Why comms deserves its own spot on the exec team — Aaron Zamost’s lessons from Square

 [00:00:00] Great. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.

 Thank you for having me. I love being invited to things like this. It's so fun.

It's also nice to be talking with a comms person who speaks for a living, so that's, that's nice. Yeah. I get, I get paid to do this, so I'll try to be as authentic as possible and remember that I'm wearing the hat of myself as opposed to any other hat.

 So, one, one place just to, to use as a jumping off point, I, I'm super interested in, you know, the things that you believe about the roles of, of comms that maybe most don't or they maybe don't understand or that that took you a while to sort of figure out anything kind of come to mind for you.

 Oh yeah. I mean, I have religion on a whole bunch of crazy things. Probably don't sound that crazy, but I would say definitely are unorthodox when you talk to people who are not communications people. Um, I think the main one, and it's super self-serving is I actually think communications deserves a seat on the [00:01:00] executive team as a direct report to the ceo.

When I've talked to companies about, um, roles or I've given advice to other senior comms folks who are friends of mine, my first question is, to whom does this job report? And the answer is usually the CMO. Somebody in marketing, somebody senior.

Occasionally it's a COO or head of business. And very rarely do they say, oh, this job, it reports directly the ceo. And then sometimes they'll give you some hemming and hawing, like, oh no, it's on the executive team, but it reports to this other person. Well, okay, then it's not really on the executive team, right?

When the CEO calls her or his, uh, leadership team together to make some crazy important business decision, does this person get brought in the room and get to give the, their boss, the ceo, their advice? most people don't follow that as a rule, and I think it's really a mistake. I think most boards similarly would benefit from having this perspective on two, do you know how many problems in the last, you know, few months alone or through c you know, companies have found themselves in, and a person at the table who had an eye for reputation could have said, Hey, [00:02:00] you know, I don't know if I would do that, and I just think that's a perspective that most CEOs aren't getting. 

 why do you think that is? Or, or why is it, you know, historically under the role of CMO or why is it not maybe the defacto kind of exec team role?

 Well, I'm a communications person. Let me give you the positive and message first, which is I think communications people, the best ones have skills that the rest of the leadership team doesn't have, as everybody on the leadership team should have skills that other people don't have, right?

You're building a team of rivals, people who compliment each other and make the CEO and the company better. And communications in particular, I think, are capable of seeing many, many steps ahead. I mean, they can see second and third order effects of decisions. I, I always start, when I'm looking at putting out news or information, I start with the faq.

You know, Amazon famously starts with the press release. I start with a list of hard questions and I take the questions down rabbit holes. And for me, this is a way of sort of seeing. Where things will go. And often you're surprised by the follow up question to the follow up question. And I think marketing people at their best are also thinking of perception of the company, but they're thinking about it from a, from a brand, you know, positioning related to have value propositions and how to sell the service.

And when they run an ad, how they want people to perceive or feel about the company. And communications is a great, you know, cousin to marketing and they work really well together. But at its core, the best communications people just can look at problems and spot exactly what the issue is going to be.

Right. I learned this from, um, a boss of mine, many, I mean many bosses that I've had, but Jill Hazel Baker, she's the current CMO and head of communications at Uber. She was my boss at Google and she just used to walk into a room in the middle of a fire. [00:04:00] Be able to so quickly identify the one fact or the one issue that was more important than everything else.

And I really picked that up from her. I picked that up in law school also, a lot of lawyers do what's called issue spotting. You're looking at a giant fact pattern and you're picking out the issues that matter the most. And just to have a person in a room for really hard, terrible situations who can give you that lens?

I mean, why wouldn't you want that in the room? So to answer the other part of your question, well, why aren't they in the room? I think the answer is because most CMOs are an earlier hire for founders because they're staffing up their marketing and they're go to market teams faster. And so they're most senior leadership early in that realm is somebody in marketing.

And that person says, oh, you know, we would benefit from a PR person. Then they go hire somebody with, call it six years experience communications. And that person rolls into marketing and that's that. But communication should not just be some like vestigial part of marketing. It needs to be something completely different.

And the best comms people, we'll take a job [00:05:00] on the leadership team where they can offer that kind of background and perspective. And those people probably aren't gonna work for a CMO. And so it's a choice that I think a lot of founders have to make.

 Is any piece of it that there's just a low percentage of outrageously talented and strategic comms people, or no?

 No, I mean, I might be a personally self-loathing communications person, but I won't shit on the profession. Right? Like I just think the training of communications people are very different. 

I worked at Google back in the day in 2000, Seven to 11. And the Google comms team when I joined was like 30 people. And then by the time I left, it was 300. And they just scaled it with the scaling of the company. And the Elliot Shrag, who was the head of communications at Google at the time, was an ex policy.

And he, he went on to be a head of communications at Facebook and he had this weird idea that he was going to hire non traditionally trained PR people. And so all my best friends from back in the Google [00:06:00] Days who are now running communications all over the valley are lawyers policy people. And investor relations people who just came in and learned how to do communications.

You know, the head of financial communications became the head of IR at, at Google was um, uh, was a financial reporter. And so I just think there was a different training to people in that way and that encouraged people to think about communications differently. There's a lot of great communications people out in the world who, you know, didn't have that kind of training, worked in agencies and all that kind of stuff, but from a like really truly, you know, I like to joke seeing in the Matrix, you know, that seeing in the matrix where Neo.

 realizes he's the one and he sees everything in code. Like great coms, people see the world in code. Like they can look around and go like, oh, I know exactly what that is. And they can bend things to their will in that way. And, and, um, yeah. I just, I I just think that it's, it's a skill set that's honed from certain kinds of companies.

If you were at a Google or at a Facebook or Twitter and you're just like dealing with shit every single [00:07:00] day, you're gonna get good at that kind of stuff.

 So I wanted to loop back on a couple things that you talked about in a second, but I, I wanted to kind of continue down this path of things that you're evangelical about as it relates to coms. So the first one is the idea, the sort of role of coms and how it sits on the exec table. What, what are some of the other things that you're just a deep believer in

I think 99% of PR agencies provide little to no value to the companies that hire them. I, I, I wrote a blog post when I launched my little boutique consulting firm that I titled, no, you don't need to hire an agency. There are exceptions. I'm happy to talk about the many exceptions for when it really would benefit a founder or company to hire a PR firm, but for the most part, it is just you're just flushing good money after bad, and you find seven months into your contract with them that you've spent God, at that point, $30,000 a month, $210,000.

You haven't really accomplished much. [00:08:00] The CEO is constantly asking why they're not on the Today Show. You're getting these really long coverage reports that don't have your company in them. It's just, I don't understand the business model because every single company I talk to says the same thing to me, which is I'm really unhappy with my agency.

How is that possible? How can everybody be unhappy with their agency? Some agency asks their people have to be happy with. I know some of them that are very good, but they do niche things that are, and they do them very well. But I at Square, in the United States in particular, we never hired an agency period in my almost 10 years there.

And we went public without hiring an agency. 

I think there's a couple, right? Let's imagine you are a company who explodes, right? Like you are a 40 person company and suddenly you strike gold with product market fit and your consumer tech in particular, and suddenly everyone is calling you.

You know, sub stack is an example of a company like that. I think open sea. Was a company [00:09:00] like that about a year ago. Just like, boom. Everybody wants to talk to you and there's just no way you can scale with that. You go and you hire an agency to do that, right? Here's our messaging. You work with them, they block and tackle with reporters and help you prioritize and make the recommendations about what press is worth your time That's a totally legitimate reason to hire someone. Another one is, you know, the classic, uh, CEO co doing something horrendously bad and you have no expertise with the massive corporate disaster you're now in the middle of. Um, so you can hire a firm who knows how to help you navigate the release of that information and the weeks of fallout, right?

Totally legitimate reason Also, um, another one, this is when we hired agencies at Square. Uh, when you're expanding internationally and you don't quite know where you need full-time support, so you're starting in the uk. You're not sure if you need someone there full time, you might, someday you [00:10:00] can hire a firm to help you in a market.

Or even when you're a scaled international communications team, there are markets probably doesn't make sense for you to, to hire one person. So I love the, uh, mishmash of countries called like Ben Luxe. Like you probably don't need someone Belgium, another lens or Luxembourg. So you hire an agency that can handle those, those, uh, countries.

Um, and then the fourth one I think is vertical expertise, the best communications people have fantastic relationships with people across, you know, business press, tech press, national, local, that kind of stuff. But let's imagine you're in music, or you are acquiring something in a vertical that's brand new to you. You know, you need to know people at Variety, Hollywood Reporter, billboard board, all that kind of stuff. And so there are agencies that have that kind of expertise, right? If you asked me to go run communications at some Hollywood studio, I would fail miserably. I don't know anybody in that world, but you could hire somebody who does. So I'd say those are the main exceptions.

 So if you are, an early product market fit company and you're scaling, maybe you're 30 [00:11:00] people or something like that, Your recommendation is not to have a PR firm in general and it, it, and other than, other than hiring your first comms person, we're gonna talk about early comms people in a second.

What, what's your advice to that person to, to do a DIY kind of approach until they hire their first person?

 Well, it depends on what you need. You don't put tactics first. This is not rocket science to say, just like any part of the business, you need to have objectives at the top. So I would ask you to ask yourself, what are my objectives? Am I about to fundraise and I need to get my story in front of the movers and shakers who are gonna give me money?

Did you just fundraise and you're trying to recruit and you need to get in front of engineers? Um, I hate communications as a tactic for customer acquisitions. This is why I don't think it should live within marketing. But are you really trying to drive awareness and downloads? So are you just trying to drive consumer…

 Why do you, why do you [00:12:00] hate that? I'm super interested, particularly cuz I feel like anecdotally when you look at a bunch of the big consumer businesses like Airbnb, that long tail press and reporting and writing around the world was sort of a driver of their growth. But curious to hear more about it.

 It was definitely a driver. I'm not saying it doesn't help, but if you are reliant on communications for customer acquisition, your marketing team is broken, right? So let's imagine Airbnb has decided early on that they're gonna really double down on Chicago. What is the best way to drive usage in Chicago?

Is it, you know, you run ads against hotel search queries. I'm not a marketing person. Some marketing person listening's gonna say, these are terrible tactics. I apologize, But the, the point, the point stands, which is, do you, run campaigns showing some of the most beautiful, you know, high rise apartment buildings in Chicago.

Um, there are ways to create a direct conversation between Airbnb and the potential customer. I view communications as a [00:13:00] bank. Okay, so you're pitching the Chicago Tribune on this person who's, this is the early days, uh, rents out their guest room and that has helped them make rent when they lost their job.

Like that's just not the fastest, best, most direct way. And so I always think that if you're asking communications to carry the weight and driving customer acquisition, then your customer acquisition numbers aren't very good. And so communications is just a bandaid trying to get you to where you need to be.

And when communications ultimately A, either fails or B doesn't fail, but can't demonstrate, you know, the exact tie between the number of people who read the article and the Tribune or the Sun Times and then uh, rented an Airbnb, It's just not the best tactic, right? There are ways to measure success and communications, but asking them to drive customer adoption I always think is just a great way to be really unhappy with your comms team.

 So, you mentioned this a little bit, but can you kind of force rank [00:14:00] good, jobs to be done for comms? If, if that's an example of sort of a bad job to be done.

 Yeah. I, uh, I think communications job is to inform and persuade the public. Now we can break the public up into different audiences, customers, the government, investors, but is to inform them about your company or, about you and persuade them to have a perspective about you and persuade them to think about you in a way that accomplishes your bigger picture goals. Right? So if you're an actor and you're trying to go from comedy to action films. this is why you see like Chris Pratt on the cover of Men's Health , right?

Like there's a tactic in support of your objective, and that is to persuade people that you are a viable [00:15:00] action movie star. And so with companies, it's the same thing, right? We'll, take Square as an example. Where I used to work our job was to inform people that we were more than just payments, right? At the early days, it was just, oh yeah, you're the cute card reader.

But they didn't know anything about the other stuff they were doing. So that's the inform side. And then persuade them. Persuade them that Square was a company that people would root for, that they were, not like traditional banks and actually cared about you and your experience with your finances.

And so I think about it as those two things. It's inform and persuade.

 So maybe to take, take it in a slightly different direction or get at the idea in a slightly different way. Let's say you were to join a 30 person company in a comms role.

 Oh, I'd be terrible at it. They would hate, they would hate me.

 Well, just as a thought exercise, we're in the realm of imagination. Um, and you showed up. What would your first few months look like?

What are the actual things that you would do with the team? Kind of going zero to one in a calm sense. They haven't really done anything. [00:16:00] Tech Crunch wrote about their series A and that's kind of the extent of comms in their mind.

 Well, I would hopefully take the job because at some point during the interview process, I came to understand the story of the thing, like the company. Right. Um, andI would probably try to manage their expectations that over the first three to six months, I would not be in any way trying to drive coverage.

I would spend six months trying to answer, to start three questions. Right. Which is, I realize it's a cliche, and it's a very bad communications cliche, but I really do subscribe to the belief that you should be able to describe things in a way that your grandparents would understand them. And so I would spend time trying to figure out a very pithy, clean, compelling answer to the question, what does this company do? Right? And then once I felt I had a good answer there, we'd move down to step two, which is, okay, how does the company do that? [00:17:00] Right? And now you're partnering with the pmms, you're partnering with other folks in the company who have, you know, head start on this to really clearly articulate now what we do and how we do it.

And then question three is, why do we do it? Which is ultimately the mission statement of the company in many ways, or the purpose statement, And so you're really trying to crystallize. Just clean, simple way of describing the company and answering those three questions, and that will give you 80% of the messaging you need for any interview you're going to be doing between call it series A and series B.

Right. You know, I work with a number of startups so much bigger than others, and with the small ones, that's the exercise really. We spend the first two months just getting the CEO founder to a place where they can just in their sleep, just barf out messaging that sounds clean and, and, and compelling and simple, and explains exactly what it is that they do, and doesn't use shitty buzz words that no one understands.

And that's it. That's, that's [00:18:00] half the battle.

 And on that point, you, you just sort of mentioned this a little bit, but my guess is that if you're gonna spend two months to get to that, There's, there's a lot of hard work that's required to do this. Well describe the company so that effectively anyone could understand it and make it pithy and clean and simple.

And so what does that look like when it's done well? Can you maybe walk through some of your favorite examples of what great looks like and maybe what bad looks like?

 Well, to be clear, that's not the only thing you're doing in two months, so I don't wanna make it sound like there's, that's not other things that you're doing. Um, you know, you're also building relationships with reporters. You need to know and having a bunch of meetings internally, getting to meet your business partners across different teams, right? but you're, you're just sort of hearing the way other people in the company talk, right? They've been there before you, right? They've gone through, if you're at 30 comp people and they're hiring you, they have hit product market fit and had insights that you do not know.

And so I love reading customer case studies, right? I think sales [00:19:00] is such a useful, intelligence function for communications because they're talking to customers who say things to them like, oh my God, I fucking love you. I've never been able to accomplish X, and now I can. Right? That's always how startups start to really take off, especially B2B one s.

And so I love talking to those customers myself. A, it's super helpful cuz someday when you're pitching stories, it's going to require you to give reporters customer to talk to. So you're already building those relationships. But B, you're just hearing people who know how to speak about it passionately.

And that is, goes to the persuaded part, right? You're gonna be the best person at informing, you're gonna have all the information cuz you're in the company. But the persuasion that comes from like real belief in the thing that you're doing and getting people excited about it. I love starting there. Um, bad.

I think look, everybody thinks they can do communications, right? It's not rocket [00:20:00] science, but it's unique in so far as everybody thinks they can do it, right? I don't go to the finance team and see them building models in Excel and go like, fuck you, I can do this.

 just go to the software engineers and just start ripping out some code

 no. Totally. Like, why are you coding it this way? but communications, everyone talks, everyone reads the news about their company and therefore everybody thinks they can do it. so being overly deferential to what some people think are, well, you have to communicate the value prop in this way, or, um, and this is the buzzword thing. It's just like technical speak that sells to customers is not the non-technical speak that sells to the public. Like imagine you're a security software startup company and you're talking about, I don't know anything that's backend infrastructure related to security and compliance.[00:21:00] 

 Okay. If you make a big billboard off of 80 in San Francisco, you might put all that stuff on it because you're trying to sell the product. But when you're talking to, you know, the Wall Street Journal about why they should care about your business, you can't go into that much detail or they're not gonna care.

 Is there, is there an example of something you've worked on over the last handful of years that's like a clean articulation of, of a really good description?

 Square came out with a product called Square Capital, which was its first real non payments company product, right? It was advancing money to people and loans come with all sorts of fun, confusing language and requirements about APRs and payback periods and square reduced the message about Square Capital to the message about Square.

 Generally, everybody knew Square, right? Oh, it's [00:22:00] that thing. You plug it into your phone and you swipe a credit card and you sign with your finger, oh my God, what a clean distillation of, of why you would use it, right? I can take a credit card payment anywhere. And so We just did the same thing with loans. We said, while you're taking payments, you're gathering insights about your volume and payment activity, and we're able to know how to advance you just the right amount of money. And all you have to do is click okay and it appears in your account.

I mean, what a clean explanation. That has nothing to do with, you know, going to a bank and having to fill out applications and triplicate and then waiting six months and then only 33% of people who do that even get the loan in the first place. And we did all of this messaging secondarily, but the core message of Square Capital was, you know, you don't have to wait in line at a bank.

Were able to just basically give you an advance based on your usage of the product, period. I mean, it was just very simple and spoke even at its best to [00:23:00] the things that people already felt about Square, easy to use, beautiful, clean on my side, all of that kind of stuff.

 What was the path into that? Was it just a number of internal conversations or, or was it immediately evident or like what, what was the process to land on that language to describe the product?

 Well, it's the same thing of that we talked about before, which is what is the product? Well, it's in advance that allows you to take capital and invest in your business. Okay? How do you do it? Right? And the how is very complicated, right? Where there's algorithms that, um, uh, are able to discern your payment volume and know your likelihood of being paid back, paying back in advance of this size.

You know, if we give you X dollars, it will take you six months to pay back. We give you y dollars, it will take you nine. And then we have the payments back to the loan come out [00:24:00] when people swipe their credit card with you. So when they spend a hundred dollars, we take the 2.75% that we usually take, but then we take a little bit more in order to pay back seamlessly over time.

So that way you're not paying a monthly payment fee. That's a really long answer, right? And it's how it works. But then you reduce it to something like every time you take a payment, a little bit goes towards your balance. we really tried to reduce it to something. I, this is just my mania on it, right?

I love editing docs. I love taking someone's statements or blog posts and cutting stuff from it, right? It's that great silly mark Twain quote. Um, I would've written you a shorter letter if I had had more time. My team would write blog posts and statements and I would hack them apart and I would say, this was great.

And they would say, how is it great? You just like cut it in half. But the point was we were just constantly reducing to something very simple. the person who looks at your blog post or your statement for you should be deleting, not [00:25:00] adding.

 So you kind of outlined, describe what you do in an exceptionally simple, simple way. Um, why do you do what you do?

 Yeah. And then we didn't even get to that. We didn't even get to that part for capital, right? So why does Square make it so easy for you to get a loan? Well, we think most people are kept out of the financial system unfairly.

So many people rejected from taking credit cards. from getting loans. And we think that, uh, opening up access to the financial system for everybody is why we get up in the morning. So now you have your what, which can be basically any square product you have your how, which is a description of the simplicity with which it works.

And then you have the why, which is economic empowerment. And you just, you just do that over and over and over again.

 And is that sort of how you think about balancing sort of a high level, uh, a high level mission or something that's not particularly functional on one end with the other end? Something that's like very functional and specific. So like functional would be, [00:26:00] we make it easy to accept credit cards. You couldn't do that.

sort of this higher order bit is, um, economic empowerment, because I often think throughout the course of the company, you tend to move in general from messaging that feels more functional to messaging, that feels more aspirational. You know, maybe Nike started out with like, you know, great performing athletic products and then it got, you know, we enable athletes to do X, Y, or Z, or you know, it's 

 a picture of Colin Kaepernick about racial

And so you kind of had this arc, but is this sort of simple three step framework a way that you're balancing those two at any given time?

 Yeah. It, it forces you to do both and you can see how those talking points allow a founder or anyone giving the interview to touch on things that inform you and persuade you about their company. my startup does X and It's been a really hard problem for people to do X and we do it by [00:27:00] doing y And the reason why we do it is because we care about Z. Right? It's, it's, you're able to do both and you're, you're bringing yourself up to the high level pitch of why people should care about you.

Right? So much of persuasion is making people want to root for you and liking you more than other, right. I think one reason Facebook can't convince anybody of anything in their positions, cause nobody wants to root for them. Right. So the, the balance between informing and persuading comes from your abilities to sort of tie all those different pieces together.

 So we were talking about kinda the first few months, three, six months, if you were to kind of build a calm strategy and begin to execute it when there was nothing there, what, what, what then happens after this? So you spend time, you've edited these things down and, and, and then,

 So why am I still working at the company after six months?

 No, just once you go through these three things, you do it well, then. Then what is the work to be done?

63dbe82e54de047643bd50e8

Former Square exec Aaron Zamost on why comms belongs on the leadership team, why you shouldn’t hire a PR agency, and how to handle internal comms.