Lulu Cheng Meservey's Going Direct: Tell Your Own Story Without a Middleman

Meservey launched Rostra, her founder communications firm, in March 2024 with a short manifesto, and its argument is historical. The press and publicists used to be the only way to reach a large audience, so founders handed their story to them. Today most people can be reached through social media or email, which turns that dependency into a choice, and usually a bad one. Her definition fits in one sentence:

Early on, a founder has little proof to show. What they have is their word, backed by their own reputation. When that word travels from founder to PR person to reporter to editor, each handoff waters it down, and the people at the end hear someone else's version. On David Senra's podcast she put the old route this way:

Her proof case is Anduril. As she tells it, Palmer Luckey had been fired from Facebook for supporting Trump, and few reporters would give his new company a fair hearing. So the team skipped the press and went to the buyers in person: the Marines at Quantico, Camp Pendleton, National Defense University, the CIA. They talked to those people and then showed them the product. Recruiting ran the same way.

The manifesto also says what the rule is not: going it alone, refusing help, or just posting more. The founder decides the story and tells it in their own voice, and anyone else involved helps rather than carries it.

In the manifesto, polish, tenure and credentials don't make the best spokesperson. The best one holds the knowledge the company is built on and can fight for it when the opposition shows up. In a young company that is the founder, and she calls founders irreplaceable as evangelists.

Her crisis example comes from The Knowledge Project, where she compared two responses. Coinbase's Brian Armstrong spoke in his own name and took the comments himself, when he could have used his staff as a human shield. She guessed that lawyers or a committee wrote CrowdStrike's statement, and it read that way to her, because a committee is not a person.

Her advice for the room where counsel says to stay quiet is about job descriptions. A lawyer's job is to push legal risk toward zero. A CEO's job is to weigh every interest, trust and reputation included. Then the CEO picks the best net outcome for the company. A CEO who simply follows counsel has stopped doing that job. Her rule on apologies uses the same weighing: apologize only when you actually got it wrong, and then own it.

On the Relentless podcast she told founders to stop chasing aura. It fades with the news cycle. She would rather they build auctoritas, the Roman idea of becoming the lasting authority on a domain or a moral position. Presence and charisma are the plating, and the core is what you stand for. Going direct is how that core reaches people without someone else's edit on it.

The first step echoes Seth Godin's smallest viable audience. Godin narrows who the product is for, and Meservey applies the same narrowing to who hears the story.

Meservey herself draws the line at boycotts:

She expects the press to matter more again, partly because AI assistants lean on articles. A model may not register a few friendly tweets, but one article in a known outlet can settle what it says about you. Roy Lee's controversy marketing is a louder form of the same move, with the founder speaking to the feed with no filter. Meservey judges a post by who it reaches.