There is a small magic trick performed in conference rooms everywhere. A prospective client meets the agency's decorated veterans. The veterans understand the business, finish the sentences, know which reporter will care. The contract is signed. Then the curtain moves, and a much younger team appears. Lizzy Harris and Ashley Mann had seen the trick from both sides - at agencies and in-house - and by 2017 they were tired of applauding.
Their response was The Colab, a Denver-headquartered, fully remote communications firm for high-growth technology companies. Its founding idea is less a reinvention of public relations than a correction to its staffing chart: keep experienced people close to the work. The firm says its client teams are made up of senior strategists and former journalists, with no junior handoff after the sale.
This sounds almost too ordinary to qualify as a strategy. That is what makes it interesting. Many service businesses are built on a pyramid: sell scarce senior judgment, deliver abundant junior hours. The Colab has chosen to make the scarce thing - judgment - the service itself.
The first thing to fail was trust
Harris has described one conversation that lodged in her memory. She questioned why an agency was recommending work that did not fit a client's goals. The answer, as she recalls it, was that the recommendation only needed to make the agency look good at quarter's end. Add the familiar frustrations - slow layers, revolving account teams, weak writing and reports full of giant impression numbers - and the founders' change of mind becomes easy to locate. They did not need a cleverer agency. They needed incentives pointed in the other direction.
“Anyone can get you headlines; few can get you the ones that matter.”Lizzy Harris, CEO and co-founder
The Colab's answer is an embedded model. The firm says it can enter a client's Slack within 24 hours. Angles, drafts, journalist responses and approvals move in view of the client, while a live dashboard records pitches, replies and placements. Daily contact feeds weekly points of view; monthly reviews examine executive visibility, media momentum and, increasingly, how a company surfaces in AI-generated answers.
The distance between idea and action
A conceptual view of the firm's pitch: fewer handoffs create more time to catch a live news cycle.
They sell the response time
Public relations likes to dress itself as alchemy, but much of the useful work is logistics. A reporter covering Nvidia earnings needs a lucid expert today, not a beautifully approved paragraph on Thursday. The Futurum Group had analysts who knew semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and AI policy, yet reporters were not regularly calling. The Colab tied those experts to fast-moving stories and says it produced 26 placements in the first 30 days. In its strongest later quarter, the program generated more than 83 media opportunities, over 80 percent of them in top-tier outlets.
in 30 days
in three months
and interviews, month one
The pattern repeats across technical categories. For LightSource, the raw material was a founder's experience at Waymo and Tesla plus a market convulsed by tariffs and supply-chain uncertainty. The Colab connected the two, securing a standalone Business Insider interview within two weeks and reporting 52 placements in three months. For Carbon Direct, climate scientists had substance but not share of voice. The work translated carbon markets, sustainable aviation fuel and data-center energy into timely commentary; the agency reports more than 60 stories per quarter.
The sharpest case may be Qualified. It hired The Colab for a three-month campaign around a $95 million Series C. The first month produced 43 pieces of coverage and 39 interviews. But the useful bit is what happened after the launch: the assignment continued for more than four years, following the company's story from fundraising into AI sales agents and, eventually, an acquisition by Salesforce valued above $1.3 billion. A single announcement became a standing editorial system.
The product is not a press release
The menu looks conventional: media relations, strategic messaging, thought leadership, content development and major announcements. What differs is the connective tissue. Research pulls in competitors, customer language and perception gaps. Former journalists pressure-test whether an angle is intelligible. Executive opinions become pitches, interviews, bylines and sales material. Coverage then travels into investor updates, website proof and outbound sales.
There is now a second audience in that cycle. The Colab explicitly designs messaging for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, on the theory that earned media becomes part of the public record those systems read. The claim should not be mistaken for control; no agency can dictate an answer generated by somebody else's model. But clear, repeated, credible language in reputable publications is a sensible way to improve the material machines and people can find.
The firm's own media product makes the point. The Colab Brief grew beyond 20,000 readers and 100 editions, then brought in veteran journalists to write features and pitch breakdowns. In August 2025 it introduced a premium tier at $19.99 a month or $200 a year, with one free monthly edition remaining. The agency that advises founders to become useful sources built a publication by becoming one itself.
What it costs, and what it asks
The Colab does not publish a standard agency price. Prospects are promised a proposal with transparent pricing, placement targets and a 90-day roadmap after an assessment. That is the honest limit of the public information. The economic clue is the staffing: when senior attention is the product, buyers should expect a tailored professional-services engagement, not a bargain bundle of press-release distribution.
There is also a cost on the client side. Speed requires available executives. Distinctive coverage requires evidence, informed opinions, customer proof or data. A company with no real differentiation cannot outsource its way into authority. Nor is the model an obvious fit for a local business seeking occasional publicity, a founder who cannot respond inside the news cycle, or a team that wants every sentence routed through six approvers.
The useful part to copy
Do the reporter's heavy lifting before the pitch: mine the data, secure the customer quote, explain why the angle matters now and tailor it to the publication's actual audience. Then reuse the resulting coverage in sales decks, investor notes, press pages and outreach. The tactic costs attention before it costs money.
A small agency with a large constraint
The senior-only promise creates its own tension. Experienced practitioners are finite. A firm can grow quickly or protect direct access; doing both demands careful hiring. The Colab's careers material reads like an operating response to that constraint: a remote team across ten cities, no-meeting Fridays, 32 combined PTO and holiday days, and an insistence on candor without weekend Slack pings. Half of hires, the company says, arrive through employee referrals. Culture here is not decoration. It is how the firm tries to retain the people its proposition depends upon.
The Colab sits between a heavyweight tech agency and an in-house communications department. It offers the breadth of a firm but wants the intimacy of a colleague. For companies in AI, cybersecurity, climate, SaaS, fintech, logistics and health tech, that can be valuable: difficult products rarely suffer from a shortage of complexity. They suffer from a shortage of sentences another person can carry away.
Harris and Mann's idea, finally, is not that publicity can save a business. It is that a good business often contains stories nobody has made portable. Put experienced people close enough to hear them, move before the moment passes, and measure whether the right audience noticed. The trick disappears. The work remains.