Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
24 published records
01 / recommendation
“I have one that's very top of mind right now, so it's How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Actually, I leave tonight for a week long psilocybin retreat.”
02 / recommendation
“That was such an interesting answer. And by the way, I love Perplexity. I once tweeted a result I had when I was using Perplexity, and that was one of their default questions you could ask about strawberries.”
03 / commitment
“There's actually this awesome Twitter thread from a couple of days ago, where the CEO of Product Hunt did this thread where he asked people, "Share your tagline, and I will give you a much better version of the tagline.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don't know, just I would say if it was a DM, I would say, "Reaching out from X company.”
05 / belief
“I mean, I would say every publication that's doing product reviews for the most part, I believe, it's a very common practice.”
06 / belief
“I think that's just one part of the overall story, is why people should care about this business.”
07 / belief
“I would say between 10 and 20. And you might be able to find a consultant that'll do it for eight.”
08 / belief
“Jeff Bezos also said it at one point, so I have no idea the origin of the quote, but I think that's a good one.”
09 / belief
“I think reporters are used to getting the same thing all the time, and so this one obviously worked well for the format.”
10 / belief
“I think I mentioned at the beginning and then we just started talking about Aaron.”
11 / belief
“I actually think I just learned so much. So it was my first in-house job, so I had worked in an agency, I hadn't worked internally at a company before, and I think I just learned so much about comms best practices from him in general, just even beyond social.”
12 / belief
“I would say most consumer companies are doing this, but yes, there's entire agencies that are dedicated to that field.”
13 / belief
“Ideally some B2B experience. I think doing B2B PR is very different from doing consumer PR.”
14 / belief
“The two times I've done it, I have regretted it just because of the amount of work going in versus the value that's there. And it's you're asking a team to do a lot of free work for you, and generally I think the best players are not going to do that, so you're going to weed out some of the best players if you're asking them to do a lot of free upfront work.”
15 / evaluation
“Especially for a company that might be early stage, they've raised a little bit of money, I think sometimes the buyers are skeptical of engaging with new tools, because they're worried they might not raise more funding, or it might go away tomorrow, and so the more that you can validate the business through things that's not just you doing personally that other people are doing, I think the better.”
16 / evaluation
“That's such a good point, because the story they're going to write about you isn't, "This is the best product you've ever seen," this is, "Look at this interesting journey this startup has gone on," and that's not going to convince your customers, it's going to convince other people just to read this publication, but the fact that they wrote about you is really beneficial.”
17 / recommendation
“Presence of is willing to, going back to what I said earlier, push the limit on opinions that they have, be bold, be controversial, then it could be worth potentially investing in. And I have seen it play out where reporters have seen those posts and used and quoted things in their articles as a result, so it can tie to your traditional media strategy a little bit, they're not necessarily fully siloed, but I would say if you're considering investing in social to just do corporate channels and not think about executives, you're really leaving a lot on the table.”
18 / evaluation
“You can try doing it, you can post for a while, even for a month or two, see how it's going, and then adjust your strategy accordingly. But, yes, I think for a lot of execs that we work with, it does feel like it's something that's really hard, there's a lot of overthinking, making sure it's right.”
19 / recommendation
“I would say for hard news, funding, the startup launch, those sort of things, less, and I try to really stagger it because we're offering exclusives, and I highly recommend offering exclusives.”
20 / recommendation
“" Because sometimes it's tying back to the PR conversation, I love if you're willing to push the envelope on stuff that you are building or are going to do and getting ahead of those conversations, so that's a lot of conversations I'm having right now is trying to convince clients to talk about that.”
21 / evaluation
“We get so many clients that come to us and they have this set date in their head, but there's not usually a real reason for it. It's like they're planning around it, it's like they have other comms they want to go out that day, but if you can optimize for the reporter over the timing, you're going to see such a better outcome because getting the first choice reporter is going to drive way more for your business than announcing it four days sooner.”
22 / recommendation
“If you're farther along, it's great if you can make that a more formal sort of process, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. And then in terms of reaching out, I highly recommend figuring out who the host is, just doing the research, figuring out who the host is, and then just sending them a casual note.”
23 / preference
“They're also really open to op-eds, especially with leadership advice in them. And last but not least, on the list of ones that we work with most often, I would say is Forbes.”
24 / evaluation
“If nine of them have one stance on something happening in the field and one has the other stance, chances are that one is going to be the one that a reporter wants to talk to because they are getting so many pitches on this topic, but they want to write a balanced article, they need that opposing view.”