Lulu Meservey - Transforming Company Narrative - [Invest Like the Best, EP.389]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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I'm excited to announce that we are hiring an editor in chief at Colossus. This will be a critical and central role in our growing media platform and in our quest to find and showcase the best people, businesses, and ideas in the world. This person will work on existing shows like Invest Like the Best and Founders, our soon to be announced print publication, and more. We aim to be the dominant media company exploring business and investing frontiers, so this person needs to be obsessed with these topics and bring serious operational chops. I firmly believe this role can help define someone's c
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Lulu Meservi. Lulu is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a company that partners with founders to level up their communications around all strategic initiatives from hiring to fundraising. Recently, I've been fascinated by the challenge of founders telling their story, and Lulu might be the single person that I would wanna turn to personally to solve a storytelling or communication challenge in my business. We discussed the evolution of media and its pitfalls, innovative methods for managing crises, and the power of going direct with your communication, her overall philosophy. Pl
I think my primary selling point is actually being unencumbered with experience in doing communications. The world of comms, I think, is so broken that the more experience you have in it, the more compromise you might be and the harder it is to break away. I have very little experience in comms and experience in other things. What maybe makes me a fit for startups and founders is having been born in this little village that was poor and backwards and rural and communist, and to this day doesn't have running water or electricity, and to this day doesn't have free access to information. And seei
many things in there that I wanna ask about. But before we do that, I wanna lay a bit of a foundation because I'm sure we'll map back onto the foundation a lot. What is your overarching philosophy for how companies and leaders should tell their story?
The founder asked to be accountable for the story. The founder holds this secret knowledge and this vision that other people don't. If that's not true, you have no business starting a company. Get out of here and go work at IBM. Get a job. Unless you have that secret knowledge and that secret vision and something to bring to the world that's new, you have no business being a founder. So everybody that has business being a founder knows something that everybody else doesn't know. I'm laboring that point because it's really important to me. But the core thing to internalize is if you have that k
What would you say the norm is?
The norm is using a shit ton of middlemen. If you look at a professional company that has all of its layers and structures in place, the CEO tells maybe a CMO or a VP of comms who then tells the person who's in charge of corporate comms, who then tells the person who's in charge of media relations, who then pitches a reporter, and then they'll find a reporter who already wanted to write something similar because they have a narrative already in mind, and then it's beamed through the prism of that
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