'Traditional PR is dead': inside Lulu Cheng Meservey's radical in-your-face playbook

Virgílio Bento was in a bind. He wanted to spread the word about his growing healthtech company, Sword Health, but the entrepreneur hated the traditional public relations playbook. He'd hired a PR agency before, which in retrospect "seems moronic," he says. "For a comms person to understand what you're saying, they need to be in the weeds." But when he tried hiring someone to run comms internally, he says, "that also sucked."

Then he shared his frustration with Delian Asparouhov, a cofounder of the spacetech startup Varda and a partner at Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund. Asparouhov told him there was only one PR person he should be talking to: Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications executive who has led messaging at companies including Substack, Anduril, and Activision — with unusual flair and aggression.

From the outset, Cheng Meservey struck Bento as radically different from other comms people. She had a no-nonsense approach. Her first piece of advice to him was: Don't let your message get diluted by your comms team, and don't depend on PR agencies to bait the media's interest. You are the founder — own your company's narrative. In short, go direct.

For Bento, it was a refreshing tack, if a little beguiling. A PR manager proselytizing the mission of "going direct" would seem to obliterate the whole point of having a PR manager in the first place. But this is Cheng Meservey's defining doctrine, and it has made her one of today's most sought-after communications gurus in Silicon Valley and beyond, particularly among high-wattage founders. Her website includes personal endorsements from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and the Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss, all three of whom attempted to hire Cheng Meservey in-house before she launched her own firm in 2024. "i super value her advice," Altman wrote to me in a text. "she is someone i love talking to."

As more tech founders follow the examples of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — shedding their communications teams and taking their messaging directly to social media and the chatty podcast circuit — it's easy to see why someone who encourages founders to unapologetically be themselves would be in demand today. "She has gotten good at teaching founders how to fish," Asparouhov says. Or as Ryan Delk, the CEO of the education startup Primer, tells me: "Lulu is the Steph Curry of comms."

Significantly less charmed by Cheng Meservey are many of her peers in the PR industry that she's set on disrupting. "People bring up Lulu all the time," one communications executive who knows Cheng Meservey tells me. "They say, 'Do you know Lulu? Isn't she the worst?'" Another snipes: "She does not have a thriving business. What she has is a thriving Twitter following."

Some of the vitriol is owed to the rumor-churning nature of PR. "If somebody is effective at communications and has a good point of view, then the industry will react to it," says Brooke Hammerling, who experienced a wave of resentment among her peers after her tech-PR firm, Brew, was featured in a splashy New York Times story. "They will feel uneasy about a new approach, so they'll criticize it."

Cheng Meservey invites the spite; it's core to her brand. The sparse landing page of her new firm, Rostra, declares: "TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD." Beneath is an 850-word "Go Direct Manifesto," in which she smears "corporate communications" as "an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee." "A founder's passion, vision, and conviction," Cheng Meservey writes, "can't be simulated by other — least of all the press-release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs." On X, she offers her 100,000 followers barb-filled, Harvard Business Review-like mini case studies on PR triumphs and blunders of the day. A recent United Airlines post was "lazy and patronizing," she declared. A memo from the founder of CrowdStrike was full of "cowardly and callous" and "legalese doublespeak," she said.

"Some people would call this self-promotion, but what Lulu does is marketing in a smart way that resonates with founders: She shows them how she thinks," Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer at Haun Ventures, says. "This flies in the face of what many tech comms people think is OK. Comms is a bit of a snake pit in this way. It's like Fight Club. They do not want you to talk about comms." (Most of the communications executives I spoke with requested anonymity.)

Cheng Meservey's vision for communications neatly aligns with today's shifting media paradigm, in which everyone — from competitors to customers — can publish their stories and screeds about companies online without depending on publicists or journalists. While there are obvious upsides to a "go direct" strategy, there are also obvious reputational risks, and it's difficult to execute at scale. For it to work, you need to stand out in the oversaturated ideas marketplace, a feat that's only becoming more challenging: "How many thought leaders do we really need? This is information overload," says one communications executive. "At the very least, you're subscribing and curating your own echo chamber."

After graduating from Yale and then the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Cheng Meservey worked for JPMorgan as a financial analyst before cofounding her first communications firm, TrailRunner International, in 2016. Its clients included the blue-chip venture firm Founders Fund and fast-growing corporations like Spotify. Even then, Cheng Meservey was known for bucking traditions.

During one 2018 meeting about a coming announcement with a corporate client, Cheng Meservey "said something along the lines of, 'You guys shouldn't put out a press release — press releases are so boring,'" Hannah Guenther, a director at TrailRunner who was on the call, says. To Guenther's surprise, the client agreed. "They were like, 'You're so right. I couldn't agree more, but we're stuck in this routine and no one wants to change,'" she says. This tendency for challenging convention stood out to a TrailRunner client that was looking to challenge the media industry, the newsletter company Substack, which Cheng Meservey joined as vice president of communications in 2021.

Cheng Meservey happened to be entering the arena of tech communications at a pivotal moment. For years, the communications divisions of the world's most influential tech companies, in an attempt to be taken more seriously by the media, hired massive teams made up of Washington-imported policy wonks and attorneys. They specialized in what one former Meta communications executive describes as "the Hillary Clinton style of communications: We figured out what people wanted us to say; then we said it." The person adds, "Sheryl Sandberg used to tell us all the time, 'As long as journalists hold the pen, you have to endear yourself to them.'" (Sandberg did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was a conciliatory strategy that relied, almost entirely, on milquetoast corporate statements and communication managers equivocating behind the veil of anonymity. To avoid public outrage at the height of cancel culture in the late 2010s, companies were instructed to deflect criticism and never own up to their mistakes. "It was all about keeping your head down, getting the press to like you, and trying to win a game that the average tech founder isn't inclined to play very well, much less win," that same former Meta exec says.

Eventually, these tactics led to an overwhelming public mistrust in the tech industry, which fueled an increasingly negative press. "The relationship collapse between media and tech came in part from the fact that tech was spewing so much bullshit through press releases that the media said, 'We can't trust direct company communications. We can only listen to disgruntled former employees,'" says Eric Newcomer, a longtime reporter who runs the tech news Substack Newcomer.

So when Cheng Meservey joined Substack and began immediately playing offense, it stood out. If, in her view, reporters got the story wrong, she called them from her personal Twitter account. "It was like, 'Oh, look, the Substack flack is going off on Twitter again," says one tech reporter who asked to speak anonymously because he wasn't authorized to talk on the record. "She was always getting into hot water, spouting off about free speech, deplatforming, that kind of thing." When The New York Times ran a critical story about Substack's "growing pains," Cheng Meservey tweeted that the piece was filled with hearsay and cherry-picking. When Wired suggested that Substack "paid extremists," she fired off a series of tweets saying the reporter put out misleading information, which eventually led to a correction on the story. Soon after, Fox News published a story under the headline "Substack executive explains journalism to Wired writer."

Cheng Meservey's unabashed stance seemed tailor-made for one particularly embattled tech company: Activision Blizzard. When she became Activision Blizzard's chief communications officer in April 2022, The Wall Street Journal had recently published two especially searing investigations involving several accounts of sexual harassment and a toxic workplace at the video game giant. The company was also embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to block Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition. (In July 2023, a federal judge ruled against the FTC's bid to delay the acquisition. In December 2023, Activision paid $54 million to settle a workplace discrimination lawsuit.)

Activision's future depended on its resurrection from the rubble of public opinion, and Cheng Meservey threw herself headfirst into the onslaught. Less than a month into her tenure, she became headline news after she was accused of union busting. After more than a dozen Blizzard quality assurance testers secured the right to hold a union vote, she told staff on Slack that unionizing might result in smaller raises and difficult conflicts with management. Her Slack messages were leaked, and Cheng Meservey doubled down on her position on Twitter. Ethan Gach, a reporter at Kotaku, wrote a story with the headline "Activision's Newest Exec Has Decided to Post Through It." In response, Cheng Meservey subtweeted Gach, inferring that he was obsessed with her.

The reporter had never before been dragged on Twitter by the chief communications officer of a multibillion-dollar company. "It was unusual," Gach says, but so was everything about the way Cheng Meservey was running comms at Activision. "Here was the head comms person for the biggest video game publisher in the United States having casual conversation about policy on Twitter."

Months later, a pitch from Activision arrived in the inbox of Stephen Totilo, a veteran gaming reporter at Axios. "It was a weird, tortured" attempt at blowing a hole in the FTC's antitrust case, Totilo says: It suggested that the HBO adaptation of Sony's video game "The Last of Us" was proof that Sony wouldn't be weakened if Microsoft bought Activision. Totilo figured he'd take Activision up on its offer to speak with Cheng Meservey. "From her work at Substack, the vibe I was expecting was, 'OK, you idiot reporter, let me tell you how wrong you are,'" he says.

Instead, he discovered the opposite: Cheng Meservey not only was more vulnerable than he'd anticipated but also answered tough questions with a sense of "humanity and thoughtfulness," he says. "She functioned radically different from any other comms person I've ever encountered in 20 years of covering gaming," he adds.

Early into her time at Activision, it was obvious that Cheng Meservey was having an outsize effect on how the company was covered. "She facilitated more journalism being done," Totilo says. For one, the company switched from dodging the press to actively, and frequently, engaging with reporters, often by text message. "I found her very charming," Totilo says. "Whether that makes me an astute observer or a chump, I'm not sure. But I prefer her strategy to the traditional approach."

Today, Cheng Meservey's growing list of clients has included people known for their bold, contrarian approach to business like Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Safe Superintelligence Inc. cofounder Ilya Sutskever (formerly of OpenAI), and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who stoked controversy this past summer when he said that he planned to forgo DEI policies and instead hire for MEI: "merit, excellence, and intelligence." Her advice has been essential to founders in moments of public scrutiny, like Varda's Asparouhov, whose company launched a capsule into space in September 2023 that was unable to return on its planned schedule because of regulatory restraints.

At the time, Asparouhov says, he was in a state of "extreme cortisol panic." Cheng Meservey was able to clearly navigate the complexity of company messaging dealing with military regulation, space travel, and, of course, announcements on X. She broke down various tactics for approaching reporters and regulators, along with a strategic narrative for company messaging. "She summarized it in this way of like, 'Look, make sure that any time you're thinking about comms, at the end of the day, your job is to make the company successful.'"

When I first reached out to Cheng Meservey, she seemed — despite her public persona — not all that into the idea of having a story written about her. "I'm not sure if I'm as interesting as your editor thinks I am," she said. "I would urge them to reconsider." Then she shifted into strategy mode. Had I considered pitching a profile of her to The New York Times?

I asked whether some of the well-known names cited on her company website, like OpenAI's Altman, might be interested in speaking with me. "Neither he nor I will want to talk about that, unfortunately, which is annoying because the work I did for them is really interesting," she said. "[Sam] has offered to pay me, but I haven't taken a penny. And OpenAI and Worldcoin are always in litigation." Then she rattled off a few names of people who might talk, including The Free Press' Weiss, who had encouraged Cheng Meservey to start her own company. ("Things are hectic here but Lulu is the best :)," Weiss wrote in an email.) Given how unusual it is for a communications executive to dish about her high-profile clients on the record, I was surprised by her candor. Was this gossipy transparency the new model of going direct?

But as I continued to report, Cheng Meservey eventually declined to speak any further on the record, save a boilerplate statement she sent over email: "I appreciate the interest and wish I could be more helpful, but we don't discuss client details. I will say that the most gratifying thing about building Rostra has been getting to see 'going direct' become a default in modern communication. The best founders are building their own platforms and their own narratives, and that's the story worth watching closely!"

Given Cheng Meservey's lively online presence, I'm certain she has far more nuanced thoughts on what it means to "go direct" in the new media paradigm. But for those, you'll have to follow her on X. Which may be the gist of Rostra's modus operandi. Why speak with a reporter when you can distill your thoughts, directly, on your own terms using social media?

Therein lies one of the obvious downsides to Cheng Meservey's strategy. Much like the founders she represents, Rostra is building a brand that's genuinely compelling, with an expressive, opinionated leader at its helm. It reminds me of something Delk, the microschool founder, told me: "If what you're building isn't interesting and you don't have conviction, then Lulu's strategy doesn't work."

Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.