The most trusted marketing has always been someone else talking about you. AI search follows much the same logic.

The pitch is presumably the atomic unit of PR. Strip away the decks, the messaging docs, the boring Q3 planning sessions - at the end of it all, someone sends an email to a journalist and hopes.

Last month, I grabbed coffee with the founder of a security company that just closed a big funding round. He'd reached out through a mutual connection to tell me about what they're building and see if I had any thoughts on their positioning.

For too long, stealth mode has been the holy cow of the startup world. Founders would proudly slap “@Building” onto their LinkedIn titles and hide behind that same grayscale triangle-like logo. (Confession: in my early days in tech, I thought “Stealth” was just the name of a company – until I kept bumping into that logo everywhere.)