Welcome to Flack

A new playbook for communications

Traditional PR

Great communications can convince people to follow you, forgive you, trust you, work for you, or buy your stuff. For startups in particular, comms can be a superpower that helps attract employees, customers, and investors. 

But the playbook for communications is outdated. 

Here’s just a sampling of what companies are now up against: Most media pitches don’t work, and the mere whiff of “thought leadership” triggers a gag reflex. There's an overload of information and a deficit of trust. People live on the internet and congregate in tribes. The culture wars are everywhere. Information is fractured, unreliable, and often hysterical. No traditional comms playbook could survive contact with today's chaotic reality. We have to adapt to a world where people receive information, build trust, and make decisions differently from ever before.

I’ve had the good fortune to lead comms for some of the founders and companies that I respect most in the world (including Substack itself, which obviously doesn’t co-sign anything I write here). Along the way, I’ve gotten the chance to experiment, take risks, and occasionally fail. 

Flack is a personal blog where I will write about what I’ve learned and propose a new playbook for comms. For inspiration, I'll draw insights about comms from other disciplines like the military, the makeup industry, physics, K-pop, psychology, and religion. I hope that the strategies and tactics here will be especially useful for founders and entrepreneurs, but anyone can adapt them for their own purposes.

Lastly, since the point is to explore and discover new ways of doing things, these posts will be more experimental than prescriptive, and I welcome your ideas and critiques. 

Thanks for joining me.

You should subscribe if:

- You’re a founder or exec who wants to help your company grow through better communications

- You’re a writer, creator, or entrepreneur who wants to promote your work and build your reputation

- You like getting useful things for free