Lulu Cheng Meservey: observation

Transcript context

…Just a couple more questions around this going direct concept. I don't know if you actually talked about why that's important because I think we talk about this a lot, and I think people may not recognize why people find this so important these days. What's the motivation behind that with Balaji and other founders? There's two reasons it's important, there's the offense and the defense of it. The defense of it is going back to having the underdog, the insurgency mentality. If you're trying to do something different that goes against the grain, people are going to attack you. Not everyone's going to like it. And the point is that not everyone should like it, but you need a way to stand up for yourself because you don't have the big institutions and power structures that are going to do that work for you because you're going against the grain. So if you're going to stand up for yourself there's only one way to do it, which is you do it. And so building the audience and the channels and you have to prime the market. By which I mean if you're a public company, you're priming the market by getting them used to how you convey information to them. If you're a small startup or a founder, you're priming the market by making your audience aware of how you normally communicate, so that when you do something it's not weird. If you never post and then suddenly you start posting, people are going to think you're having a crisis or something like what is going on? They're going to try to read into it. So you have to already have the cadence and the relationships set up so that when you need to draw on them if you're under attack then you can, that's the defense of it. The offense of it is if you're doing something new and if you're mission driven, and if what you're doing is truly unique and innovative, no one else will be to tell that as well as you. The most friendly, sympathetic reporter on Earth could not tell that as well as you because they don't understand it as well as you, and so the onus just falls on you to do it. If someone listening is like, "Yep, okay, I fully agree, time to do this." What do you suggest as a next step to starting to build an audience and going direct broadly.…

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