Learning from the best – Winning comms advice from tech’s brightest leaders

Unlock the secrets of successful tech leadership with the “Tech CEO Communications Playbook” series.

Imagine sitting down for coffee with more than 30 of the brightest minds in the tech start-up world. One by one, hearing their triumphs, blunders, and the hard-earned wisdom that propelled them to the top.   

If you can’t do that, the next best thing is reading our new series, “The Tech CEO Communications Playbook” – four guides compiling the best nuggets of advice from the interviewees on the Unicorn CEO series on our Without Borders podcast. In the series, we’ve put a particular focus on how these successful tech leaders have learned to polish their communications skills – both internally and externally.  

Why? Throughout the highs and lows of starting and scaling a tech startup, communication is both a constant and essential to finding and maintaining success.  

What’s in it for you?  

These guides are perfect if you are a tech leader, a new founder or CEO, or anyone working in the tech marketing and communications space. They offer practical insights, backed up with examples and anecdotes, of common communication challenges and how to avoid them. They also explore how to foster a positive internal culture and explain how mistakes can be leveraged for growth.  

A glimpse into the guides  

The four guides each cover a different topic and focus area within tech leadership:  

• Making remote work, work. Remote work is well-loved by the tech world, bringing with it a slew of benefits in being able to hire talent across the world and cutting operational costs. But creating and managing a team remotely comes with several complexities. This guide is essential for exploring strategies to make effective internal communications in a remote setting. 
• Making mistakes. How to communicate your failures and encourage a healthy error-culture: Every successful startup has failed at something, at some point – whether it’s a failed product strategy or a cultural misstep. This guide takes a refreshing look at how to rebrand conversations and expectations around failures. It shares advice and guidance for how leaders can embrace errors and learning opportunities and build a culture that values transparency and growth.  
• The beauty of hindsight. Advice CEOs would give to their younger selves: Everyone has 20:20 vision in hindsight. Across the series, we asked leaders what advice they’d give their younger selves at the start of their journey, and advice to help others avoid common pitfalls.
• Mentors and teachers. The Role of mentors in the start-up world and lessons to pass on. It’s widely known that the start-up ecosystem thrives on mentorship. In this guide, we delve deeper into the ways mentors have impacted our leaders’ journeys, as well as sharing lessons to help others seek out guidance and, in turn, become mentors to others.  

Sharing mistakes to share success 

The most compelling theme that emerged from the conversations we had with tech CEOs was how valuable sharing those moments of failure is, not just what drove success. Insights into what went wrong and, crucially, how this was communicated (for better or for worse!) is what has brought so much value to the podcast series and ultimately informed these guides.  

Joshua Motta, co-founder of Coalition, a leading cyber insurance and security provider, had some interesting thoughts on this topic that touch on why this series is so uniquely valuable: “A lot of companies don’t want to talk about their problems. It’s uncomfortable. But I very much see my job as to do almost exclusively that.” 

And to underscore just how crucial communication is, he adds: “At some level, I feel like almost all problems in humanity are communications problems.”

Curious to read more? Download the full series of guides here.