What We Will and Won’t Talk About
Covering the technology industry must be really fascinating for reporters in our industry. Most of the companies are privately held. There’s intense competition for markets, users and traction. Companies and their PR reps only want to talk about partnerships and growth metrics that put them in a positive light.
Meanwhile, without the drama of screwed up financings, founders having fights with other founders, or acquisition rumors, tech reporters can’t generate the controversy that drive the day’s buzz and discussion.
That makes for an interesting dance.
I’ve dealt with this before, and it can be a challenge. So well in advance of these tough questions coming our way, I thought I’d share my philosophy about what we will and won’t talk about, and more importantly, how that changes over time as our company grows up.
Unreleased products. We’re inclined towards the Apple model for this. We like to ship early, ship often to a small group of beta users, but we don’t talk publicly about products until we’re in the process of rolling them out. Just good competitive common sense.
Financing rounds. We won’t talk about financing that isn’t closed yet, but once it’s done, I suppose we’ll talk about it. We don’t consider a round of financing a huge achievement. It’s not even close to being on par with shipping an amazing product. (We didn’t bother to issue a press release for our last financing.)
Revenue, profits and overall financial results. We wouldn’t talk about financial results until we go public or are required to. At times, if you’re really a mature company, you might try and give the press a sense of your scale with a range, but that can be a sign you’re much more focused on competitors than you should be. We’re going to be very cautious about giving any public guidance or detail about our financial results while we’re a private company.
Number of employees. Again, this can become a vanity metric. Is a 100-employee company 10x more successful than a 10-employee company? We don’t see number of employees as a sign of success. This isn’t something we’re uptight about talking about, but it’s definitely not a number we’ll put a lot of focus on.
Users, page views, customers, partners. Once you exit beta and really start scaling, it can definitely be interesting to try and tell your growth story using whatever growth metric makes sense for your business. Some of this data can be estimated from public data sources anyway. The challenge is that until you start scaling, you may not know what metrics really matter yet and are worth talking about. That can frustrate reporters, but it’s life.
Competitors. I admire and have adopted the Amazon approach to this. We don’t talk about companies that we perceive as competitors. We might talk in concept about how our approach to solving problems compares with other approaches, but we simply won’t trash talk our competitors, even if they trash talk us first. It’s rude, unnecessary and we won’t stoop to that level.
Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ll just send this post on to any reporters who get annoyed when I won’t tell them something. At least they’ll know it isn’t personal!






