Martha Shaughnessy and the advantage of keeping the mess

Martha Shaughnessy put a goalkeeper in her company’s web address. Say The Key PR aloud, with a little cooperation from the consonants, and you get “the keeper.” It is the sort of joke that rewards a second look. It also tells you something about the person who made it: a former player in goal, a communications professional attentive to a phrase’s hidden possibilities, and a founder who thinks a great deal about teams.

Her public launch announcement arrived on October 23, 2017. By then, the business had already been taking shape for roughly a year. She wanted an agency that could keep people she admired, make useful work, and leave its employees enough of themselves to take home. An ambitious brief for a service business. The name, at least, fitted on a business card.

The anthropology of a press release

The route into PR began with an undergraduate thesis about child beauty pageants. Studying newspaper and television coverage, Shaughnessy became interested in how different accounts could lead audiences to different understandings of the same facts. Her first agency work involved San Francisco municipal and nonprofit organizations. Technology came later.

“I really like the architecture,” she said of shaping a company’s story. It is an apt word for work that starts before anyone writes the headline: understanding why an organization exists, what it hopes to do, and which people need to hear about it. Her interest lies partly in finding the audience a company has overlooked.

There was another kind of education happening alongside the academic one. Cornell’s women’s soccer rosters place Shaughnessy in goal from 1997 through 2000, with San Francisco listed as her hometown and St. Ignatius College Prep as her school. The position gives the company-name joke its biography. In goal, you have a view of everyone else’s movement. You also depend rather heavily on what everyone else does.

When the promotion changes the job

By 2013, Shaughnessy had spent seven years at Atomic PR and been promoted to senior vice president and managing director in San Francisco. The firm was working more closely with Grayling, whose international network expanded the scale of the agency operation. Her career had carried her well into the management ranks.

The problem with advancing through an agency is that you can eventually advance away from your favorite work. Shaughnessy missed the proximity to clients and media. Leadership brought spreadsheets; she wanted more room for the conversations in which a business discovers what it is trying to say.

She also had a civic reason to rethink her timetable. After the 2016 election, she delayed The Key’s launch to help run the San Francisco Women’s March. On LinkedIn, she has described growing up in a politically active family. The detour belongs in the business story: the founder’s priorities were already deciding what happened to the company calendar.

Five people, one farmhouse

A founder can describe an atmosphere in a sentence. Making it repeatable takes longer. In 2017, five members of The Key gathered at a Livermore farmhouse for their first offsite. They considered what they wanted to preserve as the team grew. The next year, nine people continued the work with Jadah Sellner and La’Kita Williams. By 2019, the language and artwork of their Key Agreements were finalized.

The sequence matters. Employees beyond the founding team helped work out the processes. Shaughnessy had a clear feeling for the company she wanted; colleagues and outside facilitators helped turn that feeling into practices people could use. A business built around personal conviction still needs other people to tell it how to function.

Williams’s CoCreate Work became a continuing partner in organizational design, team development and reviews. Shaughnessy has also singled out business and finance manager Shamese Campbell, along with consultants Dominique Hollis and Danielle Jankins Henry, among the people helping build the agency’s systems. That is a useful expansion of the founder portrait. An independent company contains quite a few forms of dependence.

The lioness emblem makes the same point in a different medium. The Key connects it to cooperation, protection and leadership. A pride is a convenient image for a founder who wants colleagues to share responsibility. It is also considerably easier to put on a notebook than an explanation of organizational design.

The long second act of a conversation

Shaughnessy’s account of winning Mixhalo’s business begins with an introduction through a former colleague. The first opportunity was a poor fit, but the people stayed in touch. Elsewhere, at a St. Ignatius business lunch, she met someone working at another young company. Months passed. The earlier contact became Mixhalo’s CEO, and the apparently separate conversations converged.

The Key went on to work with the audio company, whose founders included musicians Michael Einziger and Ann Marie Simpson. Its funding announcement involved investors, positioning work and meetings with journalists. The glamorous nouns sit beside an ordinary mechanism: someone remembered someone, and a relationship survived the absence of an immediate sale.

Her San Francisco has that quality. A school gathering can become a professional introduction; a former colleague can reappear in a new role. In May 2025, Shaughnessy became president of St. Ignatius’s alumni board. The school remains part of her working and civic geography, rather than a line filed away under education.

“The mess is part of the magic.”

Martha Shaughnessy, 2017

She has described laughter in a shared workspace attracting a neighbor who eventually became a prospective business partner. The appeal was the sound of people enjoying one another’s company. For a business selling collaboration, that is a fairly persuasive demonstration.

What counts as winning?

In October 2021, The Key reached No. 51 on the San Francisco Business Times’ list of fastest-growing private companies. The recognition landed on her youngest child’s birthday. Shaughnessy’s account moved between family celebrations and the less photogenic choices involved in operating an agency.

She said the firm had taken no outside funding and was generating millions in annual gross revenue. She also described preferred pricing for underrepresented founders and social-impact businesses, pro bono commitments, and investment in leadership development. These were choices about where money and effort should go. A growth ranking measures only part of that activity.

Her personal recognition followed. In January 2025, The Key announced that PR Daily and Ragan had selected her for their Top Women in Communications awards, in the Dynamic Do-er category. The category suits the practical side of her career: assembling the people and circumstances that allow a story to reach the world.

The agency’s work supplies examples beyond the founder’s own account. Its 2024 PR Net recognition highlighted work involving Descript, Fellow and Jimmy Butler. The following year’s entry included Poolside’s funding announcement and Fellow’s Aiden coffee brewer, along with clients operating in other sectors. The range demands a willingness to learn a new business rather often.

The audience has its own questions

In September 2026, Shaughnessy looked back to Mint’s early days and drew a connection to energy. Working with the personal-finance startup in 2007 had meant explaining a technical product through recognizable human concerns. Years later, The Key’s work with Renew Home presented another complex system becoming urgent to ordinary households.

Her comparison focused on translation. Money and electricity come with institutions, regulation, technical language and customers who have good reasons to ask questions. A communicator has to understand the machinery well enough to explain what a change means outside the room where it was invented. The specialist’s vocabulary can be a surprisingly effective locked door.

AI puts that problem on another scale. In a February 2026 conversation on The CoCreators, Shaughnessy discussed using AI tools inside her firm while working with companies building with them. She argued for communications to enter strategic discussions early. The audience’s questions are easier to address while decisions are still being made.

That professional dependence on an informed public also has a civic expression. The Key, with Shaughnessy named as founder and CEO, signed a February 2026 open letter from communications leaders defending press freedom. For an agency that works with journalists, the conditions under which reporting happens belong to the work itself.

Still close to the work

The company continues to add to its senior team. In August 2026, it announced Jodi Maroney’s arrival as principal after a long career at Access Brand Communications. The appointment brought experience in client leadership and mentoring to the agency Shaughnessy had created partly to stay closer to those activities herself.

On October 20, 2026, The Key announced its third consecutive Inc. Power Partner recognition. Shaughnessy’s comment began: “Great PR starts with a great partnership.” Nine years after the public launch, the line returns to the question that shaped the business: which people do you want beside you when the work gets complicated?

The former goalkeeper has kept that question in view. It is there in the agency’s name, its shared agreements and its expanding roster of colleagues. The keeper can see a great deal from the back. The game still requires everybody else.