Tell us about ma Family
Ma Family is a communications partner for new technology companies. We help companies in the technological space to achieve their commercial objectives by taking advantage of the power of the media. That could mean building the knowledge of the brand and attracting the first investors for a startup in the seed stage or helping a company like Flipper Zero backward against the overreach of the government in Canada.
What do you think makes this company unique?
What we are separated is our fund: we come from the technological world, not traditional public relations. I was the first employee in Day One Ventures, a risk capital firm based in San Francisco. My co -founder was a writer in Forbes before working in VC. Because of that, our team has a deep and intuitive understanding of the technological ecosystem. We speak the same language as our customers and know how to turn updates routine products into stories of real media chickens to cover. We operate as consultants, configuring internal messages and leading media strategy from the inside.
What is your advice for the starting founders in Public Relations?
Public relations is about taking the audience and credibility of the main media, but only if you have something really interested in saying. The beauty of public relations, unlike digital marketing, is that it does not come with fixed costs: an excellent profile can shape the public image of your company for years, attracting customers, hiring and investors.
You do not necessarily need to hire a public relations company to obtain coverage, but work is needed. Founders must identify what makes their company convincing and understand what journalists cover. Most journalists seek news: they don’t write about companies just because they like them.
Take a look at the road map of your product and commercial milestones. What does it stand out? What could be of journalistic interest alone? While financing ads used to be easy to win, they are no longer enough. If you are announcing a round today, use it like a hook, but focus on what really matters: what your product does, why it is unique and the value it brings to the client and the world.
What excites you more about this industry?
What excites me the most is helping the founders tell their stories. Many of the people we work with are highly technical, or immigrants who have moved to Europe or the United States to build their next big thing. I want to make sure they have the same fire narration fire and Stanford graduates well connected in Silicon Valley. Leveling that playing field is incredible gratifying.
How has the media industry evolved in recent years?
We are seeing two opposite trends. On the one hand, some inherited publications are missing, and with them, incredible talented editorial teams. On the other hand, there is an increase in the new media: individual writers who launch their own platforms in Sustet and beyond, many of which are now building small agile editorial teams.
Writers like Eric Newcomer and Alex Konrad are breaking important stories, conducting deep research and interviewing the main CEO of technology, everything while executing lean operations. Opportunities are still available, but it is more difficult to break. The new media publish less stories, so the coverage bar is higher than ever. Much harder to break: the new media write Ferwer articles.
How will IA the media industry and the relations of companies with it?
We believe that AI could help revitalize the media industry. Social networks interrupted journalism by allowing anyone to reach an audience without editorial standards, which undermined the value of quality reports. But the AI changes the equation.
High quality journalism is now a critical contribution to train great language models. That is why you are seeing offers between points of sale such as the Financial Times and Openai. Included in the training data of a LLM could become as valuable as the classification on Google’s first page once. In this way, the AI has the potential to restore the value of the reliable and high integrity media for the public and for companies that seek to build a lasting credibility.
