A crash course on comms for founders — Nairi Hourdajian’s early-stage advice from Figma & Uber

 thank you for having me excited to be here.

 thought. An interesting place to start might be to talk a little bit about how you've seen the journalism and tech journalism ecosystem change, call it over the last 10 or so years, and maybe how that ladders into how you think about communications as a technology company today. 

 Sure. I mean, it's changed drastically. Um, we all know that the media industry is contracting, um, and that means that on the very basic level. There's a supply and demand imbalance. There are fewer reporters to cover stories. And at the same, we've seen an incredible proliferation in the number of venture funded tech companies in particular.

Um, and what that does is put far more pressure on the quality of a communications program and the. Real sharpness of the story. It also means, you know, you gotta build those relationships and we'll talk more about that, but that's another key here. The other massive change besides industry contraction is stories five, 10 years ago that used to be full length feature stories are now a two line tweet and forgotten within minutes.

So again, that puts a lot more pressure on the quality of a narrative of a story and, uh, the teams that are trying to tell them through the earned media lens.

 So let's sort of dive in here. when you talk about a communication program, what do you mean by that? And what does great look like? 

 communications program really should encompass earned media owned media and sometimes paid as well. So let me talk about what that means. So earned media, it's called earned for a reason. You have to earn the coverage by the press. You can't just make it happen for yourself. Uh, owned as people know your owned channels.

 How are you telling your own story in your own words, on your own channels, your blog, your social channels, um, your newsletters as a company, and then paid is an opportunity to spread either your owned or your earned coverage. Um, To even more audiences put a little hand on the scale. Uh, so those are the sort of external pieces.

You know, the other piece of a comms program is of course, internal communications, which has really risen in prominence and importance and value over the past five to 10 years. Uh, and then there are lots of other pieces that you can tuck in, depending on how you decide to organize it at your company.

So that's really the, the, the core building blocks. Um, and what does great look like it's knowing what fits, where it's really being intentional about what your company long term business strategy and goal is and where communications fits into it. Um, That is I think where most mistakes happen. I think, especially with earned media, there are a lot of companies who just feel like it's a box they need to check.

They look around, they see it happening. They see their peer sets, getting coverage in certain, um, publications by certain reporters. And then they don't necessarily take the time to look at their own long term business goals and ask does press matter for my business. Is there a unique value of earned media for us?

Um, and is it something we should invest in and if we're gonna invest in it, how can we invest in it in a truly world class way? that's, I think the, the most important. First step for companies at the earlier stages is to really think about what the needs are, um, who are the audiences and how to reach them and then filter tactics and strategies throughout those different levers.

 Can you give a example, maybe it's in your current role past role, the idea of taking a long term business strategy and translating that into, let's say, into earn media strategy. Like, what does that actually look like? 

 I can give an example from Uber. One of the things we saw pretty early on at Uber is that there were a lot of drivers who were spending time on the platform, just a few hours a day, just in the, in between times, especially women. So women were taking their kids to school, uh, you know, and then they had a few hours to drive an Uber, make some money, and then, you know, go back to the rest of their responsibilities with their families at the end of the day, or if they had work that they needed to get to.

 And we really felt like this was an important business imperative to make sure we were facilitating that type of driver. Onto the platform, both to meet the rider demand, but also to facilitate the economic opportunity for those drivers. And so that became a important piece of our communication strategy, both to shine a spotlight on those use cases, because it was different from the way people were initially thinking about drivers on Uber, which as you might remember, was initially, professional live drivers with black cars, um, and really, you know, talk about the impact of that program on the drivers.

And then the rider who were able to benefit

 So maybe building on that, you know, if you were to meet with a founder and they they're kind of, I don't know, call it series a stage and Maybe they're a 15 person team. They have a product in market with a thousand users or 5,000 users. So there's early signs that there's something working and they're like, we've never really thought about coms.

We've never thought about press. What should they do? What, what kind of process do you think is, is most useful there? 

 Yeah. Well, I think that the way I usually encounter that stage of company is after they've just secured their series a and feel like they want to announce it. So actually I see it less often that there's this step back intentionality behind the program and much more of, we need to announce our funding.

Let's put out a press release, which is not the best way to approach it. But so what I tell that founder is this is a great opportunity to do some really important foundation building. I mean, you, your pitch deck, you raised the series a there's a real story there clearly. Um, how does that translate into public facing communications?

Do you have a website yet? Do you have sort of the encapsulation of what your core messaging is as a company, some people call that brand positioning. You could keep it simpler at that stage two, without going through like the formal exercise, uh, and who are the important audiences for your business strategy this year?

Are you going to grow from 15 people to a hundred this year? I can tell you reaching out to candidates and making sure that the types of skill sets you're looking to bring on that people who have them hear your message and get excited about you is a really important audience. You know, recruiting is an, a really important muscle for any company at these stages, as we all know.

And so. That candidate audience is just essential. So, um, that's definitely a piece you're series a you're always gonna wanna stay on the radar of investors, especially in the current environment. Who knows when you're going to wanna raise again, maybe you'll get inbounded at some point. So keeping some, you know, pulse on that audience important too.

But what about who you're selling to? Are you a consumer based company? Do you need to be reaching out to much more broad based consumer outlets from a press perspective? What is the right way? What are the right channels to reach? The people who are going to use your product or you B2B trade publications can be super, super valuable there.

They don't get a lot of attention, you know, in the Silicon valley chattering class, but they can be impactful from a, a business perspective. So just really doing that audit, laying it out, making sure you have that core foundational messaging. And then from there thinking about, well, what needs to live in the, again, using the example of announcing funding in the blog post that we do announcing our fundraise.

What elements do we need to plus up to make this into a pitch that's actually interesting for a reporter, um, and then working, working those details from there. But I, I think that the instinct is to just go straight into, well, I'm just gonna reach out to some reporters or we're gonna put a press release across PR news wire, either way that has no impact, don't do it.

Um, and the it's really important to take a moment and ground yourself in what you're trying to do for the coming, you know, 6, 9, 12 months.

 In terms of that first step of out messaging or narrative, et cetera. What are some of the things you figured out there? Or some stories that kind of illustrate? What, what someone doing this well? Looks like. 

 I can talk about some of the ones that I worked on when I was working in venture. So we brought a robotic company out of stealth and at the time robotics companies were being funded, left and right.

 And why was this company interesting? Well, the way it is interesting is in the context of Amazon and Amazon's work in robotics in fulfillment centers and warehouses. And the fact that this robotics company was building a pretty massive customer base of Amazon competitors. And so, you know, really like leaning into that tension and the relevance that that would give an earlier stage startup was a key piece of getting media engagement around that particular moment, bringing it out of stealth and announcing the funding all along at the same time, thinking of it much more from a profile perspective.

 at a more general level, the companies that out early to share with the world, what they're up to, what they're working on. Think about it as a multi-channel moment, um, where you're kind of building this. Surround sound that includes your VCs and your other advocates and validators posting on Twitter, about you sharing.

 If you were able lucky enough to get some media coverage around your company, sharing out the blog post on LinkedIn, that LinkedIn is such a powerful channel. The content just spreads and spreads and spreads. And especially if you're trying to hire a bunch of people, so really thinking about it in that way, but it never works unless there's like a really good story.

And so the key here is who's responsible for drawing that story out. Um, some founders have really good instincts on coms, and they inherently understand story. Um, others need more help and you need to know if you're either, 

Um, I think what I see more often is. early stage teams who don't have expertise or practice in this area, hiring agencies, and then not knowing exactly how to direct them or manage them. And then it, it ends up being a bad fit, a poor outcome. And really that was because there was sort of like a mist language.

 If, if you're trying to give advice to a founding team and they want to do some of this work themselves and really kind of roll up their sleeves. are there any frameworks or ways in which they can approach. Pulling out that narrative. And I think that it's, it's often tricky because to the point that you made a few minutes ago, there's a whole number of different stakeholders.

One of the stakeholders is the reporter and weaving something together, such that he, or she will find this compelling enough to prioritize, but the other is potential customers or, or talent, or what have you. And you can often kind of be quite insulated in your own world and kind of often mired in the details.

And so is there anything that you figured out or advice you would give as, as a founding team or trying to figure out what's the big story here? Or how do I package this in a compelling way? 

 Yeah, you'd be surprised there it's so it's so common that at this stage, it's almost even hard sometimes for the team to answer, what are you building? one of the ways that I've worked on drawing that out over the years, um, especially during my time in venture working with this early stage cohort is to say, tell me in the simplest terms, what are you up to? I. And then tell me why it matters. The what are you doing and why it matters is the starting point for a conversation.

And then what you find is exactly to your point, because companies are heads down they're. So in the weeds of their work, they don't necessarily have the time to pick up their heads and look around and understand how they fit into the zeitgeist. What you get back is quite a bit of jargon and something that's almost ind decipherable to somebody who doesn't already know their business.

And so from there, you just work on stripping it down and stripping it down and stripping it down because whether you're selling to a CIO or a consumer or a candidate, Everybody is a human and would like to be communicated to as a human simply directly in a way, and in a way that's persuasive. So you just gotta kind of workshop it, write it down, write it down again, strip it down, evolve it some more.

And hopefully that gets you down to the essence. If you're only able to talk about what you are and can't hone in on why it matters right now, within the context of what's going on in the world, it's never gonna land as a earned media story and that's okay. Right. Maybe it, that just means informing other coms tactics, but, um, that's an important depth along the way.

And you see a lot of jargon, Laden descriptors of companies on their websites. And you know, I work in SaaS now, which. I never would've thought I would work in SAS. I didn't know what SAS was 15 years ago when I transitioned from politics into tech. Um, and in a lot for a lot of SAS and enterprise companies, you go to the websites and you're like, gosh, I have no idea what you do.

I'm like pretty smart. And I work in SAS and I don't understand what your platform does. And that is the situation that you wanna avoid, especially as you're getting started.

 When you look at kind of the last year and a half at Figma, How has the way in which you described what you do changed? And maybe you, can you explain what you do? Because I assume that you've spent a lot of time working on this as kind of an inspiration for, for folks that are, are working through.

How do you succinctly and concretely explain what you do. 

 Yeah. we're a platform for teams to design together. We're a space that brings anyone who wants to be part of the design process in gives them a seat at the table and makes it possible for them to collaborate on, on design. And why does that matter?

Well, design is how we experience the world. COVID really accelerated that, but anything you look at on a screen is powered by design. And so it's, it's really the nucleus of how companies are going to run in the future. And, you know, we're enabling that

 And was there a process to get to that or is that to kind of been how you all describe the, what you do and why it matters for a while? 

 Um, it's iterative, you know, you definitely wanna do the mind Mel, with the founder and the CEO. You wanna think about the feedback from the community and users, um, and you test and iterate, right? As you'd said, this Kool-Aid drinking is so common in companies that are passion in it and about what they're up to, but sometimes you think something sells and it doesn't.

So that's kind of the cross-functional effort And the journey we've been on as a marketing team at Figma over the past few years, and really I have to give credit to the CEO and co-founder Dylan field, who, before I, or any of the marketers joined, the team had been really intentional about what do we do and why does it matter?

And you can see that in the early press coverage of the company going back years,

 So going back to, the case study that we were sort of talking through a minute ago. I think one of the things that I've noticed over years,

is even companies that get organized and do a good job with their original launch or financing announcement, or what have you struggle to do anything beyond that.

And so it tends to be, much more one and done versus an actual plan. 

 And what are your thoughts on, on like, again, you're a small team you're getting going. How do you put a plan together? That's not just, we're announcing our 6 million round and we're gonna get, you know, outlet X to cover it. 

It's so common. What you're describing part of it is because a small team only has bandwidth to execute on a discreet moment and then move on. Sometimes that's true. Um, especially at the stage you're describing around the series, a but as they move slightly into the like series B, it's really important to think thematically, what are the key themes for us from a, go to market perspective, marketing perspective, comms perspective for the year cross functionally and how are we going to hit them?

 And at what moments in time, it's nice to actually do a timeline of the calendar with those themes and then populate. It doesn't have to be something every week. Right. And if you're an early stage company and you're launching, you know, your V2 of your beta, like. That's an owned content play. Right?

Nobody's gonna write that. Um, and the reason why you see more of the funding stories is the corporate news is an important anchor for earned media interest at the early stages. The other anchors can be really novel founder stories or really luminary founders. Who've already done something incredible in their past life coming to it again, or some sort of like deep partnership with a major company.

These are some of the examples that you can use to augment your, your corporate narrative, but the product stuff is hard. from a press perspective, so product will definitely be much more, owned content, and your owned channels. You know, I think that one of the motions that's super important.

Tied to those themes is community building with users, um, with evangelists and engaging them along the way. Figma did this exceedingly well for a long time, um, because the company was disrupting way design was happening and needed to be deeply enmeshed in the design communities in order to get feedback constantly.

And so, um, that's such an important muscle to build being communicative and finding the channels that reach your, your growing user supporter, armchair observer audiences, um, along the way. 

 going back to kind of this life cycle example, the team has solid messaging. They have a hook or a narrative that they think is compelling. I in a granular way, what should they go do next? 

 let's say they're starting from zero, right? They've gotten that stuff down, but it haven't. Let's say built any relationships yet with reporters. So you have two choices. You can take a pause and make some efforts there either through your own, you know, entrepreneurial, cold emailing ways, which some founders can actually really nail and actually report a is find refreshing, or you can rely on your venture firms.

 Or of course you can bring in an outside expert to help to get you through the launch moment. 

 Before you continue on. if a founder wants to go and try to build relationships with reporters, what, what does that actually look like? What do they do? 

 yeah. Send him a note. Hey, reporter, I saw that you've been covering xtop. here's a novel thought that you may not have considered or, or an extra insight that I had after reading your story. We're not exactly in that space, but, I read recently started a company and here's what we're up to.

I'd love to keep you posted or spend time grabbing coffee if you're up for it. Uh, we're really seeing some really traction and would love to just tell you a little bit more about what we're up to in a non salesy way. Right? I've seen, especially some of the enterprise companies at the early stage, try to all automate that outreach in a blasted sort of way.

Don't do that. Don't do that very bespoke. Very one on one. This is all about the match. Press is all about the match and the relationship building stage of it couldn't be more important, no matter what stage you're at. It's true as much for big companies with massive comms teams as it is for early stage companies, without anybody.

Full-time the way I talk about it. And that I think resin hates with people is if you know, at the series B series C stage that you want to try and pursue an acquisition by a big company like Amazon, let's say you would never wait until you're ready for that moment to build the relat. Would you? No. You malpractice, you can't go to them and say, we're ready to be bought.

Wanna get to know us. You have to build that relationship over time in a strategic way, in an intentional way, in a way that is not transactional at every step along the journey. And so that is the same muscle to deploy in building relationships with reporters.

 And would you start by having the founder kind of go through the different potential publications and look for the reporters that are covering something that's related to what they're doing. So if they're a security company go and find all the people across all the public occasions, you care about That that really focus and that's kind of step one.

 That would definitely be a good step one. Um, and it's okay to be aspirational in that target list, right? It's unlikely the times or the was going to cover a early stage company. But you definitely want them to know you over time. And because your ask is just for a coffee or relationship building and reporters are always looking for smart sources.

Um, it's okay to be aspirational in that outreach. It's different from overreaching on actually pitching a reporter. Right. So it's okay to be aspirational know in the relationship building stage, you have to be really realistic in the actual pitching stage when you're ready to actually try and get a story written.

And then, you know, it's a relationship to keep nurturing. Just the way you would nurture a candidate that, you know, isn't ready to come work for you right now, but you wanna keep 'em warm. And you're hoping that eventually they'll convert same thing. So, you know, high EQ, right. You don't wanna bombard them, but a note here and there a thoughtful reply when they post, then when they write a story that you find interesting authentically, um, and you know, Hey FYI, we updated this.

Wanted to just share, just kind of work on the relationship building.

 And as a founder, if you're building these relationships, I assume if you're doing it well, uh, different reporters will reach out to you on other stories that they're working on, but within your sphere of knowledge, 

 do you have any advice on how to navigate that? Because in some ways I think it can be a great opportunity for you to kind of continue to get your name and your brand out in another story.

Um, at the same time it might be a very negative story. And again, in this case, it might not even be about you, but it could be about someone else in the industry. I think an underappreciated thing is, is that, you know, a short term oriented founder might be, if there's a negative story about my competitor, that's great.

Um, the downside of that is a lot of negative stories in snare. All of the companies that sit around it, even if you're not doing something wrong. And so it just seems like a very tricky thing to navigate. And so when a reporter reaches out and says, Hey, do you have five minutes? I'm working on a story about X, what should a founder be thinking about?

 I have a pretty strong point of view here. Um, one is. Value over volume. So, okay. There's a story being written on some topic that's like generally related to your space, but not exactly. And you know, it's four o'clock on a Friday. They're just trying to put the story to bed and they wanna get a little bit of sound from someone who's smart in this space. Is that a value to the company and the founder?

I mean, it can be validating and nice to see your name in print, but is that gonna drive value? I'm all for the engagement for talking to the reporter for sh you know, offering something of value, maybe on background or, Hey, let me share a point of view. You might have not thought about yet as far as like, kind of really trying to get yourself into something like that.

I think that the value of it is usually pretty low. That's a slightly different scenario than what you're describing, where, and it's a competitor related, um, story. And on those two, I mean, it's not, not the upside for kicking a competitor when they're down on the record. Um, It paints a particular picture of the vibe, the tone and the brand of your own company, if you're the one who's doing that.

And so again, if you put at the top of the hierarchy, this importance of building media relationships and nurturing them over time, engagement is totally fine, but I it's always so much better to talk about your own company in your own words, as opposed to a competitor you can still draw distinctions.

Um, but why would you want to be a supporting player in a story about a competitor, especially one that's negative, as opposed to the star of a story that's mostly about you at a different time.

 continuing down our sort of fictitious story, let's assume, someone from Bloomberg gives you an exclusive and they want to cover your company launching or your financing news. How should the founder approach. preparing for the actual interview? 

 Well, the first thing is to prepare. I worked in Washington at an amazing public affairs firm that was home to a lot of the X, Clinton, gore white house leadership. One of the women who worked there, her name was Dee Meyers and she was the white house press secretary for a time for president Clinton.

 Dee would often go on the Sunday shows. This is a woman who had stood up in front of an entire room of international media every day, taking live questions. Every day, fielding interviews all the time. And every time before she went into a media interaction, she was in her office preparing.

 I share that story to just remind everybody that the people who are the best at what they do are always putting in the work and thinking I'm the founder. I know my, I can go into this interview and nail it is a complete fallacy. It's a completely different environment. every word matters.

You really have to nail it. So how do you prepare first is to understand what does it mean to be in a media interview? Okay. I'll get real granular or for you all. So the conversation usually starts one of three ways. The first is the reporter kind of knows what the news is, has a preview excited to jump into it and directs the conversation.

The second option is you start chit chatting, you're building rapport, you're kind of shooting the breeze, talking about all sorts of different, um, topics. And then you realize, well man, 10, 15 minutes have gone by and we haven't yet gotten to my company or my news. You gotta grab control of that conversation, grab the reins and say, but you know, I know we're here to talk about, you know, what we have coming up.

I'm really excited. So maybe I can just kick off by telling you a little bit about what we're announcing. And then the third way these conversations can kick off is just with a bit of awkward silence. Nobody really knows who's gonna drive. how to start just kind of looking at each other.

And zoom only makes this harder. A lot of these are happening on zoom. So again, Grab control of the conversation, if it's okay with you reporter, I'd love to just kick off by telling you a little bit about myself, a little bit about the company, and then happy to take any questions that you have. Um, once I tell you what our news is, so those are the three kind of models I've seen over time for how the interaction begins and the way the founder should navigate it.

But the key here and the insight that hopefully is empowering for everyone walking into a press interview, is that the question that the reporter is asking is a vehicle for the interviewee to deliver their message. Does that mean you can ignore the question. It does not. 

It does not mean. You can go in a totally different direction than the question asked. What it means is that you can think of every question as an opportunity as opposed to an oh shit moment of like, what am I gonna say now? And once you kind of think about it that way mentally, it's a lot easier to prepare.

Yes. You should think about what questions are gonna be asked and how you're going to answer them. Are you disclosing your valuation? You know, that's gonna come up. So if you're not, you better have a plan for how to answer it. Um, I have a few tricks and important rules of the road for, you know, quote unquote media training in like 30 seconds.

624500ab53c8bf09a4098195

Nairi Hourdajian (VP of Communications at Figma & first comms hire at Uber) shares advice on how startups can get comms right, from crafting a narrative and building relationships with reporters, to working with agencies and making a full-time hire.

A crash course on comms for founders — advice from Figma's Nairi Hourdajian

Nairi Hourdajian (VP at Figma & Uber's first comms hire) on getting comms right, from building relationships with reporters to working with agencies and hiring.