Lulu Cheng Meservey and Gaby Goldberg on Halloween communications, startup launches, and strategic PR
Oct 31, 2025 with Lulu Cheng Meservey & Gaby Goldberg
Key Points
- Startup launch videos using cinematic mini-documentary formats are oversaturated; founders should pursue genuinely unexpected aesthetics instead of copying industry defaults.
- April Fools' campaigns land better when dropped randomly rather than on April 1st, since the date drowns out the signal and forces brands to explain jokes that should be self-evident.
- Founders who handle launch writing and outreach themselves get better results than those who fully delegate to PR teams, as seen in James Proud's execution at Substrate.
Summary
This segment is a brief, largely informal Halloween cameo. Lulu Cheng Meservey and Gaby Goldberg drop in while the hosts are dressed as Marc Andreessen and Ilya Sutskever, with professional film makeup that apparently took three hours and involved multiple layers, painted-over eyebrows, and a 45-minute removal process.
The one substantive thread is a short exchange on startup launch strategy. The consensus is that the cinematic mini-documentary format — a couple of minutes of founders talking to camera, Game of Thrones-style — is saturated. The advice is to find a genuinely unexpected aesthetic rather than default to what every other company is doing.
On April Fools' Day campaigns, Meservey argues the cringey part is doing it on April 1st, when the signal is drowned out by everyone else doing it badly. A better joke lands harder if it's dropped randomly, without the date as a crutch. A YC company that built an IDE with gambling and Subway Surfers integrated is cited as a cautionary tale — the bit misfired because the company had no established brand to absorb the joke, forcing them to explain it to thousands of people instead of letting the audience put it together themselves.
The Base case gets a brief positive mention. Its newspaper-format drop for a $1 billion round is called well-executed because it was content-dense rather than a standard branded merchandise drop.
Meservey also flags that Substrate's launch was handled well, crediting founder James Proud for doing much of the writing and outreach himself — the point being that founders who delegate the entire launch to a PR team tend to get worse results.
The segment ends quickly, with the hosts transitioning to an ad read and introducing their next guest, Dean Ball.