And I said, we are in for it. This is not going to be fun. You all think this is going to be so much fun. We are about to be the. You say canary in the coal mine. I said, we are a proxy for a larger discussion. Because in the fall of 2015, the markets were all over the place. There was all these discussions of markdowns and overvaluations of private companies and Dropbox and Bubbles and oh my God, we're always in a bubble. And I said, we're about to go through a giant cycle in which we are used as the lead in articles that don't really have anything to do with us. And if things go well, it'll say, ugh, this frothy, bubbly private company market, now they're going public and all these companies are also overvalued. And if things go badly, they're gonna go, ugh. Exactly what we've been telling you. And that's narrative gravity, right? Like it's the discussion of. There was a frame for a discussion about private company valuations and we were just gonna go through it. So I got up there and I said, I have no idea what's going to happen. It could be wonderful, it could be. Be terrible, but we have to be ready for that. And then our cfo, Sarah Fryer, is amazing. And she has, I mean, when people talk about credibility in our company, I use her as the example. She is very transparent, very clear. She no bullshit. And she also has earned the right to get up in front of the company and say things like that. And so she got up and she showed. What did we show? We showed the stock price of three companies without their names on them from IPO to X months or years out. And some of them at the beginning look like huge winners and become total disasters. And some of them have people forget Google priced very low and they, they lowered the range and it wasn't as big as everybody thought it was going to be. And then Google went up forever. Facebook had a disaster of an IPO and now proven everybody wrong. And so Facebook, Google and Groupon were three examples. We used Groupon, which had a terrific IPO and then collapsed. And we said, and we showed these stocks without the companies. And then we showed the companies and said, nobody knows anything. There's a great quote Sarah always uses that. I don't know who the original person is, but Sarah loves the quote and I love it too. I don't know what the quote is, but I think it's something like, in the short run, the market is a voting machine, and in the long run it's a wing machine. And Sarah got up and said, I know this is going to be very hard for you all, but you just have to ignore. Erin just said, you have to ignore the press, you have to ignore the stock. Because in the short run it's just all over the place and in the long run it will get somewhere else, which she has been validated by over time, giving her even more credibility. So now when Sarah gets up there and says anything, and that's awesome. And so that was sort of how we did it is we said, could be great, it could be bad. You should be ready for either. Please don't worry too much about it.

Given all that context, how did you think about the ipo though, as a PR moment for the company? How did you use it as an opportunity to retell? Because it is an all eyes on square moment. So to not in some ways Lean into it to retell the story of the company and make sure people understand who you are, what your vision is. You kind of have to do that, too, within the constraints, of course, of the. Of the quiet period. What were some of the things that you did that you think helped retail?

Well, an IPO is a giant branding moment, right? And there's a giant poster of your company in front of Wall street, and there's a CNBC desk inside the New York Stock Exchange where you literally ring the bell and then turn 3ft and sit down. And so you have to use this as an opportunity to tell a story. And I. And we did that. And the way we did it was by staying true to our values. I know it's very silly, and I know it's stereotypical, and talk about the purpose of your company and how much you care about your customers. But Square puts its sellers first. That has always been the core value in the company, that the sellers are what matter. And the first sale using a Square reader in 2009 or 10 was with a flower cart in San Francisco. And so her flower cart was called Lily Bell. And so we invited her to New York and had her set up a flower cart and then use our new reader, which accepts contactless payments and had Jack's mom pay with her Apple watch to buy flowers from the first Square seller in front of the New York Stock Exchange. And the bell ringing was rigged to the reader. So when the reader beeped to process the transaction, the bell rang. And that was us tying two threads together. Here's the future of the company and all the innovation that we're doing now tied to our very beginning, which is the seller. And so instead of setting up a bunch of executives in suits stand up on a podium and ring a bell and look very corporate and lame, we said, that's not who we are. We care much more about putting our sellers first. And when they show the bell ringing forever, our CEO isn't even in the picture. It's his mom and a seller. And so that was really important to us to make sure that the coverage of our ipo, by necessity, had to show the sellers who used the product.

Do IPOs reset the clock? Can they?

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the ipo. Right? So ours does didn't, because we were all over the place, and we had a price that was lower than anticipated, and then a huge pop on IPO day. So what do you do with that? Was that a success or not? Right. We wound up trading significantly higher than anybody thought we Would yay lower than our last private valuation. Boo. So I don't know if that's the clock for us, but it definitely has the potential to give you a new storyline. So I look at Snapchat's ipo, right? So Snapchat just had its ipo and they didn't really do anything to brand themselves. And that's their choice. That's cool. And as part of that, they didn't really tell a story about the company to a mass audience, which is, I.

Think they talked to the LA Times.

Right. It was a strategic decision. And now I would argue that they had a very successful IPO. They went out at, you know, 20 something dollars, which is 20 or 30 billion dollar market cap, which is 10x what Facebook had offered years ago, a $3 billion acquisition offer. And so that's a huge success. Except I would argue that the big lingering story right now about Snapchat is its growth, which is a number that came out as part of the S1. And so did it reset Snapchat's clock? No, but it definitely created like a fork in the story, which is they are now a public company. They are going to live and die by quarterly results. And there's already a sense, there's a narrative perhaps that Snapchat isn't as fast growing as Facebook and actually might be slowing as its growth. And so what category does that put it in? And maybe it's not the high flyer it was. And we're gonna be really interested to see what the first earnings. First earnings. And we're gonna see how many users they have and how fast those user numbers are growing. And so there's already a frame for the first Snapchat earnings, which is how fast is user growth going to go. And so did that reset the clock for Snapchat? No, but it definitely, definitely created a new storyline, potentially.

Is there anything you would have done differently if you were armchair quarterbacking on the Snapchat ipo?

I don't know.

Maybe that's a reflection of their culture though.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, they're very stories I'll read about Snapchats, how secretive they are. So maybe they didn't want to say anything. And hey, you know what? They can do whatever they want, whatever's consistent with how they want to operate is great. I think it was a missed opportunity. But what do I know?

Yeah. Yeah, you've never taken a company public.

It's really easy to come on a podcast and wax philosophical about Snapchat and Uber's PR problems. Here's how I would handle a Korean escort crisis. Yeah, no, there will be cons, people who love what you and I are talking about there. Will people know.

If someone got this deep into the podcast, can we actually keep that in.

Hi, mom. I know my mom's still listening.

Okay, so I'd like to end the conversation. A final thought or a final question for you? If you're an early stage founder listening to this podcast, is there a particular piece of advice that you like to give or something really actionable that we can leave people with that they can take with them tomorrow? They don't need to hire a fancy pants comms person to do.

Yes, give communications a seat at the table. I think communications is too often thought of as some vestigial part of marketing or a part of the company that, you know, you hire an agency maybe and they do all this stuff and they don't really work in your company, so you think of them sort of off on the side and then, okay, it's time to hire a first comms person. And so go get somebody with a couple years experience. And well, we'll give. They're not gonna report to the CEO, so we'll give them to this marketing person. And that's great in the early days, perhaps, but there is a point at which comms should have a seat at the table simply because the perspective that a senior communications person can bring to a conversation is different. They can look at a situation and go, you know, you don't think this will have potential negative public ramifications, but it might. I write in the Narrative Gravity post that when you're in a bad cycle, you have to evaluate every decision the business makes through the lens of whether it will in any way fulfill the negative narrative about your company. And the people with the best eyes for that are comms people. And so I think communications people who directly report to the CEO is really important once a company hits a certain point just to offer a different perspective and have a different voice at the table. And the best companies are those where marketing and communications work hand in hand, collaboratively, where the story you're telling customers through marketing and the story you're telling the public through press are one and the same, just as we talk about the message that you bring internally being the same. And I think the best partnerships between communications and marketing happen as equals. And that's one thing I love about Square is communications sits on the executive team.

And.

And I would like to think that that's a good thing and that we've done well as a team representing communications within our company. And so my advice to founders is hire really excellent, smart communications people and listen to them, and when you're ready, have them report to you.

I think that's great advice. Thank you so much, Erin, for being here. I appreciate it.

Thank you.