New Early Stage speakers to tackle growth marketing, media strategy and M&A

Published February 7, 2020

In a little less than three months, TechCrunch will bring its Early Stage event to SF for the very first time. Early Stage is meant to bring together more than 50 experts across startup core competencies, from funding to marketing to operation.

Today, I’m pleased to announce another four experts being added to the agenda. We’re thrilled to be joined by Priti Youssef Choksi, Brooke Hammerling, Ethan Smith and Susan Su.

Priti Youssef Choksi

Choksi is a partner on the Norwest Venture Partners consumer internet team. Before joining Norwest, she spent nine years in executive roles at Facebook around corporate and business development, leading the company’s M&A efforts. Before Facebook, Choksi spent six years at Google in strategic partnership roles. She was one of the people responsible for setting up the search partnerships with Apple and Mozilla, with top-line revenue from these deals growing from $0 to $4 billion on her watch.

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Brooke Hammerling

Brooke Hammerling is the founder of The New New Thing, a strategic communications advisory that works with founders to shape the brand narrative. She also founded Brew Media Relations, which was acquired by Freuds in 2016 for a reported $15 million. She has 20 years of experience in the communications field, with a focus on authenticity and relationships at the core of her business. Brands she’s worked with include Live Nation, Framebridge, Refinery 29, Sonos, Splice, GroupMe, Eko and Oracle.

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Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith is the founder and CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth marketing agency based out of San Francisco. He’s served as a strategic advisor to Ticketmaster, MasterClass, Thumbtack and Honey. Before Graphite, Smith held several executive roles in product management and marketing, and has been tapped by organizations like VenturebBeat, MarketWatch and INC to speak and write about SEO and growth marketing.

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Susan Su

Susan Su is a startup growth advisor and EIR at Sound Ventures. Su has led startup growth at Stripe, served as an in-house growth advisor at 500 startups and led the growth marketing as a founding team member at Reforge. After a career that spanned both product and marketing, Su has combined the two to take advantage of the rise of scaled distribution platforms.

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There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the show, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world on par with the folks we’ve announced today.

Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s great app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.

Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

We’re absolutely thrilled for this event, and we hope you are, too. Buy a pass to Early Stage SF 2020 right here!

Interested in sponsoring Early Stage? Hit us up here.

Brooke Hammerling launches The New New Thing, a strategic communications advisory

Published January 23, 2020

Brooke Hammerling, the strategic communications veteran who brought us Brew PR, announced her new project today.

Dubbed The New New Thing, Hammerling’s new communications advisory wants to help startups bring more authenticity to brand messaging and comms through high-level partnerships with CEOs, founders and executive leadership teams.

There are a few critical pieces to The New New Thing:

First, Hammerling will not focus on the usual six-month press release strategy that drives communications at most tech startups. The New New Thing isn’t focused as much on an individual product or funding round announcement as much as the high-level strategy of storytelling across the entire brand, including the company and the founder. In fact, the only pre-launch clients Hammerling will be taking on must be female-led and mission-driven.

Second, she’ll be working directly with startup leadership teams to craft those narratives paying special attention to the stories in between the stories.

And finally, The New New Thing will have a huge focus on authenticity as a driver of relationships between its clients and the media.

One catalyst for the new project, according to Hammerling, was the evolution of the comms landscape as a whole. Not only is the media’s bullshit detector hyper-sensitive, but so is the end-reader. It’s no longer enough to send out the same robotic press release announcing funding.

“I’m bored of seeing the same picture of two male founders announcing their funding for some fintech product that’s going to change the world,” said Hammerling. “There needs to be a fostering of the relationships between CEOs and the people telling their story. Being authentic is really hard for larger organizations, or really any organization. And now, in 2020, there is no option but to be.”

Hammerling explained that getting into the weeds with founders and tackling a storytelling challenge is what she loves doing most. She admits that managing a large team and dealing with the nitty gritty of comms (writing up press releases, pitching speakers for tech conferences, etc.) aren’t her strong suits.

As you might imagine, the launch of The New New Thing means that Hammerling has officially left Brew PR, the firm she founded and sold to Freuds for $15 million.

Brooke Hammerling on how early-stage startups should think about PR

The New New Thing is part of a newly expanded collective of service providers called Plan A, led by co-CEOs MT Carney and Andrew Essex. Plan A combines expert service providers from the fields of communications, branding, advertising, creative and social, among others.

Hammerling will be focusing on early and growth-stage startups in the tech industry, with a current client list that includes Lemonade, LiveNation, Framebridge, Splice and Eko.

One example of how The New New Thing works is made clear with Splice. The company is represented by a PR firm that manages the day-to-day news cycle and announcement schedule, while Hammerling works directly with founder and CEO Steve Martocci on the overall narrative that runs through all of that.

When asked about the greatest challenge moving forward, Hammerling’s answer offered a taste of the authenticity and relatability she’s trying to bring out of her clients.

“Can I do this? Do I have the right instincts and guidance for my clients?” said Hammerling. “I think I do and I’ve been successful at that, but how do I maintain that and communicate that to others?”