Before Anduril was a unicorn, it was a black sheep. Today it’s a multi-billion dollar company, an icon of defense tech, and a household name (at least in households with a gun safe or an Eight Sleep). But in the first couple years after the company’s 2017 founding, young progressives were overwhelmingly hostile to the military, making Anduril’s mission anathema to many tech workers, investors, and reporters.

In those early years, I had the privilege of managing Anduril’s communications as an advisor to the founders Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen. With their permission, I’m sharing for the first time the details of our campaign to win hearts and minds, so it can serve as a guide for other mission-driven founders.

The work was cut out for us. Palmer’s name had been dragged through the mud for supporting Trump, to the point that he was physically assaulted at a conference. When the media took an interest in Anduril, they tended not to focus on the product but on gotcha political questions. When Elad Gil led a round, people sent him angry texts including one accusing him of making a “fascist” investment. And when Anduril hosted a recruiting session at Cornell, the university had to provide armed police escorts due to violent threats from pacifist students (yeah — I know).

A high profile defense writer not only refused to speak with Palmer, but refused to speak with Trae for working with Palmer, then stopped speaking with me for suggesting it at all. Google, citing a violation of their terms around promoting harm, literally canceled the company — cutting off Anduril’s access to Google business solutions, analytics, and even YouTube (for anyone who wondered why the Ghost 4 launch video was on Vimeo). The list goes on.

Fortunately for both the company and the country, Anduril’s founders stuck to their guns. They seized control of their narrative, running a disciplined founder-led comms strategy, and built a movement around accelerating defense tech.

Here’s an inside look at the 10 core principles of Anduril’s comms strategy.

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Start With the Ends

The classic military approach to strategy is ends, ways, and means. Ends are the business goals you’re trying to achieve, ways are the things you’ll do to achieve the goals, and means are the resources you’ll need to do those things.

A good comms strategy takes the same approach, ensuring you only do things that advance concrete business goals, instead of wasting time chasing nonsense metrics like “impressions” or — deep sigh — “getting out there more.”

I can’t emphasize enough that valid goals for a mission-driven startup do not include things like being the coolest kid at the conference or winning the Hottest Startup trophy from TechCrunch. In fact, those would be warning signs that you’re spending time on the wrong things.

The two goals that anchored Anduril’s comms strategy were: (1) recruiting the best technical talent and (2) securing contracts with the US military and its allies.

Our single-minded pursuit of business goals led Anduril’s comms in unconventional directions. Instead of meeting at Starbucks with tech reporters, I would hang out in airports, chatting up the people with high and tights who were boarding flights early. Rather than focusing on tech conferences, we had Palmer give guest lectures and demos to the CIA and Marine Corps.

These events were always a hit — in recognition of his service to the country, the Marines at Quantico even presented Palmer with a vial of sand retrieved from Iwo Jima, while the leaders of Camp Pendleton were so grateful that they made him a custom Hawaiian shirt.

Most importantly, after every one of these talks, people in the audience would go on to tell their peers about it and help spread the word about what Anduril was doing.

We took the same goal-oriented approach to media relations. For a couple weeks, we pivoted all our comms efforts to doing unrequited PR for a partner. We showered them with so much recognition that they later emailed us to expand the engagement, specifically citing the great press they’d gotten. We wouldn’t have gotten there if we had approached PR in a conventional way.

We tracked our comms strategy with a simple document that listed each goal, the tactics we’d use to reach it, and the action items or resources we needed. If a proposed tactic couldn’t be matched to one of the goals, it was deemed wasted motion and we wouldn’t do it. Each week, I sent the founders an email with the updated document to keep everyone aligned and hold us accountable for doing the things that mattered.

Tracking and execution will look different for every company, but the obsessive focus on advancing business goals should always be the same.

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Go Direct

Going direct means retaining control over your message by speaking directly to your audience instead of depending on middlemen. This is mandatory for mission-driven founders.

Going direct will help you with both defense and offense. On defense, having a direct line to your audience is a hedge against being attacked. When you have your own platform, you don’t have to depend on anyone else and won’t be left helpless if the world turns on you.

On offense, if you’re doing something unprecedented and original, you’ll be the best spokesperson to communicate that vision, and the one with the most credibility to do it. No one can articulate your story as well as you can, so don’t outsource this.

When there are multiple cofounders, each founder can have a distinct public persona. In Anduril’s case, we often had Palmer talk about mission and tech, Trae about national security and ethics, Brian about strategy and business, and Matt about operations and talent. They would address key audiences directly and personally: Palmer flew across the country to visit college robotics clubs, Trae wrote his own essays, Brian and Matt hosted recruiting sessions.

We carefully selected the mediums we used. Twitter and LinkedIn mattered because we wanted to reach DC policymakers and Silicon Valley tech talent. We preferred blog posts and longform interviews, which allowed for fleshing out ideas more fully.

For a while Palmer thought podcasts “weren’t a thing” and refused to do them, but now that they’re a thing he does those too, and they’re great.

Again, going direct doesn’t mean avoiding all media, it just means not depending on media. We still did talk to press, but very selectively and favoring proactive outreach that we initiated.

I would vet reporters by talking to them (and putting them on the phone with a female Chinese Canadian left-leaning immigrant could be a pretty good buzzkill if they were planning a hit piece describing startups as bastions for white, libertarian, nationalist tech bros). But if a reporter made the cut to get an interview, the founders would generally speak on the record in pretty unfiltered fashion, not through an anonymous spokesperson.

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Act Like an Insurgent, Not an Incumbent

Mission-driven startups are built different. You’re creating something before its time or replacing something past its prime, and you don’t get to be disruptive without disrupting something. You will be a threat to established institutions and their fashionable worldviews. They’ll treat you like an insurgent — and you’ll win by acting like one.

Insurgents use asymmetric tactics that play to their advantages. When you don’t have decades of traditional experience, you get more creative and break with convention. When you don’t have as much process and bureaucracy, you move faster and have tighter OODA loops. And when you don’t have longstanding press relationships, you build your own network of influencers and advocates.

When we kicked off Anduril’s comms strategy, none of us had traditional comms experience. We were truly crossing the river by feeling the stones. Looking back, that was a massive benefit: we were unencumbered by decades of doing the wrong things. Some of our best decisions, like turning down interviews with major outlets to focus on speaking directly to tech and defense audiences, years before going direct was a recognized approach, would not have happened if we had “known better” and followed a conventional comms playbook.

Similarly, because we lacked a rigid process, we were able to move extremely quickly. To write Anduril’s company narrative the night before major news was going to break, the founders and I got on the phone and shipped it within a couple hours. Looking back, I have a suspicion that Matt was typing it directly into the website as we were talking. Was it perfect? No, we had to iterate a bunch of times — but its core message never changed, and we avoided leaving a narrative vacuum during a crucial period. For a bigger and older company that needs to do things the “correct” way, the editing process alone would have taken several weeks.

Last, unlike incumbents, insurgent companies don’t have deep relationships with friendly beat reporters. That does not mean you treat the press like an enemy or swear off all mainstream media! It means you can’t assume they’re on your side, and you can’t expect them to carry your message. Reporters will tell you the same thing; their article is not your press release.

In Anduril’s case, we did build good relationships with respected journalists, but even so, we never allowed ourselves to become dependent on the media to speak for us.

Just as an insurgency has to win hearts and minds, you have to spend time in the community. You’ll need others to take up the cause on your behalf and propagate your story in their own voice.

That’s why one of Anduril’s top comms priorities from the beginning was fostering a network of influencers and advocates.

Given our business goals to recruit talent and win contracts, we focused on building relationships with people like investors, Twitter anons, students, bloggers, ethicists, foreign policy analysts, theologians, cartoonists, and military officers. I once swapped into a middle seat on a six-hour red eye so I could chat up a Marine Corps colonel, who ended up arranging for Palmer to speak with dozens of his colleagues (i.e., our potential customers).

Taking an insurgent approach gave us the ability to break with convention, move fast, and build our own influencer network instead of depending on the goodwill of the press.

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Increase Pressure by Decreasing Area

In comms as in physics, P = F/A or, pressure equals force divided by surface area. If pressure is the impact of your comms, you can increase it by decreasing the surface area.

As a mission-driven startup, you win by converting a core group of true believers, not by trying to persuade the whole world. Trying to be universally liked would not only bankrupt you but would require becoming unrecognizably milquetoast and watering down your mission to the point of meaninglessness. If you’re pleasing everybody, something is wrong.

There is a trade-off between how many people you can appeal to and how deep an impression you can make on them. A message like “Be yourself” will be appealing in a bland, forgettable way to pretty much everyone. On the other hand, “Get in loser, we’re building armed drones” will totally alienate all but a small number of people — but those will be your people, and to them you’ll be irresistible.

Choosing your audience means choosing who you’re not talking to. Never contort your mission to appease nay-sayers, fence-sitters, and Johnny-come-latelies. They are not your people.

Anduril had no interest in winning over safety experts. We weren’t pandering to the people chained to trees or glued to paintings. In fact, pissing off the people who oppose your mission can send a strong positive signal to your true audience.

So narrow your audience ruthlessly and sharpen your message to a point. It’s the only way to generate enough pressure to break through.

It’s counterintuitive, but think of your comms strategy as the inverse of a marketing funnel: start very narrow, then broaden out later. Get 10 diehards to tell 10 others, who will each tell 10 others. That’s how you build a movement.

To reach our target audience of defense people, one of the first tactics in our comms plan was Trae and I doing a marathon of meetings in DC. We took a retail politics approach to winning over the locals and had long, substantive conversations with one person at a time.

It was slow going and didn’t scale, but we formed relationships with the right people, and we played the long game. One of the think tank analysts Trae and I briefed together in DC ended up vouching for us when he told reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum that they should check out the leading defense tech startup, Anduril — six months after our initial meeting.

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Nail the Narrative

George Bernard Shaw said love is the gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everyone else. This is the goal for startup comms. Employees need to believe there’s nowhere else they could possibly do work this meaningful. Customers need to believe no one else could understand or solve their problem the same way.

Your company narrative is the basis for all your messaging, and that narrative should show how you’re creating something new and mindblowing. It should persuade people you’re an N of 1. Think switch, not dial. Lighting a fire requires a spark.

To start, simply write down what unique thing you do, why it matters, and why you’re the only team who could get it done. It needs to be human (no corpo jargon), assertive (no hedging or waffling), and specific (no hand-waving abstractions).

Make sure the narrative is compelling for your target audience. You need message-market fit, which you can only achieve by knowing your audience’s cultural erogenous zones.

In our case, most people in DC in 2018 didn’t know or care about Anduril, but they loved talking about AI and US competition with China. Accordingly, our messaging emphasized Anduril’s AI work and the risk of falling behind foreign adversaries if DoD didn’t work with tech startups.

Craft your narrative, quickly, and do it yourself. Don’t let a pack of consultants charge you for four to six weeks of listening sessions only to write up the weighted average of two dozen employee interviews. If you as the founder can’t clearly and easily articulate what you’re doing and why, comms is the least of your problems.

After you have a narrative for your company, don't forget to craft a complementary narrative for yourself as a founder. Whether you’re setting up meetings with investors, candidates, or sales prospects, the first thing they’ll do is Google you, and defining your reputation needs to start early.

Right after we created the Anduril corporate narrative (I think it was actually on the same two-hour call I mentioned above), we wrote a bio for each founder and gave them good real estate on the company site. That also helped take control of their SEO to preempt someone trying to paint a false picture of them later on. Palmer in particular had experienced all kinds of defamation going back to the Oculus days.

Once you’ve decided what to say about the company and its founders, keep saying it. It will sound unbearably repetitive to say the same few words over and over, but the repetition is necessary to make it stick.

Anduril was called many things before it became known as a defense tech company. There are a number of reasons for that shift, but one of them is simply that Anduril said it was a defense tech company — over and over and over again.

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The Inner Circle Comes First

The right way to propagate any message is to start with the founders and spread the word in concentric circles outward, putting the most important audiences first.

This sequencing is crucial for two reasons. First, it allows you to address one audience at a time, which makes for a crisper message. Second, each circle of people will take a cue from the inner circles. Customers will look at what employees are saying about the company, because they assume employees know the company best. Employees will take cues from senior managers; senior managers will defer to the founding team.

If you’re telling customers a story your employees haven’t bought into yet, and customers see your message being contradicted by your own employees, your credibility is shot.

When Anduril had new messaging, our process was to first get the founders aligned, then get senior leaders on board, then brief other employees, then speak to customers, and outward from there.

A common startup mistake is to prioritize external comms (flashy, fridge-worthy) over internal comms (boring, HR-adjacent). In reality, internal comms trumps external comms every time. An external crisis is inconvenient, but an internal crisis is existential. We’ve all seen companies get hit by waves of bad press and come out OK in the end (assuming it’s just bad press, and not a Theranos situation). But how many companies survive an employee exodus?

Anduril’s comms strategy was tightly aligned with employees because we knew they were the most important audience. We made an effort never to keep them in the dark about anything important; they knew exactly where the company was headed and what they were there to do.

When we kicked off our comms campaign, I asked each of the founders what parts of their past might shock employees. Trae jokingly referred to “coming out” as a Christian like on HBO’s Silicon Valley, and Grimm volunteered Palmer’s bikini photo.

Employees knew all of it and didn’t care — including the fact that caused most of the external consternation, which was Palmer’s support for Trump. Employees understood from the start what they were signing up for and with whom they’d be working. Even when a nasty article came out, there was no gasping, pearl clutching, or demand for listening sessions.

Employees also knew how they were expected to handle press outreach. Other than the founders, myself, or anyone specifically authorized, no one was to speak with reporters or share company information. Matt would regularly send reminders to the company, especially when something big was happening, about the protocols for handling press messages and the importance of protecting sensitive information.

No company is fully airtight, but I don’t remember there ever being a damaging employee leak, and that culture of discipline and discretion persists to this day.

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Win Over the Tribal Elders

Once you’ve identified your audiences, narrative, and sequencing, how do you actually get through to people?

Find the tribal elders.

Insurgents identify the leaders in a community, the people that everyone else admires and respects. You can do the same: go to them first, pay your respects, establish common interests, tell them what you’re doing, and convince them to support you. If you succeed, they will become the nodes of influence that will spread your message to their communities (colleagues, friends, portfolio companies, etc.) more effectively and credibly than you can.

Go to them before you need something, and definitely before any crisis. The relationship has to be well-established before you make any kind of ask. Imagine getting a “Gondor calls for aid” message when you’ve never heard of Gondor. Build your alliances before you need them.

In the process of building relationships for Anduril, I’ve helped people with a spouse’s job hunt or a child’s college application. Sometimes people have ended up helping us later on, and sometimes not — and that’s OK. Whatever happens, if you take a genuine interest in people and build authentic relationships, you’ll never regret it.

The real comms strategy is the friends we make along the way (really though).

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Take More Risk Than You Think You Should

Too often, corporate communications are high volume but low substance, like a shopping bag filled with other shopping bags. You can’t build a company without taking risks, and you have to get comfortable taking risks with your comms too.

Incumbents can’t take big swings; they need to protect an established brand and feel they have too much to lose. But you, as a startup founder, have nearly nothing to lose, your greatest enemy is the status quo, and your upside is uncapped. This is a competitive advantage that shouldn’t be squandered lightly.

Startups might try to mitigate perceived reputation risk by overly scripting or muzzling their founders. That is thinking about it backwards. The much greater risk lies in stifling a founder’s originality, muting their passion, and depriving the company of its most powerful evangelist. The risks of being bland, boring, or business as usual far outweigh the risk of a misstep. Let founders be founders.

Many of Anduril’s best PR moments have come from letting Palmer be Palmer. Case in point: a few years ago, he was asked to give a talk at the Air Force Procurement conference in Orlando. He was the only civilian speaker, and the decorous thing to do would’ve been to offer some pablum about collaboration.

Naturally, Palmer used his remarks to lay into the Air Force about how terrible it was to work with them and why everything about their procurement process was broken. It could have ended in disaster, and a different company might have scripted a talk for him to prevent exactly that. But as it turned out, the Air Force loved it — so much that they invited him back to the same conference to give the same talk to a new crowd the following year.

One of the biggest risks we took was in 2018, when working with law enforcement and the armed services was downright taboo. Salesforce critics organized an open letter and street protest demanding they stop working with Customs and Border Protection. Google employees said “hold my kombucha” and successfully bullied their bosses into backing out of a government contract with the Department of Defense. Anduril, meanwhile, was working with border security and national defense, in addition to Palmer supporting Trump. We were the turducken of unpopular causes.

To give you a sense of public opinion, once while riding an Uber from the Costa Mesa headquarters to LAX, I had a phone conversation where I mentioned being proud to work with Anduril and support the military. The Uber driver pulled off the highway and kicked me out of his car. His explanation was, “I can’t be around a person like you.”

Amid all this, while other companies were going Homer-in-the-bushes with their defense work or watering down their comms to make it sound more cuddly ("the Army will use our product to do humanitarian projects!"), Anduril decided to take the opposite tack.

We didn’t sugarcoat the mission, and we didn’t make it family friendly. The purpose of Anduril’s technology was to close the kill chain, enhance lethality, and scare the crap out of adversaries. Our customer was the US military, not Paw Patrol.

So, in the summer of 2018, at the height of the tech backlash against working with the military and a month after the one-star Uber ride, we placed an op-ed signed by Palmer and Trae in The Washington Post. It argued that the U.S. is a global force for good, therefore equipping the U.S. with the most advanced military capabilities is a duty for American entrepreneurs. Rather than working on ad optimization, supporting the military is the real way to live out Silicon Valley’s favorite mantra: making the world a better place. That essay planted a flag for us and served as a call to arms for employees, a pledge of support to customers, and a manifesto for renewing the relationship between SV and the DoD.

Founders have a surplus of conviction and a deficit of recognition. By taking bold positions, they can convert the former into the latter.

Of course, not every bet pays off and it sucks to take an L, but never placing bets is the only sure way to guarantee you’ll never win. Meekly blending into the crowd is a setback for most companies — but for startups it’s fatal.

So take more risks; you can’t afford not to.

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Convert FUD to Fuel

There is no peacetime for a startup; there’s only pre-war or post-war. Victory comes only through conflict and struggle.

As a mission-driven startup, you’re going to be stepping on some nicely manicured lawns. The entrenched institutions you’re encroaching on will be filled with envy, resentment, and overall Sackville-Baggins energy. You will have haters, and they’ll want you to bend to their demands. Do not cave.

You can tweak your product, change your strategy, even pivot your whole company if it’s just not working. But never capitulate out of fear. You don’t need to run toward controversy (you have enough on your plate), but don’t run away from it, if it relates to a core part of your mission.

First, caving to pressure doesn’t work. If one side is already mad, they’re not going to get un-mad. You can either stand your ground and retain the respect of the other side, or try to please everyone and have both sides think you’re an invertebrate. Insincere contrition won’t fool anyone.

Second, corporate capitulation robs everyone of important debates worth having. While founders shouldn’t offer hot takes on every issue, they can’t be MIA when it comes to issues related to their companies’ missions. It’s your duty to advocate for mission-critical positions.

And third, if you run whenever controversy looms, you’ll be on the run forever. In today’s unforgiving environment, anything can stoke outrage. Appeasement only exposes a lack of conviction and invites future attempts to extract concessions. Herbivores attract more predators.

So how do you handle haters? You can ignore them, of course, and often that’s the right answer. But every once in a while, there will be a special moment when your haters go too far, and that is nothing short of a gift. Use it to contrast their seething, petty negativity with your calm, confident optimism. Take advantage of being the underdog.

In American football, to avoid a tackle you might run all over the place, sometimes even losing yards. In rugby, you might instead run directly into a tackle, using the collision itself to drive forward and keep the ball in play. As a founder, you should play rugby instead of football.

When Anduril got unfairly maligned in the press, we would often send Slack messages to the entire team to highlight how unfair and ridiculous the attacks were. The team got in the habit of joking and meme-ing about hit pieces, to the point that external FUD actually strengthened internal resolve and morale. Even now, a key element of Palmer’s lore is that he survived multiple cancellation attempts, emerging unscathed from the ashes of a media dumpster fire like a goateed, bikini-clad phoenix.

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Stay the Course

In comms, staying the course is harder than charting the course.

Don’t let public opinion shake your mission. You can compromise on anything else, but not this. You can have any other kind of diversity, your all-hands can look like the cantina scene from Star Wars, but when it comes to belief in the mission you need full uniformity and alignment. Don’t let reporters, investors, or even your own employees knock you off course.

At Anduril, much has changed since I ran comms in the early years (certain people wear shoes to the office now) and there’s a different head of comms now (the wonderful Shannon Prior). Yet the principles in this piece have held up over time, and I expect they always will. The founders have the same stubborn resolve, their mission is still the mission, their core messaging hasn’t changed.

In some ways, the world has finally caught up. I remember a big Bloomberg article in 2019 that called Anduril “THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL COMPANY IN TECH.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Some companies, [Trae] Stephens says, have complicated things for themselves by concealing or downplaying their defense work, leaving employees who are uncomfortable with such projects to feel, justifiably, that they’ve been lied to. “They said, ‘We didn’t sign up to develop weapons,’ ” Stephens says. “That’s literally the opposite of Anduril. We will tell candidates when they walk in the door, ‘You are signing up to build weapons.’ ”

Trae took so much flack for that — we all did. It was painful at the time, but now Palmer credits this messaging as the reason Anduril grew to be full of true believers who joined to support the cause, not to jump on a trend. Anduril is staffed by people willing to take the dimly lit path full of brambles because the destination was worth it.

Public opinion is fickle. Today, Anduril is in a great position. Competition with China, war in Ukraine, and the rise of American dynamism have ushered the company into a Hansel-sequence “so hot right now” era. That could change on a dime.

Yet no matter how the tides change, Anduril’s founders will forge on as they always have. Current Things can’t overcome conviction.

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The Power of Founder-Led Comms

Anduril’s campaign worked because the founders led the charge. Of course it was a team effort, and leaders like Matt Steckman or Chris Brose have been important spokespeople too. But without the founders’ vision, passion, and conviction, the world would know Anduril as a very different company, diluted through the layers of intermediaries.

Comms teams are important and necessary, but not sufficient. Mission-driven startups need founder-led comms. Only a founder can be the chief evangelist for their company. By assuming that responsibility and using that power, you can change narratives, change minds, and change the course of history.

-Lulu Cheng Meservey