Awesome People - Ep 95
Content Machine, Interviews, Public Relations
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
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Please meet James Kotecki, Your Head of Content and Brand
At Automated Insights (acquired by Vista Equity Partners), James marketed “robot writing software” (aka an AI-assisted writing tool). Amid media fears of workplace automation, he crafted a fresh narrative and secured positive press coverage from The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and many more. He was also the first go-to-market hire and drove messaging at Infinia ML, a machine learning startup working with Fortune 500 clients.
One little-known fact about James is that as an early YouTuber, he interviewed US presidential candidates from his college dorm room and was featured in major publications like The Washington Post. So Ron Paul and Mike Gravel got to see his Darth Vader poster!
He's trusted by the Consumer Technology Association, Infinia ML, Automated Insights, LinkedIn, DHL, and Politico. Most tellingly, he’s trusted by his former employers’ sales teams. Turns out marketing and sales can be friends.
If content matters to your business, James can help you build repeatable production systems as your editor-in-chief. You can hire him to share and shape your story through podcasts, videos, fireside chats, case studies, and more. James uses interviews to find and refine on-brand narratives, connecting them to broader media stories.
Want an intro to James? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
He was gracious enough to share some pro-tips with us here ✨
Don’t Just Create Content. Create Content Machines.
Don’t just create a bunch of disparate, one-off content pieces. Think in terms of content machines. Generate consistent quality content to distribute in various formats across multiple channels.
At Infinia ML, we launched an interview series with AI leaders called Machine Meets World. Using the live streaming platform StreamYard, we constructed the show as a LinkedIn event in order to hype it ahead of time. The interviews focused almost entirely on the guest and their insights. We didn’t strain to sell ourselves, beyond branding it as an Infinia show. We focused on our guests.
Afterwards, we distributed the video through YouTube and the audio through iTunes, Spotify, and Anchor. We partnered with PodReacher to transform each episode into a high-quality article summarizing the best points. In addition, we combined insights from multiple interviews into a lead-generating white paper.
We strategically built out a machine that produced more than content – it produced relationships and turned cold leads into warm connections before ever hitting potential clients with a direct pitch. Once we hosted the COO of a potential partner on Machine Meets World. A few months later, we landed a partnership.
You can invite your clients and prospects onto the show and give them the ability to look smart in front of their own audience. Prospects who’d never watch your demo will gladly spend 30 minutes sharing their insights. These prospects may be hard to reach for a sales call. Luckily, their company’s PR team will happily make them available for an interview.
Done right, an interview-based content machine is a successful collaboration between marketing and sales. Marketing produces the show, and sales suggests guests they want to pitch or partner with.
Know How to Interview
Let’s talk about the content at the core of that content machine - the interviews.
You’ve heard countless interviews in your life, and many probably sucked. Often at conferences and fireside chats, neither guests nor hosts seem to give much effort at all. Make sure to follow these three rules. They apply to every interview from panels to podcasts.
Prepare. Just because Larry King famously didn’t prepare for his interviews, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. You have a limited amount of time. Do research and prep beforehand, so you can ask interesting questions and cover relevant topics. While preparation may seem obvious, it’s also obvious that some interviewers don’t do enough of it.
Don’t Stick too Closely to your Script. Overpreparation can be equally disastrous. If your guest says something amazing and you move on to the next scripted question without reacting, the audience loses an opportunity to go deeper. The best interviews are a mixture of preparation and improvisation. In fact, taking an improv class will help you build active listening skills that make you a better interviewer.
Introduce your Guest. An open-ended “tell us about yourself” at the top of an interview is an invitation to a rambling reply that stops the interview dead before it even starts. It’s usually best when you introduce the guest yourself, and then start off with a real question. For inspiration, listen to the OG all-time queen of this art form, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.
If you really want to go down the interviewing rabbit hole, check out the podcast “The Turnaround,” featuring interviews with famous interviewers about interviewing. Then after you listen, email me because I love to geek out about this stuff.
The Story Matters Most
If you’re hoping for media coverage, the mere act of putting out a press release is almost certainly not enough. Of course, you think your press release is interesting. Your team has spent months on that big product update, but “Company Updates Product” is rarely a headline that interests reporters.
I’ve seen the most success in my career when my narrative lined up with a broader wave of media interest in the topic:
In college, I started a YouTube channel about how YouTube could impact presidential politics. I rode a broader wave of media interest in technology and the presidential election. As a student making videos in a somewhat messy dorm room, I seemed to embody someone who could understand the technology’s potential. I was featured by The Washington Post and The LA Times, and appeared in outlets like CNN, NPR, and the BBC. The Economist said I was “probably the world’s foremost expert on YouTube videos posted by presidential candidates.”
At Automated Insights, our technology turned structured data into prose that appeared to be custom-written. Our “robot writer” was a perfect example for pieces about whether machines were replacing human workers. Journalists took particular interest because they themselves could be on the chopping block. I was able to work with journalists to give a robust rebuttal to those concerns, and we achieved widespread national and international media coverage including The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and Slate.
Like surfing on the ocean, successfully finding and riding a media wave requires patience, luck, and a willingness to wipe out. While there are no guarantees, you can increase your odds of success. As you craft your story, think about whether that story might fit into a broader trend piece that a reporter might write about your industry - or even society at large. Those stories will have a greater chance of riding the wave.
Want an intro to James? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to James!
Stay awesome,
Julia Lipton + Will Johnson (our amazing fellow who edited this newsletter)
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
Recent Features
James, Your NFT-Native Ops Leader — most recently, led OpenSea’s internalization product including everything from research to go-to-market. Prior to OpenSea, James was an executive at Ula, the hypergrowth Indonesian e-commerce startup backed by Sequoia, Tencent, and Jeff Bezos.
Joe, Your Fractional Head of Ops — was the co-founder and COO of a YC-backed company, Tyltgo. They created a same-day delivery marketplace for SMBs. Before that, he led Uber Eats’ Canadian expansion. He managed marketplace ops across millions of monthly deliveries.
Akhila, your part-time Web3 Technical Product Manager — most recently, Akhila worked at Coinbase for 2.5 years and launched Coinbase Prime APIs. Prior to that, she was an Ethereum core developer.
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P.P.S. Intros will come next week
As you're reading this, I'm doing a 10 day silent meditation. Will pressed send on this newsletter 🤪. That means I'll be a little slow to make intros. But if you request an intro, you'll get one next week 🙏.