By Sreya Rakshit | 17 March 2026
If I had a rupee for every time a founder told me "we'll get to comms after the Series A", I'd have enough to fund one myself. It's become such a reliable part of the startup playbook that I've started to think of it as a stage of grief (somewhere between denial and bargaining).
I get it. Resources are thin. Every dollar has to justify itself ten times over. And in the B2B world especially, there's a deep conviction that the product should speak for itself. That a great API or a clever piece of enterprise software will find its way to the right buyer through sheer technical merit. Storytelling is for consumer brands with glossy Instagram feeds.
But there's something I've come to understand close to twenty-five years in this business - across agencies, boardrooms, startup war rooms, and now inside a venture fund - it is this: PR is behaviour. It is how a company shows up, consistently, over time. The things it says, yes, and critically, the things it does. When the two are in sync and sustained, they build something no press release or product launch can manufacture on its own: reputation. But here's the catch. The finest behaviour in the world won't build your reputation if nobody ever gets to witness it. That's where communications earns its keep. It makes the doing visible.
Reputation is what a CTO is drawing on when she's evaluating three vendors and one of them rings a faint bell. A LinkedIn post from the founder, a mention in a podcast she caught on her commute. She may not be able to pinpoint where she encountered the company, but the familiarity is doing work. I've seen this play out innumerable times across my career. The companies that show up with a consistent, recognisable voice accumulate a kind of trust that compounds over months and years. The ones who wait until they have "news" to communicate end up spending twice the effort to earn half the attention. That CTO didn't stumble upon the company by accident. Someone made sure the story was out there.
This is the part that founders often underestimate. Reputation isn't built in a transaction. You can't buy it with a press release or conjure it with a splashy announcement. It is built through a pattern of behaviour, through how a founder talks about the problem they're solving, how a team responds when things go wrong, how consistently the story holds together across conversations and channels. And it is built, equally, through the discipline of communicating that behaviour to the world. Doing good work and talking about it with authenticity and regularity. Brand equity, in the truest sense, is the sum of both. And it takes time. There are no shortcuts, which is precisely why starting early matters so much.
Every now and then, you meet a founder who can sit you down over coffee and trace the origin of their idea - the problem that kept them up at night, the moment they saw the gap - and you're riveted. But they're a handful. Most founders struggle to articulate what makes their company worth paying attention to. And whatever story does exist tends to stay locked inside, shared with investors and early employees, never quite making it out into the world where it could do the most work.
I must clarify: when I talk about communications at the early stage, I don't mean hiring a three-person team or retaining a blue-chip agency. Some of the most effective communications I've seen have been scrappy. A founder who writes regularly, even imperfectly. A messaging framework the team can rally around so the story doesn't warp with every new conversation. A thoughtful approach to milestones (and I don't just mean funding rounds). The less obvious moments often matter more: a design decision, a hard pivot, a customer insight that changed how the team thinks about the problem. The things that make a company feel real to someone on the outside. None of this requires a big budget. It requires intention.
There's a compounding quality to all of this. The startup that shares a genuine perspective on an industry problem today becomes the natural reference point six months later. The founder who builds relationships with journalists before there's an announcement to make has someone who picks up the phone when it counts. You can't reverse-engineer that kind of credibility at speed. It is earned, slowly (and, repeatedly), through behaviour that is matched by the willingness to put it out into the world.
Every founder wants to be known for what they've built. Fair enough. But brand equity isn't built in a press release. It's built when what you do and what you say run on the same track. And when you let the world see that, again and again, until trust becomes second nature. That's what PR really is. And reputation, unlike code, cannot be shipped overnight.