Tech companies today compete on perception as much as they do on product. In your role leading communications and crisis strategy, how do you define “reputation” in a way that ties directly to business outcomes beyond just media visibility?

Reputation is the gap between what you say you are and what people actually believe you are, and that gap has a dollar value. Look at Boeing's 737 MAX crisis - the plane didn't really change, but the reputation collapsed so completely that the financial damage ran into the tens of billions. That's not a PR problem. It's a business problem that started as a communications failure.

PR is often treated as a support function to marketing. How do you align communications strategy with core marketing goals like demand generation, pipeline influence, and category positioning?

Treating PR as a support function is a waste of what it can actually do. Communications strategy needs to be built into every core function of the enterprise. Earned media and third-party credibility do something paid media can't: they validate. A prospect who reads an independent analyst take or sees your founder quoted in a credible trade publication is when credibility and trust, not just awareness, begin to form. The alignment I push for is upstream: communications should be in the room when the category narrative is being defined, not handed a brief after positioning is already set.

As generative engines reshape brand discovery, what shifts do you see in how companies approach visibility? How does this intersect with both PR and marketing?

For decades, the goal was to rank. Generative AI changes that because the search result is now an answer, not a list of links. If your brand isn't woven into the sources those engines reference, you don't just rank lower, you don't exist in the conversation. That's where GEO becomes essential. The companies doing this well treat earned media as structured input into AI systems, not just vanity coverage. A well-placed feature in a credible publication now does double duty: it reaches the human reader and feeds the AI training ecosystem.  Google search results were marked by varying levels of visibility. Now brands must contend with invisibility. With SEO, it used to mean having to scroll to the bottom of page one or be relegated to page two, but at least you appeared. Today, you're either part of the answer or you're not.

High-growth startups often scale faster than their narratives can keep up. What challenges do you see in how these companies communicate, and how do you bring clarity to an evolving story?

The most common problem is what I call "feature announcement disorder," where every product update, every hire, every partnership gets pushed out as if it were news. The result is noise, and your audience can't tell what you actually do. Clarity comes with picking the one or two things you want to be known for right now and building every communication decision around it. Stripe did this well. For years, the message was essentially a payments infrastructure for developers that actually works. It was simple and effective.

With 5WPR’s mix of earned media, digital marketing, and emerging GEO strategies, how do you integrate these disciplines into a cohesive narrative rather than running them as parallel efforts?

The failure mode I see constantly is channel thinking, where PR is optimizing for coverage, digital is optimizing for clicks, and nobody is asking whether those two things are telling the same story. Integration starts with a single narrative architecture: one core story, expressed differently depending on where the audience finds you. The GEO layer adds a new discipline, where we're also asking whether content is structured so a generative engine can accurately scrape and cite it. When these channels are coordinated, earned media validates paid spend, and owned content builds the authority GEO depends on. When they're siloed, you're funding three efforts that quietly undercut each other.

Many agencies offer similar services on paper. In practice, where does real differentiation lie when it comes to managing complex and high-stakes tech brand communications?

The honest answer is judgment. Any capable agency can write a press release or pitch a story. The difference shows up when something goes wrong, or when a client wants to make a decision that will hurt them and needs someone to say so plainly. What separates strategic counsel from execution support is the willingness to bring hard truths to the table. Another thing, experience yields efficiency. When you've worked across hundreds of tech companies through funding cycles, crises, IPOs, and acquisitions, you stop reinventing the wheel. That institutional knowledge is what a client is actually buying, not simply the services listed on the scope of work.

At a time when impressions are easy to track but impact is harder to prove, how do you measure whether a communications strategy is truly moving the needle?

Impressions are a comfort metric: easy to report and not particularly meaningful. I urge clients to look at business proofs. Are we showing up in conversations that matter to buyers? Are prospects referencing specific narratives in sales calls? Is share of voice growing in the publications our customers actually read? The framework I use ties communications activity directly to commercial signals. If we're running a category leadership campaign, we track whether analysts are adopting our language and whether inbound deal quality is improving.

If everything you’ve seen in the last few years is any indication, what’s the one thing companies should stop doing immediately when it comes to communications?

Stop waiting for a crisis to find your voice. You can't build credibility in a crisis. You can only spend it, and if you haven't made deposits into your reputational bank account before the emergency, the account is empty when you need it most. The pandemic made this visible in real time: companies that had been consistently communicating were trusted when they had to deliver bad news, while companies that had been quiet had no goodwill to draw on. Communications shouldn't just be a fire alarm. Invest in it consistently, and you come out of hard moments stronger than you went in.