Don't Hit the NOS Too Soon: A Founder's Guide to PR
Lester Chen on how to talk to the press
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At some point, during each speedrun batch, every founder gets the PR itch. They ask: When do I talk to the press? Or, more bluntly: How do I get a tier-1 publication to write something nice about us?
The idea underlying the question goes something like this: we’ll launch, the launch will generate a wave of coverage, that coverage finds us an audience, and that audience will become customers. There’s a vague sense that getting written about is something that happens to companies that are working.
In his role on speedrun, Lester Chen has worked with hundreds of founders launching new companies. And he spends a lot of that time helping them understand a more practical way to think about PR and media relations.
Below are the tips he shares most often with actual a16z speedrun teams.
What PR is actually for
Lester starts by reframing the purpose of PR. Instead of thinking of press as a distribution channel, think of it as a test.
“PR for early-stage companies is the crucible through which founders discover if others will find value in telling their story for them,” he says.
You have a story about why your company exists and why now, and pitching it to journalists is the fastest way to learn whether that story survives contact with someone who has no reason to be nice to you.
Coverage delivers “outside validation and some form of reach,” as Lester puts it. PR is valuable, he says, as “a forcing function that aligns founders and locks in a point of view. It isn’t a feature set list, a market observation, a preachy set of beliefs, but a packaged message tailored for an intentional audience,” Lester said.
Targeting the right audience
The “intentional audience” part is one of the hardest parts of the test. Many founders default to assuming that their audience is “tech Twitter,” when their customers are actually a much more specific slice.
“Some AI companies are also selling into older industries with customers who have never heard the term ‘new media,’” Lester says. “This rings even truer internationally. The value of a viral Twitter post or TechCrunch feature holds less weight than a story a manufacturing plant owner might read in a national publication during their weekend breakfast.” The former gets you attention, the latter might “drive new inbound or firm up in-flight contracts,” he says.
The inverse holds, too. If you’re building a consumer product for Gen Z, Lester’s read is that a Forbes feature is close to worthless, and that the same energy is better spent on direct founder marketing or creator and UGC channels.
Then there’s the reason a lot of PR happens in the first place: fundraising. Lester argues that announcement coverage carries “immense strategic value for signaling to investors as well as helping in the hiring process, especially if immigration considerations are involved.”
We’d add one more that has gotten harder to ignore: earned media is what the models read. When a customer asks ChatGPT or Claude about your company, the answer is assembled largely out of what credible publications have said about you. Call it SEO, call it GEO. Either way, a good article now has a long second life.
Don’t hit the NOS too soon
When asked about the mistakes he sees most, Lester led with a metaphor we are contractually obligated to print in full:
“I would say the most common mistake I see early-stage founders making is hitting the NOS too soon. (Sorry I just watched far too many Fast & Furious movies on vacation and the analogy is just too good.) Hitting the NOS too soon means going through a premature process when so many variables remain vague, which ends up burning time and money in the process. They think PR will be the PRIMARY unlock for customer acquisition and forgo considering any other alternative. As crazy as it sounds, I hear it a few times every batch.”
There are signals that members of the media look for when deciding whether they care enough to write about a startup, and it’s possible to know whether you meet the bar. Lester lists off the negative signals he sees most often:
“There isn’t a fundraise event, PMF is still questionable, CAC is high while retention remains volatile, product still isn’t publicly launched, the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, there are instances where articles have been written about companies with these issues, but there is usually some outlier catalyst which triggers this: a stacked team with shiny pedigrees, a viral moment worth talking about, etc. For most, simply raising some pre-seed money isn’t enough. The plot needs to thicken.”
The other trap founders often fall into is simply launching without professional help:
“A second mistake I notice is founders who balk at the idea of getting help from PR consultants or firms,” Lester says. I’ve seen a lot of ‘I’ll do it myself’ scenarios that end with botched pitches, limited coverage, and founders thinking they ‘got PR’ when publishing a GPT-written press release to a newswire.”
There is, Lester says, “no shame in forking over some amount of money to get help with messaging and running a proper process.”
How the playbook is changing
Ask what’s different now versus two years ago and Lester doesn’t hedge: “It has to be founders just going direct.”
The phrase belongs to Lulu Cheng Meservey, who ran communications at Substack, then Activision Blizzard, and now runs her own firm. For years she has argued that founders should stop laundering their message through reporters and simply tell their story themselves. Her “go direct” manifesto has since hardened into something close to conventional wisdom.
The problem, of course, is that many people feel profoundly uncomfortable acting or speaking as public figures.
“For better or worse, it’s almost expected that founders build in public or develop their own online following,” Lester says. “I say worse because most founders suck at doing this or feel deep discomfort when starting. Going direct to your 426 LinkedIn followers feels brutal especially when you see a 21-year-old founder crushing it by making a video every day.”
But the trade is still worth making. “The reality is that there is far less gatekeeping and founders have WAY more channels to generate awareness and find their customers than ever before,” Lester says.
This lands us right back where the whole thing started, on the audience question. More channels does not mean every channel is your channel.
“If you’re selling into Generals at the Department of War,” Lester says, “no amount of LinkedIn thinkpieces will get you a meeting.”
That’s it for this week! For more weekly dives into the world of early stage startups, subscribe below.
Interesting read. The most important part is to deeply understand who your customer is. And then be where they are.
I agree about founders getting out there, translating their messages, and building in public. It's so hard but worth it.
Love this. As a brand strategist in tech, I’ve come to realize that there’s almost a paradox: the bigger the breakthrough, the less exciting it sounds to people. This is probably because it’s easy for us to conceptualize slight tweaks, but it’s much, much harder to imagine big changes. That’s why clear and simple communication is key. Knowing your story — specifically, being able to explain you and your idea’s past, present, and future (none more important than the other) — is crucial to getting people to pay attention (let alone then decide to care).