Lulu Cheng Meservey and Gaby Goldberg on Halloween communications, startup launches, and strategic PR

guests of the show are in the reream waiting room. We have Lulu Murvy and Gabby Goldberg stopping by. Whoa, look at this. Oh [ __ ] Uh hey hey. Uh you look fantastic. Is that a wig, too? [laughter] Great. I don't know what you're talking about, but it's great to see you guys.

Uh, we were watching during our um break between sauna and eating cheeseburgers for breakfast. The lore. [laughter] The lore is kind of Hey, John. John. Yes. Yes. Oh, do you want to show We're live. You want to show the watch you got? Oh, this. Oh, this is nothing special.

This is my AP Offshore, but um it's been on [laughter] for a while. So, yeah, [applause] great to finally cross that off the list. Well, what did you get, Dorty? [laughter] Oh, I got uh the Loot. Oh, there we go. So, uh it's in the same color, you know, TV and um it matches uh the new Maybach that I just bought.

Did you know that's how you pronounce my Maybach? It's [laughter] the my my right is outside and it matches this watch and uh so really sorry guys. Let's let's get right into the show. John, you ready? Let's do it, Jordy. All right. You're watching TVPN. There we go. [laughter] Today is Friday, October 31st.

We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dom. Thank you. You even got the You even got the horse of technology. The fortress of science. The capital of [laughter] capital. They got the They got the whole [gasps] Wow. What is that? Is that the soundboard? What is that? Oh, the air horn. Okay. Oh, the air horn. There we go.

Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Good to see you. The chat is absolutely loving this. How did you big fans of you both and Mark? So, yes. How did you guys advise? Uh oh. Wow. With the loafers up on the desk. Crazy. The level of detail here in the stick is remarkable.

Here, we'll we'll fire we'll fire back. Uh someone else it's a stick. To us, it's a lifestyle. [laughter] [cough] Um on a more serious note, what's what's the advice to uh to clients on on how to how to approach uh Halloween? Any is it is it just ignore? It's a distraction. Nope.

Uh it is as with every other day a chance to only lock in more. We actually Yeah, we printed out some examples. Yes. Take us through it, please. What else you got for us? You want to tell them about this one? You're disappearing. What is this? This Oh, this is Halloween. Uh the Halloween starter kit. I've seen this.

But what is what is in the image? Okay, so this is Spirit Halloween. The Brian Armstrong set. It includes one great for the whole for the whole head, right? Oh, perfect. Perfect. Yes. Yes. Whole head. Everything below the head is strictly. Wait, why didn't we consider that?

We were in We were in makeup for three hours this morning. We could have just shaved our head with a razor in the morning. That would have been so much easier. Would have done 90% of the work for us. Really? And I could have just I could have just I could have just grown a beard. Yes.

What What What other ideas do we have here? Let's see. So, we've got Oh, here's here's one that John and I like. Printed posts. We The level of detail here is amazing. This is insane. We might have to lose the virtual background. By the way, we we like it's really cutting in and out. What is this? Oh, I I can see it.

What is this? Uh, it's the stressed out guy smoking. Gay Halloween. What do you mean you're stressed out? Hay Miyazaki. Look at this. This is a That would be a fantastic costume. Oh, someone did it. And that's what that post is. Someone's real costume. Oh, no. That makes sense. Yeah.

You see, you're kind of tripping in and out. It is a wild. And then here, we thought this was very disrespectful of you in particular, Mark. We never We see this person, we will admonish them on the spot. We're looking for them. We did like this comment from the random recruiter. This is my sleep paralysis.

[laughter] I do. I do look like a sleep paralysis demon. That's hilarious. I look I I look a little bit scary. I don't know if I'm doing Mark justice. Yeah, the uh it it's it's a it's a remarkable remarkable effort. [clears throat] We did have a Yeah. Who do you think won?

Did like um do I look more like Ilia than he looks like Mark? Who win? Who wins the costume contest today? I think it's the Ilia thing. You think so? I think so. I I was getting freaked out before the show.

We had like five minutes after the costumes finished and [laughter] watching a 68 jacked Ilia just like come around the corner is is scary. [laughter] It is a wild wild experience. Yeah. Climbing the Yeah, it's easier to climb the mountain when you're 6'8. Yeah, it's it's all in the eyebrows.

The eyebrows are really everything because as they were working on getting the the the makeup on, um I was like, there's no way this is going to work. Like this is not this is going to look like Party City level. Like it's it's fun that we did this, but this is not going to look convincing at all.

And uh and it's definitely a crazy your post, Lulu. This isn't reposting John's post. This isn't AI. This is human craftsmanship, but it's actually crazy.

So like the the uh crew that typically works on like you know normal film productions they did was it like 50 different layers of stuff that they were putting on our heads. It was one of the most painting they're doing they they did like a base layer. They did the head. They painted over our eyebrows.

They glued you know things over the eyebrows and they put another set of eyebrows on. Then they painted over that. Uh, it's going to take like probably an hour to just get get all this off. I think so. They said 45 minutes. Okay. I don't know why you'd want to take it off. Yeah. Right.

Do you think uh do I mean obviously we're in a unique position because we get to kind of have some fun on the show. It's like almost a comedy show in many ways. Do you think there's any hope to bring back April Fool's Day in a cool way or will tech just like flop on that immediately? It's hard to do.

Someone told me a couple years ago on April Fool's Day that actually doing it on April Fools is the cringey part. Yeah. Interesting. You're surrounded by so many people doing it badly that it's really away from that. And there they were saying if you think of a great prank or jape or joke, just do it randomly.

Why wait till April 1st when everybody knows? Yeah. So there there was a company that a YC company that pissed a bunch of people off because they they created an IDE that has like brain rot in the in the in the software.

So you can do like gambling on stake, you can do [laughter] subway surfers and like they pissed they they because it's on the YC website, I feel like they like they're putting like you can gamble while you code.

They pissed off and I think if they had just dropped it as a feature that was like a real feature that you could play around with but wasn't like their entire brand it would have hit a lot harder and been and and gotten a much more like funny positive reaction versus people just being like I hate this blah blah blah like you know why does this almost like taking Yeah.

taking the joke like too seriously when when you haven't established your brand at all then people there's just you're making people do so much work. I guess that's the I guess that's the benefit of doing something on April 1 is that you're there's a lot less work to be like is this a joke?

You can just kind of uh you can kind of lean on on you know the audience needs to like uh uh like you don't need to you don't need to you you don't wind up in the situation where you have to explain to like 10,000 people like we're we're kidding. We're kidding. We're kidding.

Like people kind of put it together themselves and be like, "Okay, I'm I'm I'm good. " Are drops dead as a meta, do you think? Like it feels like launch videos and drops are both kind of over. So So I don't think that drops are dead.

I think that that specific style of drop with the like launch video has been over is completely saturated and overdone. Yeah. Um, I think you just have to figure like people are not going to stop announcing things, stop dropping things. You just have to find new ways to do it.

Well, I meant drop in the I meant drop in the context of like we made this product with our branding on it kind of thing. I thought Bass did a really good job. Did you see bases drop for their uh one$1 billion round?

It was a newspaper and I I thought that was like well executed in the sense that like it had a lot of text. It had a lot of content there. Yeah, Tyler has it there. Join the charge. Uh and I just thought like yeah, it's like it's not just like a t-shirt. It's like way way deeper.

Uh and I' I'd say the same thing for the for the launch videos. It's like uh we we found a very unique aesthetic yesterday.

I'm not going to share it because I think it would be a good launch video of uh but there there are there are specific formats where it's immediately identifiable as like oh that's that type of video and if you use that as your launch video you'll break through and you'll be the first person to take you know the like right now it's like the default meta is basically like uh after Game of Thrones stick around for the interview with the the actors like that's the aesthetic of most launch videos right now it's like cinematic couple minutes interview with a few people kind of like mini documents.

They said we couldn't build enterprise [laughter] category. No one they said it was impossible. Yeah, that did get a little commoditized. Uh but yeah. Yeah. Fresh ideas. At one point I said at one point that somebody should do a version of it of those uh sorority dance videos. That's a great one. That's a great idea.

That's a great one. If you have someone who can do flips or if you just like all wear a matching outfit like it has to be a company. Um, it if you're like solving cancer, crewing cancer, that's probably not right. But as long as the joke is not too close to home.

The problem with being a slop adjacent company that jokes about slop now it's so obvious that that is very close to what you're doing and now you have to defend yourself. Yeah. Like what was that car company um that was going to do that rebrand a couple years ago? Like Jaguar. Jaguar was really bad too. Yeah.

Oh, there was another there was another one where they joked about a rebrand. I don't even know if it was a joke. They claimed it was a joke because people hated it. What? I don't remember this at all.

Claiming after getting a reaction that people don't like something and then saying it was a joke is is not an effective strategy. You've seen seen that a little bit. Um the Substrate launch was crazy. That was kind of like a a Lulu and Gabby masterclass special. Well, James, we'll let them know. Yeah. Yeah.

[laughter] We'll let Lul Gabby know. They'll feel really good about it. James Proud is in heavy founder mode, by the way. He did a lot of the writing and outreach and all a lot of that themselves, which obviously we think is the right way to do this.

Like the founder can't just sit it out and deploy to do it all for them. But yeah, Substrate, very cool company. Uh absolute, what do we call it? Uh absolute dog. There we go. An absolute dog. That's the word. That's why we love you. He's an absolute dog. Straight from Pat McAfee. All right, guys.

Well, have a great rest of your day. Yeah. Get back to the gym. You know, before we go, we should talk about RAMP. Oh, please. What you got for us? We almost had a whole conversation. Um, before we go to the gym, let me tell you about ramp. com. Time is money to save both with corporate cards, bill pay, and more.

The average company saves 5% with There we go. Flawless. bad. Incredible. We'll we'll have you guys uh we'll have you guys do a proper proper guest uh guest host uh hosting uh session. Guest hosting would be fantastic. You're clearly well. If we ever Yeah.

Any some morning where we're like, uh we two hours in the gym, not enough today. We'll call you guys up [laughter] and and you can fill in. But uh looking sharp. Uh uh are you uh hope hopefully you guys have some other costumes for for later this evening trick-or-treating.

Uh but uh if not, you know, tell them to uh tell them to go to tvpn. com, all the kids you run into and and tell them send all the children tvpn. com and the APs. Capital Cabby's going to hand out APs, everyone. So, you got to get over there. Got to get over there. Uh great to see you guys. Talk to you soon. Cheers.

Bye. Bye. Um we have to do a real ad read for numeralhq. com. Sales tax on autopilot. spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um, we have Dean Ball coming on the show next. I don't know if he knows that we're dressed up as Mark and Ilia. Uh, Tyler, do you know Ball? Of course I know Ball.

[laughter] This is one of the Can't keep getting away with it. This is one of the jokes that keeps getting funnier. Uh Dean Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, author of Hyperdimensional, former senior policy adviser for AI at the White House and strategic adviser at the NSF, previously at the Mercada Center.

Do you know the Mercada Center? Of course. Why do you know the Mercada Center? Tyler Cowen, of course. The absolute goat himself. Uh he's been at Stanford Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, focuses on AI, emerging technology. He's