At a recent board meeting, someone suggested that we needed to go hard on PR and marketing to “build hype.” When the phrase “build hype” came up, the rest of the room soured immediately. To many, hype was synonymous with snake oil.
The company in question is doing legitimately impressive technical work, work that will define the category it is in, and almost no one outside its immediate customer base knows about it.
Later that meeting, I asked the founder: Had anyone, anywhere, ever pulled off a similar technical feat before?
No, he said. This would be a world first.
That concern around self-promotion is something I see frequently among the technical founders I work with building deep tech and physical AI businesses, who want to be measured by the substance of their technical work, not their effectiveness at marketing them.
In software, it’s common practice for sales and marketing materials to outpace what the product is capable of. In fact, it’s often encouraged as a way to probe for product-market fit. Taking this strategy to the extreme, however, can result in serious blunders and even outright fraud. Companies like Cluely, which misrepresented its annual recurring revenue numbers; Delve, which experienced allegations of fake compliance audits; and most infamously, Theranos, serve as cautionary tales of hype without substance to back it up.
And so many of these founders remain silent, hoping the tech will speak for itself. But silence is not a strategy, and it creates its own risk. People will form an opinion of the company whether it does promotion or not. They simply do it with less information. This risk is especially high for tech companies, where the product may take years to mature and the market may not yet understand the category.
As a deep tech investor, here are the five marketing principles I share with founders to help them build their identity early (when the substance is there, of course):
1. Market the vision, not just a product
Technical teams tend to describe a product based on what it is, not the radical change it might bring about. Things like form factor, model architecture, manufacturing process are all important attributes . . . but all subject to change.
Take the defense startup Anduril Industries. The “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy” manifesto from one of its cofounders, Palmer Luckey, came before most of Anduril’s current product line existed, and it described a vision of what American defense should be. That worldview is part of what allowed Anduril to raise the capital to be a force in reshaping the industry and granted them enough flexibility to adapt what that looks like in practice over time.
The first product may become a wedge into a much larger market, or evolve into something else as the company does more customer discovery. A durable identity needs to survive those changes.
2. A marketing strategy starts with defining the goal and the audience
Often, I hear founders say, “We should be in TechCrunch.” or “We need a launch video; we need to post more on LinkedIn.”
But these are wishes that are not anchored in business strategies. Ask yourself, what is the end goal? Do we want publicity because are we trying to fundraise? Hire a specific kind of researcher? Win a beachhead customer?
A founder preparing to raise a round has to communicate why-now, why-you, something suited for investor-facing publications like TechCrunch, or going direct with a launch video on LinkedIn. Founders recruiting talent must convey that the team is capable and employees’ work will matter, which is exactly what authentic team updates on X and LinkedIn are for. One selling to enterprise customers needs to focus on risk reduction signals like regulatory approvals or pilots and deployments with notable logos, clearly visible on its website as case studies and socialized in industry publications.
The strongest message changes with the audience, and so should the proof. Choose the story and format by starting with the decision you want someone to make.
3. Establish cadence, don’t aim for perfection
Tech founders often wait for a single perfect moment to launch, rather than prioritizing a steady drumbeat of communication. Then as months pass, competitors pull ahead.
Just as software teams find product-market fit through ship/measure/iterate, so too can companies build their identity through continuous storytelling.
One company that’s done this well is Physical Intelligence. They’ve barely engaged with traditional media but have shipped technical updates on X, open-sourced components, and long, unedited clips of robots folding laundry and making espresso—all of which are effective at addressing the growing skepticism of robotics amid competitors’ more polished demos. As a result, the company is about to close at an $11 billion valuation, even without a commercialization timeline!
If you don’t allow people to regularly update their view of your company, your less sophisticated competitor might, winning investors and customers before you ever had the chance to show them why you are better.
4. Make storytelling a real, in-house job with a direct owner
This is the biggest error I see. A serious storytelling function should not be a small slice of the CEO’s busy calendar, or the job of a PR agency on a three-month retainer.
Companies need someone on the task at all times, and that person needs to be in-house. Yes, agencies help with positioning, media, design, content, and execution. But they work best when someone inside the company can gather materials, share business priorities, and track the company calendar, and that someone has an allocated budget. This person has goals aligned to the company’s and is held accountable for achieving them.
Without this kind of function in place, communications can become episodic, a mad scramble to announce when a financing round closes, then silence until the next big moment.
5. Make sure there’s substance before turning up the volume
Before you do all this, consider whether your claims will survive interrogations with a Bloomberg reporter or a hostile board member, or a reference call to a customer. Claims can sit anywhere from “the result once worked in a lab experiment” to “the product performs reliably with customers, and economically at scale.” The claims might look similar in a headline, but critical eyes will know the difference. Ensure you know which one you are.
I say this all with deep empathy for the teams who are responsible for executing it. Having played both sides, I know exactly what it feels like to attend to marketing when you are heads-down trying to ship the next milestone. It feels indulgent, like something real founders are supposed to be too busy for.
But it is also wrong. The founders who treat communication as a discipline, with the same rigor they apply to their core road map, consistently get more shots in the goal than the ones who treat it as a side project or chore. Strong technical work gives you something worth saying, and building a brand helps the right people hear it.
