Last month, Lulu Cheng Meservey — former Substack comms lead, now founder and CEO of Rostra, the comms agency that declared traditional PR dead — announced she’d raised a $40m VC fund. Actually, Lulu got scooped by Axios, but she was gracious about it.

And before we go any further: Congratulations, Lulu, on expanding your empire of wordchads.

PR-to-VC crossovers are rare, but Lulu is a communications savant. She’s good at tweeting, which isn’t true of most “comms people.” On X and in her newsletter, Lulu quote-tweets founders’ and companies’ public statements, detailing what they got wrong or right. She shares timeless communications principles like “resistance is escalation.” She is also well-versed in American history.

Five years ago, when Lulu was at Substack and Facebook launched a competing newsletter service, Lulu responded to the Washington Post’s PR request like this:

Then, Lulu essentially set off an entire news cycle about the platform’s free-speech policies by telling Elon-haters, at the time, not to work there.

The principle running through Lulu’s work is: Most PR is boring, and there’s a lot of alpha in being… not boring. Say what you think, and people might actually listen. They might even pay you.

At Rostra, Lulu’s comms agency, she consults with founders her team is “obsessed” with. She’s been helping these people “go direct” (tell their own stories) since 2024. The idea to raise a VC fund, Lulu says, originally came from Palmer Luckey; Palmer experienced the value Lulu was delivering during Anduril’s early years, when she was his comms advisor, and thought Lulu should have some skin in the game. (Scott Nolan of General Matter, the nuclear enrichment company Solana profiled in Pirate Wires last year, shared a similar sentiment.)

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