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Recently most of our work at 1st Principles has centered on narrative strategy. This means we’re helping companies articulate what they do and why it matters — what we, perhaps unsurprisingly, call lore.

As an output of this exercise, people often expect a mission and vision. These statements are regularly included in brand exercises, so anyone who’s been in the game a while has been trained to expect these components. Typically a mission is what the company is working on currently, what you do for whom right now, and a vision is the big-picture goal, the way the world might change if everything goes right.

The problem is these two concepts quickly get conflated. For instance, Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Is that a mission or a vision? In my view, it’s somewhere in between, a blurry version of both — something that sorta-kinda explains what the company does today while being vague enough to cover most of what they might do in the future.

This is why most company missions and visions suck. They’re either so narrow they inspire no one, or they sound like pageant queens advocating for world peace, a dream big and vague enough to be completely useless. (Good company communications should repel as well as attract — if no one can disagree with you, no one can meaningfully agree with you either.)

So after doing some dozen or so of these exercises over the last year, I’ve come to believe visions are overrated. They require a level of certainty that almost no startup has in the early days. It’s like trying to plot a novel before you’ve even started brainstorming the characters.

In fact, I think writing a novel is an apt metaphor here. One of my favorite quotes about the process is from E.L. Doctorow: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

In the earliest days, founders have to manage a lean set of resources, applying them keenly to the highest-impact problems. But early on, you don’t know yet what the highest-impact problems are, just as few novelists know what their book will be about before they force their way through a first draft. I started my own novel thinking it was a tale of second adolescence; in fact, upon revision, it’s turning out to be a story of money, security and the American Dream. Many companies pivot once they’re an entire act or two in, realizing the thing they’ve been building is actually better suited for some other purpose, is telling some other story.

Most startups would be better off, then, without these lofty vision statements — with just some headlights in the fog. Or to use another transit-focused metaphor, this one perhaps apocryphally attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Ironically, I often see this quote employed by fellow tech operators to demonstrate the importance of having a company vision. The assumption is that a vision is what people yearn for. But in practice, a vision is more often the destination, the utopia assumed to be on the other side of the ocean. Except we rarely know what’s on the other side of that oceanic expanse. It may be the Indies; it may be the Americas; it may be the end of the world. If you put too much stock in any particular vision, you create mercenaries, people on the journey for the end destination, people almost certain to jump ship (ha ha) as soon as things get hard.

Most companies do not need an end goal. They need to have headlights, a short-term goal carrying them forward, like winning a customer contract or creating a robot that can fold laundry. And they need to have an appetite for the vast and endless sea, a love of sailing, of building, of driving in the fog, of chaos and camaraderie. If you must call either of these things vision, fine. But the reality is most company visions come later, after the spin of gaining traction, after a few pivots.

This is why I like to think of lore as an emergent property — not something external to a company, but something earned through the accumulation of decisions over time. Usually these decisions are made under genuine uncertainty, the things a company did when the map ran out, when they got to the edge of the known universe and kept sailing.

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Today, we’re talking to Bryce Strauss and Cristin Culver. Bryce is a co-founder of Nominal, a software platform for hardware engineers that just closed an $80 million Series B2 acceleration round backed by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $1 billion. He spent seven years as an aerospace engineer before setting out to build the tools he wished he had. Cristin is a communications consultant and strategist, formerly of Opendoor and Trulia, who came on to help Nominal tell their story last year.

What makes Nominal interesting is that they don’t need to run the consumer software playbook. By their own accounting, Nominal needs maybe 10,000 engineers and 4,000 customers to know they exist. (OGs will recognize this philosophy as comms that don’t scale.) So where other companies are optimizing for the impressions on their launch video, Nominal is sponsoring marathons in Pax River, Maryland. And while the timeline devolves into slop, Nominal developed a physical product catalogue — an artifact of lore designed to stand the test of time (after all, lore is the antidote to slop).

Hit play in the image above to give it a listen!

Here’s where to find the best stuff:

The Nominal origin story [01:51] — Seven years as an aerospace engineer, a recurring frustration with the tools available, and the realization that the only way to improve them was to build.

How Cristin got pulled in [05:03] — Introduced by investors, instant yes. The founder who has a lot to say but needs someone to help do more with fewer words is kind of the secret sauce.

Why they waited too long on the rebrand [06:30] — For the first two years, Nominal genuinely believed their customers didn’t care if they had a website. In retrospect, this was a mistake, and the rebrand was about taking credit for two years of hard work they’d never properly surfaced.

Your customers are better at pitching you than you are [10:03] — The moment they asked customers to pitch Nominal back to them, two phrases kept coming up unprompted: “everything connected” and “data supply chain.” Neither came from inside the company. Both ended up as the foundation of the core story. This is emergent lore in action — narrative you discover rather than invent.

Why the Series B2 happened when it did [12:51] — Customer demand was through the ceiling. Founders Fund had been watching from board meetings at portfolio hardware companies as Nominal kept coming up. When the call came, the relationship was already there.

Building the announcement [19:13] — They built a literal table, with messages in rows and channels in columns. They had the discipline to restrict each channel to a single(ish) message.

The catalog [21:00] — McMaster-Carr sends hardware engineers an annual Holy Bible-sized yellow book that’s waterproof and durable, designed to last in the field for a year or more. Nominal made their own version, full of Don Draper-style ads designed to be photographed and shared.

Impressions vs. income statements [30:00] — The launch video that would’ve done numbers had 6,000 cuts and told no story. The one they shipped was slower, designed for the single most important customer or candidate who’d actually watch a fundraising video. Bryce optimizes for business fundamentals — income statements and balance sheets — not impressions.

Talent and customers as the same audience [34:29] — The people who thrive at Nominal want to serve this specific customer base. Tell customers’ stories well enough and you’ve made the case to customers and candidates simultaneously.

Writing as survival skill [42:10] — Nominal has “promote clarity” as a company value, uses it in performance reviews, and almost got a Notion case study written about their meeting notes database.

Apply here to join Nominal as a Communications and Content Lead.

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Tech comms could take a page out of the University of Chicago’s book.

Here’s a list of ways people have described the school:

• Where fun goes to die

• The level of hell that Dante forgot

• Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA

• “If I wanted an A, I would’ve gone to Harvard.”

UChicago embraces it. You can find these taglines on T-shirts worn proudly by students or whispered with alternating horror and glee on forums like College Confidential. Fifteen or so years ago, when I was looking at schools, the tour guide spoke gushingly of these slogans (well, except for number three; we were with our parents, after all) as a reason to choose the school over its ivy-walled peers.

As other colleges cater to students’ unending desire for grade inflation, as they avoid poking any fun at themselves whatsoever, as they gut academic departments in favor of ever more luxurious amenities, turning college into something closer to a retirement community or a residential cruise line than the kind of experience through which individual intelligence or civic ethos might be forged (steps off soapbox), UChicago has taken a different approach. It remains defiantly nerdy in its branding.1

UChicago’s brand strategy works because it signals that the school stands for something, and it tells you what that something is: a rigorous education. Its entire culture is built around that full-throated geekiness, which in turn allows people who aren’t the right fit to opt out — which then, in turn, further entrenches its culture, and so on and so forth.

This is not so much intentional positioning — something decided upon by Deans of Such-and-Such in an ivory tower — nor an algorithmically driven attempt at attention baiting as it is lore, the accumulation of over a century of student mythos into a self-propagating declaration of character.

Stand for Something

There’s a lesson for startups here. Founders right now are competing for a small subset of talent, especially AI talent. You have to give people a reason to choose you over every other company out there, even if the core value proposition is (let’s be honest) more or less the same.

Because top colleges do, indeed, offer fundamentally the same product: an excellent education, a brilliant peer set, a lovely campus, connections to the élite and powerful. The differences between, say, Harvard and Yale, or Princeton and Dartmouth, are largely at the margins.

If you’re about to protest because you went to one of these schools and it’s, like, so totally different, actually from the others, I’m willing to bet you’re going to make a cultural argument, not a quality one. Harvard is for Masters of the Universe, Yale for B-averse English majors and thespians, Princeton for the preppy popped-collar set, Dartmouth for beer-sodden frat bros. These differences are differences in storytelling — and not just the manufactured storytelling of marketing communications, but the things real humans say aloud.

Similarly, great startups generally offer the same core product, things like visionary leadership, a big ole TAM (and thus market cap, and thus potential financial outcome for talent), and great colleagues. To be clear, founders should still emphasize these things! You need these factors, and great candidates won’t consider you without them, just as the best students won’t consider colleges that aren’t at the top of the US News and World Report.

But these Very Important Factors are also table stakes for great talent. Once candidates have weeded through companies to determine which are worth their time, the actual decision often comes down to culture. What will it actually be like to work at this place day to day? Can I see myself being a part of this in-group? Is this a quest I find valuable? Is this an alumni group I want to be a part of one day?

That reason to choose you is usually right in front of you, organic, the thing employees are already telling their friends. You can find it on Glassdoor or a gossipy thread on Hacker News. It’s the answer to the sentence: “This is the kind of place where ____.” For instance, this week we saw that OpenAI is the kind of place that will blow up product lines and rebuild the entire business around where it sees the strongest financial future. People who join OpenAI can expect to be somewhere with unrelenting change in pursuit of winning.

Stand against Something

One of the clearest ways to show what you’re for is through contrast — that is, to show what you’re against.

Anduril did a brilliant job of this last year with their Don’t Work at Anduril campaign. The tongue-in-cheek spot highlighted the kind of person who wouldn’t succeed at Anduril — someone who wants to work remotely, or fewer hours, or is uncomfortable with an America-first mission — and in so doing perfectly captured who would.

I use this example a lot in my client work, and sometimes a client will have a strongly negative reaction. “We can’t do that!” they exclaim. “That’s so off-putting!”

To which I respond: Yes! Exactly! You want to repel the people who aren’t aligned.

When I was at Palantir, we were very candid with candidates about our work with the US government. This was a correction from a period of overexuberance, circa about 2015-2018, when everyone wanted to work for Palantir because it was cool (at least cool amongst a certain set of Silicon Valley computer science majors) and not because they gave two hoots about the mission. That worked great, right up until it didn’t. The second the public turned on the mission, those same people — the ones who didn’t make any real choice in joining — got real noisy and distracting (and ultimately, once we were clear where we stood, left the company).

Hype, in other words, is a deficit of lore. It is a focus on the fact that something is shiny, not on what it stands for. Your brand should be a magnet; it should repel as well as attract. Your strengths should be the opposite side of the coin of your weaknesses.

I’m sure you can see the parallel to UChicago. If you’ve already vetted people for your most differentiated qualities — whether that’s reading Plato late into the night or working on a product that is used on the battlefield — you don’t have to worry about hype cycles. You don’t have to worry that you’ll lose a whole class of applicants next year, when you move from #8 to #12 in the USNWR rankings. You’ve already found your true believers.

The lesson is to force people to make some kind of choice about what joining your company means.

Additional Reading

It was a great week for narratives about narrative. A few reads that are worth your time:

• Venture capitalist and former comms head at Box, Glossier, and Social Capital argued that startups need to give people a reason to root for the future.

Beyond your cap table, who wins if you win? It can be your customer in a broad or narrow sense, it can be your customers’ customers, it can be an industry, it can even be an idea or ideal (like privacy or creativity) that your customers care about deeply. When you construct your narrative with someone or something else as the hero, perhaps counterintuitively, your own growth story becomes much more powerful. It’s no longer just impactful for your team and investors; it’s evidence that the world is getting better in some way that lots of people care about (and will root for). And in a moment when the headlines are decidedly doomsday, optimism is what’s contrarian and interesting.

• Native Studio founder contended that building great companies requires conviction and leadership, and that documentation of such belief is better thought of as articulation (expression of that true core) than “comms” (whatever wins the attention game).

People want to be a patron of a company that believes something specific enough to say it in public, and maybe even to be the kind of leader the ad describes. That hunger is what this essay is about. There is a kind of corporate writing that used to be possible, then disappeared, and whose return is now necessary.

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It’s never been a better time to be a communicator in tech. With “storytelling” in high demand, salaries are soaring into the high six figures, and communicators increasingly report directly to CEOs rather than being seen as a purely marketing function. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) comms’s rising star, it’s also never been harder to find great communications talent. In the last month alone, I’ve spoken with multiple growth-stage founders and VCs struggling to find the right match for their first comms, marketing, and content hires.

This difficulty is due in part to comms’s ever-expanding scope. Today, comms might handle a range of responsibilities including media relations (aka talking to journalists), social media, blog posts, web copy, creative and design, events, brand, content and editorial, physical media, audio and visual, narrative, public policy, and more.1 As comms becomes an ever-more splendored thing, there become infinitely more versions of “good” (and yet even more versions of “bad”), and selecting among them becomes increasingly difficult.

So, without further ado, here’s a guide to hiring great communications talent in today’s market.

Hiring Guide

1. Hire for core skills, not tactics.

Communicators need, first and foremost, to be able to hold business strategy. Comms is a business function whose whole job is to move the business forward — by, say, attracting the best technical talent, warding off regulators, or driving customer acquisition. I am being dramatic in my italicization because if you take nothing else from this guide, THIS is the point. The profile you’re looking for is that of a businessperson who happens to spike in comms.

There are a surprising number of excellent tacticians out there — people who can wheel ‘n’ deal with reporters or craft a viral tweet — who don’t understand the why behind their work. This is dangerous. It is, for example, how Cluely wound up attention-hacking their way a base of rabid fans (good comms)…who were totally different people than their actual users (bad business). Find someone who can hold the center.

This means you should be open to candidates without “traditional” comms experience. Traditional comms experience is just another way of saying “tactical expert.” But great business strategists come from lots of different backgrounds, and you can teach them the tactical parts (or better yet, they’ll pick it up themselves — tactics are changing faster than playbooks, anyway). The great Jon Wu, for instance, was an private equity investor and management consultant before he became a positioning expert. What would it look like to hire a former engineer to lead community strategy or a documentarian to craft your narrative?

2. Be really clear about what you’re looking for (and what you’re not).

As I said above, comms is a multi-headed hydra. No one is equally good at every part of it; the crisis communicator that can talk down a Times reporter is not the same person that will tweak your copy until it relentlessly converts is not the same person that will host your late-night tech talk show. (Real talk: I want to start this, so who wants to join our panel of comedic commentators?)

Your JD should reflect what you’re actually looking for. Stripe put out a killer example of this yesterday, launching a microsite for comms applicants. (The site was built on Lovable, the build-anything app, which had its own great comms week.) Here’s what the site does well that you can take into your own JDs:

1. Connect comms to the mission. This shows you understand how comms (say it with me kids) moves business goals. No one wants to be in a sideshow function.

   

2. Explain what the role actually does. Again, comms means lots of things. You can lean into that multiplicity if your comms team does lots of things, as Stripe does. You can also, instead, indicate that you’re focusing on only a few things — for instance, an early-stage startup might say they’re looking for someone primarily to convert revenue, and that they’re intentionally deprioritizing broader narrative and brand work right now.

   

3. Assess taste and drive.

   You don’t need someone who’s done this specific work before. You do need someone who’s relentlessly driven high-quality projects to the finish, over and over. To assess drive, I like this element of Stripe’s application.

   

   My favorite interview question to assess taste is, “What do you think our company should be known for?” It allows you to quickly understand whether the candidate groks your current market position as well as where you ought to go.

3. Pay well.

The best communicators may be fielding lots of inbound offers, and many of them are weighing them against consulting opportunities that, in total, might bring in mid-six figures a year (or more). But surely that’s just the senior talent, right? You may ask. Nay! Great comms talent — even those with just a few years of experience, if any at all — are being hovered up by places like a16z and Notion. If you want someone who is truly a strategist — who is going to multiply the value of your business, not just write some blog posts while serving, fundamentally, as a cost center — you gotta pay up.

And good communicators are worth it, because their work pays for itself many times over. What is a single excellent engineering recruit worth to you (having a reputation as a cutting-edge company that’s a great place to work will help close them)? What’s it worth to close your next round closed in three weeks instead of three months? Hint: probably very high: Fundraising is, as Paul Graham notes, a massive energy suck.

Now Hiring

Besides Stripe, here are a few great startup comms roles open right now:

Ankar, Marketing and Comms Lead (London)

Who they are: Ankar is an AI-powered patent operating system founded by two ex-Palantirians. They just closed a $20M Series A led by Atomico with Index Ventures, on top of a seed round seven months prior. The product gives patent professionals tools as innovative as the ones they protect, turning the slow, fragmented patent lifecycle — idea capture, novelty search, drafting, prosecution — into a single AI workflow.

Why this role: Legal tech darlings Harvey and Legora are the hottest companies in vertical AI right now — but their products don’t touch patents. Join an early-stage company that already has the proof points of clients like L’Oreal and AmLaw100 firms, just as they start to expand massively.

Northwood Space, Head of Communications (LA, DC)

Who they are: Less than a year after a $30M Series A, Northwood just raised a $100M Series B and landed a $50M Space Force contract. The company builds ground infrastructure for satellite communications — aka the antennas that let Earth talk to space.

Why this role: You’d report directly to the founding team with a meaty mandate that spans media relations, product storytelling, and strategic announcements, just as the company is entering a serious scale phase.

Valon, Narrative and Brand Lead (NYC)

Who they are: Valon is building the AI-native operating system for regulated finance (think: mortgage servicing, but that’s just to start). They manage over $100B in loans across 500,000+ mortgages, just deepened a partnership with Rithm Capital to bring their platform (ValonOS) to Newrez’s 4 million homeowners, and have posted 400% year-over-year growth. Backed by a16z with $230M raised to date.

Why this role: Valon’s job listing is one of the clearest recruiting-focused comms briefs I’ve seen. They’re explicitly hiring someone to own their external narrative with a recruiting lens — crafting content that makes their mission legible to top-tier talent, partnering directly with recruiters to close candidate objections through storytelling, and building an employer brand engine from scratch.

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Tech people love to talk about taking companies from zero to one, or building something completely new. Founding or joining a zero-to-one company can be a career-making hack, allowing you to ride a rocket ship to increasing responsibilities at a much faster rate than climbing a lockstep career ladder.

But another career hack—one we don’t talk about nearly enough—is to find a function growing from zero to one. As with building a zero-to-one company, finding a zero-to-one function is a surprisingly hard thing to do, because these fields often look like backwaters at the start. They are the functions without cachet, the things no one wants to do. Only in retrospect is it clear which opportunities were zero to one and which were just…zero.

But if you can find true zero-to-one functions, you can ride the wave of their growth to senior roles much more quickly than if you try to enter well-established fields. Call it reputation arbitrage. Call it disrupting from below. In my experience, this is the best way to build a rewarding, fast-growing career. (And for the entrepreneurs among us, it’s also just way more fun to make the rules than to follow them.)

How to Find a Zero-to-One Function

As with joining a startup, there’s no guarantee that you’ll pick a rocket ship. But there are a few things you can do to improve your odds.

There are two key ingredients to any zero-to-one function:

1. Currently the field is still seen as unsexy, either a necessary evil or an unnecessary frivolity.

This means those more established in their careers don’t think it’s worth their time. (Think digital in 2010 or internal comms pre-COVID.) It’s the thing that gets tossed to the recent grad or even the intern.

If there’s already a lot of competition for the job, it’s no longer in the zero-to-one phase. Sometimes you can catch the beginning of a function going one to n and build a successful career that way, the same way that many people build careers joining growth-stage startups, trading off less risk for more competition.

But be careful not to join a function that’s reached maturity. These are things like becoming a management consultant or a Big Tech PM or a Big Law lawyer. To be clear: There’s nothing wrong with these fields; there’s just no arbitrage to be had here. You’re going to compete on the same terms as everyone else crowding into the application pool, so (a) you better be really really good and (b) you shouldn’t expect outsized rewards. (And if, heaven forbid, you join a field in decline, you’re going to get less in rewards than you bring to the field in credentials.)

2. External factors are conspiring to make the field more important to businesses.

This is the harder piece to predict, but one way to reverse-engineer a hypothesis is to look at what businesses are starting to enter their own zero-to-one phases (or other inflection points) and backing out what they’re missing to succeed.

For example, in the 2010s, startups like Uber and DraftKings operating in highly regulated spaces proliferated. This created a demand for comms pros with a background in politics and regulation, paving the way for a pipeline from the Obama admin to Silicon Valley. This wasn’t necessarily a trend someone like campaign manager David Plouffe could have predicted early enough to build his career around—but when he saw the trend coming, he jumped on it, joining Uber in 2014.

Around the same time, once-scrappy startups like Google and Facebook were becoming riddled with the same bureaucracy and cultural issues of the behemoths they’d sought to disrupt. This led to the a rise in internal dissatisfaction that in turn led to a rise in employee activism—and subsequent need for crisis-minded internal comms guidance.

I was lucky enough to ride both of these trends, moving from politics to tech after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss and into internal comms when I joined Palantir in 2019. Of course, you can’t always predict these things, particularly from miles away. But you can develop a spidey sense for when storm clouds are starting to gather in the distance and quickly start to make yourself the expert.

Once you’ve developed a thesis, start testing it out. The good thing is that zero-to-one functions are often the ones that people aren’t territorial about, so you’re likely to hear, “Sure, give it a try,” when you make a suggestion. People don’t yet have fossilized ideas of “best practices” for these fields yet, which means you get to iterate and do crazy stuff and see what spaghetti sticks to the wall and build the plane as you fly it and whatever other overused startup metaphor you want!

A Few Examples

Digital

In college, I read an article about Obama’s sophisticated digital operation in 2012 and thought, I’m already too late. By that point I was a Facebook super-user, an undercover Tumblr-er, a nascent Instagrammer. It seemed so obvious in retrospect that digital was going to change the game. If only I had graduated just a few years earlier, I thought, I could’ve ridden that wave to a pathbreaking career.

Never mind that it’s objectively hilarious to believe yourself to be fatally behind in your career as a 19-year-old. Particularly as a 19-year-old studying political theory, a field that nothing if not proof that flacking is always evolving its form. (What was the Leviathan if not a period-appropriate thought leadership campaign for the English monarchy?)

When I graduated and joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign, I was so jealous of the Digital Team. The Communications and Political and Speechwriting Teams were helmed by longtime politicos, older individuals with storied CVs, but the Digital Communications Team was led by much younger gentleman! By 2016, digital was no longer a backwater; it was an essential part of any communications strategy. People who had spent the first few years of their careers drafting tweets and Facebook posts for no other reason than they were Millennials1 and no one else wanted to do it—those people were suddenly in charge of shit. I felt like I had just missed the boat.

In retrospect, of course, I might not have wanted to get on the boat at all. After all, I’d interned at jobs that threw social media at me because the Olds didn’t want to do it, and I’d resented that. I’d wanted to be where the action was, to be doing something seen as prestigious2—so who’s to say that I wouldn’t have scoffed at digital had I graduated early enough to get on board in the zero-to-one days?

Again, the point is that the future rocket ships don’t look like rocket ships at the start. So lose the ego.

Internal Comms

I joined Palantir amid a flurry of controversy around the company’s government contracts. 2019 was the heart of the Trump administration and protests—against Trump, against corporate sleezeballs, for women, for immigrants—were de rigueur. Protests were just beginning to move inside of companies, too, but only at a select few, Google and Palantir among them.

While at an agency, I had the chance to work on some crises for Unnamed Big Tech Company that I then parlayed into my Palantir interviews. Palantir needed someone who could think end-to-end about crisis response. Someone who could work across media and other forms of content, someone who could consider not just traditional media but also employees and candidates. That was me!

When I started doing this work, most of my non-Palantir friends thought internal comms sounded like the most boring thing in the world. “So you’re, like, communicating about benefits?” they would ask, baffled that I gave up a job that put me in the center of some of the tech world’s spiciest controversies for a field that was still seen mostly as an HR offshoot.3

But fellow Palantirians knew that this crisis was existential for our business. And this experience set me up to be the go-to person when COVID hit and suddenly internal comms became the most important thing in the world for every business, not just Palantir. Finally everyone else saw what I did: that modern internal comms was not a redheaded stepchild but instead a delicate balancing act between crisis and executive comms, a strategic function that deserved a seat at the table.

Current Zero-to-One Opportunities

There are still so many zero-to-one opportunities, especially in comms, the field I know best. Content is perhaps the biggest one: As media outlets continue to shutter, owned channels are becoming an increasingly important way for businesses to reach their audiences.

Another is executive comms, which is booming as the lines behind personal and corporate brands dissolve and communication becomes an increasingly central leadership skill. In fact, I attended a fabulous Executive Communications Masterclass earlier this week that sparked this newsletter. The daylong workshop reminded me that so much of what I like about executive comms is that the rules are still being written, which means there’s a lot of room for innovation.

I suspect there are many other functions are undergoing the same glow-ups; I just don’t know what they are. (If you have thoughts on what I’m missing, please let me know!)

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One of my bugbears is the focus, these days, on winning the timeline.

Founders now measure fundraises by impressions. This was a direct contributor, starting sometime around April 2025, to what now feels like a legal requirement have a flashy video accompany a company fundraise. For videos, of course, help stop the scroll! (No matter that you are launching a consumer software product or perhaps a protein bar — your video must include a staticky film clip of a rocket launch, perhaps a voiceover from JFK. Silicon Valley is, after all, in the business of moonshots.)

Then, there! In the distance! Hark, the herald girlboss sings, “Everyone’s a creator now! People follow people, not companies!” So now founders need followers, too.

And now, VCs are apparently resorting to buying views to convince…whom? and of what, exactly?

Collectively, it seems, we’ve lost the plot about what any of this online engagement is actually for.

So this is my friendly reminder that communications is not about impressions or or followers or views. It is about advancing a goal, usually by getting an audience to do something.

Winning the timeline may or may not help you do that. (Hint: Unless you’re selling a product people can easily buy online, like a lipstick or a very small-dollar subscription, it probably won’t.)

The effectiveness of the timeline depends on who your audience is and what they respond to. The people with the power to purchase your autonomous sea drones are probably not scrolling TikTok. The AI researchers you want to lure away from Anthropic probably aren’t wowed by viral stunts. VCs…well, VCs are chronically online, so keep on keepin’ on.

The point is: Stop starting with tactics. Start with strategy.

I know, I know. Tactics come with big ol’ hits of dopamine. The likes! The comments! We’re all just Sally Fields accepting our Oscar; we all just want to be loved.

Well: Too bad! Get your dopamine hits elsewhere! This is business, baby!

So how do you build a comms strategy that actually moves business goals?

Why, the First Principles Approach, of course! The full post below is worth a read, if I do say so myself, but in short:

1. Start with business goals.

2. Identify the audiences that move the needle.

3. Figure out what they need to believe in order to take action.

4. Meet your audiences where they are.

Ta ta till next time.

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Today, we’re talking to Jon Wu. Jon is a former investor and consultant and more recently the founder of fortyIQ, a frontier tech storytelling firm. (He’s also worth a follow on X, where he has almost one hundred thousand followers.) Jon runs positioning sprints for companies and has spent years in the weeds of social strategy, so he understands better than almost anyone how to be honest about what’s actually working.

I was excited to chat with Jon because we’re both seeing that the old playbook for getting attention doesn’t work anymore. Corporate announcements drop with a whimper, and even people with big audiences are struggling to break through. So we sat down to suss out what’s next.

We ended up covering way more ground than I expected: why “quality over quantity” is usually cope, how positioning documents are becoming the input layer for AI content systems, why taste can’t be written down and handed to someone else, and what creative work looks like when all the busywork gets automated.

Hit play in the image above to give it a listen!

Here’s where to find the best stuff:

The For You Page algorithm [00:57] — The TikTok-ified algorithm broke the corporate comms playbook, so how do you win it now?

“Go actually direct” [03:22] — IRL and niche comms that don’t scale are replacing top-of-funnel social. The flywheel is smaller and tighter than you think.

GTM engineering [07:10] — If you’re running manual processes in 2026, you’re way behind. Automation enables velocity.

The emotional cope of “quality over quantity” [08:30] — Most people who say they prefer quality are really just afraid of flopping. You need quantity to figure out quality.

Why Dario Amodei and Josh Kushner can take a banger-first approach and you can’t [12:40] — If you’re independently, remarkably successful despite your complete lack of talking about your business, then yeah, people will listen when you do. That’s not true for 99.9% of us^.

Positioning documents as LLM input [18:35] — Your positioning sprint is the code on which your entire content strategy runs. The better you communicate things to a human, the better you communicate them to a machine.

Why taste can’t be externalized [25:18] — Jon tried to write down his brain and inject it into other people’s heads. It didn’t work. We talk about what makes creative work irreducibly human, even in an AI era.

Storytelling as business strategy [36:34] — When you strip away the busywork, “why are we doing this thing” becomes the question, the whole thing.

Dope illustration by Blair DeCrane.

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Paul Graham set Silicon Valley ablaze a year and a half ago (was it only a year and a half ago?) with his essay Founder Mode. As with all of Graham’s essays, they are better consumed outright than summarized, so that you can appreciate that particular Grahamian urbanity, but this essay rapidly became meme-ified, shorn from its original context — which perhaps makes it less of a crime than it might otherwise be to summarize it for you, dear reader:

Founder mode, in short, is the idea that the CEO of a startup ought to stay intimately involved in their company’s workings, even as they grow. This is in contrast to manager mode, whereby one delegates everything to their reports.

I have worked with a great number of startups at this point, including those mature and big enough to get rebranded “scale-ups” or whatever the phrase du jour is, and so I feel relatively confident in saying, by now uncontroversially, that I agree with Graham: All great startups, and perhaps all founder-led companies of any stage, are led in this manner.

But I’ve also noticed something else: Founder mode leaders do best when they instill in their team an esprit de corps I have started to think of as cofounder mode.

Let me explain what I mean by way of example.

Two or three months after I joined Palantir, Alex Karp decided we needed to rethink the company’s homepage. I found myself flying weekly to Munich and Copenhagen, fitting in meetings about web copy (and the future of the West) around his client meetings and workouts.

Alex cared about it all, not just the messaging but the word choice and the line breaks and where the commas went. In a strict sense, it was micromanagement. But I’d been taught micromanagement was bad, and this didn’t feel bad. It felt empowering. It showed me up close the kind of precision and care that was required to build a generationally transformative company, and it instilled the desire in me to bring that same precision and care to my own work. It gave me an appetite for building.

Done well, founder mode begets what we might call cofounder mode: a pervasive sense of shared ownership over outcomes shared by all employees, not just those whose name is on the incorporation papers.

The best companies instill this spirit in everyone, and it is the only way I have ever seen companies scale without calcifying into a nightmare of middle management. Indeed, I think it is perhaps the actual secret sauce at the heart of founder mode — for no one likes a micromanager, but many people deeply appreciate being the apprentice of a brilliant person, that they may one day soon become quite so brilliant themselves.

Lately, much of my work has revolved around talent branding. Great leaders can, in this environment, secure funding and even customers with relative ease, but attracting great talent is more difficult than it has ever been. Why should someone who could easily get funding for their own idea from Y Combinator or General Catalyst — or alternately, join a frontier lab for a sum so eyewateringly staggering they’re probably obligated to take it out of some moral obligation to their bloodline — join your Series A startup?

The best answer is that they will learn things from you they can’t learn elsewhere — that your company is where they can study in cofounder mode that they might one day themselves be better equipped to enter founder mode.

This is also what keeps people from leaving as your company grows. A company can continue to operate as nimbly at 4,000 as 40 if (and only if) employees continue to feel that they have a great stake on the company’s success — if they are both empowered and obligated to impose their vision of excellence on their part of the world.

The irony and the beauty, of course, is that the more cofounders you create in your company, the less of the micromanage-y parts of founder mode you have to partake in. In this way, cofounder mode is both the inevitable product of and the thing that obviates founder mode.

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Suddenly, it seems, everyone understands the value of comms, or marketing, or brand, or storytelling. Whatever it is that we’re calling it, the gist is this: Everyone suddenly understands that making a great thing isn’t enough; you also have to get that thing into the hands of users. This insight is why LinkedIn and X are full of people saying things like Attention is the new oil and Distribution is the only moat.1

There’s a kernel of truth here. Yes, getting attention is important. Yes, it’s harder than ever to cut through in a cacophonous media environment, one saturated by AI slop and fast-fashion hauls and startup launch videos and GRWMs and political hot takes and hot takes about how everyone should just stop talking about politics already.

But the glorification of attention also misses a fundamental point: The goal is not merely to get attention but to harness it for some actual purpose.

Maybe this seems like a trivial distinction, but I think it’s actually central to a few recent communications failures.

Cluely

Last summer, Cluely hard-launched with a confetti bomb of controversy. The startup’s marketing leaned into cheating as a core use case—think: virtual coding interviews—and cofounder and CEO Roy Lee was summarily suspended from Columbia, where he’d been studying computer science as an undergraduate.

A16z quickly invested, making the bet that Cluely’s “strength in distribution” would translate from consumer hype to enterprise value.

That was in June 2025. By November, Cluely was floundering.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, in a marked shift from his v1 persona as an id-driven, just-ship-it provocateur, Lee had become noticeably more circumspect. “I can’t say if it’s a mistake, but maybe we launched too early,” he said. “The whole idea [was] let’s launch something that barely works, and if we can get enough initial users, they will find out the use cases for us.”

Later, demurring on the question of revenue, Lee added: “It’s not the fastest-growing company of all time.”

Looking at Cluely, one might reasonably conclude that attention is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful startup. The logic here is something like: Companies need attention, but they fail if they don’t have the product credibility to back it up. I don’t think this is the whole story.

Attention, as measured by the volume of coverage or impressions or engagements, only loosely correlates with the kind of attention that matters, which is attention from the people you care about. For most businesses, these are customers, candidates, and investors. And while some of those audiences might’ve been attracted to Cluely’s original antics, the ones who mattered most—the enterprise buyers Cluely’s now trying to attract—instead grew wary.

The Lesson: Not all attention is made equal. Attention is only worthwhile from the right people. And attention from the wrong people, or for the wrong reasons, might actually turn off your audiences.

Coinbase

This Sunday was the AI Olympics—sorry, I mean the Super Bowl. One of the more attention-grabbing ads was Coinbase’s “Everybody Coinbase,” a 60-second karaoke singalong set to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” (You know the one: Everybooooooooody. Yeah. Yeah.)

In addition to the Super Bowl spot, Coinbase also bought out the Las Vegas Sphere. The idea was to get 125 million people singing along.

The ad was fun. It was, as the Coinbase CMO put it, a vibe.2

And, for 53 of the spot’s 60 seconds, the ad told you absolutely nothing about Coinbase.

Then, with seven seconds left, the Coinbase logo appeared. End of ad.

This is in contrast to Coinbase’s iconic 2022 Super Bowl ad, which featured a floating QR code on a black screen. That ad, too, was unconventional and stripped of typical ad fare (like, you know, having much of anything at all onscreen). But it drove 20 million landing page visits in sixty seconds and enough downloads to take the app from #186 in the app store all the way to number two.

That ad worked because the QR code compelled action.

The karaoke ad didn’t compel much of anything at. (Or, at the Super Bowl party I was at, comprising a relatively tech-savvy group of Brooklynites, it compelled a bunch of huhs and where’s the queso?s)

To be clear, I like the idea! I am not mad, I am just disappointed! The ad would’ve been perfect for a brand about whom the song said literally anything at all.

Take Yahoo! Yahoo!’s social team has spent the last year leaning hard into exactly this kind of retro nostalgia with throwback UI posts and self-deprecating jokes about people still using their 1998 email. (Check out ’s great deep dive here.) A Backstreet Boys karaoke singalong with PowerPoint-era transitions would have reinforced something Yahoo! is already building: the idea that they’re the internet’s lovable elder statesman, still here, still fun, not trying too hard. The retro aesthetic would have been part of the story.

For Coinbase, the retro aesthetic is just an aesthetic. It doesn’t connect to anything true about the brand. Coinbase’s actual story—that crypto has gone mainstream, that 52 million Americans have used it—is a forward-looking claim, and wrapping it in ‘90s nostalgia creates a tonal mismatch.

Coinbase got our attention. But they didn’t use it, because they didn’t get our attention in a meaningful way, that is, a way that drove any action.

The Lesson: Your attention-grabbing hook needs to compel action. If you haven’t compelled anyone to take an action (like, say, download your app), you have failed. The best way to do that is to relate the content of the ad to your company (though this isn’t strictly necessary, as their contentless QR code ad proved).

Cluely got attention from the wrong people. Coinbase got the right people’s attention and wasted it. Both are failures of narrative, not distribution.

Attention is not enough. You have to harness it — first into belief, then into action.

If narrative is capital, or at least a means to it (which, ahem, is rather the point of this newsletter), my philosophy is closer to Warren Buffett’s value investing than to r/wallstreetbets. Yes, there are frothy narrative waves you can ride to short-term revenue, just as you can make a quick buck on Fartcoin. But this short-termist approach is more akin to gambling than value creation—and building a great, enduring company is fundamentally an act of value creation. Only through these means—often boring, often slogging and slow—can you actually cultivate lore.

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In today’s newsletter, we’re looking at what an idiosyncratic Air Force colonel can teach us about communications. The short version: You don’t need a strategy; you need to test, learn, and test again.

The Heretic

John Boyd had a habit of setting neckties on fire. This wasn’t metaphorical. Once, when an argument got heated (and Boyd’s arguments always got heated), the U.S. Air Force Colonel jabbed his lit cigar at his opponent until the ash burned through the fabric.

Except, it was also metaphorical. Boyd was constantly trying to prove that the Air Force was an old fuddy-duddy, a bow tie vying for futile relevance in a brave new world. Boyd wasn’t interested in tradition. He cared only about what actually worked — and he knew what worked, because he’d been an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School in Nevada in the 1950s, where, amid heat shimmer and Joshua trees, Boyd issued a standing challenge to any pilot brave enough to accept: Gun him down within 40 seconds from right on his tail.

He never lost. According to Ron Catton, one of the few pilots to graduate from the Weapons School with a perfect score, Boyd usually needed only twenty seconds but “liked a little insurance.” U.S. Naval Institute students came for him. Marine pilots came for him. Navy pilots. Pilots from a dozen allied nations. The closest anyone got was Marine aviator Hal Vincent, who fought “Forty Second Boyd” to a draw.

The secret was what Boyd called “flat-plating the bird,” turning the F-100 Super Sabre at ninety degrees, bleeding energy in a controlled way that seemed to violate physics.

But the deeper insight was conceptual: Victory wasn’t about raw speed or power. It was about agility. Whoever could change energy states faster — losing altitude to gain speed, trading speed for position — controlled the fight.

In other words, the pilots who won dogfights weren’t the ones with superior firepower. They were the ones who could think faster. Who could observe, orient, decide, and act before their opponent finished observing.

Boyd called this the OODA loop, and he spent the rest of his career getting into screaming matches with generals who wanted to plan their way to victory instead of OODA-ing.

Strategists had strategy. Boyd had something more dangerous: a theory of speed.

You Don’t Need A Communications Strategy

Here’s how that applies to comms: Your startup doesn’t need a Communications Strategy. At least not the way most people mean it. You do not need to lock yourself in a tower to pontificate about how to reach people. You need to see what sticks by executing quickly to get good feedback.

As communicator-turned-venture-capitalist Ashley Mayer, formerly of Box, Social Capital, and Glossier, puts it:

Tactics are more amenable to creativity and experimentation, don’t devour massive resources, and come with shorter and simpler feedback loops. With tactics, you can see what resonates and then build a strategy around what’s working.

This doesn’t mean there’s not a role for lowercase-s strategy. You should act with intention even when moving fast: After all, the OODA loop is 75% “figure out what to do” (the OOD of OODA loop) and only 25% “doing it” (the A). There are also moments, like big pivots, acquisitions, and other inflection points, where zooming out can be valuable. But you need to repeat the cycle recursively, over and over, with enough velocity to see different results and understand what actually happens when your plan makes contact with reality.

An OODA Loop for Comms

So what does an OODA loop for comms actually look like?

1. Observe

Listen. What’s the market saying? What’s resonating in your category? What are reporters writing about? What are candidates asking in interviews? What just happened that changes the landscape?

2. Orient

Interpret. Filter those signals through your company’s reality: positioning, strengths, gaps. This determines everything downstream. Get orientation wrong and speed kills you faster.

3. Decide

Commit (for now). Pick the message, the channel, the moment. What are we saying, to whom, and why now? Make the call.

4. Act

Ship it. Publish, pitch, post, brief. Put the narrative into the world. Every action generates new data, which feeds your next observation. The loop continues.

For startups, the OODA loop is a discipline of execution. When Salesforce launched, Marc Benioff watched what landed, adjusted, and did it again. The strategy was emergent rather than origin. The “No Software” logo and fake protests outside Siebel conferences allowed Benioff to iterate his way into a positioning as the insurgent, the inevitable replacement for legacy software. All those tactics accumulated into a strategy, and by the time competitors had a response, Benioff owned the category.

This is what I mean when I talk about lore. Companies with real narrative capital — the kind that converts into recruiting advantages, investor confidence, and customer loyalty — don’t build it through strategic planning in an ivory tower, divorced from ground reality. They build it through trial and error, through accumulation. Story after story, appearance after appearance, message tested and refined until it becomes part of how the market understands them.

Narrative capital snowballs. But only if you’re already in motion.

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Recently I saw a LinkedIn post from . Once called the Gatsby of Silicon Valley, Andrew is something of a professional party-thrower, a bringer-together of tech folk. He’d put together a magazine for an upcoming IRL Founder Showcase and was auctioning off an ad.

The starting bid was one dollar. 24 hours later, in a two-minute break between calls, I sniped the winning spot at the actual, honest-to-God last minute for $1,650.

In case you’re even worse at math than I am, that’s 1650% markup.

I wanted to use the slot to advertise this here newsletter, LORE, which, by the way, is free. So why might I do something that, at first blush, looks so idiotic? Something my accountant might describe as “deranged” or “a complete misunderstanding of the function of a business expense”?

Let me explain, dear reader. For there’s a lesson in audience here.

The General Public Is Dead

Every company, politician, celebrity, piece of legislation, novelist, filmmaker, and theologian is speaking to someone. Probably several somebodies, but definitely not to everybody, and that is the point. These somebodies are what we might call audience.

There, I’ve shared it, the secret to communications: Know thy audience and speak to them; don’t worry about everyone else. Okay, now we can pack up this newsletter and shut it down. That’s all there is to know about comms.

Maybe there’s a little more nuance than that. But not much, tbqh. To explain, it’s helpful to bring in some historical context.

Once upon a time, in a faraway time known as the 1950s, “audience” was a relatively homogenized phenomenon, at least if you lived in the United States. Families huddled around Walter Cronkite at night; everyone read the front page of The New York Times over coffee before work. If you wanted to do something like sell people a dishwasher or announce a corporate merger, you knew where to find them: Why, they were huddling around Walter Cronkite at night and reading the front page of The New York Times before work!

There were only so many avenues to get your news into the world, is what I’m saying. Communications was a relatively blunt tool.

Now, in what one Twitter poster, in a post I can no longer find, called the Q2 of the 21st century, attention is fragmented across a thousand platforms and micro-conversations. People get their news from TikTok influencers and group chats, from Substack newsletters and Reddit threads. To reach any audience, let alone many, you have to deeply understand who they are and where they tune in amongst the byzantine maze of our modern information and entertainment ecosystem.

Which brings me back to that $1,650.

My bet is that Andrew and I have significantly overlapping audiences. He’s cultivated a fellowship of over 80,000 followers on LinkedIn and over 50,000 on Substack, but what matters aren’t the raw numbers. What matters is that he and I are speaking to the same people: startup founders obsessed with growth and building generational companies.

That’s why I’m making the bet that, even though the print edition of Andrew’s magazine will only reach a hundred or so founders, that small group will be zealously interested in what I’m doing here at LORE and subscribe. (Also, Andrew posted about my antics on LinkedIn, and that’s already driven over a 10% increase in subs.)

Meanwhile, if I’d published an ad in, say, Fly Fisherman’s Weekly, even if for some reason Fly Fisherman’s Weekly had ten zillion subscribers, I doubt LORE would see a single subscriber out of it. Fly fisherman are not my people (apologies to the fly fishing community), and any overlap between the fictional Fly Fisherman’s Weekly and LORE would be entirely coincidental, quite possibly compromised solely of my father.

There’s a lesson here for founders: Suss out where your audiences actually live and talk to them there. This sounds obvious, but in practice, our egos are bound up in all sorts of ideas that contradict this, like, Successful tech founders have to launch in TechCrunch or My emotionally distant grandfather will be so proud if I land the Bloomberg story. But often, if your goal is to drive revenue, you’re better off landing a trade story or niche podcast episode, or perhaps partnering with micro-influencers. If you want to reach talent, a Reddit AMA or an excellent YouTube video might go farther.

You can reach five million people and discover not one of them is your kinda people.

You’re better off going, as the good mermaid Ariel said, where the people — YOUR people — are.

The lesson? Don’t get seduced by big audience numbers. Your audience ≠ The General Public; The General Public is dead. Find your own people, then go to them where they already are.

Additional Reading

• “Growth over going viral” from , featuring this great and relevant insight from BÉIS senior social media manager Paige Tapp:

  [G]oing viral isn’t the most important thing on social media. Reaching the intended audience and connecting to them in a meaningful way is.

Link in Bio

Growth over going viral

Last year, when I asked subscribers what brands they think exemplify great social, travel and lifestyle company BÉIS was one of the most mentioned. It makes sense, their founder content is genuinely fun and they dream up smart activations that break through…

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4 months ago · 65 likes · 8 comments · Rachel Karten

Join the Quest

As I’ve pontificated about before, building a generational company requires an eye for LORE. So if you’re new here—if you’re just joining our quest, quite possibly on the recommendation of new friend of the letter Andrew—here are a few of my favorite pieces to get you started:

• Lore Is the Antidote to Slop

• Lore Is The Only Moat

• Build Your Own Lore

Thanks for joining!

If you’re not subscribed yet, smash that button to get weekly dispatches on how to build a generational company by turning narrative capital into capital capital.

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Spend 45 nanoseconds with anyone in tech and you’ll hear the term product-market fit. A company can be pre-PMF (spinning, wandering through the wilderness, high beta) or post-PMF (inflecting, the bottom of the S-curve, A Good Company To Join). PMF is the Holy Grail, the hallowed door through which you must walk to be anointed a successful startup. Once you hit it, the legend goes, the challenge transforms from creation to scale: a challenge in its own right, sure, but a much more glamorous one, and not nearly so existential.

Now, of course, AI has changed everything. Creating software products is trivial — so trivial that a humanities major with a Claude Code subscription might recreate more or less the same product that previously required all the overhead of A Company. Companies will no longer grasp the rung of PMF just once in their lifetime; they will have to find it over and over again, a phenomenon Reforge’s Brian Balfour calls Product-Market Fit Collapse.

So what are Companies to do?

The Old World

Traditionally, marketing consultants were focused on positioning. This was a product-first approach. Marketers would descend like so many locusts upon your company to ask you a bunch of questions about how your product compared to everyone else’s and why customers chose your product over theirs, and then they’d tie it together into a pretty bow called differentiation. Successful marketing depended on leaning into this differentiation. Entire corporate brands were built on top of it.

This made sense when building software was a labor-intensive effort that required such administrative overhead as incorporating a company, renting office space, purchasing lots of computing, hiring a bunch of engineers, and so forth. There was a meaningful moat around software creation. If your competitors wanted to beat you, they would have to do all those things too, which gave you a meaningful head start. You knew who was nipping at your heels before they overtook you.

Now, product differentiation can evaporate overnight. I don’t mean that figuratively, as in, products change really fast now, man. I mean that, quite literally, a rando with a subscription to Cursor or Windsurf or whatever can replicate your product between sundown and sunup. They don’t need to know how to code; they can explain what they want in plain English. They can use LegalZoom to incorporate a business within days and set up Stripe for business banking and, without a single employee or any office space, go head-to-head with Your Company on product.

Product differentiation, in other words, has become a house of sand. But if your product is no longer a differentiator, what is?

The New World

Another way of framing this situation is that consumers are now less concerned with outputs. Loyalty to Company A versus Company B cannot solely be based on the outcomes they’ll get from a particular product, because products are rapidly changing — which means who’s winning in a particular category is dynamic, shifting day over day and week over week.

Human brains are not built to keep up with this kind of speed. We are famously pretty slow to update our priors. You see this even in the AI race, where consumers have few pre-established loyalties. I don’t use Claude because it’s definitely the best; I use it because, at one point in time, my impression of it was as the best for my use cases, and then I liked it enough to keep using it. Gemini might be much better! I wouldn’t know; I haven’t had the energy to update my priors by trying it. Besides, I’m bought into Anthropic’s whole deal: the launch of Cowork, their heritage as OpenAI secessionists, their Thinking campaign.

In lieu of caring about outputs, we now have to get people to care about the the inputs, that is, the process. If product-market fit is not a one-way door, a graduation ceremony, a threshold through which a company steps and can never return, then we have to get people to care about the entire journey.

This is what I call lore. Lore is deeper than Positioning or Brand or even the über-trendy Storytelling. Lore is a compilation of the things that make people actually care about you, even when you’re losing — which you’re going to be, at some point, in this Brave New World. Lore is the mythos that attracts not just transactional users but long-term fans, not just mercenary employees but missionaries who sacrifice their discretionary effort at the altar of your shared project. (And yes, one of those lore-things, those mythos-creators, is product. I am not saying product doesn’t matter. People use products to solve problems; if yours doesn’t do that, you’re not going to have any users. I’m saying product is necessary but increasingly insufficient.)

Lore is what makes people climb into the car with you, Thelma and Louise-style, even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going to end up.

And not unlike our good heroines Thelma and Louise, you don’t actually need some grand Vision or a meticulously detailed Messaging Strategy to get people to hop in. You can get pretty far, it turns out, with madcap characters and a general curiosity about what those crazy kids are going to get up to next. If traditional positioning is about charting a careful route to take you from coast to coast, lore is the stories you get to tell years later, cigarette falling from your lip in a motel parking lot, after you jump into the convertible and just start driving, top down.

Another way of saying this is that it is not much fun to be successful. All the fun is in the becoming. And that’s a good thing, because this next era is alllll about becoming, baby.

A Case Study: Palantir

Palantir, where I helped build out their first Communications and Content team, is a great example of lore-first comms.

Palantir is a beautiful counterexample to everything we’ve been taught about positioning. Ask 10 people what Palantir does and you’ll get 15 different answers. Last fall, when WIRED asked CEO Alex Karp to explain the company, he gave a characteristically labyrinthine answer that sounded like something out of a Infinite Jest: “If you’re an intelligence agency, you’re using us to find terrorists and organized criminals while maintaining the security and data protection of your country. Then you have the special forces. How do you know where your troops are? How do you get in and out of the battlefield as safely as possible, avoiding mines, avoiding enemies? Then there’s Palantir on the commercial side. The shorthand is if you’re doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it’s analytics or AI, you’re going to have to find something like our products.”

Is Palantir a defense contractor? An AI company? A data platform? A patriotic American institution defending democracy? A dystopian surveillance engine? The company is unintelligible by any traditional positioning metric. It’s why we eschewed traditional Gartner quadrant stuff until well into our life as a public company. We didn’t want to be in the upper-right-hand quadrant of some made-up MBA fever dream. We wanted to do our own thing, on our own terms.

This was pretty annoying to me, one of their first comms hires…right up until the point I saw it working. Palantir didn’t just attract customers and talent; it attracted zealots. The fact that it was illegible by any traditional positioning metric was its strength. People joined Palantir for all sorts of reasons: our bizarro leader, Alex Karp, a German philosophy Ph.D. who describes himself as “geographically monogamous” and, when he’s not cross-country skiing across the globe, lives on a compound in rural New Hampshire; our mission, which fell somewhere between “improve business operations” and “defend the West,” depending on who you asked; the unbelievable talent density, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a snowball rolling down a hill.

By traditional positioning metrics, Palantir should compete for mindshare with Snowflake and Tableau. Instead, it is listed alongside the greatest companies of our time: Stripe, Google, OpenAI. That’s the result of lore, the accumulated mythology and mystique around who they are as a company, beyond just what they do as a product.

Lore, in other words, is what makes you a character in a larger story, not just a vendor in a category. It’s what turns great product companies into generational legends.

Legibility Is Replaceability

Ultimately, legibility is replaceability, as we’ve seen with the collapse of product-market fit. Being fully understood is risky.

This doesn’t mean abandoning bottom-of-funnel marketing. You still need to convert revenue. But the companies that become truly generational — the ones whose legacy endures, who cultivate a coterie of superfans — are the ones who invest in long-range storytelling alongside conversion. They walk and chew gum at the same time. Because product-first positioning can’t win in today’s world. Only lore can.

But let’s say you land one. You spend 11 interviews over the course of a year with a reporter from a major national magazine. By the time the piece is nearing publication, you’re tired. You’re over it. You just want to get through the photoshoot.

Don’t.

As Sara Blask, Head of Communications and Brand at Google-owned Intersect put it:

Visual imagery travels faster than any other medium. Make it count. The details matter.

A Tale of Two Portraits

Lest you doubt the impact a photo can have, let’s compare two recent portraits. Both are of 28-year-old women. Both have new, or newish, roles in American political life. How different could the two photos be?

Let’s take a look:

Different vibes, non? Yes, one is a MAGA Republican and the other a Democratic Socialist, but the difference is about more than where they sit on the the political horseshoe.

Left: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, is shot super-close-up in super-high contrast. The result is that she looks artificial and admonishing, like a middle-aged school administrator.

Right: Rama Duwaji has an artifice too, though it manifests more as aloofness. The framing recalls royal portraiture, giving the new First Lady of New York City a regal quality that reads as either artsy-cool or artsy-weird-and-hauty, depending on whether you’ve ever been [romantically or socially] traumatized by a hot girl at a Bushwick loft party.

In other words, these photos lead you to draw all sorts of conclusions about the people in them. And that’s before you even start reading — if you ever do. (How many people saw the Vanity Fair photos without reading the more than 10,000 words that accompanied them?)

A Guide

Ok, you get it. Photos matter. So how do you take a good one when the stakes are high?

1. Know thy photographer.

The work begins well before the photo shoot begins. You or your team should get the photographer’s name and understand their style. Do they tend to like close-ups or group shots? Do they typically shoot in color or black and white, high contrast or low?

Depending on the outlet, you may have more or less ability to control the shoot’s creative direction. (As a general rule, non-hard-news outlets like fashion magazines tend to be more likely to work with you.) Regardless, you should know what to expect. As , a filmmaker and former official videographer for Vice President Kamala Harris who writes about visual power and politics for , told me:

Visuals are communication. If you want them to tell the right story, you have to communicate with the photographer or videographer when possible. That dynamic changes depending on whether the shoot is client-driven or editorial, but awareness still matters.

2. Dress for success.

As Cristin Culver, the Founder and Principal of Common Thread Communications told me in a recent email:

Before you speak, publish, or give an interview, what you’re wearing has already said something…. Clothes don’t just accessorize a narrative. They either back it up or quietly contradict it. They make you real and authoritative, or they introduce doubt.

We’ve seen this in politics for eons. Politicians, royalty, and heads of state dress with intention all the time: rolled-up sleeves to signal “I work,” fleece vests to signal “I’m one of you,” uniforms to signal authority, restraint, patriotism, power distance, seriousness. None of that is accidental.

The same rule applies in business. If you lead a company and have a narrative you’re trying to sell, your clothes are ‘owned media.’ They signal what you value, who you’re for, and whether you actually believe the story you’re telling.

For an example of what not to do, Culver added:

A couple months ago, I was incredibly triggered reading a Fortune profile of Cotopaxi’s CEO who talked about how her brand is defined by color. Then I scrolled to the company-provided headshot of her in an all-black blazer, from another brand, zero color in sight. My jaw dropped. I thought: this is not a serious person. That disconnect matters (to me, at least).

Meanwhile, the pair behind tech media juggernaut TBPN absolutely nailed their clothing choices in a recent Vanity Fair profile. Their show’s whole vibe is somewhere between ESPN and 1980’s Wall Street: Their brand kit includes “mahogany (‘the official wood of business’), shades of green (the color of money), [and] racing livery jackets and hats.” That spirit is reflected in the Loro Piana suit and Bulgari watch.

3. Frame your set.

It’s not just about you. It’s also about everything around you. This is why politicians spend lots of time at local ice cream parlors and state fairs. It’s why CEOs of major multinationals tour their factories and farms when reporters are in tow.

As Kati Dahm, Communications Advisor at Revel, put it:

[T]hink of your “set.”… We’d always aim to do videos with the factory or hardware in the background to show progress.

Or, as Intersect’s Blask quipped:

If it’s not hardware, it’s not real.

You can follow this advice even if you aren’t building hardware. Does your office have a lot of personality? Are you building in a geographically unique part of the country? Are you building for families and could feature your own? Get creative!

4. Pose!

Most (good) comms advise boils down to: Be yourself! Be authentic! Phoniness is off-putting and bad!

Yes. And. Posing isn’t natural for most of us. Or rather, if I posed naturally, I would look like a constipated hunchback. I need to force myself to pull my shoulders back and push my chin out and position my face.

Cohen suggests keeping in mind three things when posing:

1. Pay attention to where your gaze and body are oriented. Aim toward the right side of the frame. Facing toward the right side of the frame can materially change how a viewer perceives your authority, credibility, and intent…. Orientation is one of the easiest things to control, and it makes a difference in how seriously you’re taken.

2. Consider a serious or steady expression. This isn’t universal. If you work in sales, marketing, or a customer-facing role, smiling makes sense regardless of gender. But for founders, technical leaders, or people in authority-driven roles, a neutral or serious expression often communicates more effectively.

3. Ask for a slight low angle to convey authority. In photography and cinematography, there are three basic angles—low, eye-level, and high. A low angle means the camera is below the subject’s eyeline. Eye-level is neutral. High angle means the camera is above you.

   A slight low angle is powerful. Height is universally read as authority. When a camera is positioned above you, especially on a tall tripod, it makes you appear shorter and, by extension, less authoritative. That’s unfair, but it’s real.

   You see this constantly in political imagery. Look at photos coming out of the White House, particularly of Trump. They’re often shot from a low angle to exaggerate height and power. That’s classic “hero shot” framing.

Profiles live or die on impressions. What people absorb in a nanosecond can do more to impact your lasting legacy and lore than any long-form article. Treat it accordingly.

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The subject of this newsletter is how to craft lore. One of my strongest-held beliefs is that you can’t do that without reading voraciously — beyond fast-twitch news articles, podcast summaries, and, yes, Substacks. (But keep reading this one kthx.) More bluntly: To tell a good story, you’ve got to read some fiction. To crack the spine on a hardcover or over-highlight a pulpy paperback.

Last year, I read something like 40 books, and I wanted to share a few of my favorites, in no particular order, if you’re looking for recommendations:

1. Workhorse by Caroline Palmer
   
   I will always read a workplace novel about a magazine. Add a dash of Mr. Ripley-esque identity theft and some early aughts nostalgia? I’m doubly there. I do think this book was too long — it clocked in around 560 pages and spanned a decade; the plot would’ve benefitted from compression of both page and year count — but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

   

2. Remainder by Tom McCarthy
   
   I read this for my writing workshop, and it’s one of the most gonzo books I’ve ever read. Like, I genuinely don’t even know how to tell you what it’s about. But if you insist, I’d tell you something like: A man is in an accident and receives a huge payout, which he uses to fund increasingly bizarre reenactments of visions he has. A Memento-esque mindfuck, and proof I occasionally read books written by men.

3. Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
   
   26-year-old Florence becomes the assistant to pseudonymous author Maud Dixon, known for her bestselling novel about a Mississippi murder. But was it fiction at all? I have some qualms with the pacing — we spend 70 pages with Florence at a literary agency from which she gets herself fired before meeting Maud, and I saw the “twist” coming for about 50 pages — but the real story here is about ambition and coming-of-age, and that’s done beautifully. (Fun fact: My client Annapurna is adapting this one for television!)

   

4. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
   
   One of my favorite reads of the year, and not just because I love a skinny legend (this novel clocks in around 225 pages). Catalina is a senior at Harvard whose undocumented status means she has no sense of what’s next. This isn’t a plot-driven novel but stuff does happen — and more importantly, the voice in this one will charm the pants off ya.

   

5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
   
   I’m apparently the only person in the universe who had never heard of this book or its 2010 film adaption, which means I went into this assigned reading for my yearlong novel-writing class totally blind — though the book would’ve been a gut punch regardless. Beautiful, tender, touching: a modern classic.

   

6. Harry Potter 1-3 by J.K. Rowling
   
   I used to reread the entire Harry Potter series before each new book or film installment. The last movie came out the summer before I started college and I haven’t revisited the franchise since. And damn if these aren’t some of the greatest books ever. I’m particularly a fan of Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, which are more lighthearted and funny than the later, darker installments.

   

7. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
   
   I’m a sucker for a book about books — it’s like, a story about story, man — and this is no exception. Hanff Korelitz is also just great at the pulp of thrillers (she also wrote the novel that become The Undoing on HBO).

   

8. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
   
   TBQH, I didn’t totally love this memoir from a former Facebook employee. But I’m always fascinated to see how company’s lore is complicated over time (all empires must fall etc), and this was a zippy-enough listen on Audible. The standout anecdotes all made their way into the news cycle, but suffice it to say my picture of Sheryl Sandberg is more, uh, detailed now.

   

9. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
   
   I absolutely adored Perrotta’s social satires Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher, but I somehow found this more high-concept story — about the fallout of 2% of the world’s population just disappearing — less gripping. The TV show’s great, though.

   

10. Mean Moms by Emma Rosenblum
    
    From the author of Bad Summer People (about a dead body in the Hamptons) and Very Bad Company (about a dead body at a tech company’s exec retreat in Miami) comes a new satire about Manhattan mamas. As in her prior novels, this one involves a murder and rich people behaving very, very badly. The ultimate summer read. Sharing this one aspirationally, that we may all be soon reading this rum-laced and beachside.

    

Content became trivial to produce; so did reactions to it. Everyone adapted Trump’s “flood the zone” comms strategy. Startups measured their success based on the views notched on their AI-ified launch videos, and we saw the corresponding rise of “timeline takeover as a service.”

In other words, we live in an age of plenty, as far as content is concerned. So now, amid so much noise, the challenge is breaking through.

Not, mind you, “breaking through” in terms of impressions or engagement or whatever else the consulting class wants to sell you.1

But in terms of actually making a lasting connection with your audience. Impressions or engagement in the human sense, not the digital marketing one.

As the good fellow T.S. Eliot put it in that timeless epic, The Wasteland:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

Lore Is the Antidote to Slop

In this brave new world, volume alone is not what will create a generational company. This is why companies are desperately seeking storytellers and narrative chiefs, not just “communicators,” per The Wall Street Journal.

But by lore, I mean something more precise than mere storytelling, a word so broad that, by now, it can mean almost anything.

The antidote to slop — the roots that clutch out of stony rubbish — is lore.

Lore is the story behind the story, the messy realness, the how and why and who. It is, as Will Manidis, from whom I borrowed the form of this newsletter’s title, wrote, craft, and craft is that “sacred space for human hands and minds.”

Slop is the opposite of sacred. It adds a pernicious form of frictionlessness that is the opposite of the sticky and the human. Sure, people might throw you a thumbs up on your LinkedIn post about your latest fundraise — and if you text enough people, you might even create a viral moment — but winning LinkedIn for a day is not the stuff of lore. Lore is what makes people remember you not tomorrow but 10 years from now. Lore is what separates the great companies from the truly generational.

In the coming weeks, you can expect more analysis of how to do comms well and deep dives on companies who’ve successfully built their lore. In the meantime, check out this prior post on how to build your own.

Additional Reading

Last weekend, New Yorkers lined up for blocks to cop a free hat embroidered with a single word, thinking, courtesy of Anthropic AI (and AirMail, the bourgeoisie newsletter dreamt up by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter).

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Meanwhile, Anthropic’s arch-rival OpenAI mailed their power users minimalist plaques.

And on the back of a billion-dollar fundraise, Base Power distributed real (fake) newspapers around Austin. (Print media is always extremely chic, IMO.)

But anyone with a corporate job has an overstuffed Container Store bin full of swag. Between my former in-house jobs and my current clients, I have untold sweatshirts and T-shirts and baseball caps and backpacks and beanies and pens and notebooks and chargers and PopSockets and Keep Cups and Yeti tumblers and blue light glasses and stickers and even an Eno hammock emblazoned with Peely, Fortnite’s anthropomorphic banana character.

Not all swag is created equal. So what separates the good from the Goodwill pile?

What is the point of swag?

Let’s back up for a second. Why distribute swag at all?

Swag can serve two purposes:

1. Foster community

This swag is designed for the insiders (often employees). It doesn’t matter if anyone else “gets it,” and in fact can be better if most others don’t. The vibe here is if you know, you know—and if you don’t, you don’t, and the goal is to strengthen the bonds of your existing in-group.

Often the logos on this kind of swag are small and may not include the wordmark. Another example: the not-so-secret society at my college distributed black sweatshirts with a black insignia to lean into their mystique.

2. Create virality

Other swag is intended to be seen and displayed by outsiders. The swag from OpenAI falls into this camp. The point is to amplify the brand, often through photos or other social media, so the logo is front and center. The goal is ultimately to bring more people (users, talent, whomever) from your out-group into the fold.

Some swag is only intended to do one or the other (most employee swag falls into this camp), though often good swag will straddle the line. The Anthropic event is an example of this. There’s an IYKYK quality to the hats because the brand isn’t super frontal, but the Claude brand was front and center at the overall event where the hats were distributed—and as with any pop-up, part of the goal was clearly social media virality.

The lesson: Know what your goal is and design with that audience in mind.

How do you make good swag?

Okay, so how do you make swag that doesn’t suck?

1. Quality

Don’t skimp on quality. This seems obvious, but the nice stuff is often meaningfully more expensive. It immediately becomes tempting to cut corners here. Don’t.

The Anthropic hats look nicely embroidered; the OpenAI plaques have heft, like an award; the Base newspapers emulates a real paper. Don’t go for the nylon hats or that sweatshirt that feels like sandpaper. And I really, really don’t want your shitty pen.

The value of swag is that people will continually use it over time, reconnecting with your brand (and pulling more people into it) every time they do. If they never actually use it, you might as well not have bought it at all.

2. Useful, Meaningful, or Cool

Good swag should either be useful, meaning people will actually employ it in their daily lives (e.g. a cozy sweatshirt or a good charging brick); have some kind of existing meaning (e.g. YouTube’s awards for subscriber milestones or, like, your employees call themselves space cadets and everyone gets a model spaceship on their first anniversary); or cool enough that people won’t throw it out even though it’s not useful or meaningful.

Very few things meet that threshold of cool, so you should probably shoot for useful or meaningful. And don’t underestimate useful! Yes, there are a thousand company notebooks, but people use them—they actually pull them out and use them, reinforcing their connection to your brand.

3. Timely

Good swag acquires meaning over time. It creates (say it with me, kids) LORE. Sometimes this happens accidentally, like you go through a big rebrand and all the sudden your old swag becomes, effectively, limited edition. But you can also manufacture this by intentionally creating swag that commemorates specific events.

This might be a T-shirt from an iconic recruiting event, as with the Stripe Capture the Flag event shirt below. (CTF was a tactic Stripe employed early on to find high-caliber engineers by having them root out security vulnerabilities on fake web apps.)

Or these masks we made at Palantir to commemorate our public listing, in what I hope is the first and last time a face mask is, in fact, timely and appropriate company swag.

Other easy ways to do this are celebrating product launches or creating swag for a specific year.

4. Has Viral Potential

Things that are viral might be uniquely cool (again, a hard bar); rare (people want to show off that they got the thing); or fun/funny (we are but humble servants to the Instagram algo). Notably, they don’t have to be viral on public social media; your swag might be successful if, say, other employees start conversations with them about it.

The lesson: Don’t skimp on quality or meaning.

In the end, good swag is lore made tangible. It provides your people—employees, customers, partners—with physical talismans of community. Don’t make a crappy talisman. Splurge on the good stuff, and reap the rewards of a stronger, bigger in-group over time.

Read on to learn more.

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When I started this newsletter two and a half years ago, I named it Per My Last for two extremely well-thought-out reasons:

• I thought “Per My Last Email” was a simply adorable name for a newsletter

• Permylastemail.substack.com was already taken

Per My Last was a place to think through the patterns I was noticing—both in how companies were telling their stories and in my own career. I wasn’t quite sure what, if anything, those things had in common, but I’d grown up reading tech bloggers like Paul Graham and Ben Casnocha whose posts spanned the personal and the professional. I figured I didn’t need to think too hard about how it all hung together.

A lot has changed since then. I left corporate life to found First Principles Communications. I took a standup comedy class and wrote the first draft of a novel that I’m currently revising with an eye to publication. I had the good fortune of leading corporate communications for independent production company Annapurna, where I got a masterclass in universe-building.

In other words, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to tell a story. And the one concept I keep coming back to, the thing really stuck in my craw, is the idea of lore.

What is LORE?

In video games, lore is the backstory behind the game’s fictional universe. It can also refer to the body of traditions and knowledge held by a particular group (e.g. folklore).

Lore, in other words, is the story behind the story.

Lore comprises the sticky details that actually draws people to do things like:

• Buy a product

• Invest millions in a company

• Leave the stability current job for a new one

More bluntly, lore is the means by which narrative capital turns into, well, capital capital. It’s the substrate on which great companies, movements, and brands are built.

What should I expect from LORE?

My plan is to release LORE weekly-ish. I want to write a newsletter you’re excited to see in your inbox, while also challenging myself to write at a slightly uncomfortable clip for someone with a demanding day job.

Who is LORE for?

Entrepreneurs, executives, builders, communicators, and the growing crowd of people realizing that communications strategy is business strategy

Running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.

-Elon Musk

I first heard the phrase “eating glass” at Palantir. Apparently, eating glass was one of my superpowers.

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This basically meant that I did hard things. The kind of things other people decided weren’t worth the pain.

I took a lot of pride in being a glass eater. It became a part of my identity, and it opened up a lot of cool opportunities along the way. I got friendly with my team’s prickliest stakeholder and forged collaboration where there’d been a wall. I became known as someone who just “got” our most idiosyncratic leaders and could help translate their ideology into various communications.

Then I went to another job. More prickly stakeholders, more idiosyncratic leaders. More glass eating, in other words. But this time it didn’t feel worth it. I spent a long time trying to figure out why. Only recently did I put my finger on it. Eating glass is only worth it when there’s exponential opportunity on the other side.

Eat this glass

It makes sense to take on additional hardship up front because the difficulty will scare off other people and you’ll get rewarded on the other side for doing the hard thing. If you have to eat glass in order to impress the CEO, but then you forever have his respect and suddenly you have latitude to initiate cool projects on your own, that’s worth it.

Or in the entrepreneurial context, you might spend years making a below-market salary and sacrificing traditional measures of career success, but the potential output after eating that glass is exponential in the form of career capital and, well, capital capital.

Don’t eat this glass

On the other hand, when the opportunity on the other side of the glass wall is merely linear, it’s just not worth it. There are plenty of linear opportunities in the world, most of which don’t involve eating glass. Don’t spend disproportionate time eating glass if there’s not a disproportionate reward for it on the other end. Don’t, for instance, work for a notoriously hard boss if impressing them won’t gain you more credibility than working for a nicer one. If your crowning achievement at the end of either the “hard boss path” or the “nice boss path” is the same, don’t pick the “hard boss path.”

Why? Because eating glass takes time and effort, which stalls your linear progress. If your reward is merely linear, you would be better off never eating the glass in the first place and just continuing up the glass-free career ladder.

This is a small insight but was a big unlock for me in deciding where to apply my efforts. Building a business, for instance, involves a lot of eating glass in the form of unpaid business development—all those coffees and Zoom calls that might not ever turn into clients. But some of the coolest, most “me-shaped” opportunities in communications are consulting assignments, and you can only unlock those exponential rewards by eating glass. (Also, it turns out I kind of like having those meetings, so it’s more like, idk, blowing glass? Whatever, there are limits to this metaphor, people!)

Hard things, in other words, are not worth it because they are hard. Hard things are worth it because they create a moat around desirable, exponential outcomes.

Additional Reading

I finally pulled this post from my dusty archives, where it’d been sitting for six-plus months, thanks to this great post from . It’s worth a read (as are all her posts).

I find myself thinking of her, that me of [redacted] Mays ago. What I wish she knew. What I’m glad she didn’t.

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On a sweltering late-spring day, after a long weekend of various graduation ceremonies that included an entire speech in Latin and another by Christopher Nolan, my mother backed her Chevy Traverse away from my stony dorm. The car was mounded with four years of detritus, the molt of someone becoming themselves, and I wheeled a single suitcase to New Jersey Transit. 75 minutes later I arrived at Penn Station, the ceilings low and dank (this was pre-renovation, pre-mall-shiny Moynihan), and another 45 minutes later I emerged from the C train at Franklin Street.

Down the street from my apartment, a sagging brownstone I shared with two sisters, I bought shampoo. The shopkeeper slid the bottle to me from behind the Plexiglass barricade where he sat with his wares, visibly amused at this bleary-eyed girl.

Would you believe me if I said this was all just a wind-up to a list of things I wish I’d known when I was 22?

How deeply she wanted to know everything, to be who she would be, to get where she was going.

That feels silly to admit now, in my thirties (a lady sometimes reveals clues about her age), a time when every few months I seem to learn anew that there is no end game. There is only pushing the rock up the hill every day, so you might as well pick a good rock. The whole point of life is to live it, etc.

So what would I tell her?

Perhaps that your twenties are not a time for titles. (There may never be a time for titles.) To collect experiences and learnings and people, not trinkets. (Except the shoes. Collect the weird shoes.)

That time has a way of looping around itself. Steps back become foundations for something new, sturdier.

That the only thing that matters, really, are relationships. Not just in the, “I’m on my deathbed and wish I’d seen my family more way.” In the, “Lightly bully your friends into moving to your neighborhood so you can have tea and catch up spontaneously on a Tuesday,” kind of way. And also in the, “We worked together once and now I want to bring you in to be my coworker again,” kind of way.

That quite literally no one has it figured out. That those who seem to are probably just careening toward a mid-life crisis.

That your early career, and maybe your whole career, is best thought of as an apprenticeship. Who do you want to apprentice under? Only work for people you admire.

That if someone owns an apartment in New York before 30 they have family money. (No shade, just don’t compare yourself.)

Recently I walked by my old apartment. The brownstone is still there, but the store down the street is gone. Even my old coffee shop, that harbinger of gentrification, has been remade into a luxury grocery store.

I wanted to hate it, this shiny gentrified place (doesn’t everyone believe the perfect time to arrive in New York was just before they got there?), but then I saw a group of friends emerge, their bags full of snacks, laughing. They couldn’t have been older than 25.

The point is: things change.

The point is: things can be more beautiful than you ever imagined.

Dear Per My Last,

I think I’m under-leveled. I’m at a client services firm that doesn’t account for my experience before I moved into client services, which means younger employees are being given bigger titles than I am. It’s frustrating, because I see every day how valuable my prior experience was in preparing me for this job and feel like I’m doing the same work they are for less pay and a lower title.

I’m pretty new so I don’t feel like I can reasonably ask for a promotion even though I’m certain I’m already doing higher-level work. Should I bring this up with my manager? Is it even fair that it’s eating me up, or am I just being insecure?

Sincerely,

Under-leveled

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Dear Under-leveled,

I relate to this a lot. Before I started working for myself, I cared deeply about titles and was constantly sleuthing to see if people with comparable experience to me had fancier-sounding titles. But the reality is that the more you progress in your career, the less (years of) experience really matter(s). What managers ultimately care about, at least at good employers, is your level of impact on the business.

If you look critically at those who are at the level you want to be at, is there anything they're doing differently than you are? Do they lead projects or client relationships? Do they operate more autonomously or need fewer revisions on their work before it goes to the client? Do they take a more strategic approach rather than a tactical one?

It is, of course, totally possible that you're doing essentially the same work, but it's worth being really objective and honest with yourself here. In my experience, there's usually some way in which people at the level above you are operating more autonomously or strategically, shouldering more of the glory, yes, but also more of the risk.

I'll also say that titles mean something different at every company, so it's not worth getting TOO wound up about them. I'm not saying that titles don't matter—they're tied to compensation and will impact the level of future jobs you can apply for, both of which are very real things—but they probably don't matter as much as you think or in the ways that you think. What will matter most when you interview for future roles is what you actually did within the role. For instance, I've known senior managers who were barely a step up from entry level and senior managers who were leading entire functions, and any good interview is going to dig in to understand the work and impact behind the title to figure out where to slot you next.

So I do think it’s worth a conversation with your manager, but I wouldn't frame it in terms of your relative years of experience. Instead, I'd say something like, "I'm interested in taking the next step and wanted to help in identifying areas where I can improve to make that happen." You want the conversation to be collaborative ("let's make this happen as a team") as opposed to combative ("explain to me why Susie is [title] and I'm not"). Your manager should be your ally, not your enemy, as you progress in your career.