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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

I'm Sonal and I'm here today with Margaret Wrenmuckers, who runs the marketing team at

Andresen Horowitz, is an operating partner and co-founded one of Silicon Valley's top PR

agencies, Outcast.

And I'm here at Kim Milosevic, who used to work at Outcast, did PR at Skype and multiple other places, and is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who covers some of the most interesting companies, actually, in our portfolio.

Anyway, okay, you guys, welcome.

You work with our founders every day.

And a lot of them have questions about, first of all, why do I need PR or I want PR? And so I'd like to hear your thoughts on like some of the

best opportunities for doing PR. I mean, there's some obvious times to do it, but maybe it's not so

obvious. I think at one level, PR is a good forcing function for the CEO and the rest of the team

to really figure out what is your story. And your story is very, very important because the story and the rest of the team to really figure out what is your story. And your story is

very, very important because the story is the company and it doesn't just help you get the

article in TechCrunch or the New Yorker, both of which are great. But it helps you with

recruiting and retention, helps you raise money. It helps you explain yourself to customers.

Overall, it's an important thing to be able to know how to do,

even if you don't want to get articles at one point or another. Right. You might be a founder

who doesn't necessarily have a big name already and you can't just recruit on your own brand name.

So you may have to actually have people look you up and see that you're legitimate. It's a very

competitive environment. Yeah. And I think one of the things I talk to a lot of our founders about is that you have very few moments, especially in your early life as a company, where you have news. And so when you're dealing with like a funding announcement, a company launch, a product launch, a big customer announcement, those are the announcements that you really have to make the most out of because the rest of the time it's going to be figuring out how do you get yourself into the

existing conversation and how to maximize that. So it's sort of like how do you figure out how to

make the most of those few moments where you do have something to actually announce.

...