Lulu Cheng
Meservey

In an industry built on whisper networks and media relationships, Lulu Cheng Meservey chose a different channel: publish directly, argue loudly, be right. It turns out this strategy - obvious in hindsight, invisible to most of PR - compounds fast.

She came up through Washington, not San Francisco. A Yale political science graduate who sharpened her instincts at Tufts' Fletcher School - one of the most rigorous international relations programs in the world - she carried the State Department's grammar into tech boardrooms. Diplomacy as competitive advantage.

Her first big move in tech communications was co-founding TrailRunner International in 2016. By the time she left five years later, she had worked her way up to President. Then Substack, where the free-speech wars were the product launch. Then Activision Blizzard, where she became EVP and Chief Communications Officer in October 2022 - arriving precisely as the company needed someone who could stand in front of a camera during a $69 billion FTC lawsuit and not blink.

She did not blink.

In January 2024, Meservey left Activision after the Microsoft deal closed. By March, she had founded Rostra, a communications firm built on one contrarian thesis: the future of PR is the founder speaking directly to the audience, and every company that understands this gains what she calls "narrative alpha" - a structural edge in how markets, employees, and regulators perceive them.

Her newsletter, Flack - known within some circles by its original name Res Ipsa - is the operational evidence. Instead of writing about communications abstractly, she applies frameworks from military strategy, K-pop management, the physics of amplification, and cosmetics marketing. The result reads like a strategy memo that somehow landed in the wrong Substack folder. It keeps arriving anyway.

Rostra's client list reads as an index of consequential tech. Cognition AI's Devin - the first AI software engineer, which passed engineering interviews at major AI companies before launch - was a Rostra project. Anduril is a Rostra project. Coinbase, Ramp, and others have been in the orbit. The firm is not pitching reporters. It is building architectures that make reporters unnecessary.

In December 2025, Meservey raised a $40 million VC fund. This was not a pivot. It was the logical conclusion of her thesis: if you believe in a founder enough to shape their narrative, believing in them with capital is the honest next move. Palmer Luckey reportedly suggested the fund after observing her at close range advising Anduril - his idea was to give her "skin in the game." She obliged.