Welcome to The Raise.
In our latest edition, I spoke with the dynamic Jessy Wu, founder of Encour.
Encour are a strategic communications powerhouse who’ve partnered with some of Australia's leading fintech, marketplace, and healthtech startups. Jessy has a knack for storytelling in the context of innovation, capital raising, and world-building.
Before founding Encour, Jessy was an investor at Afterwork Ventures, where she championed innovative companies like Everlab, Primary, and OwnHome. Her insights are regularly featured in top-tier publications such as Forbes and the Australian Financial Review.
Jessy generously shares her expertise in communications strategy across the tech sector. Scroll on to hear Jessy’s answers to these burning questions for on the minds of entrepreneurs 👉
Check out the video interview on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
Skim the show notes from my chat with Jessy Wu:
“The founders' ability to paint a really credible, vivid picture about the future that they were sailing towards were more likely to be able to attract really great talent, especially if they were building something in an area that was a little bit niche, like procurement or supply chain. Those industries are not intuitively the sexiest things, but f you're able to say why does supply chain matter? Why is supply chain actually the backbone of our whole economy? Why is solving the tough, unsexy problems in supply chain actually able to have a huge impact on GDP?.
Those who were able to raise the stakes of the problem that they were solving were able to attract better talent. They were able to attract better partners, better advisors, you know, more investors.
And all of those things help with the success of businesses, especially in that early to one stage.
In more competitive spaces, the companies that were able to paint themselves as the totemic example of the company solving that problem were able to create a bit of a virtuous flywheel when it came to brand trust.”
“As a venture capitalist I was reading the news a lot and kept seeing missed opportunities. I was seeing companies and VC funds having a slightly antagonistic relationship with the press where the journalists are trying to tell the truth, they're trying to report interesting developments. And then if that wasn't in the interest of the companies or the VC funds to have those things investigated, the way of engaging with those journalists I felt was quite unsophisticated. There was a lot of declining to comment and just hoping to stay above the fray and above the media circus and not give it oxygen and hope it all blows over.
But I think that when you leave a narrative vacuum, somebody will fill it, somebody else's perspective, somebody else's set of facts will fill it and it's just a wasted opportunity when you decline to comment. I know a lot of PRs don't agree with me on this. They think that sometimes you do want to stay above the fray. Sometimes you don't want to dignify it with a response. They encourage their clients not to comment because they think that's ‘getting into the rabble of it.’ So I saw that there was an opportunity in Australia for an agency whose advice was to be a bit more bold. Not necessarily to be on the offensive but to command the narrative and take opportunities to comment as an opportunity.”
“In this era where there's low trust in media, low trust in institutions, there's a lot of respect for people who kind of unapologetically command a clear narrative and take ownership, even if it means owning mistakes and admitting that they were wrong. I think generally I would say first decide whether you're going to apologize and what's the decision tree. Did you do something wrong? If yes, then own it and apologise.
If no, then don't apologise. If you don't think you did anything wrong, then stick by your guns. Use the opportunity to underscore or highlight a key value that is guiding why you did that thing. And to the extent that you're going to polarise some people and annoy them, what we say is bludgeon the curmudgeon. So if there's going to be a group of people who are, no matter what you do, not going to be pleased, then instead of trying to sway them, because you probably won't be able to actually pick a fight with them and use that kind of point of contrast between what you stand for and what they want you to stand for to highlight your key values and resonate stronger with a key tribe that you've already got on board.”
Qwilr has launched a fun campaign, where they've built a "march madness" college basketball style bracket for sales. It's pretty unique and is the second of this style of campaign where they're trying to create a viral social moment in the B2B sales space.
Last year they did a similar thing where they let you create your own trading cards and then physically created and sent some out to people.
Not only is it effective for sales, the mashup of cultural icons in B2B tech sales must make work a lot of fun for those behind the scenes at Qwlir…more of this 🤌
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If you’re in Tāmaki Makaurau this evening, it’s not too late to come along to the first meetup that Generate are hosting with drinks and snacks shouted by Atlas Digital.
Sign up free via Eventbrite
Kaylee Liu will be hosting an expert panel with me, Sam Sherson of Tracksuit, and Georgia Robertson from Blackbird. We'll be sharing our thoughts on the opportunities for Kiwi tech businesses to grow overseas.
Generate are generously giving away a free ticket to this year’s Generate Summit in Sydney - how good!
Generate now has over 900 in-house ANZ marketers, from top B2B SaaS brands, to solo marketers, in their invite-only Slack channel (meaning better connections and no spam) . They have a bunch of laughs and share knowledge through their quarterly in-person meetups, virtual masterclasses, and annual summit.
If you’re a B2B marketer in Auckland, get curious and come along - use the code ATLAS2025 when you sign up - its’s free.
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