Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and this is our crisis segment. I'm not in crisis,

but we have two people here who know everything about crisis. Judy Smith, founder of crisis management firm Smith and Company.

She's an author and the real life Olivia Pope. So if you haven't caught up on your episodes of scandal, go online and catch up

right now. Also with us today is Margaret Venmockers, a partner here at Andrewson Horowitz, the co-founder

of tech comms firm, Outcast, and the person in Silicon Valley who everyone turns to in a crisis.

So Judy Margut, welcome. I know, right? So this is all

crisis all the time right now. And so let's get into crisis mode. Let's start with the basics.

And Judy, let's just define crisis. When do I know that things are really not headed in the right

direction?

Anytime I don't get any sleep, which is most of the time, I might add.

Look, you know, I think a crisis really is anything that, whether it's an individual or corporation corporation really fundamentally believes that it is going

to affect their brand and in fact affect their reputation as well.

I don't know, Margaret, do you think?

Yeah, I know.

I agree.

It's sort of like, what do people think of you today and then all of a sudden you find

yourself in a situation where if you don't resolve

this well, they'll never think of you in the same way ever after and are unlikely to believe

you or buy your product. So I want to get to unlikely to believe you and or buy your product,

but what flavors do crises take? Are they, is it sort of a consistent theme of somebody didn't tell the truth,

somebody did something wrong, what is it? They involve any range of things in here in Silicon Valley

can be as simple as a site outage that is persistent, you know, Twitter back in the way in the day

...