Crafting Brand Intent for Greater Customer Impact
Rachel Konrad, Chief Brand Officer at The Production Board, shares her mission for crafting brand intent first and foremost in order to make greater customer impact.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Me In Studios.
And today I am joined by a very special guest, Rachel.
How are you?
- I am great.
Thank you so much, Ian, for having me.
It's a real honor.
You've got some illustrious people
in your podcast alumni network.
So I'm not worthy to be here, but happy nonetheless.
And I'm really psyched to talk to you.
- Beyond worthy, and I'm beyond excited
to chat about all the cool stuff that you're doing
at the production board, and also all the other stuff,
cool stuff that you've done in your career,
in marketing and all other places.
So let's get started.
What was your first job?
- Oh, good.
- The marketing.
- Yeah, my first job was actually delivering newspapers
when I was about 15 years old.
I did that.
And then I got to say, after that,
my first job for Real Z's was at CBS.
So I was selling, you know, NAGZEMA and Acne Cream
and shaving cream and, you know, alcohol
to everyone in my neighborhood near Detroit, Michigan.
- You have served at some of the most
illustrious brands and companies,
like Tesla and Impossible Foods.
And now you're at the production board.
Can you tell us a little bit about
what it means to be the chief brand officer?
- Yeah, so this is an all new role at the production board.
It's one that a role that a lot of venture capital companies
are starting to take interest in
and adopt in their own organizations.
Basically, I spend, over the course of a year, I'd say,
I spend, you know, over half of my time working directly
with all of our portfolio companies,
sometimes as the interim CMO before they hire one,
or sometimes working directly with the CMO,
working directly with the CEO,
doing everything from re-brands to, you know,
website launches to coming out of stealth mode, media training.
And then the other part of my time, you know,
30%, 40% of my time, I work directly with Dave Friedberg
and the other investment partners at the production board,
promoting awareness about what we do,
not only to, you know, the media
and in thought leadership circles at universities
and elsewhere, but on podcasts and also to prospective,
just prospective entrepreneurs who want to talk to us
about investments, it's a really interesting job
and no day is ever the same.
Yeah, it seems like no day is ever the same.
And you have not just, you know, working with startups,
but an important mission as well to decarbonize earth.
I mean, how important is that to you?
How important is it to evangelize that mission?
- Well, I mean, to me personally,
it's incredibly important, you know, in 1991,
I took a class at Northwestern University
called Environmental History of the United States
and it profoundly shaped my view.
I was this kid who was born and raised in Detroit
in the auto industry.
I applied for the Lee Ia Koka Fellowship, you know,
to go to college, all that kind of stuff.
And I was really in the belly of the beast of, you know,
big autos and big oil, frankly.
And it wasn't until I got to college that I realized,
whoa, you know, there's this anthropogenic
global warming thing that's starting to happen more and more.
There's biodiversity collapse.
It's getting pretty, pretty major.
And so I spent about a decade as a journalist
trying to work on the problem.
I, as a journalist, covered the EV1,
the debut of the first electric car from General Motors.
And it's demise.
I started covering the Toyota Prius,
the first sort of really alternative power,
powertrain that got traction with mainstream Americans
and people around the world.
And then when I moved out to Silicon Valley,
I was covering technology as a journalist
and decided, man, maybe there's something more I can do,
you know, I can have a bigger impact
than just writing objectively about this stuff.
And so I applied at the time to this utterly obscure company
that no one had heard of and got a job
as the head of communications.
I asked all of my friends in Detroit,
including at the time the heads of communications
at General Motors and Chrysler, who are some of my mentors.
And they said, you're nuts.
Don't go to the, what's it called?
Telset Tesla.
I've never even heard of this company.
No, who is this?
Elon Musk, who is this guy?
But I was really drawn to the company.
I took the job and it was insane.
And obviously it was like the most important, you know,
career fulcrum that I've ever had.
I learned so much in just a few years.
And it really made me understand that actually, you know,
getting a career in an industry that is significantly,
in a startup that's significantly trying to decarbonize
Earth and make a difference is actually one of the most
rewarding things you could possibly ever do.
So I talked to a lot of students and other people about it.
I think it's really something that anyone can do.
It's pretty important.
It's got high degree of job satisfaction.
And you actually have a multi-generational future impact.
So it's a pretty sweet spot for me.
Let's go to our first segment, the Trust Tree,
where you can go and go honest and trusted
and share those deepest, darkest marketing secrets.
Obviously working directly for Elon,
working in Comset Tesla, a place that does marketing
completely different than anywhere else on the globe.
How did that sort of shape your view of marketing?
- Oh man, I mean, it profoundly shaped my view of marketing.
And I know this is gonna sound really weird
and controversial on this particular program,
but it honestly made me absolutely despise
conventional marketing.
20th century conventional marketing is just purely
a waste of money and resources that should be spent elsewhere.
So just to put this in perspective,
I was doing some data analysis on this issue.
If you take the top 10 global car makers by volume,
so Ford, Honda, Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, et cetera,
the top 10 spend well over 100 billion with a B,
$10 per year on advertising, marketing,
and direct consumer incentives.
That is basically $10 billion a year,
just to steal, if you're lucky, one or two market share points
away from your rival, your intense rival,
whether that's in Stuttgart or Yokohama or Paris
or Detroit, right?
And if the world could take that $100 billion,
it's just torched on like Super Bowl ads
and dumbass tennis championship sponsorships
and stuff like that.
And spend it on actual R&D and core innovation,
we today would already have robotic solar powered,
flying drone fleet helicopters all over the place
with zero fatalities and zero emissions, right?
But we don't.
We don't spend it on frankly kind of trivial stuff.
And Elon is the one who taught me that, right?
Like let them, the big incumbents, torch money
on stupid stuff.
We won't do that.
We will take all of the revenue we generate from sales
and plow that not in ads or just sort of like breathless,
you know, buzzy campaigns, but to a better, better car,
which is why today the Tesla, you know, model three,
model X, model Y, they're at least 10 years ahead
of anything else at any price point, frankly.
And that's by the auto industry's own admission,
you know, six to 10 years ahead.
So it really taught me that the most disruptive companies
are the ones that not only think different
from the tech perspective,
but even from an advertising marketing perspective,
you know, you have to really reimagine,
you have to really reimagine the playing field.
And the moment that you, especially as a startup,
moment you adopt the incumbents chessboard
and try to play against them at their level,
you're screwed.
You can't out spend Toyota, right, on ads.
They have more money than anyone else.
You can't out spend Hyundai Kia on golf
and, you know, tennis tournaments.
They out sponsor everyone, right?
So don't try, you know, you play your own game,
have your own media messaging, your own channels,
do it yourself and spend as much as you can
on the core technology and the product.
- Yeah, I obviously, I agree with a lot of what you said
and I disagree with part of it.
But I'll get into that in a second.
But I think it's so true.
It's like what my personal marketing philosophy
is like fight where you can win 'cause I grew up.
- Yeah.
- I spent my farm in years in the army
and that's what you do when you're in the army, right?
Like you don't fight people that you can't beat
and you figure out a way to win.
And I fundamentally believe that like most great marketing
is asymmetrical in some way that they're gonna figure out
a way to do something, be where your competitors are at
or be where your competitors are in a way that they aren't,
whether it's from a positioning standpoint or whatever.
The thing I will say, my one quibble with what you said
is that the $100 million goes to nothing.
It does fuel a lot of the content and programming
that we get so there is value to it there.
But I think that most marketing teams
would rather just do what their peers are doing
because they're probably not gonna get fired
because a one to 2% difference is never gonna get you fired,
right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- And then it's like once the bottom of the boat falls out
and you lose 5% points or 10% points
and you're like, well, I was just doing whatever I was doing.
And then you get fired 'cause you have the bad quarter.
It's like the people who are doing that
were making investments like five years ago that you weren't.
So.
- It's also, you know, to your point exactly.
If you can steal one or two or three percentage points
of market share from, if you're, you know,
I spent five years working at Renault Nissan Mitsubishi,
top three global car groups.
So I get it that there's a very different game
in the incumbent world than in the startup world.
In that incumbent world, you know,
if Nissan could steal two percentage points
of market share from Toyota in the United States,
the world's most profitable single, you know,
most high margin auto selling region.
People's entire careers are made out of that, right?
So it's almost the opposite.
It's not like people are saying,
oh, if I just lose, you know, one or two points,
it doesn't really matter.
It's more like, if I just gain one or two points,
that's like a lifetime career all-star achievement, right?
And you can do that based on conventional sort of, you know,
consistent cranking out marketing stuff.
But if you're Tesla and you need to go
from literally zero awareness, zero revenue,
zero cars on the market to your goal,
which is to replace effectively every single car and truck
with electric propulsion, you know, battery powered cars,
you cannot use the same playbook
that is meant to gain you a couple of points of market share.
Just doesn't exist, just not the right playbook.
So this is the problem that I see,
I do a lot of, you know, work with startups
across a lot of different industries now
in the venture capital world.
And that is probably the biggest problem
that I see with startups is that they are trying
to replicate a playbook that is inherently meant
for the incumbents who just have billions
and billions of dollars to spend on this stuff.
You cannot do that.
- Have you ever heard the story of the Apple Knowledge Navigator?
- No, what's that?
- Okay, so back in like 1987,
Apple outlined this idea of called the Knowledge Navigator.
I give a talk on how marketers can create the future
and this was in there, so I know the story a little bit.
But basically, long story short,
they're coming up on Mac world,
they wanted to create this device,
they wrote this basically a video,
they created a video for like 60 grand
and it was called the Knowledge Navigator.
And basically, it was an iPad.
It's not quite, but this is like 25 years before the iPad.
And so basically, they just came out with this video,
they never even made the product
and they released it in Mac world
and it was sort of like basically someone
skyping with someone in like a video call in Brazil
but this is like, you know, in 1980.
So it basically everyone was like,
oh, that's crazy, the future, like what is it gonna be?
And so it inspired a bunch of people
and to the people that had inspired
or Steven Spielberg and Peter Schwartz
and they ended up making my minority report in 2002
based partly off of this idea of this Knowledge Navigator
and then they inspired sort of a next generation.
So one of the things that I think about marketing
that's so powerful is like the ability to tell stories
and the ability to influence a generation of people
by being forward looking and forward thinking.
And like to me, Tesla marketing was always that right.
It was, so don't tell marketing of like,
we're gonna show you what the future can be.
And everyone else is just sort of like showing you
what is the new car this year?
And like it's such a completely different mindset
of like we are creating the future
and everyone else is stuck in the past.
And like that is what any early adopter wants
is to be in the future.
And it's just like a remarkable headwind that you get
when you are the one who is cool and innovative.
Yeah, anyway.
- Yeah, no, it's true.
And it's a future that is going to happen whether,
this is why it's so powerful.
It's this future of in this case,
electric propulsion, electric drivetrains
in virtually every car that's out there,
that is gonna happen.
And it's gonna frankly happen whether or not Elon
was ever born, whether or not Tesla exists
or manifests itself in exactly this way.
Because petroleum is a very, very finite natural resource.
And ergo, it will go away.
It's not sustainable and therefore,
it's not sustainable as a business model either.
And so this is the true power of the Tesla model
of comms and marketing,
which is that we're just here trying to accelerate
the future that we know we're all destined for.
And the future we frankly all deserve,
clean electric energy propulsion systems.
And we're just trying to accelerate it.
Like that is the simplicity of it.
It's you don't even have to buy our car.
We don't care.
Go buy another electric car.
If you buy any electric car,
you're not part of the problem.
If you're buying a gas guzzler, that's the problem.
That's what we want to wean you off of.
And so we're just here to provide more options
for people who want a car that is clean,
but frankly is safer, has a better user interface,
has better interior ergonomics,
has vastly better,
nits a crash test, safety ratings,
all that kind of stuff.
And the fact that it happens to be electric,
man, that's just icing on the cake.
I remember the first time that I heard about Tesla,
I was talking to a friend's parent,
who's a big car guy.
He had like, I don't know what he had,
maybe a super or something.
He had some little fast.
And he would go and ride in via,
I'd live in the Bay Area.
He would go ride in like,
hills in the Bay Area and hit all the turns and love whatever.
And he said that the moment that he was converted
was the first second he stepped on the gas pedal,
the Tesla.
Well, it's the accelerator.
It's not the gas pedal.
Yeah, it's just, yeah, right?
Ruby-age matters.
The accelerator and the long pedal on the right.
And he's like, and it took off and he's like, that was hooked.
And I, you know, I was,
however old I was at the time,
I'd never even heard of what a Tesla was.
I wouldn't press my foot on an accelerator of a Tesla
for 10 years later.
And I still remember that story.
I remember where I was sitting and standing
and seeing a devout car guy.
That was, his whole life was transformed to that point.
This is someone who loved cars and loved
specifically like engines forever.
And it was completely changed.
And like, that is the type of storytelling,
accelerating word of mouth that we talk about
and marketing all the time.
It's so hard to do, but that's a story.
Well, and that's a totally dork out,
but I mean, I'm from Detroit.
Like we talk about cars at, you know, happy hour.
And the reason that that is true is because, you know,
electric cars are actually really, really, really,
really well suited to extremely good zero to 60 acceleration.
Because like, think about when you turn on a light,
you know, it's either on or off, you know,
you're not like cranking it up, you know,
and then it's cranking down, you know,
it's either on or off.
So you have that whole power band
right from the moment you hit the accelerator.
And so you get vastly better torque,
even in a shitty electric car,
you get vastly better torque than in a Lambo or Ferrari
because of that fundamental physics issue
that you have going in your favor.
So, you know, one of the things that I think Tesla did
really well, which is another learning experience for me
that I applied at Impossible Foods and elsewhere
is you have to understand the consumer prioritization,
sort of what matters to the consumer.
And for cars, a lot of it is zero to 60.
A lot of it is safety, right?
'Cause you're gonna put me and my family in this vehicle.
I trust you with my life car, right?
Every single day.
And then a lot of it is also interior ergonomics,
how comfortable is it?
And it's user interface, right?
I mean, how many times have, you know, like knobs
and all that, it just seems so archaic, you know?
And so Tesla really nailed all of those things, right?
And a lot of the other stuff, I mean,
it had to kind of get in the right zone.
It had to be in the same zone as the,
whatever Toyota Camry or Honda Accord,
but it didn't have to have, you know,
the body panel gaps of, you know, a Mercedes.
It just had to deliver the body panel gaps of a, you know,
Nissan Centra or something, right?
Because that's not, most consumers don't get out there
and like measure every day the body panel gaps.
But they do really get a kick from the torque,
from they wanna have the giant touchscreen,
the beautiful sort of user experience that the Teslas have.
And so you pay attention to those things.
Then we did the same thing,
very same philosophy at Impossible Foods.
It's like, what really matters to people?
It's not that their meat comes from a severed corpse
of a ground up sentient being.
No one cares about that.
In fact, we try not to think about that, right?
Like, so what we care about is number one,
overwhelmingly the taste,
number two, the nutritional aspect of it,
number three, the convenience, you know,
slap it on the grill, it's easy.
And number four, the price, right?
So if you can deliver a food product, right?
That taste just as good or better than meat from a cow,
that delivers the nutrition, which is a very easy low bar
'cause beef from cows is actually horrific
for cardiovascular breath, every aspect of human health.
And it's convenient, you can put it in stir fries
or lasagna or burgers or whatever,
it acts just the same as the food you know and love.
And it's at the same price point, then you're off,
then it's done, game over for the cow.
- Sounds impossible.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
But it's not, it's actually a lot easier than you think
if you break it down into these,
what does the consumer want?
What does the consumer care about?
And everything else is just not even something
you should overly worry about.
You just have to be in the same zone
of the incumbents on those,
but you have to dominate the few things
that really profoundly matter to the customer.
- I think part of the stories of Tesla and Impossible,
which I'm curious to hear your takes on
is about this sort of like absence of marketing.
And I think that it's, I think that that's not true.
I think that the absence of buying advertising
is what was happening.
Because as a comms person,
Tesla was written about,
is still written about every day.
I mean, Elon is in the news literally 50 times a day.
- Well, Elon owns Twitter, right?
I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- But Tesla has been, I mean, you tell me,
like Tesla has been in the news every single day
for, I mean, a decade, right?
And so, I think that there is so much,
yeah, more than that, 15 years.
There's so much marketing happening with Tesla.
There's so much word of mouth.
There's so much in the customer experience of Tesla.
When you meet someone and they tell you all,
oh my, this is what it was like.
And I designed it on my phone and I picked it up.
And like, there's all these things,
marketing activities that are happening
that were planned, that are thought about,
that are carefully crafted and considered.
They just aren't buying advertising in bulk on TV stations.
And like, that is a huge departure
from how things were done,
but it doesn't mean that there's not marketing.
- I would say that there is thought,
a lot of thought, a lot of intention
around the mission of the companies,
both Impossible and Tesla.
There is a lot of intention that is put into the brand,
ethos, the employment deed,
the people you hire, all of that kind of stuff.
And the goal is not for us to be thumping our chests,
telling our story in our own words,
using a lot of marketing jingo.
The goal is users.
The goal is having user-generated content,
having your true believers, your advocates,
persuading and convincing and converting
the non-believers, right?
That is the goal.
And the fact that Tesla has never done
a conventional video advertisement, for example,
is a really great case in point.
They don't have to,
because there's literally hundreds of thousands
of videos out there of people punch in the accelerator
and driving it plaid and driving in,
turn the volume up to 11 and drive it in crazy mode, right?
And that's the vastly more credible,
better advertisement, right?
It's not, it's a testimonial.
We used to call them at Tesla,
testimonials, right?
That is vastly better,
because it's one thing for me to try to go create,
the next 1984 ad, right?
Apple's famous 1984 ad,
but it's actually way more powerful
for 150,000 users to each do a little video
that they post on their own social feeds,
that you ENC, because it's your father-in-law,
or your best friend or whatever.
Like that's actually much more resonant with most people
than a big budget, giant day ad.
And it's something that's frankly more sustainable.
And the fact that it doesn't cost a fraction
of the $5 million that costs just to buy the Super Bowl ad time,
that's money that you then put back into the car,
into the R&D, into the innovation piece of it.
So again, when I moved over to Impossible Foods,
I thought, whoa, here's a really interesting opportunity
to apply that to a product that instead of being 50
or $100,000 like the Teslas,
this is a product that's like five bucks at Burger King,
and so the UGC, user-generated content engine at Impossible,
we really honed it to optimize for that.
So even we thought, again, it goes to the thoughtfulness
of it, we thought about things like,
oh, what if we had toothpicks with flags
that said Impossible that people could stick in,
and then when they're biting the burger
and showing on a video, showing their friends
that it bleeds, that it's got rare meat inside of it,
it would say Impossible, like let's do that, right?
And so there's a lot of thought and intentions,
not some haphazard thing,
but it's not at all geared toward us telling you,
consumer, what the best thing that you can do is
with your money, it's about you making that choice,
and then you telling other people,
that's why it's so sticky and so effective.
- Yeah, I would add to that too,
that I mean, my personal belief on this is like,
I think probably Tesla could start spending money
on ads in a unique way,
but because to accelerate testimonials,
but I also think that like the thing to me
that one of the things that sold me on Tesla being cool,
I don't know, by the way, I should say,
and also I should say that you're doing this interview
in a Tesla, right?
So they're also great for podcast recordings.
- Yeah, I should say I'm doing it
because my dog is going nuts inside barking,
so I'm just trying to find a little haven't I don't
normally work in the car, but yeah.
- Yeah, but you know, and the show is about B2B marketing
and taking lessons there,
and like so much B2B marketing is about testimonials,
it's about accelerating word of mouth,
it's about accelerating the customer experience,
and being able to like try before you buy
and all these things, executive briefing centers,
there's all these like, it's much more complex than B2B
because of those reasons, but like, there's at the mall,
you see Tesla has the car sitting there,
like I remember my nephew at whatever, five years old,
got to sit and crawl around and be in a Tesla,
first time in a Tesla, he went home and told his mom,
he told his, oh my gosh, like I was just in a Tesla
for the first time, like that sort of stuff is so cool,
the impossible flags, that's another good one.
I mean Burger King obviously marketed the living heck
out of the impossible burger.
- Oh, you'd be surprised actually.
- Oh really?
- Yeah, I mean Burger King, it was actually
the most successful launch that Burger King has ever had,
they spent no money effectively,
they did one video on it.
- Oh really?
- When they launched it, yeah, it was really all
about word of mouth, and again, you know,
I don't work for Impossible or Tesla,
and I certainly don't work for Burger King,
but you know, Burger King, when they first approached
Impossible, they said, you know, Burger King
is a really interesting company in that their core audience
is older than that of McDonald's and others, right?
And so their core user is something like,
I'm just kind of spitballing it,
it's like a 52 year old white guy in the excerpts
of America, right, like not as much urban penetration
as mothers, and so they were like,
we're getting a lot of customers who come in
and they want like a vegan option for their daughter
or for their girlfriend or something like that.
And you guys have the best product in the business,
what do you think about collaborating?
And we were like happy to talk,
but like time out on this idea that you're gonna just put it
in the vegan ghetto on the menu and wrap it in like
Russell Sprouts and serve it with oatmeal or something,
that's disgusting.
And the amazing thing about this product is that, you know,
it can legitimately take the place of your flagship product,
which is the Whopper, right?
The most, you know, the most important brand
in the Burger King Empire is obviously Burger King
and the second most is Whopper.
And so we were like, you need to make this a Whopper
and it needs to be center menu
because it's center of plate for consumers, right?
And don't put sprouts on it,
don't put it in like disgusting pink wrapping.
And again, don't put it with the salads,
which are brown and sucky, right?
Like make this, really go for it
and call it the impossible Whopper.
And the head of marketing at the time,
the Sprilling Guy and he was like, I get it.
Like immediately, as soon as I said that,
I totally get it, that's what we're gonna do.
It's gotta be the Whopper and we're gonna go nuts with it,
right?
And he really took it.
He became this huge ambassador for the product,
for doing it a very different way
than the initial product development team thought.
And I think that's what was so shocking and surprising, right?
And you saw some other companies,
Beyond Meat and others that would roll out
with like, the McPlants, the plant-based planty burger
that's full of plants and it's good for you.
And it's like, no, don't do that.
That's not what people want.
Like especially if they're going to a fast food restaurant
and ordering a burger, they're not obsessing
over the cholesterol or anything like that.
Like you're already giving them a much better product, right?
And don't worry about these things in the value equation
that they don't want, right?
And by doing that, you're sort of liberating
your core customer who might only go there once or twice a week
to get it every day.
'Cause suddenly you've got no cholesterol in the patty.
You've got a fraction of the calories and the fat
and all of the stuff, like go for that market.
It's the more interesting play.
So you'd be surprised at how little Burger King spent
because it was actually much more about that word of mouth
interest and the placement.
- Interesting.
- Yeah.
So to your point, there's a lot of marketing involved, right?
But it's more thoughtful about the brand and the placement,
you know, the coloring of the package,
all of that kind of stuff, the name of the package.
It's not about just advertising the hell out of it.
- Well, yeah.
And I remember seeing it everywhere at launch.
So maybe it does just, you know, I'm sort of
recounting it in my mind.
I thought, I would have thought that Burger King
did spend an absolute bolo on advertising that
because I felt like I saw it everywhere when I launched.
My point is that like marketing exists primarily
in the six inches between your years, right?
It's like the coolest marketing, the best marketing,
is done the most creatively with constraints
to figure out a way to do things that other people
can't do, won't do, and to work, you know,
something different.
Okay, let's get to the amazing work that you're doing at TPP.
- Such a cool company, such a cool portfolio.
What are some of the types of companies
that you're working with right now?
- Yeah, okay.
So the production board is a venture capital firm
that's based in the Presidio in San Francisco.
And, you know, virtually the entire portfolio
is geared toward companies that are decarbonizing earth,
that are helping, you know, to rewild earth
and restore biodiversity and that are improving
public health.
And in other words, making at least a hundred X improvement
in the big old systems of production that used to, you know,
crank out, you know, energy, vehicles, food,
everything else that we live by.
So the portfolio includes a number of companies
in the food tech space and in the ag tech space.
The founder of the company is this guy named Dave Friedberg,
whose first company was the Climate Corporation,
which he sold in 2013 to Monsanto for $1.1 billion.
It was the world's first digital agronomy company.
And so a lot of the portfolio is related
to his work in food and ag tech.
And then we also have a company called,
this super interesting one called Super Gut,
which is a gut microbiome nutrition company
that sells food products that are geared to reduce
your blood sugar levels, your A1C levels,
through all natural ingredients,
helps you lose weight, helps you maintain better mood,
sleep better, boot better, everything.
It's a pretty amazing set of products
that are geared toward, you know, restoring public health.
And then we've also got a bunch of other investments
in, you know, the future of manufacturing,
in the future of the way we produce materials
and energy and a whole bunch of things.
So it's a super exciting place to be.
And like I said, it's a real learning curve.
I, on any given day, I'm doing something different.
And there was even one day earlier this year,
where in a single morning, I was researching
nucleosynthesis and bio mining
and decentralized finance, you know,
like that's become my life.
So it's really pretty interesting
we were talking before, like at impossible foods or Tesla,
those were not easy jobs at all.
And I would never have described them that way.
But now when I look back at them,
I feel like I could indulge in, you know,
very deeply in single verticals, right?
And, you know, I could know everything about
the impact of animal agriculture on our planet.
And that was good enough.
Or at Tesla, I could take all of my wealth of knowledge
about the auto industry and apply it
to battery production and startups and, you know,
photovoltaic, you know, powered cars
and all that kind of stuff.
So super, super fun.
Now it's like every single day, I need a PhD in something
that I don't have, right?
It's pretty fascinating.
- Let's get to our next segment, the playbook,
where you talk about where you open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you
and those companies win.
I don't even know what you would say
or your uncutable budget items at this point,
but could you just sort of talk through some of the ways
that your portfolio companies invest in marketing
or that you recommend that startup should invest in marketing
with all of the caveats that it depends
based on what you're doing.
- Yeah, obviously.
Well, the one thing I would say,
and I'm the people on the finance team,
like the CFOs that I work with, they always love me
because my attitude is like literally everything
in marketing and comms you should and can be able to cut
if you have to, right?
Like you can collapse this down to zero if you have to.
And I really believe that.
I actually can't stand it when I work with people
who are like, nope, we cannot function without X, Y, or Z.
And I'm like, the why are you here, right?
I mean, just, so anyway, I believe,
especially for startups and hiring people
who are Swiss Army knives, right?
Who can do a lot of different things.
You can flex way out of their comfort zone,
who can do social media one day
and who can help me put an event the next day
and who are good at internal comms
because that's always needed, et cetera, right?
Who are real Jacks of all trades.
That's really the name of the game and startup.
So I don't think that there should be ever
an uncuttable budget.
That's just not the reality of startups.
The reality of startups is that every single one
during any piece of the economic cycle
is that you raise a round,
you make some key hires on your team,
you expand budgets, you can hire an agency,
you can do what you need.
And then you start getting closer
to burning through all of your cash.
You start seeing that ticking talk of the runway, right?
And you pull stuff back in, you make budget cuts,
you call your agency, I am so sorry, I've got to stop,
got a halt, I got to cut it in half,
cut the budget in half, do all that kind of stuff.
You have to do riffs, you have to make all these hard calls,
right?
And then, you know, get another round and all right,
great, back on again, right?
That's just the reality, that's the rhythm
of Silicon Valley startups.
And if you as a marketer can't roll with that,
like go to a big incumbent and try your luck there
because the reality of what startups do
is that they have to flex according
to how much money is in the bank.
- I would say that marketing is uncuttable.
And you can define marketing how you choose,
but like there's two things that companies do, right?
They make stuff and they sell stuff.
And the sell stuff is your revenue generation function.
- Yeah. - And if your go to market function
doesn't align like with your strategy,
with your product, like all that stuff,
if you haven't thought about it, you're gonna fail.
I know so many founders that don't think
about go to market strategy,
whether it's sales driven or marketing driven
or bottom up or top down or whatever you wanna do.
And they fail because of that.
So like my piece on what you said is,
I think generally that's all very true.
But I think that when you don't invest in marketing,
however you define that, you will lose
if you're not thoughtful about it.
- I agree, I don't think we're too far off on this.
I will just say, I know right now we're in
a real period of doldrums in tech investing.
There are a lot of great companies
that they have two months, three months of runway, right?
You gotta make some really hard choices
because you just don't know when that next infusion,
that next investment is gonna come in.
And I know multiple, multiple marketers
who it's just down to like the CMO and chat GPT at this point.
I mean, that's just reality
and you have to be okay with that.
So if you get too precious about like
preserving the marketing budget,
I mean, often you're just depleting cash
and that's going to either make you hit the wall,
go into the zone of insolvency
or you're just gonna dilute your own shares
going forward in the next round
if you require a big budget just for marketing.
I'm talking like mission-based startups, right?
You do need to have a mission
that you can articulate.
And that's something, I'm always shocked
at the number of companies I dive into either
as a consultant or we're looking at a company
or considering investing in it or something,
you ask the founder,
like why does your company exist with the mission?
And it's some rambling,
soliloquy about the technology and the physics
and the MIT thesis paper and all,
and it's like, whoa, what problem do you exist to solve?
And so when I think about the work that I've done
for other startups,
a lot of it is really doing some very basic brand articulation,
like what is your thesis?
Why does your company exist?
If your company is successful, how will it change the world?
How will the whole world look different
as a result of your company and its technology, right?
There are a lot of companies out there
that just don't even have that yet.
And so they tack on this marketing stuff.
I've dealt with companies before as a consultant
where they have like two, three people working on social media
and they don't have an articulated mission
for why they exist.
And I'm like, what are you doing, right?
So I find that when I say everything is cuttable,
I mean a lot of the staff, a lot of the programs,
a lot of the campaigns should be cuttable,
but it always goes back to that core story
and that core articulation of your mission.
That to me is not cuttable.
And that is where I actually think companies
could spend more money, could spend more time,
whether it's bringing on someone to help with it
or bringing on a consultant or doing some workshopping
or something that is really, really helpful.
- I think too that a really good point that you're making,
which is one that I got from a CFO years ago,
is you need to have a triaged,
plan of what you cut in order as a CEO.
Of like, who do we cut, when do we cut, whatever?
Like, what is the order of operations
in which that has to happen?
And then where are the milestones
in which those cuts need to happen?
That's one of those things that like,
it's easy to be a sort of, you know, peacetime founder
and much harder to be a wartime founder.
- Yeah, what I always advise CEOs,
I talk to a lot of CEOs, I mean, every week about this.
Like, you need to tell me,
I will help you flesh out and articulate the mission,
why your company exists, how the world will look better
because of your company, right?
I can help you do that if you can't do it
and demically inside.
But I then need to work with you a lot,
you pretty much need to tell me who your key stakeholders are,
you know, and you can't say everyone, right?
That's what they all say,
"We wanna be everything to everyone,
"it's gonna be amazing, we're 100% awareness,
"and blah, blah, blah, no, you don't need that."
Usually somewhere between seed and series B or C, right?
You're key stakeholders are prospective investors
'cause you need new investors.
Maybe media, if you wanna get the word out
in some specific way, and maybe it's, you know,
regulators and policymakers, maybe it's, you know,
the FDA in the case of impossible foods,
you need to get approval on some of its ingredients.
Or maybe it's, you know, early adopter consumers
who are gonna buy $150,000, you know,
Lotus Chassis with a Tesla engine in it, I don't know, right?
Like, give me three stakeholder groups
and I will put together, you know,
messages for those audiences.
And then we'll then talk about tactics,
whether it's social media or old fashioned press releases
or outreach to business press,
or thought leadership programs at universities or whatever,
we'll put that in place then.
I see too many companies put the tactical marketing cart
way before the message and the stakeholder groups.
That is just the key thing for me that's invaluable.
- Yeah, I think, you know, my piece on this is like,
you need to be obviously as close as humanly possible
to the people who will actually spend money
who are not your friends on your product
and earning those conversations.
However you wanna do that, sales marketing,
go to market, whatever, you need to be booking
those conversations, having those conversations
and convincing people to give you their money.
And whether that's online or whether it's in person
or whether it's like how or just on your website
or whatever it is, they're like, that is the gold star,
like having those conversations,
learning what they're saying, learning how they're buying,
why they're not buying, all those things.
Like, if you ain't doing that,
like your business will not survive.
- Yeah, exactly.
- You have no chance.
- Yeah, I mean, that's, you know,
the Jeff Bezos sort of, you know,
super obsession with the customer, right?
I mean, and in early stages of business,
your customers, especially before you have revenue,
before you have a product on the market, right?
Like your customers are effectively, you know,
the people who will give you money, including investors,
prospective investors, maybe it's, you know,
government programs or others, right?
Like, think really critically about
who your key stakeholders are.
- Okay, let's get into our final segment here.
We're gonna do quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers,
just like how quickly qualified
helps companies generate pipeline faster,
tap in your greatest essay.
Website to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversation.
Quick and easy, just like these questions,
go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Start sales conversations, quickly, quick hits, Rachel.
Are you ready?
(laughs)
- Whoa, yeah, that's intimidating.
Yes, I'll try, I'll try.
- Intimidating, like you wanna go to Qualified.com,
we're intimidating, just like, quick hits.
- No, like after that amazing monologue, that was great.
I'm gonna go to Qualified.com today.
I like that, like where your head's at.
What's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
- I can stand on my head upside down,
obviously, longer than probably anyone.
I do it a lot.
- Do you have a favorite book, podcast, or TV show
that you're checking out that you'd recommend?
- Oh, man, this is a really, really hard one.
A book that I have read in the past year
that was really highly valuable was called The Power Law.
I'm brand new to Venture Capital,
and there's a great book by a journalist,
and it's called The Power Law,
and it's all about this sort of wacky laws
around Venture Capital, and anyone is interested,
either in going into a Venture Capital firm, like I did,
or getting money from a Venture Capital firm,
which is all the people I work with,
you should read that book,
'cause it really explains how VCs think,
and it's not intuitive, it's not the way most people think.
- Yeah, very strange, very interesting.
- Yeah.
- Totally agree, it kind of warps my brain a little bit.
What would be your best piece of advice
to a CMO who's in their first CMO job at a startup?
(laughs)
- Thick skin, yeah, have a very thick skin.
Try new stuff at least once, twice,
maybe even three times a year.
Do a campaign that makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable.
A few years ago, the first person I hired
at Impossible Foods is this amazing, amazing marketer
and communications pro named Jessica Applegren.
She's probably the most accomplished sustainability-oriented
cons and marketing pro in the world.
Now she's at Google, actually,
and she had this crazy idea
to do an educational campaign in schools
around the importance of plant-based meat,
the true environmental horror show of animal agriculture.
And it had effectively no funding,
but we took this curriculum to a bunch of schools,
and now it has become like one of the most intriguing
thought leadership vehicles in the plant-based movement,
because the program and the product,
the impossible product that comes with it,
is sold in the Oakland, California School,
school districts all over the country.
When she first approached me with that,
I was like, that just sounds too nutty.
Why would we go for kids in third grade or whatever, right?
But that's the kind of program
that I think every CMO should be open-minded
to multiple times per year.
Like just go out of your comfort zone,
do something that you're uncomfortable with.
If it doesn't work, it's okay, right?
But if it does, it could really be a gold mine.
It could be a real unlock for your company.
- Yeah, save 10% of your budget for experiments.
- Exactly, yeah.
- Yeah.
Rachel, I love it.
This has been awesome.
Thank you so much for sharing.
All of those stories, so many good ones there.
For our listeners, you can go check out
the production board, go to tppb.co
and learn about all the cool companies
that they've invested in or are building.
Rachel, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- Yeah, the one thing I just wanted to say is,
I work a lot with students.
I talk to students a lot at Stanford and elsewhere.
And a lot of people want to bend the trajectory
of their career into sustainability
and the climate tech in particular.
And I really just want to tell people that you can.
It's easier than you think.
These companies have a lot of need for people
from every part of the organization,
from every industry, right?
They're parallels.
And you, I have nothing against nonprofits.
I think they're great.
I'm on the board of one,
check out Earth League International.
It's great.
But at the same time for your career,
you do not have to take a vow of poverty.
You do not have to relegate yourself
to living on some, you know,
Earth's ship in the middle of the desert
in order to be sustainable.
You can actually have a pretty big impact
by leveraging capitalism.
And, you know, my old boss, Elon Musk,
is now literally one of the richest people in the world.
And his, you know, the vast majority
of his industrial empire is all around decarbonization.
You know, decarbonizing transportation and energy.
And if we can't do that and we ruin this planet,
his fail safe is to go to Mars, right?
And with that portfolio,
he has become one of the richest people in the world, right?
So if you don't see those trend lines
and think that capitalism can help solve
this late stage problem,
you are just being willfully ignorant.
You can do it.
You can change your career.
You know, I did.
You did.
And I actually think it's the best thing for the planet
if more people did that.
- I love it.
Awesome.
Thanks so much, Rachel.
And we'll talk to you.
- Thank you.
Bye, Ian.
Thank you.
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