Ep. #11, How LLMs Are Changing PR Forever with Greg Galant

Isaac Nassimi: You were just saying that you started a podcast in 2005, which I'm pretty sure that's around when the term "podcast" was invented and they didn't take off for a long time.

So what was that like?

Greg Galant: Yeah, it was a pretty wild time.

When I was starting my podcast, the primary term for it was "RSS Feeds with Enclosures," not a sexy name, but that's what it was.

Christine Spang: What's an enclosure?

Greg: So within the RSS file, they had this big innovation where you just add a line that said "enclosure equals," and then the URL of the MP3.

And then someone could write a podcatcher, as they called it, where we would then read that RSS feed, download the MP3 and add it to your iTunes library 'cause that was before Apple added it.

And some people started calling it and then we didn't even know back then that Apple would eventually add it natively into, into iTunes. And now it's its own podcast app.

And people started calling it podcasts, but I didn't, I didn't use the word pod in the name of my podcast 'cause the common wisdom at the time was that Steve Jobs would get pissed off and sue everybody who used the term podcasting and assert, you know, the trademark of the iPod, which is how people are meant to consume a podcast.

And that it's funny, you know, now looking back that you know, especially you talk to someone who's young, they don't even know what an iPod was or they forgot to exist, and everyone knows a podcast.

So the term pod kind of flipped. And it was hard doing it back then. I mean now we're on StreamYard and there's so many of these things you can just set up.

Most computers have mics and cameras. Back then, like I had to get a, actually I had an old computer in my parents'basement that had a voice modem, which was like these computers from the late 90s, early aughts.

The idea was that your computer would replace your answering machine. So it had a way to hook up your phone line to it and be an answering machine, but it also let you record a phone call.

So I actually had to buy this old computer, hook it up through that to record it. Then later on I got an external audio interface to record calls using Skype out.

But it was really, I mean it was hard to do a podcast back then. Like you really had to jerry rig a lot of tech to make it work.

Isaac: It was hard to consume too, wasn't it?

Because you had to go on your RSS feed or whatever and you're not going to sit there and listen to it on your computer.

You'd have to get it onto your iPods somehow. And these were like really manual actions.

Greg: Yeah, that, that was a nightmare. It was like first you had to have a third party app to download it and connect it to iTunes, which would break half the time.

But then even after they built it into iTunes, like back then most people would only sync their iPod and you had to plug it into sync it, you know, maybe you'd sync it like once a week or once a month 'cause it was primarily used for music.

So how often do you get a new album that you want to listen to? You know, it's not something you do every day and half the time the sync wouldn't work.

So I remember I'd be going, if I was going out for like a long drive or a train ride, I would think that I synced my iPod and I was excited about the new podcast I was going to listen to, and then when I get on the train, I look at the iPod, I'm like, gosh, shoot, it didn't sync right. And now I don't have the content.

So the whole thing uses so much friction. But nevertheless I thought, I mean this was right when I graduated college and I was like, yeah, podcasting, it's going to, I mean it's so good.

Like how can this not like just take over, you know, radio and audio books and everything else within a year or two.

So I not only did my podcast, the podcast was great. I had like Reid Hoffman on back from LinkedIn with 50 employees, the founder of Vanguard Group, Yelp, a whole bunch of others.

But I tried launching a podcast ad network also in 2005 that in retrospect was literally 10 years to early to market.

Like people do that successfully, maybe as early as 2015. You know, it's 10 years later and even now people struggle to you know, actually sell ads on like a network within podcasting as opposed to show by show.

But it a lot of good lessons and a big lesson in "don't be too early to a market."

Isaac: But you also did something else in the late 2000s, right? And did this award show for social media, is that right?

Greg: Yeah, that's right. I launched the Shorty Awards and that actually came out of the podcast 'cause one of the people I had on my podcast was Ev Williams who did a podcast company called Odeo that was like the, it was supposed to be the first ever directory for podcasting, also conceived before iTunes integrated podcasting.

And Odeo never really took off. I stayed in touch with Ev because we were both doing businesses in the podcast world. And then he launched a little side project called Twitter.

So that led me to sign up to Twitter way early. I got my first name on there @Gregory just by being the first Gregory to sign up to think to get their name.

I didn't even ask for a favor, I just registered it before anyone else did.

And so I was in that kind of social media world really early and it occurred to me and my co-founder that there was no way to really figure out like, you know, of all these people on social, like who should you follow?

Who should you pay attention to? There are no directories, no lists, definitely no algorithms like we have now.

So the idea was like, let's just let people vote for who's the best on social by whatever category they want.

So we built the first server system where you could vote with a tweet and now you know, it's really common whenever you vote for something online, oh, please share this on social.

But that, that had never been done in, this was late 2008.

So we launched the Shorty Awards and it was just a website. We didn't make any promise there'd be an event.

We built this website in two weeks and within 24 hours it became the top trending term on Twitter. And then very quickly Wall Street Journal and New York Times, BBC all covered it.

And man, I'd never been part of something like that before since where something doesn't exist and then within 48 hours it's the top trending term on Twitter and people are talking about it and it's getting press and it put me right at the beginning of that social explosion that really changed the web.

Christine: Yeah, I'm super curious, just kind of like looking back, you know, obviously you got involved in a lot of media stuff like super early on and kind of the crossroads of media and tech, but like you studied philosophy at university.

What was the spark that ended up pointing you in the direction of media?

Greg: Yeah, it's kind of funny how it all happened.

I'd actually started my first business in high school building websites for businesses, actually when I was 14, even a little before high school.

And that was kind of like back in the like late, mid to late 90s and like all the customers I would sell, I had to convince them why they should have a website.

And I kept that business going through high school and college. And from doing that, I learned I really loved business.

I loved both building them and then also helping other businesses get the word out about things.

And I went to college dead set on studying business 'cause I liked business and or I got to university and I took a few business courses and man, I hope there are no MBAs who listen to this podcast, but I thought they were all kind of BS.

Like there was a marketing one and it just felt like everything was very stale. It didn't address internet marketing at all or the, the scenes that I'd seen.

I went to a management class and on the first day, the professor was like, so I've never managed anybody but, and it's like, well wait a minute, what are we doing here?

And then in the meantime I'd taken some philosophy classes and I took the first one just 'cause it was required to take philosophy 101.

But I found it really fascinating, just kind of how you come up with ideas and make, make sense of the world and construct narratives.

And I also like the honesty of the philosophy department. 'Cause in the business school they were all like, hey look, we're going to give you the skills you need to get a great job and these are going to be actionable skills.

And no one in the philosophy department said that. There was no progress of the philosophy department.

It was like, we're going to get help you get a job or give you any useful skills in life. So I'm like, at least they're honest.

But beyond that, I actually have found that as an entrepreneur, I think especially as the business gets bigger, the philosophy skills are more and more valuable.

'Cause like you can take the business course, you know, learn accounting and yeah, that's helpful at the beginning when you got to do the books yourself, you know, and you, you don't need to read a financial statement, but like you can always read a book and learn how to understand a financial statement around debits and credits work.

And then so many other, you know, business skills are evolving.

But with philosophy like that, you know, the real job of an entrepreneur, it's like to look at a messy world and think, okay, well where's the opportunity for a new idea, a new company?

And then how do you construct that narrative? And then most importantly, how do you communicate it to other people to you know, your co-founder, to your company, to investors, to customers, to the market.

And you know, as the business gets bigger, as I'm sure you know Christine from going on the scaling journey, but once you got a couple dozen people, it's like you can't really do anything yourself except for communicate 'cause you have to delegate and rely on people.

So in a way you kind of end up becoming a philosopher 'cause all you're doing is going to meetings and listening and spreading ideas and trying to make sense of it.

Christine: I feel that very deeply, Greg.

I was going to say that, you know, especially now that Muck Rack is, you know, 400 plus people, like, it makes a ton of sense to me that you would kind of be making more and more use of kind of a philosophy background.

And I, I've definitely felt it that like your job isn't to like do the accounting. It's not to write the code.

It's not to even write the copy for your emails that are going out.

It's really to pull all the pieces together and to give a vision and to communicate with the external world and to paint a story and also to point the company in the right direction.

I'd love to hear a little bit about just kind of how you got Muck Rack off the ground. So like, you know, you studied philosophy, you got into media really early on.

You were also one of the first podcasts. You discovered social media back before it even worked and kind of like pulled a lot of these early threads together.

What was the jump from there to starting a platform for journalists and for doing PR?

Greg: Yeah, it was, it was also one of these things that was very much just kind of reacting to what I saw happening where the short and it actually came out of the Shorty Awards.

A lot of people think we started the Shortys to promote Muck Rack. It was kind of chronologically the other way around.

So we started Shorty Awards and from doing these other businesses over time, like the podcast ad network and all that, I would always try to get press for them.

And as any entrepreneur can relate, it's like really hard. You know, you got this new idea like how do you get people to care about your new rinky-dink company before it's got any funding.

Christine: Yeah.

Greg: A nd so, you know, I got some press for, for the podcast ad network, but I, you know, I really, you know, had had, you know, just months and months of trying to get people to write about it.

And then with the Shorty Awards it was the opposite. Like after it went viral on Twitter, we had Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch write about it.

I remember we actually then were based in Brooklyn in this neighborhood called DUMBO that now is really trendy.

But back then, no one wanted to set foot in DUMBO and Brooklyn in general. And I remember the Wall Street Journal reporter offered to come to meet me in Brooklyn for lunch.

I was like, holy shit, not, not only do they want to write it about it, but they'll even come to Brooklyn to write about it from Manhattan. You know, it wasn't that she just lived there.

So I realized that like, oh wait, journalists are using social media to figure out what to write about.

And that was like a really new concept at the time. Like, 'cause before that if a journalist started a blog, they'd get fired. They weren't allowed to publish stuff on their own.

So it was really new idea that like oh wait, journalists could publish stuff without running it by an editor first and doing it on a platform owned by their publication.

So that led to us having that realization. We saw, hey, there's no one place where you just find all the journalists and you know, get linked to their social profiles.

And also with the journalists, there was no like IMDB for journalists. Like one place you could find all the journalists in one place and see their work and everything like that.

So we actually launched Muck Rack, the first version, again, we built it in two weeks back in 2009.

And it was a site where totally free, there was no business model, just free site for journalists to set up these portfolios.

And we thought of it like, okay, it's for journalists, for news junkies, launched it.

And then we were actually trying out a bunch of ideas at the time, like we kept doing the Shortys and they're still going to this day it's spun off to its own very successful business.

But we were doing the Shortys, we were experimenting with a few other businesses, but we saw that Muck Rack had become very popular journalists.

Like we had over 10,000 requests to get listed on there in the first year.

And you know, there's people like Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg and a bunch of other like really big name journalists who were like, you know, getting to go there.

I mean even the New York Times linked to Muck Rack on their intranet so Times journalists could find each other on social.

And then being in New York at the time, I kept bumping into all these PR people and they'd always tell me like, "Oh you do Muck Rack? I love that site. I use it to figure out who to pitch on my story ideas."

And that's where like, oh that's interesting. Like there's this entire profession using our free website to figure out how to do their job better and trying a use case we didn't even build the website for.

So it occurred to us, okay, well we already had the data they want. We've got a brand with them. The only thing we're not doing is charging them money, like idiots.

So, so we figured, okay, well let's build, you know, what's now called SaaS of course, but at the time, this is before the SaaS craze, so we just called a subscription, but like let's, let's build a subscription service people could buy.

So we left the free stuff free, we figured okay, we'll have like the pro version and then we built like our own search engine to find the, the best journals based on what they're writing about and based on what they're sharing on social and then a workflow to add them to media lists and pitch them.

And then since then we've gone on to add media monitoring. We'd be reporting it. There's so much more.

But back when we launched, it was this very focused use case on top of the free website.

Launched it, we had a bunch of people sign up and we were kind of off to the races and then we just kept listening to the customers and adding more and scaling it on and on.

Christine: I'm curious when you say "we". Who's "we"?

Did you have like a group of co-founders who were like trying a lot of things together and also how are you guys paying the bills at first?

Greg: Yeah, so that was, that was the challenge.

It was pretty much like me and my co-founder Lee Semel who's the CTO at Muck Rack.

I would do all the business stuff, he'd do all the tech stuff and we'd kind of split doing the product stuff and the wire framing and the things that kind of bridge business and tech.

And we had, you know, one person we hired, straight out of school and a couple contractors. So it was really lean and mean.

The first year we did the Shortys, we sold sponsorship, we got the, we just did this is in two months. Like it went viral.

Two months later we did the event, most intense two months of my life. And over that time we sold the Knight Foundation, Pepsi and a few other fans on sponsoring it. So we actually made a profit that very first year.

Back then the joke was like, oh, how will Twitter ever make money? How will social ever make money? It's so funny looking back knowing how many billions are in social now. But at the time, social media was a joke and we were, at the time, making more profits than any of the social media platforms.

But we made some profits on that, and then we actually licensed out an early version of the platform that powered Muck Rack as like kind of a social media curator, we licensed to like American Express Open and Conde Nast, and a few others, like Power, like you know, a just kind of like a white label things so they could power having a way to show like a bunch of small businesses on social and stuff like that.

So we kind of had these little income streams that we sling together between all that.

But it was, with the Shortys especially, it was always profitable and still is.

But in those early days it was so stressful 'cause I had to sign a venue contract every year, obligating us to spend, you know, $700,000 and then would've to scramble to sell the sponsorship.

And every year we did. But any year it was like, if we don't sell the sponsorship, like we're this going to be on the hook for way more money than we have.

And we kind of don't know what we'd do if that would happen. I just tried not, tried not to think about it too much, but it made me really appreciate us getting business models that give you predictable revenue.

And then that kind of came together where we saw the market opportunity with Muck Rack where like, oh this would be a perfect subscription product for people.

And kind of went after that opportunity there.

Christine: How did you meet Lee and how did you convince him to jump in and do a bunch of really uncertain stuff with you?

Greg: Well it, it all goes back to podcasts and he was actually a listener of my podcast.

And then we met each other through kind of the early New York Tech scene and like now, you know, New York's known is a hub for tech, you know, maybe second to.

Christine: Yeah, number two I would say.

Greg: Yeah, I was about to say we're equal to, but we, we've got a lot of bias on this podcast.

Christine: We we could duke it out after.

Greg: That's right. Yeah, well we'll have to rumble later.

But back then, basically 2005 to 2010, the New York Tech scene was like 100 people in that like there'd be like one and, 'cause it was kind of in the rubble of the dot-com bust, you know, which is before my time, but it was like the dot-com bust happened.

Everybody in New York tech's like, well I guess Internet's not going to work so I'll go find a real job at, you know, a media company or a bank or a consulting firm or some other reliable, stable, you know, industry.

And then there was like the New York Tech meetup that Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com organized. And it would be like, when I first went, it was 30 people.

For a while, it was like a hundred people. We'd meet up once a month and that was like the only tech event in New York every month.

You know, now there's probably five events every night like there is in San Francisco. Back then it was like one event a month.

So you'd kind of get to know everybody in the tech scene. So we met each other that way and at first we were kind of advising each other on like our own ventures where Lee was working on a few projects and I give him advice on how to like market it and get the word out about it.

I was working on some of my own, like with the podcast ad network and he was giving me some tech advice and then with the idea for the Shorty Awards, I pitched him on it and I was like, I didn't think it would make any money.

I mean people thought Twitter was a fad back then and people didn't think Twitter was going to last.

'Cause at the time it was like Friendster, MySpace, everybody, the common knowledge was like these social networks or you know, fads, they get popular for a second, they fall apart.

And then definitely I'm thinking an award show on top of, you know, this flimsy foundation could be effective.

So I pitch 'em on the idea. I'm like, hey look, we should do this together and it's not going to make any money but I think we can do it in one weekend and it'll be a lot of fun.

And he is like, I'm in. I was wrong. That took us two weekends to build it, but we got it built and then it took off and it actually made money.

And so after the Shorty Awards of made money we were, it was kind of a great way to test it out with a co-founder 'cause it's like two intense months of a project together.

Like that's when you know like, can you work with the person. Do you, do you both handle stress well? Can you work out complex issues? All that jazz.

Whereas a lot of people I see, they do one or two coffee meetings with someone. They say let's co-found a company and then the coffee meeting is not indicative but it's actually like grinding it out.

Christine: Yeah, it's like going straight from your second date to getting married.

Greg: Exactly. So this was kind of like the living together first equivalent of that where, yeah we got to go through it on that and we, and when we did the Shortys, we didn't have a legal agreement on how it worked between us 'cause it, it went viral so fast.

So then afterwards we're like, okay, well we work together well, we seem to have good ideas that work.

So like let's just figure out how to do the company formation and then keep going at it and building stuff.

Isaac: I have a quick question. You mentioned earlier you had, you just casually got these contracts with, you know, Conde Nast and American Express at this really, really, really early stage.

I think that's something that a lot of founders would dream to be able to do. How are we able to accomplish that?

Greg: Yeah, we just like really intense networking. This is, oh now I can go back to why New York's a better place than San Francisco.

Isaac: Oh.

Greg: Although now I live in Miami so I'm, I'm a really bad ambassador anyhow.

But you know, one is in, in New York you can kind of, you know, you get a lot of these media brands, advertising agencies.

And it actually ended up helping a lot 'cause I built a good network there from the podcast ad network business.

I was never able to make that business work 'cause like podcasting never got to the critical mass of numbers that, you know, that would really be compelling to an advertiser in that era.

But it did build up my network so it actually ended up working out really well 'cause then when the Shorty Awards hit, I already had a pretty good Rolodex that I could call upon.

Another trick I would use is like, back then there weren't that many people on social media.

I mean I remember pulling this stat that Twitter had already gotten to like 30% of the traffic of wordpress.com and I thought that was impressive.

You know, which, I mean no offense to WordPress, it's, it's an awesome company but you know, now you'd expect, you know, any popular social network to, you know, well eclipse a blogging domain.

You know, this is the domain WordPress not the use of the platform.

So the social media was kind of like a, you had to be kind of a nerd to be in it or an enthusiast to be in it.

So we we'd find like, okay, well I want to get to Pepsi, let me, let me figure out who at Pepsi has like using Twitter.

And then if you were on Twitter back then in, in 2008, 2009, yeah 2010 you definitely heard about the Shorty Awards because like it was the top trending term for like a month 'cause everybody was voting.

So we used that to get at these brands. I mean that first year we had like MC Hammer at the Shorty Awards.

Shaquille O'Neal accepted by video and it was like, there were very few celebrities on social, but those that were on social knew who you were and I just DMed them and then was able to get them to do stuff.

So it was pretty well timed. But I think there's a lesson out of that. If you can build a name for yourself on the web, it does open doors at these companies and there are lots of people at these companies who are looking for the latest, greatest new thing.

Isaac: That makes perfect sense.

And you used the term networking, very common term obviously, but I think it's really overloaded and I think it's kind of a Rorschach test that some people, when they hear networking, they think of like going to networking events and meeting other people who are trying to find A players in the room, right?

And the room isn't filled with A players. It's filled with people who are trying to find A players.

So I think it's a really interesting thing that you're saying it's sort of of like building some sort of reputation for yourself and leveraging that, even if it's in other ways or other means. I love that.

Greg: Yeah, well said. I think there's many forms of networking where yeah it could be you go to the room and shake hands and exchange business cards, but now you bump your, your iPhone and I did that and that's a big part of it.

But it's also, you know, networking through social media and you know, sliding into someone's DMs or it could be just asking somebody out for, to grab a cup of coffee with you.

And I think especially back then, like in my 20s, I mean I was just like every night I'd be going to something every, you know, I'd be trying to load up on breakfast and coffee meetings and just keep building that network and, and then also doing interesting things at the same time.

So people wanted, 'cause I didn't have our, our reputation to rely on then. So it, you know, it it was doing interesting things that people want to hear about and learn about.

Isaac: So you started a awards for social media. You go to these events, you're on social media.

You do seem like a social person, like an extrovert, if I had to guess.

Do you have any advice for the introverts who are looking to get some networking in?

Greg: Yeah, it's a great question. Definitely guilty as charged.

One is, you can find an extrovert to work with. We're out here, we're ready to work with introverts. And you kind of have to, because if both co-founders are just out there networking, then there's no one to build the product.

I actually saw it happen to some friends of mine. They were like two extroverts, you know, both MBAs, you know, and they started coming together and they got all these great meetings.

They got all these people interested in their company, but neither of them actually built a product that they shut it down 'cause they just didn't, didn't have a product.

They have lots of meetings and no product.

Isaac: So lots of words.

Greg: That's one.

But you know, or, or you don't have to co-found but you know, at some, you know, if you get it going on your own, you can hire people to work with who will be out there to go.

But you know, beyond that, you know, with introverts I think a lot of people think that getting out there and meeting people is like something that you're born with and really it's not.

You know, if you took someone who grew up, raised by wolves, they wouldn't know how to, you know, how to walk into a room in New York City or San Francisco and socialize with people.

It's like learned behavior and it just takes practice, you know, going out there and knowing how to walk up to someone, knowing what to say to present your idea or your company in the best light, trial and error with it.

And you know, if you don't like big events you can, you can do more one-on-one meetings with people and connecting for, you know, for coffee or drinks. There's a lot of ways to go about it.

But I think there is a, just a big degree to which like it's a, you know, it's a learned skill to how to network and if you're an introvert, maybe you need more time to recharge, you know, maybe this is going to be the thing you have to push yourself on all of it more.

But I've seen lots of introverts be very successful at networking and forming deep connections with the right people that'll propel them to the next level.

Isaac: I think it's fantastic advice across the board.

There's another part to being social in business, which is fundraising, right? That's a pretty important piece of things.

Tell me if I'm wrong here. You ran Muck Rack for 10 years before you raised your first capital, before you did your first fundraising round. Is that right?

Greg: That's right, yeah. Actually a little bit longer.

Isaac: That's incredible, first of all that you bootstrapped for that long.

What made you decide to take that leap to move in the, you know, the funding direction and then also what was that process like for you guys?

Because you're probably much more mature than most companies the first time you took money.

Were there cultural changes that need to be made? What was that like for you guys?

Greg: Yeah, so the story with it was like we, you know, we bootstrapped it all the way.

I mean we raised, in full disclosure, we raised under 200 K in angel funding with just individual checks from a few people I knew.

But you know, we never raised more than 200 K until we got to about 50 million in ARR and then that's when we did our, our funding round.

So, you know, we grew a, you know, a sizeable scaled company with just a 200 k in angel and then kind of just reinvesting the revenue that we made.

So, you know, my biggest advice with fundraising is try not to do it and try to make the business profitable so you don't have to go fund raise.

And you know, and there were a few times along the way, like it took a lot longer because we didn't raise money in the early days 'cause it took us like five years to get the first million in ARR.

You know, which now, like it'd be a bad month if we didn't add at least a million in ARR.

But it took, you know, a really long time to get that first million and you know, in retrospect like yeah it could have totally been accelerated.

Had we raised money at the same time, we would've probably blown ourselves up because most venture capitalists don't want to wait more than four years for their return.

And maybe they had pushed us to a bigger market and you know, some things just take time in a market for people's contracts to be up that they're better to switch to a better solution and for, you know, various other technology events to play out.

So we didn't raise money for that that first decade and just bootstrapped it and we got the scale.

I mean it was by the time we did the deal, it was like I said, almost 50 million in ARR, profitable, over 200 employees.

We had really experienced people on the executive team and we always had kind of a chip on our shoulders wanting to like be as buttoned up as a VC backed company 'cause all these people would be like, oh, it's a lifestyle business so like you must just be like hanging out and having fun.

I'm like, no, we're working just as hard as the VC backed companies.

And you know, the only difference is we don't, we haven't raised the the cash but we're still, you know, doing everything that any other business would do and have every ambition that, that any VC backed company would have.

And then what changed it was, you know, a few things getting to scale. Like we had a lot of growth equity investors coming to us, being interested in investing.

And once you're already profitable, it's a totally different game raising money than the early days, because you don't have to sell this crazy dream, like, " hey, I know we have no revenue but it will be a billion dollar company." That's a hard thing to do.

A lot of people do it and a lot of people make a lot of money doing it. And you know, there've been great companies built using VC, Google, Facebook, Intuit.

So, you know, not knocking, going the VC route, but I do like to remind people like there's an alternative route where you get the money from customers and then, you know, if and when you do decide to switch to having investors as we did at scale, it's just a very different game because you, you still have to sell the dream of like where you're going to take the company and what the next level is.

But it's very different when you, when you had the track record. So I think, you know, what changed for us in the calculus was we realized like, hey had been a long journey.

We wanted to signal to everybody that we're fired up for the next leg of the journey and, and do the minority growth equity round that, you know, signaled, hey, it's still going to be founder controlled.

We just have a lot more firepower and flexibility to really go for it and really, you know, take this company to the next level.

Definitely made it easier hiring executives to join us for the team and get a lot of talent, gives us more optionality.

We actually since acquired two companies, which would've probably been hard to do without that, without that.

And then we'd also found a, a growth equity partner that we really liked. I got to know them over the course of three to four years for four we actually did the deal.

So it felt like it de-risked a lot versus some people where it's like, okay, they just go out there pitch and then, you know, you had three meetings with someone and take the check and now they're, you know, partnered up with them for the foreseeable future with, you know, it's in a way almost stronger than marriage 'cause you can't even get a divorce from a investor unless you have the money to buy them out, which most people don't.

So, you know, it just felt like it was advantageous at that time.

And, and then also the, the best part was it didn't really change how we operated 'cause we were already like, okay, you know, we want to operate in this profitable, sustainable way.

Our investors on board with continuing that way.

And at this scale too, it's, it's like that, you know, they believed in our management team and what we were doing.

So it wasn't like they were like, oh we're going to invest and then we're going to tell you how to grow up and what to do.

It's more like, hey, we just want to be along for the ride. So it hasn't changed that much in practice about how we run the company.

Isaac: That's awesome. I mean, you actually went through a lot of my questions that I already had.

So now you've brought us up to current day a little bit.

I'd like to hear about the future and what your plans are there and where you think the industry is going and what do you even think the future of this market is as far as like your users and what their day-to-day looks like.

Yeah, where is that going?

Greg: Yeah, it's a great question.

So let me start with the industry of public relations and then I'll come to where, where we fit into it.

So PR has been around a long time and traditionally, you know, what it used to be was, okay, you someone in newspaper, they write about you, you get the newspaper article and then you, you get a pair of scissors and you cut out that newspaper article and then you show it to your boss and like, you know, look, we're in the newspaper. People know about who we are.

And it's super powerful 'cause you didn't pay for it unlike an ad. And it's more credible 'cause it's earned.

You know, now people call it earned media, which is just a fancier term for it.

Now where it's evolved is that the universe of people you need to pitch is so much wider because it's not just journalists but it's, it's podcasters like yourselves, it's Substackers, it's YouTubers.

So, it's all earned media. I'm not, I'm not paying to be on this podcast or at least I hope I don't get a bill afterwards for it. So, you know, so this is earned, right?

Like I'm honored you thought I was a worthy guest and this is powerful for us 'cause it's getting the word out about us and you don't have to pay for it.

And it's more credible 'cause the audience knows like, hey, you know that it's worth learning about Muck Rack because the podcast host thought it was interesting versus the podcast host is getting paid.

So that's kind of the power of earned media and I think what's changing now, so we've already been going on that journey where the, the universe of people we have in Muck Racks, you know, expanded to podcasts or Substack, et cetera.

Then we've also added in all the monitoring and reporting. So you can see like, hey, I pitched Christine at being on this podcast and then the podcast happened and now we can tie together the, you know, the action or the pitch to the result of the show and where to go.

But I think what's really exciting both for the PR profession and for us is that the next level now is influencing LLMs.

So everyone's talking about how Google Search has declined for the first time ever.

And you know, a lot of us I think are going to ChatGPT now, or Claude or another LLM, or maybe even you know, Google's Gemini to ask questions that maybe we used to Google for or maybe before we didn't even think to get an answer for 'cause it would've been too complicated.

And you know, it might be product recommendations, it might be travel destinations, might be what restaurant to go to.

So what the LLM tells us is going to be really influential. And then now with with LLM search, like it's often citing the source.

So you say, you know, maybe it's a big purchase decision. I mean I just bought, you know, a new piece of luggage. So I said to ChatGPT, what's the best luggage?

And it answered and, and it showed me like various blogs, news sites, Reddit threads that it used to say what it, what are the good pieces of luggage, you know, or maybe it's what travel destination should I go to?

And you know, those kinds of queries used to like, you know, are worth a lot in like the Google AdWords business 'cause like if I'm saying I'm looking for luggage, like everybody wants to sell me their piece of luggage.

But now I'm really getting this recommendation from the LLM because of what earned media is out there because did Tumi or Briggs and Riley or away get good press coverage or not.

So I think the next frontier and what's really going to be a boon to the PR industry, and I think every entrepreneur needs to think about 'cause they need to get LLMs recommending their company, is how do you influence the LLM so that when your potential customer asks the LLM about your product category, you get recommended?

And then you can reverse engineer it and say, hey look, you know, we know that OpenAI, you know, did like a $200 million deal with NewsCorp to get their content to site in, in these search results and to train on so well, you know, NewsCorp owns the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe you should pitch the Wall Street Journal on your, on your company, on your product because that will then influence ChatGPT, which will influence your perspective buyer.

So that's where I think there is like the whole new frontier both for PR and then, you know, for software that enables PR is really being the tool that lets you influence LLMs.

Isaac: It's definitely going to be wild over the next few years.

What comes to mind is a old Charlie Munger quote, which is, "In the long term the market is a weighing mechanism, but in the short term it's a voting mechanism."

And you ask, hey, what's the, what's the best luggage? It's not going out there and like buying all the pieces of luggage and sending them to ChatGPT headquarters and analyzing 'em.

Like no it's, it's looking for what kind of has the most votes and the most mentions kind of implicitly, what's the most popular.

And man that kind of creates a "winners take all" scenario. I really think it's going to incentivize some weird behavior from companies and whatnot.

So curious where that goes over the next 10 years.

Greg: Yeah, it'll be quite something to watch, you know, I mean my guess is it kind of plays out like SEO did and it'll be a bit of a cat and mouse game that people will try some really low ball tactics to try to influence it at first like they did with SEO with buying backlinks, then the people operating it are like, hey that's kind of a black hat, you know, like a shady way to do it, so we're going to not allow it.

And then, you know, eventually there'll be a flight to quality.

So I think, you know, what we're seeing now is, you know, already people are just putting out junk there to try to get the LLMs to train on it.

I think pretty soon the LLMs, if they want to keep their customers and have a good user experience, will figure that out and start, start penalizing that and then, you know, they'll start looking like, okay, well where, where's the legit place that the LLM should be looking for, you know, these data points on what good luggage is and what's not.

But you know, it is, I think it was Yogi Berra said it's, it's tough to make predictions especially about the future. So it it's going to be a wild ride these next few years.

Christine: Yeah, definitely.

I'm curious, you know, as you guys are evolving the Muck Rack platform, are there areas that you're already applying kind of AI tech internally and kind of what do you see as like the next few things of real use cases that drive real value for your users in the near term?

Greg: Oh, very much. Yeah, we have this one feature.

So in PR everyone has their media list. That's kind of one of the, the core things where your list of journalists that you have that you want to keep in touch with or invite to events.

So we released this AI functionality that suggests new journalists to add your media list based on who's on there and a number of other factors similar to how when you're listening to Spotify and your playlist, then you get to the end of the playlist that just starts suggesting more music that it goes along with that playlist and the channel.

It does a pretty good job. So that's been a very popular feature for us that we introduced.

Another is a press release system that helps you both draft the press release but then also suggests journalists to send it to as well as integration to actually put your press release out on the wire.

And we have a bunch more functionality already, another is a media briefing tools.

So when you have an executive like you know, Christine, if you were going to be interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, you're a PR person want to put together something for you that tells you about that journalist that the Wall Street Journal. So when you walk in, you know what to talk about.

We have a whole briefing tool that uses AI plus all the data that we have to prepare a really advanced AI media briefing, which then the user can edit and put the final touches on.

There's a lot of other pieces of PR workflow we think we can do a lot of innovative things with AI to, to simplify the process.

And you know, PR like a lot of other professions, it's one of those ones where like everyone goes in it because they want to be strategic, craft a story, communicate, build relationships, and they end up spending all day copy and pasting things between Excel files and doing very mundane research.

So we think we can really free people up a lot to focus on the more impactful parts of the job.

Christine: Totally. I mean I think Muck Rack is just another great example of, you know, you folks have like a very deep expertise in what do the kinds of people doing PR, what do journalists, what do, what do they need and what are their workflows, what's their day to day like?

And you both help people who already know how to be good at their job, be more efficient and effective, but you also make it much easier for people who maybe are, you know, not that experienced to get up to speed and to kind of focus in the right ways and to just almost be like an operating system that provides some of the domain specific expertise as well.

And we have an interesting perspective where we have a lot of these vertical SaaS businesses that use us to connect to communications.

And I think it's just really cool that a lot of this expertise and culture around different areas gets embedded in the software and the software kind of becomes the operating system for that role and Muck Rack is doing that for PR.

Greg: Thanks, yeah, it's been been a really fun journey and now getting, getting to meet people, a lot of people who I meet, like they spent their whole career using our software to do their job, or were introduced to it, some in school, it's taught in a lot of communication classes now and many right out of school.

And yeah, it's really gratifying to see people just, you know, have this be part of the, the fabric of what they do.

And then we found it's also one of those things where I think you know it speaking of just the time it took to grow, a lot of what I saw was that somebody would use us right when they were out of school, they were an associate or analyst or whatever the job title was and really loved using the platform but their boss grew up using the legacy tools and was like, hey, we got to have the legacy tools. That's it.

And then now, you know, four years later, five years later, whatever they've, that person who is at a school using our software is now the director of VP and they know us.

It's a good option and like that's why we're running the business and that's something you just can't short circuit that kind of just letting, letting people love your product blossom in their own careers and then, then do more business with you.

Christine: Wow, that's amazing. That's got to feel super meaningful.

And just another thing that jumps out to me is that kind of thing really underscores to me just how important consistent leadership is.

You know, you have to kind of show up for years and years and years and be able to kind of keep evolving the organism, you know, it's like creating something that grows and expands and being able to see that, you know, a few years down the line, you know, somebody will have that as being something that was like a part of their education.

That's just super cool.

Before we wrap, I have one question that I think people will find kind of interesting because, you know, I think a lot of our listeners, they're interested and familiar with software but they have less expertise on journalism and things like that.

So I'd love for you to tell us what the name Muck Rack comes from.

Greg: Sure, well, I started by telling you about 2005 which felt like a long time ago, but now we got to go back to the 1920s when Teddy Roosevelt made the term popular where originally there was this term muckraker, which was a kind of derogatory term for an investigative journalist.

People like Ida B. Wells and others who were going undercover to uncover stories.

And the term was like, you know, you're raking the muck, you know, you're raking the dirt to find stories.

And so Teddy Roosevelt used it in a speech also in a semi derogatory way and that kind of made the term stick.

But then over the years, journalists came to view it as like a real point of pride because it was like, hey look, I'm not just regurgitating a press release or printing what people tell me to print, like I am investigating and then, you know, I'm a muckraker, like I'm digging up the dirt, you know, and I'm really finding the truth.

So when we were starting Muck Rack, and I shouldn't say also with the Shorty Awards, we had a $8 branding budget, which is what it cost to buy a domain name on GoDaddy at the time.

So we had to come with a domain name that just was free on GoDaddy so we could register it for eight bucks and we had the idea of like, okay, there's like a muck raker, but muckraker.com was taken, but there's like a muckraker is this term.

And then I was thinking about like a newspaper rack or a magazine rack, like a place that you get all the news in one place.

I thought, well here you get all the journalists in one place. So $8 later muckrack.com and still rolling with that today.

Isaac: Awesome. That's a great story.

Greg: Yeah, I have to tell that story a lot though now.

'Cause a lot of people learn that, or not everybody, but I'd say maybe like 70% of Americans I meet kind of have some big idea what a muckraker is.

So we get a little bit of traction off that, but I've learned no one outside of the US learned that term.

So whenever we meet internationally, we acquired a company based in the UK and Europe, and so I'm telling that story a lot now.

My mission is now to educate the rest of the world on muckrakers.

Isaac: I think we're about at time, but first we have a section called Picks where we bring to the table anything we're excited about.

Doesn't have to be business related, doesn't have to be AI related or whatever. It can just be something you found this week that you can't shut up about.

Spang, do you have any picks this week?

Christine: Yeah, so my pick this week is a book, it's called "Working" by this guy Studs Terkel.

And it was published in the early 70s and this guy basically, you know, went around the country with a tape recorder and recorded interviews with people about their jobs and how they felt about their jobs.

And he interviewed like all sorts of different people, like farmers, steel workers, like people who are doing telephone operators and switchboard operators, all sorts of different things.

And one it's like amazing, really fascinating.

And two, I think it's really interesting in that like, you know, this book was published 50 years ago at this point and as we're all thinking about, you know what's going to happen to X job or the world, or whatever, you know, with AI in its final form, I think it's really cool to just see some things that were jobs in 1970 that honestly kind of sounded like terrible jobs that are just gone now and it's for the best.

Like that was just not a good job. And hearing directly from the people about, you know, I feel like a cog in a machine or like, there's no room to be human here.

Being a switchboard operator where you're literally just routing calls to like a different place.

These people weren't even allowed to make small talk with the person who was on the phone. And so it was almost like telling a person to do a very robotic thing.

And I hope that we can manage to get rid of a lot of those things that are just super robotic and find ways to enhance the human aspects of jobs over time. But really fascinating case study. Recommended.

Isaac: That sounds really cool. And I was just thinking about the same thing because I've been rewatching "Mad Men."

Last time I saw it, I was younger. And I'm at the season where they're like bringing a computer into the agency and the conversations they're having about the computer, they're like, it has infinite knowledge, all kinds of things.

Like, it sounds like a conversation you would hear today around AI and it's almost quite, quite soothing because there's something that every generation believes that this is the moment in history where everything's about to, you know, go up in flames and it's fine.

The world marches on.

Christine: Yeah, it's like nothing has ever changed this much before, and it's like.

Isaac: Yeah.

Christine: Actually, it's because you're not that old.

Isaac: There is a, there's a meme on the internet lately, which is like nothing ever happens and it's usually true. Nothing happens.

I've got two picks this week, I'm cheating. Number one is L-theanine, which is something I'd heard quite a bit about. It's just a, it's a supplement you can take.

And what I really like about it is that it smooths this kind of jitter to crash curve of caffeine and makes me feel kind of the way I did in like my early 20s when taking, drinking caffeine.

I don't want to say taking caffeine, it makes it sound bad.

Greg: It's a drug.

Isaac: It's a drug, it's a, it's a--

Christine: Doing caffeine today.

Isaac: Yeah, we provide it to our employees. It's addictive, all kinds of stuff. But it just creates this gentler curve for the caffeine.

So you get like two hours of real focus and concentration without that like mania to crash kind of areas of the curve.

And my second pick is actually a article I saw a long time ago from Carta and it's one of those articles I keep coming back to every six months or every year or something like that as like a refresher renewing my vows sort of.

And it's called "A Manager's FAQ" and it's a 10 minute read. And if you're out there and you're trying to learn how to become a good leader, a good manager, this is the article.

Like if you follow these principles, which is really hard, laid down in the article, you will be a good manager immediately.

I found it or I was given it when my second time managing people. My first time, I feel very sorry for those people I managed.

And I kind of made the commitment that I was going to really try and keep true to this article and it made me, I'm not going to say a great manager, but it made me a better manager effectively overnight.

So "A Manager's FAQ", it's on Carta's blog. Highly recommend,

Greg: Nice. The pick I came with was I just got my first pair of the Meta Ray-Ban glasses.

Isaac: Ooh.

Greg: And I'd previously had the Snap Spectacles, so I've got some experience with this, you know, which was Snapchat's version where of having a sunglasses so you could pick your with, but the Meta Ray-Bans are like, I mean they have five years of technological improvements to work with, but I was very impressed being able to take a photo, record a video, ask it a question.

It even has like this live translate mode where someone's speaking to you another language, you can set it up.

It's still a little clunky with like how it interacts with the iPhone app that it has.

I think, you know, they're in that battle of Apple where you have to like keep repermissioning it to let it do its thing within the Apple world.

But it made me see like how far these glasses have come and then you knowing, especially all the rumors out there about, you know, what's Open AI going to do with Jony Ive and with others thinking about other ways of doing wearables.

It definitely like just, you know, even though the, these I don't think are, are yet at the point where it's like, oh, AI is changing my life somehow through the sunglasses.

But it was kind of my first real taste of like, hey, maybe this paradigm that I've lived my life with for the past, you know, 20 years of like my interaction with technology is my laptop and my icon that like, hey, maybe this is going to really, you know, maybe we're in for something very different in the next, next several years.

That there's a lot of new ways that we're going to start interacting with technology and AI, you know, without just looking at a screen.

Isaac: That's awesome. I've really been considering a pair of those. I think I'm going to pick them up.

Christine: I feel like I haven't seen anybody with them, but I guess that's kind of the point.

Greg: Yeah, you know, the first person I met at a conference with them, I didn't realize that she was wearing them until she pointed it out to me.

So you might well have come across people wearing them. They're very understated.

Christine: Yeah. They've successfully bridged the The Google Glass.

Greg: Yeah, exactly. Luckily if they're taking a photo of you or recording you, they light up. So you do know if you're being recorded.

Isaac: You can mod that away.

Christine: I was about to say. There's got to be the evil version though.

Greg: They'll sell a version of an extra $100 that doesn't light up, I'm sure.

Isaac: Yeah. Alright guys, I think we're at time.

Thank you so much for joining us. Muck Rack is incredible and I'm really excited to see what you guys do in the future, as AI takes off and all that stuff.

Thanks for joining us.

Greg: Thank you for having me.