Lulu Cheng Meservey

By her own account, Lulu Cheng Meservey was born in rural China, lived as a child with her family in Germany, Norway and Canada in turn, and later went to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry for college. She links the experience of repeatedly adapting to new languages and cultural settings to her habit of observing audiences and reading the context of a conversation.⁠[1]

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.⁠[2]

Early in her career Meservey worked as a financial analyst at JPMorganJPMorgan Chase & Co.JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company headquartered in New York that operates investment banking, consumer and small business financial services, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands; its roots trace back to the Manhattan Company of 1799.Open the full entry, took part in international open data initiatives at the World Bank, and worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on a framework of international norms for cyberspace.⁠[2]

In the interview she recalls that she had hoped to work in government but was not yet a United States citizen at the time, and so turned to political-risk consulting in Washington.⁠[1]

From 2013 to 2016 she worked in the office of the chairman at McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm; from 2016 to 2021 she continued as an advisor to the firm.⁠[2]

Meservey co-founded the communications advisory firm TrailRunner International, serving as chief operating officer from May 2016 to January 2021 and as president from January to June 2021.⁠[2]

She recalls that Jim Wilkinson invited her to start the firm with him and that she learned communications work on actual projects. Her experience of helping the early AndurilAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry reach its direct users also shaped her later view that founders should voice their company’s mission themselves.⁠[1]

In her 2026 interview with David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry she says that when the firm started she did not know what PR and communications were and, as co-founder and chief operating officer of a communications firm, was searching online for the meaning of those words; she learned by embarrassing herself. Jim Wilkinson, she says, put her into meetings with the leaders of organizations such as Citadel and S&P GlobalS&P GlobalS&P Global Inc. is a financial information company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that provides credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions for global capital and commodity markets. Its divisions include S&P Global Ratings and S&P Dow Jones Indices.Open the full entry, where some of what she said landed and at other times someone would pull her aside afterwards and suggest fewer Power Rangers references next time; in a meeting with Gap Inc.Gap Inc.Gap Inc. is an apparel retailer headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, whose brands include Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic and Athleta, selling clothing, accessories and lifestyle products through company-operated and franchise stores and e-commerce sites. It grew out of the first Gap store, opened in San Francisco in 1969 by Donald G. Fisher and Doris F. Fisher, and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GAP.Open the full entry she thought corporate communications meant putting on a summer sale.⁠[3][3][1]

She says that what she was learning then was traditional communications, that she had no credentials, that nobody answered her emails and that reporters did not take her seriously, all of which she calls understandable.⁠[3]

TrailRunner International’s clients included Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry and Spotify.⁠[4]

She says that for one company retreat the firm went to train with UFCUFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is a mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion based in Las Vegas, United States. It began in 1993 as a no-holds-barred fighting tournament and gradually entered the mainstream after the Fertitta brothers’ Zuffa bought it for $2 million in 2001; it was sold for about $4 billion in 2016 to a consortium led by WME-IMG, and in 2023 it merged with WWE to form the publicly traded TKO Group Holdings, where as of 2026 it is one of the largest businesses by revenue.Open the full entry fighters: Urijah Faber and his team spent the day training with them and talking about their mindset. What stayed with her most was “nobody owes you anything”: fighters would turn up at the gym from Brazil with a backpack because it was the only thing they wanted to do, and did not need anyone to say they were ready.⁠[3][3][1]

Anduril was founded in 2017. In an essay published in Pirate WiresPirate WiresPirate Wires is an American subscription media company covering technology, politics and culture. It was founded by Mike Solana.Open the full entry in January 2024 she writes that during the company’s first couple of years she ran its communications as an adviser to co-founders Palmer LuckeyPalmer LuckeyPalmer Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He founded Oculus VR and developed an Oculus Rift headset prototype in 2012; Facebook acquired the company in 2014. In 2017 he cofounded defense technology company Anduril Industries. He subsequently established retro-gaming hardware company ModRetro and helped found Erebor, a bank serving the technology industry.Open the full entry, Trae Stephens, Brian SchimpfBrian SchimpfBrian Schimpf is co-founder and chief executive officer of the U.S. defense technology company Anduril Industries. A Cornell University graduate, he spent nearly a decade at Palantir, where as director of engineering he led the teams that built the Foundry platform.Open the full entry, Matt GrimmMatt GrimmMatt Grimm is a co-founder and the chief operating officer of Anduril Industries, responsible for global operations including procurement, manufacturing, and supply chain. He graduated from Cornell University and previously worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, Palantir, and Mithril Capital Management.Open the full entry and Joe Chen.⁠[5][6]

In the David Senra interview she says that she, Matt Steckman and Trae Stephens were all in Washington at the time and got to know one another there; it was Anduril’s first year, and Trae Stephens recommended her to the team to handle communications after it had already spoken to a number of other people. The company, she says, was then in semi-stealth, with only a website and with rumors circulating about what Palmer Luckey was doing, and the team recognized that it was time to define what the company was.⁠[3][3][3][1][5]

She likens the Anduril of that time to an insurgent: its team was smaller than those of its rivals; working with the government was unpopular in Silicon Valley, her example being the Google employees who walked out in protest at the company’s involvement in Project Maven of the U.S. Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry; and the mainstream media were hostile to Palmer Luckey. The team therefore decided, she says, to create its own stories and its own ways of getting them out.⁠[3][3][1]

She says the team did not take the usual route of the technology press and startup-conference awards but went straight to the people it needed to reach: speaking to Marines at Quantico, with Palmer Luckey going to Camp Pendleton, and speaking at the National Defense University and the Central Intelligence AgencyCentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent U.S. intelligence agency established under the National Security Act of 1947 to provide national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia.Open the full entry, walking into their buildings, talking to them in person and then showing them the product; recruiting was done the same way.⁠[3][3][1]

The Orange County Business Journal summarized her essay in May 2024. In that summary she writes that Anduril’s military mission was then unpopular with many technology workers, investors and reporters; that the aims of its communications were to recruit top technical talent and to win contracts from the U.S. military and its allies; and that the method was to address audiences directly through Twitter, LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, blog posts and long-form interviews while declining some interviews with major media outlets.⁠[6]

The summary also relays several episodes from the essay: on an UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry ride from Anduril’s headquarters in Costa Mesa to Los Angeles International Airport she mentioned in a phone conversation that she was proud to work with Anduril and support the military, and the driver pulled off the highway and put her out of the car, saying “I can’t be around a person like you”; GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry cut off Anduril’s access to its business tools, analytics and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry under its terms on promoting harm, and did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment; and on a six-hour overnight flight she swapped into a middle seat to talk to a Marine Corps colonel, who then arranged for Palmer Luckey to speak with dozens of his colleagues.⁠[6]

At the opening of the essay she writes that Palmer Luckey’s name had been damaged by criticism of his support for Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry; that after Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry led a funding round in Anduril people sent him angry texts, one of which called the investment “fascist”; and that when Anduril held a recruiting session at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, the university provided armed police escorts because of violent threats.⁠[5]

In the interview she says that the Anduril team took a bet on her when she was plainly underqualified and that this changed her life. Palmer Luckey, she says, sometimes credits her with helping the company’s communications, whereas in fact she learned how to do communications by working with them; otherwise she would probably be at a regular PR agency doing regular agency work.⁠[3][3][3]

In June 2021 she became vice president of communications at Substack, the independent publishing platform, and took part in the work of its leadership team.⁠[2][7]

In a post of January 2023 she writes that she was Substack’s first head of comms and that her main job was helping writers grow their audiences; in the subtitle of that post she calls herself the former “chief publicist” for Substack.⁠[8]

After The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry ran a critical story on Substack’s “growing pains,” she tweeted that the piece was full of hearsay and cherry-picking; when a Wired story suggested that Substack paid extremists, she posted a series of tweets saying its writer had published misleading information, after which Wired issued a correction and Fox News ran a story headlined “Substack executive explains journalism to Wired writer.”⁠[4]

She uses the episode as a case study in her Flack post of August 10, 2022, “Press so bad it’s good”: a Wired freelancer had claimed, without offering any supporting evidence, that Substack “recruits and pays extremists,” and after she made Substack’s case publicly Wired issued a correction. She writes that the correction was not the real goal; such a piece can always be ignored, and a public response that makes an example of it is for the piece that really goes too far, with the aim of mobilizing supporters, energizing believers and deterring future attacks. She calls such prejudiced coverage a hit piece and argues that fawning coverage invites skepticism while absurdly biased attacks can make the target look reasonable.⁠[9]

While at Substack she posted a tweet saying that Twitter employees uncomfortable with Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s plans for the platform need not apply; she later said the post had been misread.⁠[10]

In her post of August 29, 2022, “Joe RoganJoe RoganJoe Rogan is an American podcaster, stand-up comedian and UFC commentator whose long-form interview podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, launched in 2009, is among the most listened-to podcasts in the world; he hosted the NBC reality show Fear Factor, and his show’s content and political statements have repeatedly drawn controversy.Open the full entry has a werewolf,” she writes that she pitched the appearance of Substack’s chief executive, Chris Best, on Joe Rogan’s show; she went along to the taping, met Substack’s co-founders in Austin and flew home afterwards. The episode, she writes, was published the next day and was followed by increases in visits to Substack, new publications and reader sign-ups.⁠[11]

On April 16, 2022, Meservey joined the board of Activision Blizzard and became a member of its Workplace Responsibility Committee. The company announced the appointment on April 21.⁠[2]

The Form 8-K that Activision Blizzard filed on the appointment states that the board was temporarily expanded from ten to eleven members for it and would return to ten after the 2022 annual meeting, at which she would stand for election. The same filing discloses that directors Hendrik J. Hartong III and Casey Wasserman had notified the company on April 16 that they would not stand for re-election, and that Kerry A. Carr had been nominated for election as a director.⁠[12]

At Activision Blizzard’s annual meeting on June 21, 2022, she was elected a director for a one-year term with 594,225,355 votes for, 2,302,158 against and 1,935,444 abstentions, with 49,424,806 broker non-votes. The nine other directors elected were Reveta Bowers, Kerry Carr, Robert Corti, Brian Kelly, Bobby KotickBobby KotickBobby Kotick, formally Robert A. Kotick, is a business executive and director who led Activision and subsequently Activision Blizzard from 1991 to 2023. His tenure encompassed the combination with Vivendi Games, the King acquisition and Microsoft’s takeover. He is also cofounder and cochairman of the Call of Duty Endowment and became an independent Skydance director in October 2026.Open the full entry, Barry Meyer, Robert Morgado, Peter Nolan and Dawn Ostroff.⁠[13]

On July 31, 2022, she published “Welcome to Flack” on Substack, launching her personal newsletter Flack under the subtitle “A new playbook for communications.” She writes that she has had the chance to lead communications for founders and companies she respects, Substack itself among them; that the traditional playbook is outdated; that she will draw on fields such as the military, the makeup industry, physics, K-pop, psychology and religion; that the posts are experimental rather than prescriptive; and that Substack does not co-sign what she writes there.⁠[14]

Flack’s About page explains that the word flack means both a person who handles PR and incoming fire. On that page she writes that she is not classically trained in communications and that her background is in finance, geopolitics, tech and consulting; she calls communication “a superpower, a force multiplier, or a trip wire.”⁠[15]

Her other Flack posts in the second half of 2022 were “Press so bad it’s good” (August 10), a two-part series on the basics of communications (the first part, on ends, ways and means, on August 23, and the second, on tactics, on September 8), “Joe Rogan has a werewolf” (August 29), “Build your fanbase using the K-pop method” (September 29), “The risks of playing it safe” (October 18), “How to go on TV in 5 steps” (November 6), “Talking to reporters: on the record vs. off the record vs. on background” (November 22), “FTXFTXFTX was a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang that operated FTX.com, moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in 2021 and was valued at $32 billion in January 2022. In November 2022 it filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection amid a liquidity crisis, and Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud and related charges. Its reorganization plan took effect in January 2025, after which the FTX Recovery Trust began paying creditors in stages.Open the full entry’s 7-part media playbook, and what it can teach other founders” (November 30) and “The art of the apology” (December 29).⁠[9][16][11][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]

In the two-part series she borrows the military framework of ends, ways and means: no more than three goals, which must be business goals rather than communications metrics such as view counts, and a complete plan that fits on a single page. Her formula is that a communications plan should instill a belief in an audience so that it takes actions that achieve a business objective.⁠[16][17]

In the second part she writes that the tactics she has executed include podcast interviews, a YouTube series, a guest lecture to military officers, an HBO special, a West Wing tour and starting a conference from scratch; she also mentions spending a day at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency and creating customized limited-edition Jordans, and says that in some projects local radio delivered better returns than national media.⁠[17]

In “Build your fanbase using the K-pop method” she writes that she has spent years analyzing how people, groups and companies build fandoms and spent several months following BTS, Blackpink and other bands. From this she draws four tactics for startups: lower the barriers to entry, spotlight individuals, build community and identity, and bring people into the process; her examples include SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry, CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry’s policy and legal leads, Palmer Luckey and Dana WhiteDana WhiteDana White is an American sports executive and the President and Chief Executive Officer of the mixed martial arts promotion UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). In 2001 he and the Fertitta brothers bought the near-bankrupt UFC for $2 million, and the reality show The Ultimate Fighter brought the sport into the mainstream; the UFC was sold in 2016 for about $4 billion and became part of TKO Group Holdings in 2023. He is also a longtime supporter of Donald Trump and has been a director of Meta since late 2024.Open the full entry’s “The Ultimate Fighter.”⁠[18]

“The risks of playing it safe” argues that avoiding risk does not reduce mistakes but produces a different kind, mistakes of omission; she compares relying only on proven tactics to keeping all of one’s assets in cash. In the post she calls Substack’s chief executive, Chris Best, her “old boss.”⁠[19]

The main points of “How to go on TV in 5 steps” are: settle on one headline message and state it in the first answer; use stories and statistics rather than adjectives; settle things with the producer in advance, supplying a few bullet points about oneself and visuals; research the hosts and watch past segments; and during the interview stay on message, end answers cleanly and never memorize a script. She adds that reviewing her own past interviews is painful.⁠[20]

The post on talking to reporters explains the difference between on the record, off the record and on background: by default everything said is on the record, and the ground rules are informal agreements rather than binding contracts and should be settled before speaking. “FTX’s 7-part media playbook” analyzes why Sam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, he was charged in the United States with misappropriating customer funds; in November 2023 a jury found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, in March 2024 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit about $11 billion, and in 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected his appeal.Open the full entry and FTX received abundant flattering press, sets out seven tactics and offers for each a lesson that other founders can apply ethically. The main points of “The art of the apology” are: apologize directly and personally; take responsibility for specific wrongs without excuses; describe the impact on those affected; say only what is airtight and true; and follow through and follow up unprompted.⁠[21][22][23]

On October 6, 2022, Meservey resigned as a director of Activision Blizzard and became executive vice president, corporate affairs, and chief communications officer, joining the senior leadership team. She was responsible for the company’s strategic communications and its public voice, against a background that included MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry’s then-pending acquisition.⁠[7]

She and Activision Blizzard signed an employment agreement on October 5, 2022, effective October 6, with a term running to October 31, 2024. Under it she answered directly to the chief executive officer or another executive designated by the company and could work remotely, subject to required travel that included regular travel to the company’s offices in Santa Monica.⁠[24]

The compensation set out in the agreement was: an annual base salary of $850,000; a target annual bonus of 100% of base salary, with the 2022 bonus prorated for days employed that year and guaranteed at no less than target; a Long Term Commitment Bonus of $500,000, repayable in full if she was terminated for cause or resigned in breach of the agreement before October 31, 2023, and by half if that happened after that date and before October 31, 2024; and time-based restricted stock units with a grant value of about $2,000,000, vesting one-eighth every three months from the third month after her start date, subject to approval by the compensation committee. The company also provided supplemental term life insurance of $2,000,000 and reimbursement of legal fees of up to $25,000.⁠[24]

The company’s Form 8-K states that she informed it on October 5, 2022, that she would resign from the board, that the resignation was connected with her new position and that it did not result from any disagreement with the company on its operations, policies or practices.⁠[25]

The company’s press release describes the role as newly created. In it the chief executive, Bobby Kotick, says, “Lulu is a unique talent with a brilliant strategic mind,” and she says, “It’s clear there’s a gap between perception and reality.” The release adds that her position in the office of the chairman at McLarty Associates was that of a director and that the firm is based in Washington, D.C.⁠[26]

On October 18, 2022, she posted a message in Activision Blizzard’s company SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry; more than a dozen quality assurance (QA) testers at Blizzard Albany had earlier won the right to hold a union vote. Game Developer writes that it was posted to a read-only channel and said the company “fully respects” workers’ right to unionize but described collective bargaining as a comparatively slow way to secure increases in pay, bonuses and benefits. Kotaku writes that she pointed to a BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry analysis finding that contracts take more than a year on average to negotiate, said that labor law bars increases in pay or benefits during contract negotiations without a special arrangement with the union, and said that figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show non-union employees generally receiving larger raises; in the message she called for “direct dialogue” between the company and its employees.⁠[10][27]

Kotaku’s article of October 20, 2022, writes that most staff could not reply directly in the channel and responded with negative emojis; she followed up with “I can hear the booing from here!” and said she had registered the “disappointed dog” emojis; after a former employee, Jessica Gonzalez, shared a screenshot of the message on Twitter, she replied to critics there. In the same article a company spokesperson, Rich George, said that both the union and the company may share their views on the pros and cons of unionization, that the company respects the right of each eligible employee to decide and to have that vote counted, and that a small minority of employees should not decide on behalf of all their colleagues.⁠[10]

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) brought unfair labor practice charges against Activision Blizzard over the message, which its unit Code-CWA announced on Twitter on October 24, 2022. The CWA said that the message disparaged the union, threatened to withhold raises and benefit improvements from workers who joined it and gave workers the impression that their support for the union was under surveillance; its secretary-treasurer, Sara Steffens, said that a one-way channel in which management feeds information to workers is not dialogue and that a union is the vehicle that gives workers a legally protected voice. Game Developer’s article of October 25, 2022, notes that it had asked Activision Blizzard for comment on the charges.⁠[28][27][29]

NME’s article of December 6, 2022, states that the QA workers at Blizzard Albany had succeeded in forming a union, the Game Workers Alliance Albany (GWA Albany).⁠[30]

The Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry profile of 2025 carries the assessment of the Axios reporter Stephen Totilo of her dealings with reporters at Activision Blizzard: she answered hard questions with “humanity and thoughtfulness” and “facilitated more journalism being done.”⁠[4]

Her Flack posts in 2023 were “How to grow your newsletter audience” (January 26), “Flack’s crisis communications playbook” (March 14), a post on Twitter Blue titled “‘Please just take the checkmark away!’ How Twitter devalued a status symbol” (April 6), “Did bad PR sink CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry’s CEO?” (June 9), “How to go viral: Barbie’s billion dollar meme machine” (August 9) and “The 5 ingredients of a great fundraising announcement” (August 23).⁠[8][31][32][33][34][35]

In “How to grow your newsletter audience” she writes that as a Substack employee she did not turn on paid subscriptions for Flack and admits that she is far from posting weekly; her advice to writers is to define their personal brand and value proposition, set up the publication’s name, description and welcome email with care, post consistently and track the growth of the free list rather than open rates.⁠[8]

The crisis communications playbook argues for preparing before a crisis arrives: settle in advance a war room of key executives with assigned roles and keep a list of their cell numbers and locations saved locally on one’s devices; agree in advance on what counts as a true crisis, for example something that disrupts normal business operations, seriously jeopardizes customers’ trust or materially affects finances and valuation; and have spokespeople never speculate and never say “no comment.”⁠[31]

The post on Twitter Blue argues that the product itself is decent and that the problem lies in its messaging: the legacy blue checkmark worked as a status symbol, while the new product was marketed like a cheap imitation. “Did bad PR sink CNN’s CEO?” takes the departure of CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, as its case and argues that bad press rarely topples a fundamentally sound company or chief executive and only accelerates problems that already exist; she recounts that at an all-hands meeting a colleague asked her whether bad press can take down a company and that she answered no.⁠[32][33]

The post on the film “Barbie” argues that its hype came mostly from free, fan-made memes and sets out four points: provide a good canvas, let people talk about themselves, form a tribe and find a great foil. “The 5 ingredients of a great fundraising announcement” takes RampRampRamp is a corporate financial technology company founded in 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee. It provides corporate cards, expense reimbursement, bill payments, procurement and finance automation. Glyman and Atiyeh became co-CEOs in June 2026.Open the full entry’s funding announcement of August 2023 as its case and breaks such an announcement into objectives, audience, message, execution and validation; she notes that Ramp’s co-founders shared the news in their own voices and linked to the company’s own blog, which set out the story in full.⁠[34][35]

On March 23, 2023, Lenny Rachitsky released a podcast interview with her, “Navigating comms and PR.” The episode notes describe her as the former head of comms at Substack, then executive vice president of corporate affairs and chief communications officer at Activision Blizzard, and the writer of the Flack newsletter. Its chapters include what helps an idea spread; why taking risks matters, and her thread on standing for free speech; her framework of “cultural erogenous zones”; how underdogs get attention; how Substack used concentric circles to spread information; a physics-based framework for comms; why a super-specific audience is needed; focusing on one direct channel first; and why not every founder needs to be on Twitter.⁠[36]

The reorganization plan that followed the completion of Microsoft’s acquisition set Meservey’s departure for the end of January 2024. She agreed to help Kari Perez, the head of communications, complete the leadership transition, and Activision Blizzard’s communications team began reporting to Perez.⁠[37]

On January 23, 2024, Pirate Wires published a long essay under her byline on Anduril’s early communications, billed in its headline as “10 Rules for Mission-Driven Founders.” She writes that, with the founders’ permission, she is sharing for the first time the details of the campaign to win hearts and minds. The essay runs to about 4,500 words.⁠[5][6]

The rules summarized by the Orange County Business Journal include: win over a core group of believers rather than the whole public; have founders craft the company’s narrative themselves, with her observation that in 2018 most people in Washington did not know or care about Anduril but loved talking about artificial intelligence and U.S. competition with China; put internal communications first, in her words “An external crisis is inconvenient, but an internal crisis is existential”; court respected community leaders before their help is needed; and build a network of advocates that includes investors, students, ethicists and military officers.⁠[6]

The summary states that she urges founders to take more risk and to “let founders be founders.” Her example is Palmer Luckey’s talk at an Air Force procurement conference in Orlando, where instead of polite remarks he criticized the service’s procurement process and was invited back to speak the following year; one line of the essay reads, “Many of Anduril’s best PR moments have come from letting Palmer be Palmer.” Her conclusion is that “Mission-driven startups need founder-led comms.”⁠[6][38]

On February 14, 2024, she published “The comms of falling in love” on Flack, subtitled “13 communication tactics for finding and keeping love, based on psychology research.” The post argues that communication can shape how people feel about each other, names proximity, similarity and familiarity as the three drivers of love, and offers tactics that include making one’s interest clear while leaving some uncertainty, winning over the other person’s friends, sharing personal information to build intimacy, asking for small favors and expressing guilt sincerely rather than manipulatively.⁠[39]

On March 19, 2024, Meservey announced the founding of Rostra, which offers strategic communications advice to technology founders. The firm takes its name from the public speaking platform of ancient Rome.⁠[40][41]

Toya Holness and Sergey Alexashenko serve as Rostra’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer respectively.⁠[42]

“Go Direct: The Manifesto,” published the same day, argues that founders should explain their product, mission and values themselves and build a connection with their audience through their own platforms, instead of handing all of their messaging to communications intermediaries. She stresses that going direct takes sustained effort and a clear strategy and is not merely a matter of posting more on social platforms.⁠[40]

On Rostra’s client testimonials page, CognitionCognitionCognition is a U.S. artificial intelligence company founded by Scott Wu, Walden Yan and Steven Hao that develops the autonomous AI software engineer Devin. It launched Devin in March 2024, acquired the AI coding tool Windsurf in July 2025, and announced a Series E exceeding $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation in September 2026. Its annualized revenue passed $1 billion that month.Open the full entry co-founder Scott WuScott WuScott Wu is an entrepreneur with a background in competitive programming and the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the artificial intelligence software engineering company that developed the AI coding agent Devin.Open the full entry mentions that his team worked with the firm before the launch of Devin; Anduril founder Palmer Luckey likewise describes how Meservey helped the company’s communications work.⁠[41]

At Rostra’s launch she became the firm’s chief executive; Toya Holness is an Activision Blizzard alum and a former head of communications for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex; and Sergey Alexashenko, a former Substack engineer, planned to build in-house communication tools to track, measure and predict messaging opportunities for clients.⁠[42]

In Axios’s article of that day she says that Rostra works only with founders and the people they designate: “it has to be a founder who was bought in and it has to be a founder-led company.” The firm was not taking on new clients at that moment, and the first major project it had just completed was the launch of Devin, the generative-AI software engineer built by Cognition.⁠[42]

Before she launched her own firm in 2024, Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, Coinbase’s chief executive Brian ArmstrongBrian ArmstrongBrian Armstrong is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of the crypto asset trading platform Coinbase. He founded Coinbase in 2012, led the company to a direct listing on Nasdaq in 2021, and holds a majority of its voting power through a dual-class share structure; he also founded the scientific collaboration platform ResearchHub and co-founded the longevity research company NewLimit.Open the full entry and Bari WeissBari WeissBari Weiss is an American journalist and editor, the founder of the news outlet The Free Press, and editor-in-chief of CBS News since October 2025.Open the full entry had each tried to hire her in-house.⁠[4]

On June 5, 2024, ShopifyShopifyShopify is a commerce software company that originated in Ottawa, Canada, providing merchants with tools for online stores, physical retail, payments, orders and inventory management. The business began with Snowdevil, an online snowboard store founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke and others, and the standalone e-commerce platform launched in 2006. The company went public in 2015 and now trades under the ticker SHOP on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange.Open the full entry announced that Meservey and Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah had joined its board of directors.⁠[43]

The Orange County Business Journal’s OC 500 listing published on November 17, 2024, places her in its 2024 technology category, describes her as the former PR chief at Anduril Industries and refers to the essay she wrote for Pirate Wires.⁠[38]

In March 2025 Business Insider published a profile by the reporter Zoë Bernard, “‘Traditional PR is dead’: Inside Lulu Cheng Meservey’s radical in-your-face playbook.” The clients it names are PolymarketPolymarketPolymarket is a prediction market platform founded by Shayne Coplan in 2020, on which users buy and sell shares in the outcomes of political, sports, financial, cultural, and other events, with trading prices regarded as the market’s estimate of the probability that an event will occur. It rose to prominence during the 2024 US election, returned to the US market in 2025 by acquiring a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, and received a major investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, while facing gambling-regulation and insider-trading scrutiny in US states and several countries.Open the full entry’s chief executive Shayne CoplanShayne CoplanShayne Coplan is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymarket, the prediction market platform he founded in 2020, and advocates using market prices to aggregate people’s judgments about the probability of events. He attended New York University before leaving to start a company, and has led Polymarket’s fundraising, its return to the U.S. market, and its product expansion.Open the full entry, Safe Superintelligence’s co-founder Ilya SutskeverIlya SutskeverIlya Sutskever is a computer scientist who studied under Geoffrey Hinton, helped develop AlexNet and sequence-to-sequence learning, and is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. As a board member in 2023 he took part in removing Sam Altman, and after leaving OpenAI in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence, which he has led as CEO since 2025.Open the full entry and Scale AI’s founder Alexandr WangAlexandr WangAlexandr Wang is an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Scale AI. He joined Meta in June 2025 as the company’s first chief AI officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. His work spans AI training data, model evaluation, government applications, and personal agents.Open the full entry; it adds that she helped Delian AsparouhovDelian AsparouhovDelian Asparouhov is a Bulgarian-born American venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founded the in-orbit pharmaceutical processing and reentry capsule company Varda Space Industries with Will Bruey, serving as its president; he also co-founded The Hill & Valley Forum, which connects Washington policymakers with the Silicon Valley technology community.Open the full entry, co-founder of Varda Space IndustriesVarda Space IndustriesVarda Space Industries is a space and microgravity life sciences company headquartered in El Segundo, California. It builds its own W-Series satellites and reentry capsules, processes pharmaceuticals and other materials in the microgravity of low Earth orbit and returns them to the ground in its capsules, and also provides a hypersonic reentry flight test platform for the U.S. military and NASA. The company was founded by Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov; as of October 2026 it had raised $598 million in total.Open the full entry, with messaging in 2023 when the company’s capsule could not return on schedule because of regulatory restraints.⁠[4]

The profile states that she has done work for Sam Altman and OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry; Sam Altman offered to pay her, and she said she had not taken “a penny.” In a text message to the reporter Sam Altman wrote, “i super value her advice.”⁠[4]

The profile carries assessments by several named people: Delian Asparouhov says she is “teaching founders how to fish,” Ryan Delk calls her “the Steph Curry of comms,” and Rachael Horwitz of Haun VenturesHaun VenturesHaun Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2022 by Katie Haun, a former U.S. federal prosecutor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It focuses on digital assets, financial infrastructure, and related frontier technologies; it raised $1.5 billion across two funds at launch and a further $1 billion in 2026.Open the full entry also speaks well of her.⁠[4]

The profile states that she has about 100,000 followers on X, where she often critiques companies’ PR, calling a United AirlinesUnited AirlinesUnited Airlines is an airline based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is wholly owned by the Nasdaq-listed United Airlines Holdings, Inc. and is a member of Star Alliance. One of its founding carriers, Varney Air Lines, made its first flight in 1926, and the company merged with Continental Airlines in 2010.Open the full entry post “lazy and patronizing” and a memo by CrowdStrikeCrowdStrikeCrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is a cybersecurity company headquartered in Austin, Texas, co-founded in 2011 by George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch. It sells subscription services for endpoint protection, threat intelligence, identity and cloud security through its cloud-native Falcon platform and a single lightweight sensor, and listed on Nasdaq in 2019 under the symbol CRWD. On July 19, 2024, a content update to its Falcon sensor caused large numbers of Windows systems around the world to crash.Open the full entry’s founder “cowardly and callous”; that Rostra’s landing page declares “TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD”; and that her manifesto runs to about 850 words. She first spoke to the reporter on the record, later declined to discuss client details on the record, and said she was not as interesting as the reporter’s editor thought.⁠[4]

In her Flack post of March 14, 2025, “Should you hire a PR agency?”, she writes that she has run communications at a startup and at a public company and has led an agency, and that she has hired or reviewed the pricing of dozens of agencies; the most expensive one she had charged about $400,000 a month, and she ended that engagement. She refers to TrailRunner as her “former firm” and lists it as an example of a boutique for corporate communications and special situations.⁠[44]

The monthly retainers she cites range from about $5,000 for a single junior freelancer or a young firm to $500,000 or more for a very large global firm; technology PR firms typically charge startups $20,000 to $35,000 a month and specialized or high-profile shops $60,000 to $100,000 a month. Her advice is never to outsource the story or the overall plan, to do the work oneself at the very beginning, to hire a full-time communications leader as the company grows and to use an outside agency when the team is overloaded; she avoids hourly billing and recommends judging agencies by business goals rather than by metrics such as share of voice. She also writes that she has charged $1 for crisis assignments in which she did not care about the fee and simply needed to be formally on retainer.⁠[44]

She also writes that Palmer Luckey has said Anduril’s communications added hundreds of millions of dollars to the company’s value.⁠[44]

On July 30, 2025, she published “How to Win the AI Talent War” on Flack. The essay argues that the race to AGI will be won by attracting and keeping the people capable of building it, that money matters but is not enough, and that companies win by inspiring belief in their vision, mission and leadership, which she calls a “religious victory.” She lists ten points: make people believe the team will win; have a clear and specific mission; give top talent direct access to leadership and technical autonomy; build an us-against-the-world esprit de corps; recognize individual researchers publicly; use the way clusters of talent attract more talent; turn recruits into recruiters; shield top people from bureaucracy; lead by example; and keep momentum.⁠[45]

At the end of the essay she thanks Chris Best, Dwarkesh PatelDwarkesh PatelDwarkesh Patel is a podcast host and author who hosts the long-form interview show Dwarkesh Podcast, covering fields such as artificial intelligence, technology, history, and economics. He began making the podcast in 2020 while in college, was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2024, and compiled and published The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 with Gavin Leech.Open the full entry, Sholto Douglas and David Perell for reading drafts.⁠[45]

In her Flack post of September 5, 2025, “The DOD Rebrand,” she writes that renaming the U.S. defense department the Department of War was Palmer Luckey’s idea: he started before the 2024 election got going and spent the next couple of years making the case to military officers, policymakers and senior government officials, and the new administration ultimately adopted it. She lists five goals he had in mind: deterrence, transparency, clarity of purpose, morale and what she calls “objector repellent.” She also mentions that two years earlier she had posted a picture from Anduril’s headquarters with Palmer Luckey.⁠[46]

Lulu Cheng Meservey, LP, formed in 2025, is a venture capital fund organized as a DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry limited partnership. Its Form D filing lists Meservey as managing director of the general partner entity; the date of first sale was November 21, 2025.⁠[47]

The filing, which she signed on December 5, shows a total offering amount and an amount sold of $40.35 million each, with 45 investors. The amounts listed in the filing are the amounts raised for interests in the fund.⁠[47]

On November 24, 2025, she published “Kevin Spacey vs The Telegraph” on Flack, subtitled “How to fight a bad headline.” The post analyzes Kevin Spacey’s video response to a headline in The Telegraph that described him as homeless and judges it skillful: he shifted the frame from defending his finances to speaking from a position of status, opened with light humor, addressed his supporters directly, blamed the editors rather than the journalist and chose video as the right format.⁠[48]

On December 29, 2025, she published “When someone says they hate your product with a burning passion” on Flack, subtitled “What CodeRabbitCodeRabbitCodeRabbit is an AI code review platform company started in early 2023 by Harjot Gill, with Gur Singh as co-founder. In August 2026 it raised a $143 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation.Open the full entry did, and what to do instead.” Taking a public exchange between Aiden Bai and CodeRabbit as its case, the post describes how the dismissive replies of the company’s chief executive backfired and how the episode ended in what she calls an “apologish.” Her five points are: separate the information from the emotion; agree on principles before defending oneself; take more ownership than seems necessary; explain rather than defend when clarifying facts; and, if an apology is warranted, keep it simple by recapping the problem, explaining the fix and the prevention, and then moving on.⁠[49]

In “Standing out,” Meservey treats real results, original expression, in-person connections and long-term accumulation as important factors in communications. She argues that, in an environment of growing competition for attention and more automated content, companies should offer verifiable actions and results and should not measure the value of communication by clicks alone.⁠[50]

Shopify’s Management Information Circular for its annual meeting of June 16, 2026, which presents information as of April 21, 2026, states that she is 39, lives in PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry in the United States, is independent, sits on no board committee, attended every board meeting held in 2025 and received 99.81% of the votes cast at the 2025 annual meeting.⁠[51]

The circular lists her holdings as 8,175 Class A subordinate voting shares, 4,741 restricted share units (RSUs) and 666 deferred share units (DSUs). Her compensation as a director for 2025 totaled $350,395, made up of $300,126 in share-based awards and $50,269 in deferred share units; she elected to convert all of her cash compensation for 2025 into deferred share units. The circular explains that directors receive an annual equity award with an intended value of about $300,000 and that new directors also receive a new-hire equity award with an intended value of about $400,000.⁠[51][51]

On June 16, 2026, Meservey was re-elected as a director at Shopify’s annual meeting of shareholders, receiving 99.71% of the votes in favor.⁠[52]

On August 12, 2026, David Senra released a long interview with her on his YouTube channel; the official episode page, titled “Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra,” appeared the same day with a transcript. The conversation mentions that it was filmed at Aman New York.⁠[1][3]

The first half of the interview covers, in order: her birth and a childhood spent moving between countries; her college years and learning English; how she sums up her work; how she entered communications and came to work for Anduril; the counterinsurgency she studied in graduate school and the role of a manifesto; the “Go Direct” manifesto; the origin of the name Rostra; and how she helps founders compress an idea into a single phrase.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

The second half covers, in order: why she does this work; the public image of the artificial-intelligence industry and a commencement address by Eric SchmidtEric SchmidtEric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist who was Google’s chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011 and later executive chairman of Alphabet; he chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and has led the rocket company Relativity Space since 2025.Open the full entry; techno-optimist storytelling in the manner of the cartoon “The Jetsons”; how Shopify tells the stories of its merchants; her 2026 essay “Standing out” and purchased engagement; a renewed regard for beauty; why she does not use templates; the example of Dana White and the UFC; the point she adds about trusting oneself; and Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols.”⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

She says the place where she was born was a small village and that her mother had no way of knowing even whether the child would be a boy or a girl. The family was able to leave China because her father was sent to Germany to take a doctorate in astrophysics. Under the arrangements of the time, she says, she and her mother were supposed to stay behind to make sure he came back, but the two of them did go to Germany to join him at the University of Heidelberg, where he was working on his doctorate.⁠[3][3][1]

Her father, she says, then moved between universities and observatories to study and work, the University of Oslo among them; she did much of her growing up there and went to public school. David Senra remarks that she speaks Norwegian, and she says she “became a little bit Norwegian.”⁠[3][3][3][1]

She says that in Canada the family was able to become Canadian citizens, which they found exciting and welcoming; that she has been in the United States ever since arriving for college; and that she was naturalized as a U.S. citizen during Donald Trump’s first administration.⁠[3][1]

Living in America, she says, was a dream inherited from her father: had he not gone to Germany he would have tried to go to the United States, which was oversubscribed as a destination at the time. She regards what she does now as the culmination of several generations of work.⁠[3]

She tells a story from her school days in Oslo. Public schools there had a transitional class for immigrant children who could not yet speak Norwegian, and she was in one. Halloween had been discussed in October, and assuming that, as in the United States, children wore costumes to school, she arrived on October 31 in a full-body rabbit costume with gloves and a tail, to find that nobody else was in costume; she spent the whole day holding her pencils through the gloves. Her conclusion is that a great deal of context goes unspoken, and that thinking one has it when one does not gets exposed in dramatic ways.⁠[3][3][3][3]

She says that after arriving in Canada she learned English from a green and blue book whose title was simply “English.” In college she had an interview with BCG or a firm like it, was asked whether she had experience of something and, meaning to say “under my belt,” said “below the belt” instead; she did not get the job. She says she is still learning English and still thinking about the fine textures of words in different settings.⁠[3][3][3][1]

She says that in college she did not know what she wanted to do and that the thing she does now did not exist until she started doing it.⁠[3]

In the interview David Senra says that she works seven days a week, picks up when he calls at 11 at night Eastern time, and has a “bunch of kids.” He also says that at every restaurant dinner with her she drinks hot chocolate, which she jokingly calls her “performance beverage.” Her August 2022 post about her visit to Joe Rogan’s studio likewise mentions that she drank hot chocolate there.⁠[3][3][3][11]

An author biography on The Muse under the name Lulu Cheng states that she had worked for JPMorgan in New York and, when it was written, was a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where her focus was on technology, media and economic development.⁠[53]

She says that in graduate school she studied diplomacy, within it international security and within that counterinsurgency. The course had students create mock terrorist groups, her explanation being that the best way to study what one is fighting is to understand it, and draw up a mission, a vision and a manifesto; that, she says, is when she became “manifesto pilled,” adding that manifestos are perhaps now overdone and that this may be partly her fault. A good manifesto, in her view, admits that the other side has more people, more money, more force and more legitimacy, and sets out to beat all of that with greater intensity; she quotes a line she says may be apocryphal, “One man plus the truth is a majority.”⁠[3][3][3][3]

She illustrates the political-risk work she did in Washington with examples: what to do if Google is entering Egypt and there is a coup; and how AlibabaAlibabaAlibaba is a technology group focused on commerce, cloud computing, and AI. Founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, it received a major investment from Yahoo in 2005.Open the full entry, in holding its largest initial public offering in the United States, had to deal not only with ordinary business matters but also with fears about China and about data privacy. That work, she says, led her to partner with Jim Wilkinson, who was helping Jack Ma run the offering; she describes him as a born-and-bred Texan who had worked in government and had become Alibaba’s head of corporate affairs, and calls him a great mentor and teacher.⁠[3][3][1]

She sums up her work as follows: “I help founders build a movement to help their company succeed.” This, she says, is not necessarily relevant to the seventh business-software company in a crowded category; the founders she wants to help are those who must get people to believe something counterintuitive in order to create something new, and she gives Ramp and General Matter as examples.⁠[3][3][1]

Asked how many clients she has at the moment, she answers “Over a dozen” and says that none of them is not mission-driven. David Senra says she has some 10 to 12 clients at a time and a waiting list of a thousand companies, to which she replies, “A little less.”⁠[3][3]

She gives an example of how she helps founders compress an idea into a single phrase: at an event a founder spent about six minutes describing to her a business that lets people who cook well at home run their own delivery kitchens, and she summed it up as “you’re turning a cook into a chef,” which he adopted on the spot; he is not, she says, a client of hers. She adds that Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry’s comparison of the computer to a bicycle works because a word everyone understands saves two paragraphs of explanation.⁠[3][3][3]

She offers General Matter’s website as an example of something made with care: her team, General Matter and another team labored and argued over it for a long time, and the mission and manifesto that resulted are both very short.⁠[3][3][1]

In the interview David Senra refers to Cognition as a client of hers and recalls an event hosted by Cognition at which they worked together: another founder’s PR person had sent over a list of questions for him to ask, and she said bluntly in the email thread that the questions were not good enough.⁠[3][3]

On why she does this work, she says that the world is better when new technologies are allowed to take root and flourish, and that building a technology is often not as hard as getting people to use it; in her view the greatest and most underestimated barrier between a technology existing and its having an impact is whether people understand it, welcome it and want to work on it, and far less effort goes into that than into the engineering.⁠[3][3][3]

As a Shopify director she says that Tobi LütkeTobias LütkeTobias Lütke, who also goes by Tobi Lütke, is a programmer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, and a startup investor. He took part in the Ruby on Rails open-source community, has served as Shopify’s CEO since April 2008, and joined the board of Coinbase in 2022.Open the full entry and his colleagues are good at telling Shopify’s story on two levels: one is the technology, where she calls Shopify infrastructure for entrepreneurship and calls entrepreneurship the “last bastion” of human economic value; the other is the merchants, who are the heroes of the story while Shopify stays in the background. The merchant she cites is SKIMS.⁠[3][3][3][1]

Commenting on a commencement address by Eric Schmidt, she says it had two problems: the protagonist of the story was the technology rather than the people being addressed, and when the speaker talked about artificial intelligence possibly taking a large share of jobs he showed no recognition of how the audience would feel. Her view is that chief executives who believe artificial intelligence will cause massive job losses have an obligation to warn people and help them prepare, but “don’t look happy when you’re saying it.”⁠[3][3][3][3]

She says the last really effective techno-optimist message was the cartoon “The Jetsons,” in which the technology is ambient and the story is about a family, whereas pessimistic stories such as “Terminator” and “Blade Runner” put the technology in the foreground. From this she argues for placing technology in the background of a human story and suggests calling this “the Jetsons rule”; her other examples are Neal StephensonNeal StephensonNeal Stephenson is an American author of science fiction and historical fiction whose best-known works include Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. He coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash (1992), and his novels are known for their detailed imagining of technology and the information society, influencing generations of technologists; he also took part in the early work of Blue Origin, served as Magic Leap’s chief futurist and co-founded the blockchain platform Lamina1.Open the full entry’s novels “The Diamond Age” and “Seveneves” and the way Dana White used a reality show to make viewers familiar with mixed martial arts without their noticing.⁠[3][3][3][3][1]

Speaking of her 2026 essay “Standing out,” she says that many product launches now use the same templated video and that the engagement on some posts is paid for; when she sees that, she writes off the whole company as fake, will not buy its product and would not recommend that anyone go to work there.⁠[3][3][3][3]

She says that people are once again allowed to care about objective beauty. In her view an aesthetic relativism prevailed for the better part of the previous decade, and she cites the imagery that Victoria’s Secret used for a time as an example. She calls beauty a “scoreboard”: fake things are not beautiful because nobody has put love and care into them, and beautiful things cannot be faked. Her example is the work of Joe GebbiaJoe GebbiaJoe Gebbia is an American designer and entrepreneur and a co-founder of Airbnb. In 2007, he and Brian Chesky founded AirBed & Breakfast, the predecessor of Airbnb; in 2022, he stepped down from his full-time operating role at Airbnb and joined Tesla’s board; since 2025, he has served as U.S. Chief Design Officer, leading the White House’s National Design Studio.Open the full entry and the National Design Studio team on government websites.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][1]

She says she does not use templates: no two situations are the same, and using a template means giving up the chance to do better than her own work of six months earlier. On writing with artificial intelligence, she says she uses such tools all the time, but that relying on them to write and to generate ideas puts a person at “sea level,” with much the same output as anyone else willing to pay a fraction of a cent for it; she also cites Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of imitation as suicide.⁠[3][3][3][3]

She argues for working backwards from the small group of people a founder actually needs to reach: an artificial-intelligence company that only needs to recruit five top machine-learning engineers, and knows who they are, has no reason to go on mass-audience television. Her example is Brian Armstrong’s appearance on Pod of Jake, a podcast with very few listeners. She adds that a message relayed through PR staff, reporters and editors loses the founder’s original intensity along the way.⁠[3][3][3][3][1]

She says founders must first convince themselves and then move outward in concentric circles to convince others; the person at the center has to be the most convinced and have the clearest idea of where the movement is headed. She draws the comparison with commanders such as Napoleon BonaparteNapoleon BonaparteNapoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and statesman who was first consul of the French Republic from 1799 to 1804 and emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and again in 1815. In 1803 he sold the Louisiana territory to the United States, and in 1804 he promulgated the French Civil Code.Open the full entry and Julius Caesar, who led from the front.⁠[3][3][3]

She says that for some repeat founders the several companies they start are extensions of a single mission, which she calls a “meta company,” and gives as her example William Hockey, who did PlaidPlaidPlaid is a financial technology company co-founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey and headquartered in San Francisco. It provides infrastructure connecting financial accounts with applications, with products spanning account verification, payments, lending and fraud prevention, and develops AI models for financial transactions. A planned acquisition by Visa was terminated in 2021.Open the full entry and is now doing Column.⁠[3][3][1]

At the end of the interview she retells Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols” and says the lesson she takes from it is that people who are not given a coherent story try desperately to fill one in. The scattered facts a founder puts out, she says, such as a hire, a new office or a fundraising, will be woven into a narrative by others in any case, and all the founder can decide is who gets to tell it.⁠[3][3][3][1]

The purpose of a manifesto is to make a founder’s intensity concrete and to paint for people a picture of what the world could be (video at 16:41).⁠[3]

Founders must treat their story as seriously as they treat the product, the code and hiring, and only the founder can tell it (video at 20:38).⁠[3]

Going direct does not require traditional personal charisma, and quieter, more introverted founders can do it, but they must believe intensely in the idea (video at 27:52).⁠[3]

Rather than chase impressive engagement numbers, put out work that truly represents the best of what you do: engagement may be lower, but the people engaging are real and they care (video at 49:30).⁠[3]

Anything worth doing deserves an original approach rather than a template (video at 58:29).⁠[3]

Do not wait for the opportunity before getting ready; stay ready all the time, because the big chance can come at any moment. This is a mantra she heard from UFC fighters, and she also used it in her Flack crisis communications playbook of March 2023 (video at 1:10:10).⁠[3][31]

Trust yourself and stay with the same thing, because something that keeps changing cannot compound (video at 1:11:50).⁠[3]

A founder cannot control how others string scattered facts into a story; what the founder can control is deciding what that story is and filling in the gaps for them (video at 1:15:50).⁠[3]

As of November 2026 Rostra’s About page carries endorsements from nine people: besides Scott Wu and Palmer Luckey, they are Nat Friedman, Eric GlymanEric GlymanEric Glyman is a fintech entrepreneur and the co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp. He previously co-founded Paribus, an online price-tracking and refund service that Capital One acquired in 2016. In 2019 he founded Ramp with Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee, using the corporate card as an entry point into expense management and finance automation; since June 2026 he has shared the chief executive role with Atiyeh.Open the full entry, Sam Altman, Bari Weiss, Brian Armstrong, Mikey Shulman and David HolzDavid HolzDavid Holz is an American entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of the AI image generation service Midjourney, who earlier co-founded the hand-tracking hardware company Leap Motion; his remarks on training data sources, content moderation, and medical hardware have repeatedly drawn controversy.Open the full entry.⁠[41]

As of November 2026 her personal website calls her the founder and chief executive of Rostra in its title and says that she sometimes writes on Flack and mostly posts on X.⁠[54]

JPMorgan: Official website: https://www.jpmorgan.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[55]

McLarty Associates: Official website: https://maglobal.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[56]

TrailRunner International: Official website: https://trailrunnerint.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[57]

Substack: Official website: https://substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[58]

Activision Blizzard: Official website: https://www.activisionblizzard.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[59]

Rostra: Official website: https://rostra.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

Shopify: Official website: https://www.shopify.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[52]

Personal website: https://luluchengmeservey.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[54]

Flack: Newsletter: https://www.getflack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[54]

X: Public account: https://x.com/lulumeservey (opens in a new window).⁠[54][60]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulu-cheng-meservey/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]