Editor’s Note: This Leader Board is a Business Journal summary of a 4,500-word original essay published on the Pirate Wires website by Lulu Cheng Meservey, who managed early communications for Anduril Industries. The Business Journal’s annual list of PR firms begins on page 11. For more on Anduril, see the front page.
Before Anduril was a unicorn, it was a black sheep. Today it’s a multibillion-dollar company and a household name (at least in households with a gun safe). But in the first couple years after the company’s 2017 founding, young progressives overwhelmingly hostile to the military made Anduril’s mission anathema to many tech workers, investors and reporters.
In those early years, I had the privilege of managing Anduril’s communications as an adviser to founders Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm and Joe Chen … The work was cut out for us. Palmer’s name had been dragged through the mud for supporting Donald Trump, to the point that he was physically harassed at a conference.
The media tended not to focus on the product but on gotcha political questions … And when Anduril hosted a recruiting session at Cornell, the university had to provide armed police escorts due to threats (of potential violence) …
Once while riding an Uber from the Costa Mesa headquarters to LAX, I had a phone conversation where I mentioned being proud to work with Anduril and support the military. The Uber driver pulled off the highway and kicked me out of his car. His explanation was, “I can’t be around a person like you.”
Google, citing a violation of their terms around promoting harm, literally canceled the company—cutting off Anduril’s access to Google business solutions, analytics, and even YouTube. [Google did not respond to a Business Journal request for comment.]
Top 10
Fortunately, Anduril’s founders stuck to their guns. Here’s an inside look at the 10 core principles of Anduril’s comms strategy:
1. I can’t emphasize enough that valid goals for a startup do not include things like winning the Hottest Startup trophy from TechCrunch. In fact, those would be warning signs that you’re spending time on the wrong things. The two goals that anchored Anduril’s comms strategy were: (1) recruiting the best technical talent and (2) securing contracts with the U.S. military and its allies. Our single-minded pursuit led Anduril’s comms in unconventional directions. Rather than focusing on tech conferences, we had Palmer give guest lectures and demos to the CIA and Marine Corps.
2. Going direct means retaining control over your message by speaking directly to your audience instead of depending on middlemen … We carefully selected the mediums we used. Twitter and LinkedIn mattered because we wanted to reach DC policymakers and Silicon Valley tech talent. We preferred blog posts and longform interviews, which allowed for fleshing out ideas more fully.
3. Some of our best decisions were to turn down interviews with major outlets to focus on speaking directly to tech and defense audiences.
4. Spend time in the community: You’ll need others to take up the cause on your behalf and propagate your story in their own voice. That’s why one of Anduril’s top comms priorities was fostering a network of influencers and advocates like investors, Twitter anons, students, bloggers, ethicists, foreign policy analysts, theologians, cartoonists, and military officers. I once swapped into a middle seat on a six-hour red eye so I could chat up a Marine Corps colonel, who ended up arranging for Palmer to speak with dozens of his colleagues.
5. You win by converting a core group of true believers, not by trying to persuade the whole world. Trying to be universally liked would require becoming unrecognizably milquetoast. We weren’t pandering to the people chained to trees or glued to paintings.
6. Your company narrative should show how you’re creating something new and mind-blowing … To start, simply write down what unique thing you do, why it matters and why you’re the only team who could get it done. It needs to be human (no corpo jargon), assertive (no hedging or waffling), and specific (no hand-waving abstractions). In our case, most people in DC in 2018 didn’t know or care about Anduril, but they loved talking about AI and U.S. competition with China. Accordingly, our messaging emphasized Anduril’s AI work and the risk of falling behind foreign adversaries if DoD didn’t work with tech startups. Craft your narrative yourself. Don’t let a pack of consultants charge you for four to six weeks of listening sessions only to write up the weighted average of two dozen employee interviews. If you as the founder can’t clearly and easily articulate what you’re doing and why, comms is the least of your problems.
7. The right way to propagate any message is to start with the founders and spread the word in concentric circles outward … A common startup mistake is to prioritize external comms (flashy, fridge-worthy) over internal comms (boring, HR-adjacent). Internal comms trumps external comms every time. An external crisis is inconvenient, but an internal crisis is existential. Employees understood from the start what they were signing up for and with whom they’d be working. Even when a nasty article came out, there was no gasping, pearl clutching or demand for listening sessions.
8. Win Over the Tribal Elders, the people that everyone else admires and respects. Go to them first, pay your respects, establish common interests, tell them what you’re doing and convince them to support you. If you succeed, they will become the nodes of influence that will spread your message to their communities more effectively and credibly than you can.
Go to them before you need something, and definitely before any crisis. The relationship must be well-established before you make any kind of ask. Imagine getting a “Gondor calls for aid” message when you’ve never heard of Gondor.
9. Take More Risk Than You Think You Should: Too often, corporate communications are high volume but low substance, like a shopping bag filled with other shopping bags … As a startup founder, your greatest enemy is the status quo, and your upside is uncapped. This competitive advantage shouldn’t be squandered lightly. Startups might try to mitigate perceived reputation risk by overly scripting or muzzling their founders. The much greater risk lies in stifling a founder’s originality, muting their passions, and depriving the company of its most powerful evangelist. Let founders be founders.
Many of Anduril’s best PR moments have come from letting Palmer be Palmer. Case in point: a few years ago, he was asked to give a talk at the Air Force Procurement conference in Orlando. The decorous thing to do would’ve been to offer some pablum about collaboration. Naturally, Palmer used his remarks to lay into the Air Force about how terrible it was to work with them and why everything about their procurement process was broken. It could have ended in disaster but as it turned out, the Air Force loved it—so much that they invited him back to the same conference to give the same talk to a new crowd the following year. One of the biggest risks we took was in 2018 to work with law enforcement and the armed services when it was downright taboo.
Salesforce critics organized an open letter and street protest demanding the company stop working with Customs and Border Protection. Google employees successfully bullied their bosses into backing out of a contract with the DoD. We didn’t sugarcoat the mission, and we didn’t make it family friendly. The purpose of Anduril’s technology was to close the kill chain, enhance lethality, and scare the crap out of adversaries. Our customer was the U.S. military, not Paw Patrol.
In 2018, we placed an op-ed signed by Palmer and Trae in The Washington Post, arguing that the U.S. is a global force for good, therefore equipping the U.S. with the most advanced military capabilities is a duty for American entrepreneurs.
10. Even now, a key element of Palmer’s lore is that he survived multiple cancellation attempts, emerging unscathed from the ashes of a media dumpster fire like a goateed, bikini-clad phoenix. Anduril’s campaign worked because the founders led the charge. Comms teams are important and necessary, but not sufficient. Mission-driven startups need founder-led comms. Only founders can be the chief evangelists for their company.
