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We could run ads from many other advertisers, but I chose to run AdQuick because I believe in the power of out-of-home advertising.

They are by far the number one platform for startups that don’t have a 10-year relationship with a large media-buying agency but want to buy a few billboards in San Francisco or in the airport at the destination for a large conference.

Don’t believe me? Go and try to buy it traditionally.

The next VYS event is at Entrepreneurs First in SF on Tuesday, May 12, and it’s going to be the best one to date.

Why? Because we will have:

Stifel Investment Bank has been our sponsor since our inception. Their entrepreneurial culture and long-term vision make them a fantastic partner for any leading-edge startup.

Karmic Buzz has also supported us since the first event. Leading the way with Reddit marketing for startups, Karmic is who you call when your marketing manager first posts on Reddit and gets banned.

Now, if you’re a founder, investor, have significant startup experience, or work at a highly regarded high-tech company, you know what to do. Apply here to attend.

Sponsorship opportunities are always available. Reply for details.

Co-founder and CEO: Garret Brennan
Location: New York, USA
Stage: Pre-Seed
Website: epoch.trade
Social: LinkedIn

Epoch is building trading infrastructure designed for an AI-first world. Instead of humans manually placing trades, agents can execute strategies, react to data, and operate continuously. It turns trading from a manual activity into a programmable system.

Epoch provides the rails for automated and agent-driven trading. Developers and traders can plug in strategies, connect data sources, and let systems execute in real time. Rather than logging into dashboards and placing orders, users define logic and let it run. 

Most trading tools are still built for humans to click buttons. Epoch assumes the opposite. As AI agents become more capable, they will need financial infrastructure to act on decisions. Epoch positions itself as that layer where capital meets automation.

Built from the actual Coachella 2026 lineup, not the usual festival filler. Big names, side-stage standouts, one track per artist, and just enough main character energy to make the recap feel like you were there.

Back when I worked in big advertising, we wanted to understand the ROI of creative messaging and did a huge analysis across all the large-scale global media campaigns we had run. Our conclusion was that as the scale increased, by spending more, the power of creativity went down.

Since most can’t spend more, we used this research to push smaller customers to invest in breakthrough creative to help offset their smaller budgets. The logic is simple: if you can’t double your media budget, you can take a small percentage and invest it in creative experiments to increase performance.

This same logic applies to the startup world.

No startup can outspend a Mag 7 company or even a unicorn. You have no choice but to invest in a breakthrough message that will captivate customers and get attention. Too many founders are too conservative. They try to copy the marketing techniques and ideas used by the Mag 7 companies that they have previously worked for. This is always a recipe for failure.

Your startup does not have the budget, access, or level of awareness that the bigger company you used to work for does.

Here is what you should do instead. You need to take risks and weaponize narrative in a way that your competitor can’t or won’t. Is this already making you nervous? Good. It should. Industry disruption is hard, as it should be.

Here are 10 different techniques for creating the type of breakthrough narrative that will get you attention in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas:

The Dave vs. Goliath narrative is the oldest startup narrative out there. Steve Jobs positioned Apple against IBM. Google Search Ads were positioned against traditional advertising. Americans love to see underdogs take on bigger, more well-resourced competitors and win.

For this narrative to work, it can’t be fake. It has to be of substance. And you don’t need to duplicate the Apple vs. IBM narrative. Find an issue where you can take the other side and go hard. I don’t know if you have been following me on X, but I have become the number-one anti-Washington State millionaire tax-resistance account on there. These posts have generated nearly a million impressions and helped me make a bunch of friends among VCs and entrepreneurs, my core ICP.

I do this relentlessly. Because it’s fun. I am not sure I need to explain this more. Email me if you want pointers.

Nearly every AI startup has some element of this in its messaging. All of them are positioning the traditional approach, human labor, as inefficient and error-prone compared to their new AI-powered approach.

The best part about this strategy is that it helps create urgency. You do it by showing examples and giving the impression that if your potential customers don’t evolve quickly, they will be at a strategic disadvantage relative to competitors. OpenAI and Anthropic have made this their core identity as companies.

Loom is my favorite example of this. They positioned themselves against meetings. Which was smart. Who likes to go to meetings when you can just send out a Loom and work asynchronously?

There are plenty of sacred cows to go after. Slack offered a better way for teams to collaborate and was originally positioned as an alternative to email. While Slack never replaced email, part of why I adopted it at first was the promise that some day it would. That is no longer part of their vision, and is why I am cycling off of it. Early adopters are not buying just your product. They are buying what it stands for in the marketplace and what it may someday become.

Every category has a number it worships. Go after it.

If you spend any time on LinkedIn (god help you), you eventually run into some form of “The MQL is dead” narrative. GTM startups and consultants have been attacking legacy metrics like this for years. And it works.

But be careful, if you do this, you'd better become the de facto expert in the granular details of the measurement system you're attacking. You will get challenged, and expect to attract people who understand whatever metric you're going after, maybe even better than you. Read up.

Now that the internet has made information readily available, people crave perspectives and opinions about it, not from journalists and writers. They want to hear the opinion of those they know and trust. Friends, family, coworkers, VCs, and even founders. In the modern media landscape, it is essential to have a voice and state your opinion on a wide range of subjects if you want to have an audience.

This is still a controversial perspective. Your average comms person will tell you this is professional suicide. They are wrong. The media landscape is radically different from the one they knew 10 years ago.

All you need to do is find an issue you’re passionate about and take a side.

I was against this for a long time. But after seeing so many examples of it working, I am now all for it. (I am ultimately a pragmatist.)

The AI startup Artisan took a lot of heat for its tagline, “Stop Hiring Humans.” They put it on billboards, across social media, and in other channels until it became inseparable from the company. Whether people liked it or hated it, the line was impossible to ignore, and Artisan says the campaign drove millions of impressions and $2 million in ARR. It’s hard to argue with that outcome.

Cluely launched with the line “We want to cheat on everything” in its manifesto, and framed its product around helping people “win” in meetings, sales calls, and negotiations, even if the world calls it cheating. It challenged the norm that AI tools should sound respectable and not circumvent rules and regulations. This radical positioning helped them secure $15 million in funding from a16z.

I know this is a controversial example, but I think Roy Lee tapped into a powerful narrative that many in his generation can relate to. They feel that things are rigged against them. Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that this put him on the map.

Buffer is the very best example I can think of for this. They broke a real taboo in tech by publishing every employee’s salary publicly. In most companies, compensation is treated as totally off-limits. Buffer said it anyway, in public.

For this to work, you need to say the thing your category treats as off-limits. Not just contrarian, but actually uncomfortable.

If you can name a real taboo cleanly, people pay attention fast, because they are not just reacting to the point, they are reacting to the fact that you were willing to say it.

If you have unique platform data that others can’t access, you can develop narratives and campaigns that stand out and capture significant attention because the information is hard to obtain.

While Carta has successfully used this approach by publishing unique takes on startup funding, Cloudflare has gone even further. They pointed out the obvious truth. AI companies are scraping the open web, keeping more of the value for themselves, and sending less back to the publishers who created the content in the first place. Not only did they publish this, but they are also in a unique position to offer a product that solves this for customers who don’t want to share their data with AI companies.

Most startups do not fail because the product is bad.

They fail because nobody cares. Narrative is how you make people care. And in a world where everyone sounds the same, playing it safe is the riskiest move you can make. Safe narratives get ignored. Dangerous ones spread. Choose wisely.

🎙️ 042 Gregory and Paul Show - The rise of GTM engineering, GitHub Fake Stars, AllBirds AI

This episode moves from GTM theory into something more fundamental: how markets, metrics, and narratives get distorted when money shows up. Gregory and Paul break down the rise of “GTM engineering,” why marketing keeps trying to become a science, and how incentives create fake signals from GitHub stars to AI valuations. The second half hits macro, layoffs, real estate, and why the AI boom may be closer to a correction than people want to admit. It closes with a sharp take on AI writing and where communication is heading.

I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, devising new ways to get people to click on things, I now help early-stage B2B SaaS companies scale their businesses through strategic sales and marketing consulting.

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