Lulu Cheng Meservey on the next era of founder comms: 'attention is all you need'

Summary

Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of communications firm Rostra, argues that founder comms has entered a new phase — and the core frame for it is 'attention is all you need.'

Going direct, the approach she helped popularize alongside the founder mode essay, has now become table stakes. Any YC company launching today assumes the founder will post, build in public, and own the narrative. That diffusion is precisely the problem: once something is the default, it stops being an edge.

The next era: capture and convert

Meservey's pitch for what comes next is less about getting attention and more about not wasting it. The failure mode she identifies — call it catch and release — is founders doing something that earns a spike of visibility and then letting it evaporate without converting it into anything durable. Her counter-example is Ashton Hall, whose viral morning routine video landed on top of an existing fitness coaching business with millions of Instagram followers already in place. Attention flowed straight into a funnel. The Saratoga Water moment, by contrast, went uncaptured: a brand with a genuine viral opening that responded with hashtag soup and no follow-through.

The two jobs, in her framing, are getting the attention and harvesting it. Neither alone is sufficient.

Sequencing before broadcasting

Before any of that, she argues, founders have to sequence their communications correctly. The model is concentric circles moving outward — co-founders and executives first, then investors and board, then customers, then regulators and the broader public. Skipping a ring creates compounding problems. If employees read a mission refresh in the press before they hear it internally, two things happen: some conclude the company has changed in ways they didn't sign up for, and others post skepticism publicly, which destroys downstream credibility. The rule is never get greedy and jump rings.

Archetypes, not imitation

On whether founder communications can be learned, Meservey's answer is that the question is slightly wrong. There isn't one archetype of effective founder communicator — there's the brash controversial type, the meme-and-humor type, the strong-silent-posts-once-a-year type, and others. What fails is trying to play between archetypes, or trying to LARP as someone else entirely. Founders who are naturally long-form writers shouldn't be pressured into punchy X posts just because X is the dominant platform. The concept she uses is 'standard out' — each founder has a default medium, and the job is to identify it and accelerate within it rather than force-fit them into a format that doesn't match how they naturally communicate.

The ship-to-yap ratio matters more than raw posting volume. Elon Musk posts constantly, she notes, and no one questions it because the rockets are being caught by chopsticks. The ratio is right.

Taste and signal quality

On cheap-attention tactics, Meservey draws a distinction between engagement volume and signal quality. High like counts mean little if the replies are bots or low-signal audiences. The 'company hot chart' matters: an established company with a decade of wins can absorb a cringey launch video. A first-time founder cannot, because every piece of content is 100% of the data points that audience has on them. Taste matters more when there's less history to absorb a mistake.

Building toward traditional media

Her advice on landing a mainstream profile is deliberately slow. Start with relationship-building — drinks, networking, no pitch — for roughly three months. Identify the Venn overlap between your unique perspective, what the publication covers, and what your target audience actually cares about. Then find one news hook, offer a deep dive, and have a credible third party in both your network and the journalist's network flag it independently. Familiarity breeds credibility: people told a fact repeatedly tend to believe it regardless of other factors.

The AI era and personality hires

Meservey's closing argument is that AI accelerates all of this. In a world where AI can ship and launch constantly, the volume of product drops is already moving from monthly to weekly to daily. Signal gets noisier, not cleaner. The companies that break through will be the ones where a real personality is visible and legible — which is why she frames the coming era as one of personality hires across the board. When AI is better than humans at most execution tasks, the distinctly human thing — a genuine, consistent voice that people trust — becomes the scarce asset.