Your CEO can't outsource being interesting

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, is the opposite of the founder we are trained to admire. 

He is the anti-template tech CEO. While Zuckerberg employs an army of PR executives to hone a crafted image and Musk obsesses over what people say about him, Karp doesn't care. He hasn't even read his own authorized biography. 

The standard Silicon Valley founders’ behavior is to wrap everything in world-improvement language: “connect the world,” “democratize X,” “make things better.” Karp's public thesis is an attack on that exact behavior.

He runs a company that builds software for militaries, intelligence agencies, and police. “Palantir is here to disrupt and, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them" he said, "you may not agree with that and, bless you, don't work here."

I grew up in Ukraine. When a war starts in your country, you learn very quickly which technology matters and which technology does not. A photo-sharing app does not help you. Software that helps a military understand the battlefield and move faster than the enemy, does. Palantir's tools have been used in Ukraine for exactly that purpose. So when Karp argues that Silicon Valley wasted a generation of brilliant engineers on trivial consumer apps while avoiding hard problems like defense, I get what he's talking about. 

Palantir's CEO public image is one of the company's most effective marketing assets. What makes that interesting is that he built it by ignoring almost everything we tell CEOs to do.

In today's newsletter:

1. Can a CEO be your marketing channel?

2. What's Karp's method?

3. Can you outsource it?

One thing your CEO needs to become a marketing channel

The standard marketing advice for a CEO is to post on LinkedIn regularly, share company milestones, and stay positive. Why should a CEO do this? To improve company visibility, to show up often enough that people remember the company exists. 

Some CEOs do post interesting things on LinkedIn that people want to follow, but regular posting isn't the reason why people would seek out what these CEOs have to say. They follow CEOs for what they think. For a CEO to become a marketing channel, they need an opinion worth disagreeing with. 

That opinion can be about where the industry is heading, or about why most of their competitors have it wrong. It does not need to be likable, and it should not be. An opinion only counts if the CEO is willing to pay for it, whether the cost is losing employees, alienating part of the market, or making people uncomfortable.

Karp is the proof. Here is the method.

Karp's method

1. Start from a conviction you genuinely hold.

Karp's central argument is that the technology industry abandoned serious work. In his book The Technological Republic, he writes that engineers spent two decades building photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms instead of solving problems of national importance. He has believed this for years, and he repeats it everywhere he speaks.

2. Name what you are against. 

A position needs an opponent. In his shareholder letters, Karp attacks what he calls "technocratic elites" – the highly educated managerial class that runs large institutions, including much of Silicon Valley's leadership. His complaint is that these people are cautious, conformist, and more interested in appearing competent and respectable than in doing anything hard or risky. 

3. Protect the voice from the approval process. 

Palantir's head of communications has said that she reads Karp's letters but never edits them. Only Karp and his co-author discuss them, and they publish exactly as he wrote them. The voice and opinion survive because no committee is allowed to edit it into something safe and generic.

4. Turn an existing obligation into your format. 

Karp's quarterly shareholder letter is a document most CEOs treat as a formality, but he turned his into an essay that quotes St. Augustine, Richard Nixon, the poet W. B. Yeats, and the New Testament. He took the obligations he already had and made them worth reading. 

You do not need to add a new channel to your calendar. Look at the communication you are already required to produce, such as the quarterly update, the customer email, the earnings call, and make it yours instead of treating it as a box to check. 

5. Decide what you are willing to lose.

Karp took out a full-page newspaper advertisement stating that Palantir stands with Israel, he kept the company's contracts with immigration enforcement through heavy public criticism, and he has said openly that he has lost employees over his positions and expects to lose more. 

Every position has a price. Settle that in advance and you can hold the line when the criticism arrives, because you already accepted the cost when you chose the position.

For most companies, the price will be losing prospects who were never the right fit. 

Can you outsource CEO thought leadership?

Should a CEO build this themselves, or should they hand it to the marketing team?

Karp's opinions are genuinely his, and he is willing to defend them in public.

A communications team cannot produce a conviction the CEO does not have. The point of view comes from a person, and people can tell the difference between a position someone holds and a position someone was handed. Marketing can find the right format, clarify the argument, and decide where the message goes. It cannot supply the conviction.

If you don't have the conviction, don't fake it. A performed personality is worse than no personality at all. If the CEO is not the right face for the company, build the marketing around something else that is true, such as the product, the customers, or the results.

See you next week

I'm curious, does your CEO have an opinion?

Kateryna

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