Gaby Goldberg

Mark, you mentioned going direct.

We're certainly in the era now of going direct.

It feels like it's table stakes for founders.

But I've talked to a lot of founders who feel that now they have sort of a second job of being the spokesperson for their company on top of running the business day to day.

And you can even think of a lot of great founders who spent their lives or careers

in a lab or staring at a computer and this is not what they've been trained in.

So I'm curious both of your advice for founders who maybe are uninterested in doing this or they don't know where to start.

Do they have to get good at it or are there other paths for them to get their company the attention it deserves?

I would love to hear how you apply...

this thinking to your own work.

Ben, you mentioned earlier, or you mentioned before that you and Mark spend a lot of time discussing how and when to respond to things publicly and also when to not say anything.

And so I'm curious what those discussions are like for you both.

How do you decide when to fight back versus stay quiet?

And maybe if there are times that you wish you did things differently?

I would say there's two mistakes that I commonly saw working with founders and they're sort of related.

The first one is

It can be very easy to do this too.

It's a trap to fall into because the timeline feels so addicting, but a lot of founders really over-index on distribution and tactics before actually getting the message right.

Distribution is really just a multiplier on the message.

And so if the message is wrong, now you've amplified something that is either irrelevant for your business or not the thing that your audience needs to hear.