PR Secrets for Startups
Editor's Note: At a time when anyone can broadcast their opinions about your startup to the world, public relations requires a new level of engagement on the part of companies and entrepreneurs. But what are the new rules of PR?
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2008, the gatekeeping role of traditional tech press was eroding: blogs, RSS, and early social platforms meant any customer or critic could shape a startup's narrative without a journalist in the loop. This piece arrived amid a wave of practitioner advice on the same theme — ReadWriteWeb's 36-point startup playbook had covered PR alongside engineering just months earlier — and it foreshadowed the more confrontational shifts that followed, including TechCrunch's own call to abolish the embargo system later that year.
First-order effects
- Founders reading this in 2008 face an immediate mandate shift: PR stops being a hired-agency function of press releases and becomes direct engagement — responding publicly to blog posts, comments, and user sentiment in near-real time.
- Startups that ignore the new channels cede narrative control to whoever speaks first online, since a single influential blogger can now frame a product launch before any official announcement lands.
Second-order effects
- The breakdown of controlled messaging puts strain on intermediary conventions like embargoes — if everyone can publish instantly, the coordinated-announcement model loses leverage, which is exactly the tension TechCrunch escalated when it declared death to the embargo months later.
- Agencies and in-house comms teams have to retool around monitoring and rapid response rather than placement, raising demand for operators who understand both press dynamics and founder voice — a need Chris Dixon's later practical guidance on dealing with reporters reflects from the entrepreneur's side.
Third-order effects
- If engagement-based PR becomes table stakes, communications professionalizes rather than disappears: the long-run pattern shows ex-journalists and Big Tech PR alumni — like the former Google communicators who went on to run comms at Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Sequoia — concentrating top communications talent inside a small set of high-profile companies.
- Over time, the line between 'PR' and the company's own publishing (blogs, then social accounts) blurs structurally, shifting power from media intermediaries toward companies with direct audiences — while leaving smaller startups still competing for the credibility that independent press confers.
The trend: Startup PR has been migrating from gatekept, agency-mediated announcements toward direct, always-on engagement with a democratized media landscape — a shift this 2008 piece caught at its inflection point.