Credibility is the only thing that matters.

Startup Communications with Square’s Aaron Zamost

Forming a well crafted communications strategy is part action, and part reaction. It’s about developing and telling your brand story in a deliberate way, while at the same time understanding the macro media landscape and thoughtfully responding to the narratives about your industry. Aaron Zamost, the Head of Communications at Square who led comms through the company’s IPO, has done an amazing job at synthesizing how the tech press works in his blog posts including “What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?” and “The Invisible Force That Warps What You Read in the News.”

In this podcast, I sit down with Aaron to talk how a tech startup should think about communications from the early days all the way up to IPO.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Soundcloud | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

Below are a few of my favorite excerpts from our conversation. The transcript has been edited for brevity.

“Silicon Valley Time”…Or How The Tech Press Moves like Clockwork

Aaron: The idea is very simple. Company stories move in cycles, from highs to lows. Narratives move like a clock, moving from morning and sunshine to evening and darkness and then around again to another day.

Elisa: It’s interesting to using the construct of time because time is very predictive. This notion that these cycles are actually predictive because when you’re living in it, you feel like “How am I going to survive this moment” or “What’s coming next? How do I think about the next step and the next play.” I think [the clock] is a helpful tool for people.

Taking Emotions Out Of The Job

Aaron: 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. 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 and the narrative about your company and there’s only so much you can do, it actually provides clarity.

Elisa: Yeah, you can make rational decisions.

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

Uber and the “Law of Narrative Gravity”

Aaron: The law of narrative gravity is the idea that narratives have gravitational power. 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 that narrative. It’s very similar to confirmation bias — it’s psychology.

This year there was a huge #deleteUber campaign. But narrative gravity is not about the press. The idea that Uber is terrible feeds on itself. Now, everything that Uber does, and they have done a lot of things that have been really bad, but I’m sure they get no benefit of the doubt. For anything they’d do that’s neutral, it will only be interpreted negatively.

Elisa: What does a comms team do then in this situation?

Aaron: Well, the bad press is the symptom, not the cause. Their problem is not communications, their problem is the stuff in the company that is making their lives harder. A comms person can make a bad story less bad, but they cannot make a bad story good. The key to getting out of it is to stop giving the press fodder for bad stories. I would imagine that the Uber Comms team has laid the law down and said, “Would you like this negative new 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 a symptom.

Your External Story and Internal Story Should Be The Same Story

Aaron: 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.

In the best companies, the internal purpose matches the external purpose. The best example here is Google. What Google did in the early days was serving and indexing the entire web around the world and they said to the employees, “You are here to basically make the entire world information accessible to everybody.” That is an unbelievable message to tell reporters. “Imagine every book in the universe was online” — that works. The best communication strategies are motivating employees with a purpose which is communicated as part of the news you are putting out in the world.

Elisa: I actually think the distinction between internal and external comms is a bit arbitrary and sometimes actually detrimental to a company. The people who are going to tell your company’s story are not just the folks who are working with reporters everyday, they are 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 responsible for the story of that company. That’s why when negative things happen and you see people start leaking, it’s because they’re not feeling compelled by the culture, or they’re not feeling like they are a part of it, or they don’t have ownership with that culture.

Aaron: Interesting. Well I think you’re exactly right. Look, the only people who are better at smelling bullshit than reporters are employees.

Credibility: The Key To Managing Internal Comms During an IPO

Aaron: In order to prepare for that time in your company’s life, you have to have started the work months in advance. You have to manage expectations about what you can and cannot share with the company. Credibility does not mean telling everybody everything all the time. Having credibility means being honest with people about what is going on and what you can and can’t share. Credibility is the only thing that matters in communications in any direction, with the press, with your employees, with your partner or spouse, with investors, even with your kids.

Communications Must Have A Seat At The Table

Aaron: I think communications is too often thought of as some vestigial part of marketing or a part of the company that you hire an agency for. Then there’s a time where you hire a first comms person and you get somebody with a couple years experience but they’re not going to report to the CEO, so you give them to this marketing person. That’s great in the early days perhaps, but there is a point in which comms should have a seat at the [executive] table.

I think communications people who directly report to the CEO are really important once the company hits a certain point, just to offer a different perspective and have a different voice at the table. The best companies are those where marketing and communications work hand in hand collaboratively, and the story you’re telling customers through marketing and you’re telling the public through press are one and the same, just as the message that you spread internally is the same.