Killing stories and creating categories — Shannon Brayton’s comms tips after 25+ years in tech

[00:00:00] You got to know your objective and if it's to get more users, the answer is not just a headline in whatever publication about look at me, we raised this money. You've actually got to tell the story of the company and what it does. And I don't think people are great at that. It's kind of natural to look outside and go, okay, well, you know, God, they got that.

Story. And they got that story and I should have a story like that, but that actually at the end of the day, does nothing for your product or your business. Now it drives some credibility and maybe makes other investors interested in the business, but it actually does nothing for me, usage perspective necessarily.

[00:00:42] welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, bounders and startup leaders need to grow their teams. Their companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like notion, roadblocks, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

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This episode of in-depth. I am thrilled to be joined by Shannon Brighton. Shannon has been working in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years. Most recently she spent nine years at LinkedIn first as the VP of corporate communications. And then as CMO before that, she was at open table where she managed comms in the lead up to the company's 2009 IPO.

Prior to that, Shannon spent several years at eBay, Yahoo and Intuit. It's clear from looking at her experiences that she's done an exceptional job of choosing companies, which is why her next move makes perfect sense. Shannon recently shared that she's joining Bessemer as the venture capital firms first ever CMO.

It's an exciting new chapter. And I'm so glad we were able to sit down with Shannon and reflect on the lessons. She'll be bringing with her into this new role. In addition to her advice on picking a company to join. We get into a wide array of topics in our conversation, from our thoughts on why coms is one of the most underappreciated functions inside of a company to her advice for founders, trying to create a new category and set up the comms and marketing functions from scratch.

Shannon also gets into the tactical weeds, sharing her pointers for killing stories. The framework she's come to lean on for building relationships with reporters and examples of branding moments from other companies that have, and have it impressed her recently, I loved about our conversation is how personal she gets in addition to sharing stories from her time at LinkedIn and eBay, including a move to Switzerland and what it taught her about global comms.

Shannon opened up about the challenging transition from head of comms to COO. She also shares the lesson. She picked up from Jeff Wiener and other leaders throughout her career. Of course, this episode is a gold mine for comms and marketing leaders, as well as founders who may be thinking through their career narratives, but because Shannon shares so many career and leadership insights, I think everyone will walk away with some new ideas.

I hope you enjoy this episode. And now my conversation with Shannon. Thank you so much for joining us. Shannon. 

[00:03:41] Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:03:43] So I wanted to start at the top by talking more broadly about how you think about comms at accompany and maybe how you would describe your philosophy around 

So I think it is one of the most under appreciated functions inside of a company. And I think when people do it really well, you almost don't know because it means they've killed a ton of stories along the way that people didn't want actually seen it is completely critical. Especially when a company has found product market fit.

I don't always recommend doing a ton of PR before you really know you've got something that's going to take the world by storm in some way. And I feel like. Communications people for many years were sort of the stepchild to marketing. And I feel like over the last few years, people have really started to understand how a great communications person or team can really differentiate your company.

It's weird because I don't understand why it's always been that way, where marketing was more of a driver than the comms function. But I do know that some of it now that I've run a marketing team too, it comes down to the fact that it's really hard to measure. So marketing's really easy to measure.

Comms is really hard. And I think that sometimes comms got thrown out with the, Oh, you know what? This isn't something we can actually measure. We'll just figure out if it's working, if it is. And if it's not, it's not. And I don't know that that's completely true anymore. I think comms can make or break you when 

[00:05:10] you were running comms or in your board work today.

And you look at a company. And you have your own internal algorithm where you're assessing, whether they're doing a poor job, a good job, or an Epic job at coms, what sort of that algorithm and what does it look like? 

[00:05:26] Well, it's hard to know because I, like I said, I do actually think that a great comp kills a bunch of stories that we never end up seeing.

And that's hard to actually measure, but the team knows and the reporter knows, and maybe the CEO knows that the story didn't actually happen. So it's hard to actually point to a work product and say, Oh, how amazing was this? Because the story got killed or it got reshaped, or it just didn't happen because the team was able to make it go away.

If it's a story that the company didn't actually want, I think that's the highest echelon of comms right there. My own algorithm. It's interesting. People ask me all the time, what I think of the Facebook comms team or what they're doing, what Facebook has is not a comms problem. They have a business problem that the comms team is constantly trying to chase.

So I don't love when people point to comms and say, Well, it's a PR problem. We don't have great people. It's usually the comms team. That's actually trying to deal with a business issue. And so you use lots of different inputs. You said algorithm to figure out if something's working or not. But really it's hard to say I read USA today this morning and it said something negative about Facebook.

It's not fair to point the finger at the PR team. The PR team is trying to make something that the business decided. To go away. It's super challenging. So 

[00:06:41] how do you go about killing a story that you don't 

[00:06:43] want out there? I think it depends. Sometimes you get reporters who call you and they already have a story in their mind what they want to write.

And you know, that, that, that point it's probably almost pretty done and very hard to kill. They'll call for a quote at the very last minute, as opposed to doing all the research with the company upfront, especially if it's a negative story, right. Or they have some type of evidence that makes them excited about writing something negative.

So I think if it's already kind of a bake story, it's a little bit more challenging to try to kill. If you get a call from a reporter who said, Hey, I'm kind of exploring this thing. I was at a cocktail party back when we used to go to those and I heard this thing and I'd love to know more, those stories are easier to kill because they don't have an opinion potentially formed all the way.

And so I think those are the ones that you have an easier time making go away or reshape. And. I think one big piece of this too. There's a lot of time. There's actually no evidence. It's just an opinion. And so if you can provide evidence to the contrary of an opinion, it can help reshape a story or make it go away altogether because the reporter realizes there's no headline there.

[00:07:47] this sort of intersects with one of the things that I've been interested in, which is the role and interplay between press and technology over the past 10 or 20 years. And I think you have a really incredible vantage point, both sort of in the last.com, but most recently you had 2006, seven, eight, nine, and 10, where I feel like press was looking for every story to build up technology.

And certainly the story of the last three to five years is a story that everything comes at it with a critical eye. And I'm sure some of it's for good reason and a lot of it's not, but I'm curious what your observation is about the fundamental role. Of press and how it's changed as it relates to technology, how that influences the role of comms today?

[00:08:32] Well, it used to be a lot more copacetic. I would say there was much more partnership and can holding, I would say in some ways between tech and press, but I think to your point in the last five years, I think it's changed pretty dramatically. I think most reporters call up when they've got something that they.

Really want to potentially expose because that's great for them. And it's great for their outlet. And the PR person is immediately on the defense. When you get that kind of phone call, I've sort of counseled people lately. Anytime there's a privacy or security question, that's going to come in from a reporter.

That story is very likely not going to end up great. You have to just sort of know that as you're dealing with it, when it first comes in, it is not necessarily ever going to be a benefit for the company, but you've got to play ball to some extent, but those stories are completely in the press as mine and I, by the way, support the free press I have.

A million great examples of reporters who do an incredibly thorough job and are incredibly balanced in the way that they approach these things. So this is not to paint the overall tech press with the bad brush, but I think there's so many times that they feel slightly burned or they really are looking at.

Stories where they think the company has not acted in the best possible manner. And they're excited to write an expos a about it. And so I think that relationship between comms teams and some exec teams too, in the process has just gotten really fractured over the years. 

[00:09:55] So if you're running comms today versus running comms seven years ago, what does that mean for how you should be operating or approaching your role?

[00:10:06] So I'll go back even further. I think about taking a call on a Friday night when I was at Intuit, then like 1997 from the wall street journal. And they wanted to write a story that kind of compared Quicken and Microsoft money, which ironically at the time were complete competitors. And these were software products, not cloud products.

These are the ones you had to buy at best buy and then go home and install that type of story. You would get a phone call about it. And in your mind, you knew it would take potentially three months to actually maybe see the light of day. There's tons of back and forth there's software. You've got to ship to the person to actually do the review and look at it.

And it is so not like that anymore. You get a call on a Friday night. That story not only could run in the next 20 minutes, but actually you could have tweets all along. And that thing is gone. From the minute you get on the phone, the social media piece of this for reporters is much more scary to a comms person.

And it's also much more stressful because instead of having to wait for the paper to show up, you know exactly what's going down between you and the reporter and you are just out of control on a much more palpable way than you were previously. So, how 

[00:11:18] does that inform the way that you would run or structure a comms team?

Because it sounds like in some ways you could be more proactive historically, and now I'm sure there's in an ideal setting, you are being very proactive and thoughtful about your long-term strategy, but there's all this firefighting that goes on along the way that maybe is a little bit 

Absolutely. And it's a complete whack-a-mole too. I think one of the things we did well at LinkedIn is we talked about a follow the sun model. So because we were a global company and we had global comms teams in most regions, one team could actually go to sleep and not be completely stressed because they would pass it to the Europe team.

And then when the Europe team went to sleep, they passed it to the Asia team. And so we always had somebody senior that was. In the function to pay attention to whatever was happening. And that was really helpful. But previously it was just much harder to do because it's like this reporter is sitting there typing up a new story with no way to make it go viral.

And so I think that the follow the sun model works really well when you're a global team. And so I always recommend having international presence. When in fact you potentially have a crisis driven business as not something you want to invest in. Immediately, but over time as you become a bigger entity and you've got international potential crises, you've got to have senior people in those regions to help really ease the burden from whatever team you're being impinged upon.

[00:12:45] back to something we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, when you meet with founders that are like in that like a 50 or 60 person company, they have product market fit. They're really starting to scale. Maybe they don't even have a comms person yet. And they're deciding they're going to be much more intentional about this.

What's the advice that you give them, or what's the coaching that you give them to hopefully help them sort of fast forward through a bunch of mistakes. 

[00:13:09] If they've got product market fit, to your point, I feel that a lot of founders will automatically think that they need corporate PR. They need stories about funding.

They need stories about themselves. They don't necessarily focus on what really drives the business, which is potentially if it's a consumer business, a consumer. Press story. Or if it's B2B, depending on what trade they want to go talk to that type of PR really helps drive the business. Corporate PR really doesn't.

And I feel like sometimes egos get in the way and people want the big story about them that does nothing for your actual business. And so I feel like when I get on the phone with people who are kind of struggling with this, I always. Tell them, you've got to figure out what you're trying to achieve.

You've got to know your objective and if it's to get more users, the answer is not just a headline in whatever publication about look at me, we raised this money. You've actually got to tell the story of the company and what it does. And I don't think people are great at that. It's kind of natural to look outside and go, okay, well, you know, God, they got that story and they got that story and I should have a story like that, but that actually at the end of the day, does nothing for your product or your business.

Now it drives some credibility and maybe makes other investors interested in the business, but it actually does nothing from a usage perspective necessarily. And I think that's a miss. 

[00:14:31] So if a founder wants to do the work to really tell their story, are there exercises or frameworks or things they should be doing to really help crystallize it?

Because obviously the internal story, the employee's story, the ad hoc stories they've been telling fundraising stories may be quite different than the ideal story. As you start to be more open and louder as a company, at least as it 

[00:14:52] relates to coms. Yeah, completely. And I get on the phone a lot with people pitching me for investments.

And if I don't have a pretty good idea of what the company does in the first 10 minutes, I get a little bit lost and I'm not as excited about what they're doing. You've really got, I know the elevator pitch is such a cliche, but you really do have to get it super crisp and clear. What are you doing? Who are you targeting?

How do you make money? How do you tell that story in 10 minutes? The more that you can crystallize that story, the better your PR is going to land. You don't want to diffuse the message you want to have it very. Tight. And you want to be able to tell that story literally in a 10 minute period to somebody, the big thing, of course we all see is all the tech gobbly goop that people really have a hard time understanding.

You've got to be accessible. You got to actually explain what it does and use language where people understand what it is. And I think that's a mistake. People default to. A lot of technical API, this, and it's not for the average person. And if it's a consumer product, you really have to be able to tell that story 

[00:15:50] about telling your story as it relates to trying to dominate an existing category versus trying to create a new category and then own that category.

[00:16:02] When you're an upstart, trying to unseat somebody's major, you obviously have to take a little bit of a different approach. I definitely see much more guerrilla tactics and things that are a little more fun than maybe a stodgy older company wouldn't necessarily do. I think if you're trying to create a category, you really take a very, a different approach.

And that CEO ends up becoming a huge spokesperson and mouthpiece for the company. And. For that category. And so you've got to have somebody who's got credibility and who actually is comfortable in that space. 

[00:16:36] Are there stories that come to mind for you, of people that have done this exception while obviously probably the best example in B2B would be Benioff with no software and sort of owning that entire thing.

But I'm curious, are there other areas you've 

[00:16:49] been genius when it comes to that? This is going to sound a little bit trite, I think too, but I think what Eric and zoom have done too, and we're able to capitalize on. Video as the default communication. I mean, that brand literally changed overnight. That does not happen to brands.

Brands take years and years to build, and then really become household names. I mean, that sometimes takes decades what they were able to capitalize on about video being the default communication to keep the world kind of running. I thought was really impressive. Watching that happen over literally like a week or two period where my mom was calling me, telling me she was doing a book club on zoom.

I was stunned. So I think they've done an incredible job. One of my old stories is when eBay and PayPal were competing before they were combined and before they were split, PayPal came to one of our events and went up to the eBay sellers and we're handing out $20 bills and trying to get people with t-shirts and stuff to try to.

Switch over from eBay bill payment to PayPal at the time. I mean, this was maybe 2002. It was a pretty innovative tactic to capitalize on a competitive were that way, but they were thinking much more innocent scrappy way than an eBay ever. Would've been able to think about now. Of course it turns out a few months later we ended up buying the company, but they got our attention in a major way.

And it's ironic, of course now, because I worked for Reed for 10 years and. I know that Reed had a lot to do with thinking about how to be pretty interesting and innovative when it comes to disrupting your competitors. 

[00:18:20] If a company is competing against sort of a gorilla, kind of, as you've been talking about, are there ways they can be thinking or approaches that are most effective or is it generally kind of sitting in a room and just trying to be creative and think about where are you strong or what can you do that?

[00:18:37] can't. Yeah, I think creativity obviously is huge. And I don't think that kind of thing that I just described from 2002 would happen necessarily now in the same way, but I think being creative on digital and I think really understanding their weaknesses and Achilles heel and really pushing against those is an awesome way to try to get them in a PR.

Since you also want to make sure too, that you're not overboard about it either because you don't want that gorilla company necessarily to go build that exact same thing. That is the thing that may be the Achilles heel was pointed to. Here's actually a great example. Handshake is a. College version of LinkedIn essentially, but LinkedIn is not necessarily a brand that college students love for a whole variety of reasons, but handshake has really owned that market and they have just doubled down on the message that handshake is for college students.

And LinkedIn is for your mom or your dad. And I think that that's going to be a hard thing to kind of climb out of when a brand gets that cemented. With an audience and handshake just did it really quietly for a long time, but then they really figured out what do college students want from a site that LinkedIn isn't giving them.

And they did a brilliant job at building an incredible business on the back of that. It's 

[00:19:59] interesting sort of in that example, that it always seems easier to go to sort of create a brand that talks to a younger customer and age it up over time than it does sort of in the inverse. And I guess that. You know, Facebook started out on college campuses and then eventually people's parents were on it, but if it started out in the inverse and people's parents were on it, it would be highly unlikely that it would go sort of downmarket from an 

I can't even think of an example of where that's happened. Well, maybe zoom in some way. Right. It was kind of the hipper version of blue jeans, essentially. Right. And now because of the pandemic, I mean, my mom's using it for her book club. 

[00:20:36] Yeah, that may be one of the only examples, but you normally see something that key point of differentiation is you target a younger population and then it moves.

[00:20:44] Right? Absolutely. But I mean, handshake's done a great job, like really thinking about how do they just own this market in this brand? How does it make sure it continues its resonance among college students where LinkedIn has had a harder time cracking that code. Now LinkedIn has a great product for college students, but the brand is more associated as a.

Older brand where a handshake is just own this really important and lucrative college market. Curious 

[00:21:09] what you've changed your mind about as it relates to comms, sort of over the course of your career or their beliefs you had, or points of view you had. That you found to be incorrect or you've kind of updated your mental model?

[00:21:22] I feel like because in my 10 years at LinkedIn, the first five years I ran communications and the second five years I was the CMO and the comms person in me actually really didn't understand why marketing had to do anything with comms. So it was like, well, those are two totally separate disciplines. We don't have anything to do with each other.

We're very different people. I actually didn't want the job initially because I felt like they were such. Opposite ends of the spectrum. I mean, 20 years ago. Marketing people bought ads and PR people took reporters out to lunch. And I think now one of the things I've massively changed my mind on is you really get a lift when the comms and the marketing work in concert with each other.

And they're not that far off. And the way that the world is now, it's all one big thing. I mean, the narrative for the company, those two disciplines have to rely heavily on each other. And that's something I've really changed my mind, not in just the last five years. So 

[00:22:14] what does that look like? More pragmatically?

Like if marketing. And comms are working in harmony. What does that look like? And maybe when they're out of sync or whether they're more functionally oriented, what does that look 

[00:22:27] like? So when they're in harmony, here's something interesting that happened during the pandemic. And I've used this example a couple of times, because actually it's also internal communications, employer, branding, HR.

I mean, these functions all now are highly dependent on each other where before and companies, they were all super discreet. And now I feel like. They're all kind of knitted together in a way. So weight Watchers is a lifestyle brand. Hey, we make you happy. We make you thinner. We make you healthier. They are all about that.

We treat people amazingly well. They are a lifestyle brand that people hopefully love and get some success from. They did a layoff. They did a layoff over video. They did a layoff that took two minutes. They had all these people on LinkedIn posting about how poorly it had gone. And the note that the CEO who I really respect and admire sent out, I think was not particularly compassionate and didn't necessarily resonate very well with the employees who had been laid off.

And there were people posting on LinkedIn that said, you know, I'd been here 12 years. I literally got laid off in a two minute phone call. If all of those things, marketing comms, internal comms, employer branding, executive comms had been more knitted together in a story like that, you would actually have realized you can't lay people off for a lifestyle brand in a two-minute phone call.

These things all have to really be dependent on each other now more than ever, because now employer branding, they're going to have a harder time recruiting from a retention standpoint. I think people thought it did not go well at all. And as a user, you look at it and think, do I want to work at a company that treated people that way?

And that is a completely new dynamic HR. Did they treat people well on the way out? Because now people have a voice to go say, Hey, I was treated really poorly. So I feel like all of those things, really now, if you're deciding on a layoff, like all of those people need to be in the room where before it was like the CEO and the HR person.

[00:24:22] And so is that the simplest way to weave these things together is to be in the virtual room when you're discussing all of these things. Are there other ways in which the company or the org structure needs to be set up? Such that these things can click together. 

Bessemer CMO Shannon Brayton has worked at Yahoo!, eBay, OpenTable and LinkedIn (as head of comms and CMO). From killing stories and creating new categories, to frameworks for building relationships with reporters, Shannon shares the comms and leadership lessons she’s picked up after 25+ years in Silicon Valley.