Lulu Cheng Meservey's Advice on Writing: Silicon Valley's Top PR Strategist on Clear Communication

Lulu Cheng Meservey ran communications at Substack and led corporate affairs at Activision Blizzard. She has worked with companies including Anduril and advises founders across Silicon Valley on how to communicate directly with their audiences. Her newsletter Flack is a playbook for modern communications.

Her writing advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, Lenny's Newsletter, and her public writing on communications strategy.

Go Direct

The old communications playbook: hire a PR firm, pitch journalists, control the narrative through intermediaries. Meservey says that playbook is dead.

"Go direct" does not mean do everything yourself forever. It does not mean boycott the press. It means the founder speaks to the audience without middlemen. Without filtering through PR corpo talk. Without hiding behind a spokesperson whose opinion nobody cares about.

Why? Because people need to know what you stand for. They need to hear your actual voice. A founder speaking in the first person carries authority that no press release can replicate. A paid spokesperson "is putting the fries in the bag of the email." Everyone knows they are being paid to say it. The message arrives neutralized.

Message, Medium, Messenger

Meservey breaks communication into three components. Each one can be right or wrong independently.

Message is what you say. The test: could you say it without a call to action asking people to give you money? If you can only speak when there is direct self-interest involved, your communication is just advertising. The candy coating that makes a message stick is a statement about the world that is novel, helpful, or educational. The commercial interest rides underneath.

A second test: if our company did not exist, what could we say that would make our target audience feel understood? Start by relating to them. Figure out what they care about, what they are scared of, what they want. Then figure out how to link it back to the company. If you start with the link, you lose people immediately.

Medium is where you say it. Not every founder needs Twitter. Not every company needs a blog. Pick one channel. Get specific about who you are reaching. "Consistent, good content is better than trying to go viral."

Messenger is who says it. This is where most companies fail. Different messages require different messengers. The founder has moral authority to talk about vision and mission. But the founder has zero authority to say "this is a great place to work" - that claim is credible only from the most junior employee. An investor has authority to talk about market size. A customer has authority to talk about product quality.

The janitor saying the CEO always greeted him by name is worth more than any CEO profile. "Same person, two different contexts. One I'm indifferent. The other I want to go see Dazed and Confused for the seventh time."

The Emotional Level Principle

Meservey uses a visual for crisis communication. Imagine a scale from happy to upset. When something goes wrong, the customer is down here, upset. The company is up here, unbothered.

The customer's first instinct is to drag the company down to their level. They need to feel that you get it. If you come in and say "what's the big deal?" they will spend all their energy explaining why it is a big deal. You end up in the same place, but through conflict.

The better move: go lower than the customer. Come in more upset than they are. She uses the example of a coat shop. Customer comes in angry about a hole in their coat. The floor clerk gets the boss. The boss comes out: "There was a hole? You've got to be kidding me. That is absolutely unacceptable. Give me the coat." The customer's emotional response flips. "It's not that bad. Please don't get this mad."

She rewrote CrowdStrike's crisis response during their massive outage to demonstrate. The original was passive, corporate, distancing. Her rewrite: "I'm the CEO of CrowdStrike. I'm devastated to see the scale of today's outage. I'll be personally working on it with our team until it's fully fixed for every single user."

First person. Emotional honesty. Responsibility taken. Not "an issue has been identified" but "I am sorry." CrowdStrike eventually did their own rewrite along these lines. But those first hours matter.

Speaking from Experience

Meservey makes a sharp distinction between opinions and experiences. Everyone has opinions. Few have monopolies.

Writing from experience gives you a monopoly. Nobody else has had your exact experience with your exact reactions and your exact take. When someone writes "I spent 487 hours learning this," people pay attention because time spent creates knowledge that cannot be faked.

Opinions are the opposite. Millions of people share your opinion. There is no reason for anyone to buy that message from you specifically. "Competition is for losers" applies to writing and speaking as much as to business. Find the thing where you are the only source.

This is also why corporate communication fails when it is generic. A company saying "we value innovation" is stating an opinion that every company shares. A founder telling the specific story of a product decision they made last Tuesday - that is experience nobody can replicate.

Cultural Currents

Meservey warns against trying to manufacture virality. You cannot force people to say something they did not already want to say. If you ask someone to amplify your launch post, three things can happen: they ignore you and feel guilty, they do it resentfully, or they do it happily because they already cared. Only the third outcome helps. The first two burn relationship capital.

Instead, find what people already want to say. Give shape to it. Coin a term. Make a fuzzy feeling concrete. "If there's a current going this way, you don't swim against it. You swim at an angle."

Substack used this with "go direct." The feeling already existed - founders frustrated with media gatekeepers, wanting to speak for themselves. Substack gave it a name and a platform. People adopted the language because it articulated what they already believed.

Favors Are Not Renewable

Asking someone to share your post feels like a small favor. It is not. People hate doing it. The energy of an "al-Qaeda hostage video" comes through in the joyless "LFG" reply they post out of obligation.

You have burned more relationship capital than you think. And it is anti-viral. You made them say something they did not want to. They will never want to say it again. "They'll be allergic to saying it again because they don't want to relive the trauma of the cringe."

Stand for Something Without Dividing

Companies should be opinionated. They should take risks. But the line they draw should be gerrymandered to fit around their people, not through them.

Choosing a political party splits your employees and customers in half. Choosing a stance that aligns with what your specific audience already believes costs you nothing and gains you loyalty. A crypto company should draw the line at economic freedom versus suppression, not at one political party versus another. The people outside that line are people you never needed.

Apple's "Think Different" worked because it drew a line that included its customers and excluded people who were never going to buy a Mac anyway. Nobody felt alienated. They felt invited.

Key Takeaways

• Go direct. The founder must speak in their own voice, without intermediaries.
• Match the messenger to the message. The janitor is more credible than the CEO on workplace culture.
• In crisis, go lower than the customer's emotional level. Devastation beats deflection.
• Write from experience, not opinion. Experience creates monopoly. Opinion creates competition.
• Do not ask for amplification. If people want to share it, they will. If they do not, forcing it makes everything worse.
• Find cultural currents and give them language. Virality comes from articulating what people already feel.
• Stand for something, but gerrymander the line to include your people.

Meservey's core insight is that the best corporate communication sounds like a person talking, not a corporation performing. The same principle applies to any writing: specificity, honesty, and the courage to speak in the first person. Athens is for writers who want their words to sound like them, not like everyone.

This post draws from Meservey's appearance on How I Write, Lenny's Newsletter, and her newsletter Flack.