 Thank you very much, and it is an honor to be here. I'm really looking forward to giving you an idea of how Silicon Valley actually works in public relations. And I'm assuming that since you're sitting here and planning to listen to me, you have an interest in it. So without any further ado, I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to try to give you, in the course of 12 minutes, 30 years of PR experience. And for those of you who are in tech startups, you already understand the importance of public relations, but we're going to go ahead and do that right now. So I call this presentation the Rocket Science of Art. And just to give you a brief understanding of my qualifications and why I'm up here, I've been doing PR for the last 30 years only in tech. As they mentioned, I used to be in charge of PR for Sony. I was also in charge of PR for Apple, a company called SGI. And I've worked with about 130 different startups, of which about 40 are from the Nordics. And for better or for worse, I've been called one of the top five PR people in the world. That's fantastic. They mentioned about the fact that I've been profiled. That's fantastic. I'm also very well known for the fact that my idea of how PR should be done is very, very different than probably what you've seen in the past. And it's worth noting that I have a very twisted sense of humor. This is not going to be a presentation like you've seen before, trust me. So with no further ado, my goal is to help you understand how Silicon Valley does public relations the right way and how you can use PR to basically give you an opportunity to increase the visibility and opportunities for your own companies. You'll notice I'm wearing a Vario T-shirt. How many people here have heard of Vario? Some of you. The reason you've heard about them is, of course, because of the fact they have A, have a great technology, but they also have public relations, the fact that you've read about them. So we're going to tell you about how that all happened. You'll see on this slide that I'm giving you a sliding scale. Most journalists view PR people as either the shambling hordes of the undead or an archangel. And you'll notice that the 10 ends. This is a sliding scale. So what you want to try to avoid is not being the walking undead. You want to be helpful to a journalist. And a lot of PR people frankly aren't. And we'll talk more about that in a second. Your spokesperson, speaking ability ranges between a potted plant and Steve Jobs. Let me tell you, you'll notice the 10 is only one Steve Jobs. Elon Musk, close. But the reality is that your spokesperson needs to be in that 7 to 10 range, because they're basically your spokesperson, they're your public face. The experience of your PR counsel is going to range from one pencil test or to two Fantasia. One is very simple. The other is much more involved. You want somewhere towards the 10. Your press release ranges from a steaming pile of shit to Shakespeare. You'll notice the 10 ends before Shakespeare. No press release is the equivalent of Shakespeare. But since we're in Finland, let's forget about Shakespeare and talk about the Kalevala. Something a little bit more close to home. Just remember, a press release is designed to be informative. It's not about hyping your company. It's about communicating why you're different. And we'll talk more about that in a second. Your helpfulness to a journalist ranges between a brick wall and throwing them a life vest. You really want to be someone who is helpful to a journalist, not someone who's obstructionist. A journalist has a very simple job. They're there to report about the importance of your company. You want to help them, not hinder them. And unfortunately, most PR people tend to hinder. How you perceive your messaging, lyrical, magical. You've spent months working on this marketing campaign. And you believe, in your heart of hearts, Ave Maria. It's a wonderful thing. Listen for a second and then understand, this is how journalists perceive it. It's very funny, but it's also true. Journalists are, by definition, the most cynical people on the planet. Because they hear all of these PR pitches over and over and over and over again. So no matter how wonderful you think it is to a journalist, it's not that great. Remember that. So the most basic equations of PR, press kits. You want to have something called a background or a one-page document on your company that explains what you do. You want to have an FAQ. One that's internal, designed for your executives. And you have another one that's external, designed for people who are outside the company. Images and logos, press decks, very important. You've noticed that my transitions here are in keynote. You don't ever want to send a PowerPoint to a journalist. Really, really important. They hate them. Make them a PDF because if they don't have the right fonts, it's going to look like garbage. And avoid hyperbole, exaggeration, and buzzwords. Try to make your PR as clean and as efficient as possible. This is how journalists see an off-topic pitch. Enough said. I believe that there are seven virtues that are inherent to the art of public relations. Context, honesty, intelligence, wisdom, discretion, persistence, and most importantly, relationships. If you're not having a relationship with a journalist, I've spent 30 years developing relationships with journalists all over the world. And that's why they take my calls or my emails because they trust me with good reason. I don't waste their time. I'm going to give you an example of three different pitches, all of which are for the same company. One's good, one's mediocre, and one sucks. So the newsworthy pitch. We're a new company just out of stealth. Pretty obvious. We help prioritize what's important using AI. You now know what they do. Our founders have several exits with the same investors. That tells the journalists that these people know what they're doing. That's a good pitch. A mediocre pitch. We're a new company just out of stealth. We talked about that. We bring intelligent alerts to all devices. Factual, but not really interesting. We're seed-funded from people you know. Again, factual, but not something that really grabs attention. But it's not bad. And then you've got the worst one. Buzz off. We're a new company just out of stealth. Again, same opening. We do alerts for mobile, and we've got seed funding. And if you take that approach, that's going to be a journalist saying no to you. So try to remember, look at the differences between those three, and you'll see what makes good indifferent and bad. This is perhaps the most important slide in this presentation that I can give you. Do not exaggerate. Do not bullshit. Do not lie ever. And too many PR people are guilty of all three of those. But if you do, this is what happens. What's going on? We have a right to know the truth. The most important thing now is that you remain calm. There's no reason to panic. Now it is true that one of the crew members is ill. Slightly ill. When you want to communicate something, it's very easy to basically do something that has buzzwords in it or is too long. So it's important to have clarity in your messaging. Otherwise, you get something like this. The Tenka Ichabudakai is finally complete. What the f*** are you talking about? Was that even English? Actually, it wasn't. Persistence is admirable, but no when enough is enough. If you send an email to a journalist and they don't get back to you, that's not surprising if they don't know you. You have the right to basically wait 48 hours and then repitch them. If they don't reply back, it's dead. Don't bother because it's over. But don't be too persistent. Otherwise, you get this. Didn't I? So I'll talk briefly about what I consider to be scenarios in PR that you've probably seen or maybe haven't, but it'll help you in terms of how you can go about doing PR for your own companies. Digital. Pretty straightforward, right? Using the power of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, et cetera. This is vectoring of news. If you get one article in TechCrunch, it vectors. What that means is it spreads from point to point to point around the world. And there are good examples of how that can get very badly out of control. And I'll take questions and answers to give you examples of that. Bad PR will pursue you. They say there's no such thing as bad PR, bullshit. There's tons of bad PR. Gorilla PR. How many of you remember the Felix Baumgartner jump when he base jumped from the outer atmosphere? That's a perfect example of gorilla PR. And it can do really well or it can backfire. And again, I apologize that I'm going so fast, but I can take questions later and we can talk more about these. Blue period, crisis communications. We can talk about that. There are examples of blue period. My favorite is San Francisco's response. For those of you who are Finnish, you recognize the word Pekko. That's our president right now, I'm afraid. Not our fault. So now I want to talk about a case study, Vario. So when Vario first came to me a year ago, they basically had just been in business for a few months and we're going to talk a lot about how we did this PR launch. So the reason why they're actually here today on stage, the company expected maybe five to 10 stories when they launched. What ended up happening is we actually got more than 400 stories and we raised $14 million from, we got stories in CNN, wired, MIT technology review, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are all names that you're going to recognize. So without too much more further ado, I'm going to invite UC Marketing, who's the chief marketing officer of Vario, to come up and do some questions and answers with me. Just to give you some background, UC used to be working with Rovio and he was in charge of the marketing for the Angry Birds movie and a lot of other things besides. So please welcome UC to come up on stage. Hi. And we can now take some questions as soon as they give me some questions, which I'll be delighted to do. Why can't we take pictures? I expected that. Very quickly, one of the four reasons that I'm about to give you is true. I'm very shy. I used to be an intelligence agent. I'm in the witness protection program or all of the above. You can decide which one is the right one. How is PR different from product marketing? I think UC should take that. Yeah, this is a great question. Product marketing basically simplifies your message about the product. The more complex the product is like a human eye resolution, VR display, you need to simplify it. So great product marketing is simplifying the complex and then PR is actually getting that message out to the world. So they kind of like, you know, need to work together hand by hand and that's what we've exactly been doing together with Jonathan, with Vario. Okay. And the next question is, what are my views on unpaid PR and methods used for the same? If you have to pay to get an article in a magazine or online, you're wasting your money. That's basically, there is something it's called advertising. If you want to pay to be in a magazine or on a blog, take out an ad. But for you to have to actually pay to get a story, that means you don't have a story worth telling. So the short answer is from my perspective, it's a complete waste of time and money. And that follows for the next question, what about paid news? Exactly the same thing. PR is designed to be credible. Advertising is when you pay to get your message across in the words of yourself. PR is when a journalist says your messaging in their words and it's honest and true. Advertising, totally different thing. How do you choose the right newspaper? That's a great question. So if you're looking in Finland at HS, for example, one of the great examples of looking at newspapers are, you know, people read them locally. And for example, when we launched Vario, we made very clear that we wanted to talk to HS for the simple reason that we wanted to hire a lot of engineers. And when you can actually show a newspaper to your mother or father and say, hey mom, look at the company I'm working for, suddenly that becomes a really hot company to hire from. And it makes sense to do that. Next question is what about press releases and where to release it? Again, great question. Yusi, do you want to take part of that or? No, please go ahead. So from a press release, you actually want to keep it to ideally one page. It shouldn't be more than that because the journalist is looking at the top level. There's a headline, there's something called a subhead, which is basically a two line summary of what's in the press release. And then there's basically two or three paragraphs. And then there's company boilerplate. And what you really want to look at for that is we're releasing that if you're trying to basically raise money and raise your valuation. As most of you are probably aware, there's tech crunch, a story in tech crunch, many European VCs who I work with will not invest in a company unless they've read about them in tech crunch first. So if that doesn't give you a level of perspective about why you want to be in the credible tech outlets, that's it. You basically won't raise any money. It's already hard enough to raise money in Europe. You don't need to do it without that. I can take, there's a good question on how do you, how do you, at the question went away, but how do you convince startups to use money in PR? And I think for Vario basically, it was that we knew that we need PR. If you have a startup who doesn't understand that you need PR, I think it's something that you know. You can basically convince that if they don't understand it themselves. So every startup should understand that they need to spend money on marketing and they need to spend money in PR as well. And Yusin, I think the next question is also good for you. Yeah, how much money would you invest in PR versus marketing and why? I think it depends quite a lot on your product and on your company, how much you want to invest in, invest in those things. I would say that as a startup, I would say at least in Finland many startups do not spend any money on marketing. They believe that their product itself is good enough. Now, Vario is a great example of that. We have the world's best technology. And still, yet, we, of course, we need to invest in marketing and we need to invest in PR. So I would say the main, most important thing is get a person who leads marketing and leads PR. Because if you don't have that person, there's no one to actually get in. There's actually no one kind of like making sure that there's an investment in PR and marketing. If you don't have a PR or marketing person working for in your startup. So with Vario from the very beginning, we understood that yes, we need to spend in marketing and PR even though our technology is best in the world. The next question is, what is the best way to use social media? Carefully. That's the best example I can give you. Things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of those have their place but they're different buckets, if you will. Twitter is a great way to amplify your message quickly, worldwide. Facebook tends to be more close to the vest, tends to be more about your country and the company that you keep. Instagram is much more visual, of course, because it's pictures. So I think the best thing to remember is there's no pat answer I can give you about the best way to use social media because every company is different. Vario is used, they have a very specific way of using social media. If you have a company that's very visually focused, Instagram is a great way to talk about that. Food tech would be a great example. But for that, I can't give you an easy answer because otherwise I'd be, frankly, lying. People are asking the next question, best guerrilla tactics? Be very careful with guerrilla tactics because they can backfire on you. Couple of years ago in the States there was a silly cartoon called Aquatine Hunger Force and they decided to do a guerrilla PR campaign where in the city of Boston, they took these buttons that were lit and pulsing with a logo of one of the people from the cartoon and they plastered the city with them. Unfortunately, what everybody thought was that these were bombs and they spent literally $10 million of Boston's budget getting rid of these damn things. And guess what? They charged the company that did that the $10 million. So guerrilla campaigns can work but be very careful how you decide to do them. The next question is, can you tell us more about guerrilla PR and the Felix jump? Imagine this, you're Red Bull, you have hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing. Felix Baumgartner is gonna do the world's biggest jump. If he lands successfully, you have the world's greatest viral campaign and it worked. But what if he didn't land successfully? He would have splatted and taken Red Bull's marketing with it. So very risky, it paid off. One last question because we're running out of time. If you're a very small startup, how would you approach a newspaper journalist? LinkedIn, Twitter, their offices? I would suggest Twitter. Most journalists leave their direct messages open which means even if they're not following you, you can actually reach out to them and because it's Twitter, you have to keep your answers simple and quick. So with that, I'd like to thank UC for being up here. I'd like to thank all of you for your time and I hope this has proved valuable. So thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you so much guys. That was surely valuable. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Jonathan. Great.