- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KH9T262Q1JMB9T6FG0MPVA6B (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: me tomorrow. Andrew, what’s up? Hey, how you doing? Andrew Safranko: Hey guys. Hey Emma, hey Ben. Michael Houck: Oh wow, we’ve got the whole crew. Love it. Emma Sivess: And you know, I’ve got a footbill. I just can’t, I’m struggling. To be fair, it’s like 9pm for you guys right now. Nina was saying how she has her walking pad too. Michael Houck: It’s like 9pm. So we just appreciate you guys being on the call, let alone getting the set up set up. Emma Sivess: Yeah, at this time, we definitely should have our steps in. It’s not even plugged in. Nina Lea: I moved house a few weeks ago. It’s not even moved from the box. So yeah, on the time. Michael Houck: For this, we’re gonna have two of the three founders join the third one who sort of push the deal forward is on vacation right now. But I’ve also talked with Ian before, have not talked with Jared before, so that’ll be new. Do you guys have preference who goes first, Andrew, Emma, between the two of you guys? Or Nina, if you’re going to lead it from the Geo side too, whoever’s going to lead from that side. Nina will take the lead. Emma Sivess: What do you think, Nina? Would you rather go first, second, either way? Yeah, I’m happy to kick off if you want. Nina Lea: Okay, cool. That’s fine. Michael Houck: Andrew, I think The toughest part is going to be on your side, because we’re going to need to at least talk about two different people on this call, right, which is Ian and Art. So I’ll have to do some follow-ups, but yeah. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I figure I’ll probably try to grab time with them next week at some point, if possible. Yeah, should be fine. Michael Houck: I know they have their board meeting on Wednesday, So my guess is it’ll be a little tough to get time with them before that. That’s true. Nina Lea: On the call earlier, I think her name was Laura. She did say if we can’t get in touch with the founders to get in touch with herself. She said she’s the best point of contact in terms of access and chasing and things like that. Michael Houck: it would be nice if they could have like centralized the review process around one person and maybe that would be laura Andrew yeah problem is if we do if we if we suggest that we sort of introduce the concept of well the founder probably wants to take a look at it too right we don’t want to get into that kind of situation so um let’s work right here try to go direct to the founders for everything for now and if we run into issues we can redirect it sounds like to laura okay we’ve we’ve going down that road before. Andrew Safranko: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So yeah, exactly. Michael Houck: Okay, anything else we should I mean, they’re not waiting or anything. So we’re just waiting on that. But anything else? You said there’s a there’s a piece of content, right? Andrew Safranko: Do you have any idea of what that piece of content is that they want to get out before the board meeting? It’s just anything. It’s just anything. Michael Houck: They didn’t have a specific piece of content in mind. They just talked to I talked to Ian and Matthew over a week ago at this point, and they wanted to get it done last week. And then availability with the team sort of slowed things down. And so they just wanted to see something out before then. So we don’t need to have a whole week’s worth of content ready for them, but just as long as we put something out before then, they’ll be happy. Emma Sivess: Yeah, from our end, we’re creating smart schools now with things they absolutely should be ranking for and we’re going to use them next week to get a gauge for kind of their approval process and that they’re happy essentially from the get-go so we can run and depending on the feedback on that that will determine the exact amount of articles we put out but we’ll roll with that together when they’re ready. Michael Houck: I can’t hear you, you are muted. Sorry about that. Doing pretty good. How are you all? Jared Hanson: Yeah, we’re good. We got the full crew here. Michael Houck: And we’re waiting on waiting on Ian before we get started today. I know Matt’s not going to be here, but you know, be here. I believe so. Let me ping him. Jared Hanson: He replied. Michael Houck: Man, good to meet. Also, I’ve met Matthew and Ian at this point. This is our first time meeting. I saw like some other calendar invites. Jared Hanson: and I don’t know if they disappeared from my calendar, but I don’t know why it didn’t show up before. But yeah, good to meet you. All good. Michael Houck: Where are you based, Jared? I’m in the Bay Area. Jared Hanson: I live in the East Bay, Lafayette for folks that are familiar. Michael Houck: I used to go out to, um, what’s it called? Martinez all the time. And I lived up there actually. Jared Hanson: Like I was in Berkeley for like 20 years basically, but, uh, got a couple of young kids. So it moved, moved a little further out for, for family reasons. There’s more places to be than, uh, inland on the East Bay. Michael Houck: It’s pretty nice. It’s true. It is. Jared Hanson: It is pretty nice. I like it. Michael Houck: That’s cool. Where are you? These days, I’m in Charleston, but I was top of the mission right by Dolores for a while. Oh, cool. Emma Sivess: Yeah, the rest of us are all over. You’re as far as, probably Nina’s the furthest, actually. Me and Nina are based in the UK. She’s up north in the UK, which might be closer, actually. My geography is not as good as my GEO. So don’t judge me on that. But yeah. Phased over here, so we’re very jealous. Much rather be where you are. Nina Lea: I think it’s rained every day in the UK in 2026 so far, I saw. That made the news. Andrew Safranko: I haven’t even seen my grass since December has been covered in snow. Emma Sivess: Wow, okay. I’m in Toronto. Andrew Safranko: It’s like the worst winter we’ve had in like 30 years. Emma Sivess: Yeah, I’m jealous, but It can’t last for that long, can it? And so you’re really sick of it. Andrew Safranko: It’s sunny today. It’s like the first day it’s been sunny in like a week. So I don’t know. It’s weird. Sounds like we’re doing a team retreat down here in sunny Charleston, guys. Emma Sivess: That’s what we’re waiting for. We know why you moved there. Andrew Safranko: We know why you moved there. A little bit. Michael Houck: All right. Should we get started on the SEO and GEO side of things, then we can get more into the specific social stuff later in the call when- Yeah, let’s do it. Jared Hanson: He said he’s gonna be 15 minutes late, so he’ll probably be showing up in 10 or so minutes. So yeah, let’s get started. Emma and Nina, if you guys wanna kick it off and talk about GEO, just Jared, for your context, we’re gonna split this up. Michael Houck: So we’ll do the first half on sort of how to grow traffic through the blog and through the site, and then second half will be digging into like persona, audience we wanna target for you and Ian specifically. And we’ll probably have some follow-ups after the call and that stuff too, we can talk through Slack on that. Or if you guys need to hop back on, you can find some time, but just a high level, we wanna use this time to sort of A, introduce what we’re gonna be doing and B, learn from you perspectives on sort of how we should go about it, who we wanna be talking to, answer any questions that we have there. But I’m gonna turn to the team, they’re gonna lead most of it. Kind of pop in to add context and color where appropriate. Nina Lea: Um, so we caught up with the team earlier, um, and we ran few, we ran through a few bits and Bob, so I’ll go over the same with yourself. So we have gone away and created for content perspective, your brand guidelines, which is essentially just like the bread and butter of all content that we’ll be creating just to make sure that we’re aligned from the get go. So I shall share my screen. Emma Sivess: I’m just going to jump in there as well. So everything that me and Nina are focusing on is to do with the website. So it’s our job to optimise it from a technical perspective to allow it to rank for SEO and also GEO. So our brand content guidelines are based on everything we’re doing on the site. Obviously that’s a different strategy to socials and having people at play, but yes, this is the branding for the website stuff. Nina Lea: So these are brand guidelines that we’ll use internally for writing all content that’s across the monthly press releases and also the blog posts which will be going live on your site as well and this is a live google document so what I’ll do is following this call because it’s quite a juicy document it’s quite a few pages long I’ll send it over to yourself and also the team that we spoke to earlier just to review it just to make sure if there are any amends it’s best to make it at this point now, so as we move forward we’re all aligned from the get-go before we start rolling out content. So this is all about you as a business, your positioning, your brand tone of voice, how you want to position yourself and it’s also from a writer’s perspective, it’s got examples of what you do you want to sound like and also what not to do, so that’s also really important. So internally we know what to avoid, such as words you want to avoid and things like that, So we’ve created this whole document for you to have a look at, but this is essentially, like I said, just to make sure that we’re all aligned before, before we push out any content. So if you do go ahead and make some changes, if you do make changes now is the time to do that. And Jared, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll share this in Slack. Michael Houck: So you guys can all, all three of you can go through this and let us know what you think. Yeah, perfect. Jared Hanson: Just as I’m seeing you scroll, it looks tracks to kind of like what have expressed internally. So yeah, it looks good. Nina Lea: Um, so that’s the first document that we’ll share on Slack. The second one is we’ve gone away and created keyword, um, research for yourselves, um, all keywords that we think you definitely should be ranking for and also ones that we want to aim to rank for in the future as well. So we’re looking for, um, high volume, low, low, word difficulty. Again this is all stuff that we will be focusing on with the content and what we’ll be measuring results on each week and each month as well and again this is a live google docs if you want to glance through it and if this is something that you think no that’s something I absolutely don’t want to rank for you can just highlight it in red and put everything on here from from our perspective is kind of where we should be going but just from personal choice. If you do want to go through it and put anything in red, that is absolutely fine. So that is the keyword doc. And then from the keyword document, we’ve also created a 90 day, so the first three months content plan. And this covers blog posts that will help you rank for SEO and GEO. So we’ve got the blog titles, the keywords, which link to the keyword research to help you rank and then also FAQ questions which again will support the AI side of things with Geo and then SEO as well for kind of organic ranking through Google. So again it is quite a long document so I’ll give you some time to kind of have a Read through it before we kind of go ahead and roll anything out but if there’s anything that you’re not happy with again please do let us know at this time. Before we kind of roll everything out. I don’t know whether you’ve got anything to add on that Emma? Yes I’ll jump in for a little bit. Emma Sivess: So yeah totally agree with all of that. So this is everything that essentially without using your brand we want you to rank for. So we want people to find you with GEO and SEO that have no idea who you are, never heard about you before but they have a need for what you do and this is what this targets. Now I don’t want to work with you you, you can be as involved as you’d like to be. I will say some clients like to know every single thing and that’s totally fine. Uh, but the way we roll best is autonomously. So it’s why we send you everything upfront to make sure we’re just totally aligned. Like Nina said, if anything’s just doesn’t feel right, let us know from, from the jump. And then our strategy, we’ll make sure that we’re consistently feeding into actually what’s going to move the needle. We want to get more eyeballs on your site, but then more importantly than that, we want to make sure that people can convert. And so that’s what the content does. It builds off each other. It builds off the existing pages and funnels, and it allows people to really feed through that user journey. Michael Houck: And Jared, I assume, obviously, because you guys are in AI agent space, we don’t need to explain sort of why the FAQs, for example, are maybe more important for GEO because they’re going to show up. That’s how the crawlers are going to answer questions. For you guys to be the authority on answering those questions versus SEO, where maybe it’s more important to have keywords in the blogs and things like that. But there are some differences between what’s going to be more important for one versus the other. But it’s important that we sort of cover both and sort of see where the traffic’s coming from Jared Hanson: One question that just popped up as you were mentioning this is like, you say you kind of prefer to work autonomously. I mean, that’s totally fine. I mean, go off and do your thing. Jared Hanson: I love it. That being said, like, I’m just like, I’ll give more feedback later. But like, kind of looking through this list of blog titles, I mean, yeah, all very relevant. A lot of them strike me as like, perhaps like quite technical, or like, my, my main thing is like, do we have a chance to kind of review them? Because like, at least for the stuff that I consider, like, I want our expertise to be reflected. And so like, some of these I mean, I’ve been doing this for like 15 years or whatever. So like, I want to be able to kind of like revise it if I find things that I’m like, yeah, that’s not technically accurate or I don’t really want to say that, you know, does that make sense? Emma Sivess: So we’ve started to write our first ones that won’t go on, might go live on your site until you’re happy with them, but for that exact reason. So you’ll have three really by kind of mid next week. Absolute deadline. We’re gonna have three articles ready and we’d ask for your feedback on those because if you’re happy then great let’s keep rolling. Realistically you’re not gonna, I assume, have the time to Read through and edit 90 articles. If we jump then obviously we can trust that that is good. What we’ll also do is monitor our growth right so if we’re seeing any particular articles are getting particularly high traction we can always jump later and you know add more to it it’s also a great when when that happens to talk a little bit more about funnel building on site too because having things like content and making sure that actually the design of the site the ux of the site is pushing people to the right places when we see where this traffic is coming from that is really useful so yes absolutely the first ones will be through to you any feedback throw our way and we can throw a few more edits back and forward till we’re all happy but as we grow up you see where that growth there’s some more that you know of that as well. Jared Hanson: And I would expect, you know, probably most of them I’ll just kind of like glance over or like even not depending on time. Like my priority would be like the deeply technical ones. Like I’m looking at like row 30 and 31, for example, of like, you know, those jump out to me as like super technical. So yeah, they’ll probably occupy more of my attention. Michael Houck: And Jared, what I would say there is I talked to Matthew about this a little bit before we, before we jumped in and sort of started the motion. Um, you know, we want quality to be really important, really high bar for you guys, because it is a product. You are sort of building your reputation in this space. There’s eyeballs on it, et cetera. We totally get that. So we’re going to take a quality over quantity lens here. But at the same time, what I would say is I’d echo Emma’s point where, you know, if we put an article out and no one’s looking at it, you don’t, you shouldn’t be spending a ton of time evaluating that one. Nina Lea: But if we see one that is getting traction, obviously like let’s go deeper on it I would size like let’s take those shots on goal and then yeah yeah for sure makes total sense yeah yeah ship early ship off and I guess like from my yeah yeah and just touching on what we just said then about kind of let you know about performance and reporting and things like that so and comms wise we’re happy to with you however you wish because I think the best approach would be we’ve decided that we would work on slack for kind of back and forth comms um you know this blog post is performing x y and z we think we should push this out and things like that um if we could schedule a call once a month if if that works with your schedule because I know you are busy to go through kind of a deeper dive of the previous month or like I said if you are busy and you just want that over slack or email that’s absolutely fine and then if you want me to jump on a call to run through anything in detail just let me know. So comms wise we’re completely flexible just let us know what works best for you. Sounds great. Emma Sivess: Awesome yeah and to echo that something that we find really useful on those catch-ups is what’s happening with the back end of the business as well so where are leads coming from, what’s happening, what areas are you seeing the most growth in, what conversations are happening more and more you know with your team. That all helps us to shape what we do as well and iterate that strategy. Emma Sivess: I’m just going to share one last thing to wrap up the GEO stuff. So we have our content which helps us to rank for new keywords. So with SEO, it’s important that they’re being featured. And then as you know, for GEO specifically, we need content that is a deeper dive and answers questions. If we just have landing pages, we just never succeed as much with AI as we do with actually being thought leaders and having information in a space. The link building with press releases are to help boost that so it passes on authority and credibility from other external websites linking back to us which helps us to perform better. And then the last element and excuse my many many tabs, I’m not as clean a presenter as Nina is, is the technical side. So with technical GEO and SEO essentially it’s the foundation that we absolutely need to be right to be able to rank. It means that we can actually be Read by AI, we can be Read by Google and we can be shown to people. Most people we cook off with actually are in a far worse situation than you guys so it’s really nice to see that generally speaking everything is very healthy. The last thing we’ll be doing monthly is to dive into this and optimize what does need to be done. So from an AI perspective perspective, love it, good to see, this is great. From site health perspective, there’s a couple of things that we do need to optimize. So the foundation kind of baseline health with websites is 92% plus. If we hit that, then we’re sitting well, we’re benchmarked well against competitors, and we won’t be penalized in rankings that allows our content to show up. And so we dive into the errors and the issues on the page. So we have some duplicate meta descriptions, easiest fix ever but it’s things like this that we’re looking for that we jump into but also optimize so it’s important to have kind of that seo angle on this sort of stuff because meta descriptions should always be keyword driven. We want them to describe the brand and to describe the value of a page but actually it’s keywords that help it rank in the right places. Issues with sitemaps are one of the first things that has to be right because if we have 404 pages or pages just pointing to the wrong place by crawlers then again it can start to take us away from search results essentially as their goal is to point people towards the answers on websites that work. So we’ll be diving into all of this monthly and making those changes for you and one thing 99 of our clients are very happy with this but I always like to check while we’re together are you guys happy to give us back end access into the site so one we can post the articles for you but for the second point that we can jump in and just optimize this every time we see a flag and an error? Jared Hanson: I’m going to defer on that one, because I don’t know. I assume that’s fine, but yeah. Ian Livingstone: OK, cool. Emma Sivess: No worries at all. We’ll send that in our follow up, and we’ll chat with the team about it. We do, on the 1% of the time that people aren’t happy with us having access, we work with developers so we can absolutely tell them everything that needs to happen. But for kind of swift actions and making sure that everything’s right, straight away and we see better results, having it as soon as possible really helps us to meet our growth goals, essentially. Michael Houck: Good to see you. Emma Sivess: Hey, sorry. Sorry for being late. Ian Livingstone: I had one of those calls that’s like, I can’t leave. I must stick around and run it to completion. You’re good. So anyways, happy to be here. You’re here at the perfect time. Michael Houck: So basically up until We’ve been talking about the geo and SEO side. Context there is we’re going to send over a couple links in the Slack channel today after this call. Covering here, here are some blog topics we’re thinking about covering. Here are some keywords we’re thinking about trying to rank for. And I would just say, take a quick pass on those and see if there’s anything that you want to flag as either we’re not prioritizing it enough or prioritizing it too much. And then we can get rolling with all that. The one point that I would double down on that Emma made earlier was that we want to take a quality over quantity lens with you guys. That’s what Matthew mentioned on the call I had with him last week too. We know the blog voice, blog content is really important because you guys are in a fast evolving space. What I would say is that we don’t want to get in a position where we’re filtering what we’re putting out too much. It’s like, let’s see what goes out. And then if we get traction on the page, let’s make sure that, you know, we’re sort of taking other paths and optimizing it even further. But we do want to make sure that we’re getting stuff out. So since it is a technical product, technical space, we just want to make sure that we’re getting stuff out for you guys on a regular basis, too. So just take a peek at the topics we send over and let us know what you think. Emma Sivess: Also, you have a fabulous background. I’m very jealous. Michael Houck: In my home it’s perfect. Emma Sivess: I love it. Ian Livingstone: I wish I could say it’s mine. It’s definitely not but it should be awesome. Emma Sivess: Well yeah that’s everything from the GEO SEO perspective so we’ll send you all of those links after this call and like I said you can be as involved as you want to be if you have questions please please do send them our way we are always here but likewise it’s our it’s our job to do this for you to free up your time and to present our growth to you and what’s working. So we’ll be in touch with all of them. Emma Sivess: Cool, okay. Michael Houck: Jared, any questions on your end there? Nope, nope, I’m good. Jared Hanson: Okay, cool. Michael Houck: Let’s then use the rest of the time, Andrew, if you wanna take it away and talk social. And then at the very end, Ben, you can hop in and talk content ops and things like that. So let’s let’s dive into social. Sounds good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Hey, Jerry. Andrew Safranko: Nice to meet you guys. Okay, let’s dive through this real quick. So the goal for today will just be to do a high level on what you guys are looking for in terms of content, whether it be LinkedIn, or for moving to X as well and repurposing content, but I’ll probably have to meet with you guys again at some point. And this will be an iterative process anyway, where we’ll probably want to stay in touch, you know, maybe once a week, once every few weeks, right? The goal is to be able to build things for you guys that is top of mind in your world, and then also things that you would like to say, but online. I’ve gone through all of your profiles online. So I kind of have a sense for the kinds of things you’d like to talk about. Although, obviously, we can always evolve. And as the company grows, as the space evolves, as we’re well aware, you know, AI is going in all kinds of different directions. You know, we’ll want to just kind of stay in lockstep in terms of, you know, topics, types of articles potentially put out there, that kind of stuff. So a little bit about me, you can see that here, you probably already Read it. So I’ve written for a few AI companies now, founders in specific. I’m still in the tech space. I’ve been in the tech space for like 17 years. Was like my first job out of university. Yeah, so kind of know your space in some regard. I think it’s really cool, actually. I was reading a heck of a lot of what you guys do. I think it’s actually very interesting. Access management, I’ve been in the access management space from the traditional Okta type stuff, but not, obviously, the agent space is a whole other ballgame. So OK, you’ll see the outcomes for this. Ideally, again, we probably won’t be able to get through in like a grand specificity. So we’ll do our best to kind of at least give me some ballpark ideas, and then I can go back. I know there’s some content we want to get out by next week. So to just allow me to kind of build some stuff, and then we’ll go from there. So let’s just dive right into it. Ideally, what I want to get from you guys, and you might have different goals, which is cool, because I think all three of you guys will have different kind of perspectives. But today, what we’ll do is I’m just going to type, Please just ramble. So like as an example with the goal for content for you guys What would you think? What would you say is is it that you’re looking to get out of the content like from a social media standpoint? Ian Livingstone: I think there’s there’s two there’s There’s two things at least from my perspective one is cementing key card from a thought leadership perspective in the market is the leader Right and and I think in let’s talk about what cementing us as a leader means for the space we’re in. That’s about our ability to both articulate the problem, but also to articulate the model that is the solution, right? In a way that doesn’t come off as like, we’re selling and lying, but it comes off as genuine, authentic, and true, right? And I think that’s incredibly important when you’re selling to developers and security. I think the second component of this, that’s awareness and branding. The second is actually to drive engagement. So a good example would be like something like OpenCloud occurs, right? It comes up, you have all these security vulnerabilities, you have these CVEs that come out. Specifically when you’re dealing with CISOs and heads of security engineering and security folks, it’s like so much of like every time there’s a vulnerability, it’s like a fucking Black Friday for these folks, right? Like it’s like, holy shit, what do we do? And it drives all these buying cycles. And so your ability to Um, on the security side, like your ability to respond in topic with like, here’s what happened. And here’s what, like, and then lean on the thought leadership of content we’ve created to then be, and here’s how this stuff solves this. And like, but to do it in a way that’s authentic, it doesn’t sound like you’re selling, right? Like the core of it is like authenticity is king here. We know that’s incredibly true now with AI and also other fun stuff. Um, so I think those are, one is engagement around key events, right. And key launches, but like, from this perspective, it’s like, that’s important, which with the key personas we care about, which would be developers. I gave you security-focused examples. There are developer-focused examples as well, right? When new libraries launch, new techniques come out, or like new capabilities, like when Opus 4.5 landed, it’s like, holy shit, this thing actually works. Agentic coding is here. Like, what’s that mean? Like that type of stuff. And then on the flip side, you have security lens of a color. There’s this vulnerability, or there’s this new thing going on, or blah, blah, right? Those are the best places. And that’s, those are thought leadership, but they also help drive buying cycles in the sense that like people like, Oh crap, this thing occurred. Which vendor do I talk? Who do I talk to to understand how I solve these problems? And who’s the, who’s like the, the first place to go. Do you have stuff to add to that? Jared Hanson: That’s just my, yeah, I was like, I kind of wrote down on, on my notes, like what I was going to say. And like the, the first one, which I think maps pretty well to like, you know, cement, key card as a thought leader my framing was it was like kind of speak to practitioners and be seen as like for your expertise you know like authentic etc and like practitioners is kind of key to me because like you know I think we needed to speak to both like you know kind of like high level executives he says etc that’s important but I think like also the people really like doing the work uh like in implementing these things uh I want them to like key card as the solution there. I think that maps pretty well at what Ian was saying. Then the other thing that to me is really important is we want to be seen as innovative, basically at the forefront of these problems. Is changing so fast. There’s all sorts of new standards and protocols. Things like that for how these systems, you know, like work and operate together. And I want Keycard to be seen as like, you know, like you can trust us to like deliver those things, you know, well before you might get them from anyone else, uh, you know, if ever. Um, so like really being on the forefront of that stuff and driving it. Andrew Safranko: Uh, that all to be said, are there any sort of secondary goals, things that are sort of not as top of mind or maybe nice to have, if you will. So common answer to this is always leads. Yeah, I think nice engagement. Ian Livingstone: That was word for leads, by the way. I mean, I think like the secondary goal for everything is, I mean, let’s be upfront, let’s inverse the pyramid. The number one goal for anybody is always leads. Ian Livingstone: And that’s why brand matters. And thought leadership matters, right? Michael Houck: Ian, the reason we break this up is because, you know, sometimes we’ll work with you know, really what we want to do is just grow our follower count on social. And if it leads getting business break, right. So it sounds like for you guys, it’s more about driving the business, but I think, I mean, there’s, there’s leading indicator, right. Ian Livingstone: There’s truly leading and trailing indicators of what you just said, working, right. And the leading indicator of this working is certainly like, okay, growing presence, growing, like followers, growing brand engagement on posts, right? Like those are all leading indicators that like our brand is getting better. Um, and that people are engaging in that, what we’re saying is resonating. And then there’s, the conversion of that energy into something that’s tangible, a tangible impact, like the bottom line of the business, right, which is like lead generation, which would be a trailing indicator of the first work. Yeah, kind of go hand in hand. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, okay. I understand. Ian Livingstone: I understand your, your, your why you have the framework you have, but yeah, sorry, go ahead. Michael Houck: It’ll shape the content strategy to a degree, right? Like, are we, are we posting memes and viral hypey stuff? Or are we posting deep thought leadership, long form essay type stuff, right? It’s like, it will influence. So that’s why, yeah, so that’s why we asked. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, like, from my perspective, to be able to try to, you know, quote, unquote, Read your minds as much as I can, right, as we go through the process. Just knowing what’s important to you helps me figure out where to look for what I think will make sense from a content standpoint, you know, like, as I research, and then further to that, as I start to build out the writing, we’re obviously going to go back and forth. There’ll be edits. It’s just natural, right? There’s no way I’m going to hit this out of the park, and I don’t expect to. I don’t try to. There’s no point in getting perfection out when I know I’ll need to get you guys to give me the feedback. But at least I’ll be able to understand the lane I should be in, and then that’ll help us move quicker as well. But I think what you’ve given here is perfect, so we’ll go with this. Jared Hanson: Can I jump in on this secondary goals So I saw you guys like noted like you know kind of Cloudflare is kind of like a model or like you know take some inspiration from them. I Read once somewhere and I forget where I Read it but it really stuck with me that like if you look at Cloudflare’s blog and like one of their goals with their blog is actually to like attract talent and hire people and I don’t know if it’s like a direct goal but like if you Read their blog and I’m a big fan of their blog is like, oh, yeah, those people there, they’re doing interesting work. Not only do I think I trust their product more as a result of what they write, but I’m like, I would want to work there. I don’t literally, because I’m here, but you get my point, right? If it’s well written and doing its job, the expertise should speak to other people that are interested in this problem, and they should think about Keycard as a place they might actually also want to work to in a disengaged like use and find a product. Yeah, I think that’s valid for sure. Andrew Safranko: I think a lot of what we do here at least is just that. I like to do a lot more personal storytelling as well. I think the best content, especially nowadays, is more so how can we build genuine character around what you say and do online. Just knowing what we know about the access level of information and plus the access level of being able to just automatically spew information out, right? The more we can get in and around who you are as people, and then map that to your job and map that to the space in the market, and then you as a person in the market, that will produce really great content. So we’ll definitely, I’ll have pointed questions for you guys on a regular basis. We’d love to obviously build more personality there. So thanks. Michael Houck: make here is a side effect that we see, and sometimes this is the main goal, but a side effect that we see for folks is that when investors are looking at your guys’ social media profiles, when you’re talking to them or what have you, if you get to see your content before you ever reach out, it’s a way for them to de-risk the investment in you guys, right? Like for a future round, because they see, oh, this is the public resume of your brain and how you’re thinking about the market and how you’re thinking about the product you’re using, where things are going, et cetera. So we always try to put things through that lens as we get to know you guys. It’s like, you know, what do we want potential future investors, employees, partners, et cetera, to see? So just, just know that that’s on our minds as well. Like when we raised our A from Andreessen at my old company, it happened really quickly because I was growing by 3000 followers a week on Twitter at the time. You know what I mean? So like, you know, not saying we can make you go over 3000 followers a week in the first month or two, Um, just that, uh, just that, yeah, no pressure Andrew, but just that it, uh, it does impact those things and we, we put it through that lens. Andrew Safranko: Uh, we kind of touched upon it, but just wanted to get from both of your perspectives. So in order for us to kind of see success, are there any tangible things that kind of come to mind that you can kind of like look in the future and say, okay, check box. Checkbox kind of deal? Ian Livingstone: Can you ask the question again? I’m sorry. Michael Houck: Just like, you know, we’re at the end of the quarter at the end of this first quarter of us working together. Yeah, we’ll get more metric driven with it as we sort of see initial data points. But I’m just curious how we measure that success from your guys’s perspective on day one here. Ian Livingstone: Look, I think I think So this is a really good question. I think there’s like multiple ways to do it. I think like if you ask him what my gut is, I think one is like follower accounts on your various channels, like increase, right? Like, and, and, uh, have a pretty drastic increase. Cause like the truth is, is I don’t know about you, Jared, but I post like three times a month. Um, and that’s too sporadic to actually have like real effect. Um, and two is that the conversion of the content is leading to some type of uptick in, in, in actual conversion to waitlist signups or like inbound or what have you. Um, but those are the things I’d want to see a move right from baseline. Now, some of that, that from baseline, I think the easiest things to med to like a couple of ROI on is actually like, well, we’re doing very little in social. So, so what’s the impact of social? And then I think that, you know, you always have your anti goals, which are like, we’re not posting, you know, You’re not doing things that are that tarnish the brand. I think obviously that’s the anti-goal here. Jared Hanson: Yeah, I’d echo that. I mean, from my standpoint, we’re doing so little, so it’s hard to maybe screw up a little bit. Jared Hanson: starts, you know, just building momentum around this stuff like that, that to me is, you know, materially improved from from where we are today. And yeah, obviously, like, hopefully, that translates into some like measurable metric. But yeah, I kind of assume it would, relative to where we are. Yeah, cool. So we’ll do that. Michael Houck: As we get further into this quarter, we’ve got some posts going out. And we sort of see what typical engagement baseline engagement is like based on how and engage your guys existing audiences are. We’ll be able to get a little bit more metric driven with it, but it’s good to know that these in general are the priorities and anti-priorities that we should keep in mind. Andrew Safranko: So we’ve got five more questions, very simple stuff. So in terms of your target audience, we’ve kind of touched upon this. So we talked about the developer community, but as well as the CSO community, would you say that those kind of define officially others we should be thinking about? Ian Livingstone: I think there’s there’s three, actually, like, actually, probably more, like, if you actually break down the personas you have, and it depends on the market, like you’re communicating to. So you have your DevOps team, right inside platform, which is you’re like the people that are focused on how do I enable my org to like adopt agents or whatever, right to adopt the coding agents, you have your heads of agent development like your email whatever people actually building agents I can be internal or external. I’m not about these are all the rules right you repeat your ctl all the same bucket which like is the concerns roll up you have more than security you have there’s a difference in messaging between. What you message to secure. Versus the way you match this to the CISO. They’re related, but they speak very different languages. Michael Houck: Ian, just a high-level question for me. How do you think about speaking to these different audiences? Like, should we have you and your persona speak to one of them, Jared speak to another one, Matt speak to some company? How do you see that? That’s a good question. I don’t know. Ian Livingstone: I don’t have thoughts. Michael Houck: I guess as we dig into it, we can present like, maybe Andrew, maybe this is part of what we do with the initial pass here, is we come back with like a proposal, how we would split it up after we get all the information from this call, we And we then see how the team responds. I mean, all three of you guys are pretty technical. Andrew Safranko: So I mean, in theory, the content can live across all three of you. Andrew Safranko: But yeah, I mean, we’ll probably figure out those lanes as we go, but I’ll do my best. Knowing what I’ve seen online, I’ll do my best to try to at least try to figure out what I think makes sense. By all means, it could be a jump ball. I’d be like, OK, I like that. I like that. And you guys can kind of take it and tell me what you like, But yeah, we’ll figure that piece out. And I apologize, on my end, at least, Ian, you cut out for those four audiences. So I got the devs, and I got the security side. Were there two others that I missed, or was this it? It looks like we just lost Ian. Maybe his computer died or something. Michael Houck: Maybe Jared can jump in. Jared Hanson: Yeah, we can get you more details on that. I forget how he broke them down, too, now. But yeah, we can go back and forth on that. No worries. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I mean, I kind of get a gist of who you guys are going after here as well, and it makes sense. Like, high level, you’ve got the community, and then you’ve got the exec community, and then you’ve got, like, the partitions within those communities as well. Yeah, yeah. Jared Hanson: If I had to add anything, I think, like, you know, the dev and platform teams is, like, pretty broad, and, like, you know, we do want to speak to them, but there’s also kind of this emerging, like, you know, AI engineer, like, kind of, like, you know, it’s a bit nebulous. But, um, the people on the edge, you know, uh, Twitter crowd or like, yeah. Michael Houck: Honestly, that’s, that’s where part of the opportunity will be because, uh, you know, just like with a new market that emerges for products to enter into when a new archetype and persona emerges on social, there’s a guy or a group of guys who are talking to them and sort of building their trust, building their credibility around it. And we can be part of that mission. Andrew Safranko: That’s where you catch the lightning in the bottle there. Andrew Safranko: I don’t know if this will be something you guys can answer too in depth, but what would you say your audience would come to you for, or what would you think they would come to you for, I guess, in your space? Andrew Safranko: Good question. Jared Hanson: I mean, you know, I think they come to us looking for like our expertise and then like practical advice and solutions. Jared Hanson: I think, at least from the people I speak with, the problem is not always well understood, but a lot of people are really starting to understand the problem. They’re like, yeah, AI has a bunch of potential, I want to deploy it, but then they have a bunch of concerns around how they can secure and trust the thing. So they recognize the problem. And then I think everyone is just basically asking, do I do about it? How can you help me with this? And they really just want answers and products at the end of the day. Andrew Safranko: I guess, because I know you guys have spoken at a bunch of events, does that track, I guess, to if you have the side combos at the events, people in that work from home? Jared Hanson: I think the events are kind of like, at least when we’ve been going to events, the events tend to be a bit like, mostly meant to be talking about the problem and how you need to think about it. And inherently, we’re doing the things that I’m talking about, but it’s not like a work there. Jared Hanson: That makes sense. Andrew Safranko: So this is the final bit. Actually, almost final bit. Topics that you guys are interested in talking about online that should be easy for you. What are some things you want to make sure you get out to the world? Jared Hanson: I mean to me it’s like you know kind of talking about like identity systems and protocols and standards also like AI systems and protocols standards like they’re like this is like the technical stuff that I find I don’t know like nerdy and interesting yeah those are the and then you know I guess probably probably also some respect kind of like speaking to some of the higher level stuff, you know, when we get in meetings with like CSOs and whatnot, like they may or may not care about like the actual protocols and the nuts and bolts, but they definitely want to understand kind of like, you know, like, you know, there’s zero trust within these agentic systems and things like that that you see out there. I don’t know. That’s, yeah, I think we want to, we want to talk. Ian Livingstone: There’s two, there’s two, just two sides of this, right? Ian Livingstone: At the messaging pillar, basically at a high level, you can think of it as, what does security care about? Which is, well, we care about enabling to adopt agents securely across our company. There’s different facets, obviously, of what that implementation means. How do I enable my developers to adopt coding agents? How do I enable developers to build? How do I govern things like chatGBT or OpenAI or whatever? I would probably call it a pillar of agent security and how we fit into that. And Ian is a core pillar of that genetic security. And then on the flip side, it’s the enablement lens of like, I’m a developer, how do I build or use these things are really are some of those topics. And the trade off right around, we had around, how do you enable autonomy while not nuking capability, or taking on all the security risk. So when I’m a developer, it’s like, what does a developer want? Well, I want to build an agent that’s autonomous and hyper capable. And when I’m security, I want to enable my developers to build an agent that’s hyper autonomous and capable, but also secure. And we’re not, as an organization, we’re not willing to make that the trade-off between those two things. But today, that is a trade-off that exists. And then there’s like how you actually like the actual components of what that message is, right? And those, those are, like a good example is like, we can even talk about things that are not directly related to the product, but drive us, drive brand value. So a good example, like we don’t do enable prompt security. Security, but top security is a huge issue related to building agents and multi-agent architectures. And so I think what I would, the thing to drive here is developers will engage around how does your thing help me build something that’s better than I could have built otherwise? And does security will engage around how does this thing enable me to enable people in my organization without getting fired? Andrew Safranko: Okay, makes sense. And then in terms of pillars beyond that, are there, there’ll be use cases obviously, right? So that’s one thing I’ll want to work with you guys on as well, whether you’ve got any references we can pull, whether we have any real life stories we can use, things that kind of like create a much more tangible story of people, right? Something that people can like latch on to like, ah, yes, you know what, like I was with my CISO the other day, and this is the exact conversation we had the other day, because we were also experiencing it, right? So look for me to do that with you guys. And even if we don’t have stories, I think just having that perspective of like, here’s a hypothetical that we can build into a story, I think that’s always great as well. Back to my earlier point of trying to differentiate Differentiate you guys as a company and you guys as founders and just people in general right like being able to drive unique Storytelling in and around that space will be good because there’s there’s only I mean, let’s be honest, right? We can only I mean we can we can talk forever on I am and security, right? But at the end of the day you do that over and over and over again eventually, you know The well starts to dry up on attention, right? So look for me to kind of like spice that up a bit and figure out Okay, where are ways we can tell this story and in true practical senses as well. Michael Houck: So yeah Okay, sorry one one other thing I want to throw in there too is Jared Ian either you guys or Matt too if there are Moments in sort of the the zeitgeist of your guys’s space, you know news or you mentioned there’s all these buying cycles that happen whenever there’s a major Breach or something like that. Like when those things happen, you know, we’ll be doing our research We’ll be monitoring the news, but if you guys have unique perspective to share on those Just ramble into a voice note in slack and tag Andrew and we can get posts ready for that stuff too So you can be part of that conversation Yeah, if you’ve got if you’ve got it typing anyways Voice notes are perfect. Andrew Safranko: Please voice notes all day. Uh, yeah Voice notes. Michael Houck: It’s there’s nothing better. Andrew Safranko: Honestly time Well, it also gives me your literal voice, which is obviously going to be very helpful as well. So knowing your inflections, knowing how you say things, that’ll be very helpful. We’re almost done. Unique perspective on these topics. So what would you say the things you guys say make you stand out versus maybe other players in the space or just in general, this whole giant AI conversation? What are you guys saying or thinking that’s making you feel like you’re a bit more of a unique Ian, do you have thoughts? Jared Hanson: I have tons of thoughts, but you should go first. I don’t know, like, that’s a hard one for me to answer. I mean, like, just because, like, I’ll give you that, like, this is gonna sound somewhat egotistical, but, like, at least within, like, identity systems, I think there’s, like, very few people on the planet who understand them more than I do, at least at a deeply technical level. So even prior to starting Keycard, I know lots of people at lots of other companies trying to do similar things just because I’m connected to all these folks. So I’ve spent a lot of time talking to them about what they’re doing and have like more expertise and a better approach to things. And I could go into details on that sort of stuff, but that to me is kind of like my top level answer. We will definitely want you to go into detail. Michael Houck: We don’t necessarily need to do it right now, because we want to be conscious of your guys’ time, but maybe that’s something for you, Jared, and Andrew to jam on. It’s just like, we want to get those perspectives out there in a way that, you know, doesn’t blow the lid off of what’s special about Keycard and everything like that, but that does sort of tell that story positions you effectively that way. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep, definitely. Ian Livingstone: Yeah, I think I think like at the end of the day, like there are unique perspectives that this is not a security only solution you have to it’s a dev security collaboration. The developer doesn’t want to understand like these things. The point is to understand how to make it easy. The core of what the system delivers and the promise of how to do that is important. But ultimately today it’s been enabling like developer. It’s been enabling security as we’re giving like a set like a set of tools that make everybody happy one way or the other. And you know, I think I would say is like the pattern. We’re gonna sit back, we asked this question about brand. Well, what is key cards like ultimately, what is key cards brand, it’s that we build great tools that enable developers to build and use great secure applications and coding and agents. Ian Livingstone: And it’s developer first. Security second. Ian Livingstone: Because ultimately, if developers actually use it and adopt it, you’re going to end up with a more secure solution than any, who cares about what, like any security architecture in general. And that is shown over and over and over again in our industry. And this way, it’s no different. Makes sense. Andrew Safranko: I don’t know if you ever came across a platform called Bluemix, which was like an IBM microservices platform. This is something that I sold back in the day. And that was literally the selling point was it’s a developer-first platform, but it’s also one of the most secure at the time, at least. And it was that exact idea. So it resonates. It makes sense to me. Andrew Safranko: Last two questions. I’ve kind of got a bit of it from online, but you tell me. What’s your voice? How do you like the sound online? Ian Livingstone: I think everyone’s going to be different. Because if these are personal accounts, we’ll be different. Michael Houck: Yeah, we want this individually from each of you guys. Jared Hanson: I don’t know if I have a great answer, because I don’t think I do stuff online frequently enough to know what it comes across as. Jared Hanson: I don’t know. From my standpoint, like, I really do want to, like, reflect, like, expertise in it. That’s probably, like, my top of my mind, as you’ve probably gotten from a lot of my answers. This might go against, like, some company branding stuff, but, like, I can also be kind of, like, sarcastic in a lot of my comments, which I don’t know if that’s something I want to preserve, but, like, I do have that tendency. I don’t know. It’s maybe a bit of kind of, like, I don’t know, like, I don’t know. Jared Hanson: I don’t know. I’m open to this is basically what I’m saying. Like, I kind of want to like do a bit of a reset and like actually have a point of view. Michael Houck: We want it to sound like you like we want your community, your audience, people who are already engaged with you already follow your interest in your career. We want them to think, Oh, this content sounds like Jared, right? So if that’s, if that’s irreverent, if that’s sarcastic, a little bit, you know, we should, we should lean into that to some degree. Andrew Safranko: I mean, ideally what I’ll do, right, because we won’t, again, nail it right on the first go. I’m getting the vibe it’s a little bit more casual, you know, definitely professional still, but on the casual side. So look to me, look for me when I send you some stuff. Jared Hanson: Yeah, I mean, I definitely don’t want any sort of like talking head type of thing of just like, you know, like, the words have to carry meaning, you know, like, hopefully, like, I don’t know, like, Got it. Andrew Safranko: And how about yourself? Ian Livingstone: I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time developing my voice between like hundreds of podcast episodes. It tends, my, my vision is one is like, I focus on a first and foremost, trying to tell some formulation of the story, but like where shit’s going. So it’s like a very future looking viewpoint. It tends to be grounded in what are the problems today and why those problems exist and what have we learned about them. Um, so, you know, to starting something authoritative in terms of understanding. And then three, it tends to be not taking myself too seriously. Andrew Safranko: Are there any people online that you guys think of as you’re posting or just think of as great voices that you might want to mirror a little bit? Ian Livingstone: I mean, I think from a blog content, we were going to say, What blogs like technical blogs or like blogs industry? I think are great I Think Kurt at flat IO writes some of the best technical blog content available I mean, it hasn’t really converted to like an amazing outcome for them, but like That’s about Kurt and more about other things going on, right? Jared Hanson: So yeah, he also might not be optimizing for geo SEO I mean fly.io is probably like to me one of the better written blogs and like you know that it’s not Kurt but there’s some other guy there who I don’t think he goes online by some made-up name as far as I understand that I can’t recall but he’s deeply like focused on security topics and I always find his like blog posts quite kind of like like they’re very entertaining in a way that like I don’t know just Security people have a sarcastic lens on many things and he really does that well, I think. I can send you some of those blog posts if you want to Read them or whatever, specifically ones I find good. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, if you’ve got anything that personally hits home for you, send it my way for sure. Michael Houck: It’ll also be true for social. If you guys are scrolling through X or LinkedIn or something and you’re like, this content format, or I love how this person said this, just drop it in the Slack channel and tag us, and we’ll take a look. Jared Hanson: Yeah, the other one I’d draw to is the folks at AMP Code. If you come across that, they’re great. I love most of their… I’ll put them in the Slack channel too, but their Twitter accounts and their blog are really on point, I feel like, especially within the AI space. Very cool. Andrew Safranko: Okay, that was it for me. Summary note is I’m gonna go back and put some drafts together for you guys so we can kind of riff on it because I know there’s some stuff you want to get out early next week so look for something from me basically what ends up happening is we use notion as a way of tracking all of our content you’ll see notion links that come your way and then it’s just a matter of going in and taking a look we’ll just call it out right now we all get busy it’s hard to keep up with content especially as we you’re producing drafts for you, several drafts a week, right? And we’re trying to build out that cadence of multiple posts a week kind of deal. So calling it out right now, we get busy. It might be challenging at times. It will be challenging at times. We’re all busy. So that’s cool. Please, let’s just do our best to communicate on that front. I know it’ll be challenging to be able even just to do that. But know that I’ll be in the background always researching and writing and then we’ll do our best to make sure you guys are on top of like what you should be approving as opposed to what you need to edit as opposed. And then we’ll kind of go from there. But yeah, that was all that’s all we had, Michael, if you want to just real quick. Michael Houck: Yeah, just real quick at the end, guys, I know we’re at time when we constitute time. So we also do a content ops process, Ben manages that where we’ll be in scheduling the content for you will be getting your logins, things like that. He’ll DM you about that afterwards. The other thing is that we’ll engage with people’s content on your behalf as a way to sort of build profile, get your name out there, et cetera. We’ll start that process once you guys sort of feel comfortable with the voice, our sort of ability to capture what you guys want to communicate on social. So that’s not a day one thing, but that’ll be coming down the line and Ben will sort of be in charge of that process. Michael Houck: Other than that, you know, We’ll be in Slack, and we’ll get the first poster review for review very soon. And same on the blog side. Emma will get started and follow up, and then so we’ll lean on any action items there. So any questions from you guys before we hop? Ian Livingstone: We all got to run away, so. OK, guys, I’ll let you go. Michael Houck: But thanks for your time. We’re really excited. Ian Livingstone: See you soon, guys. Emma Sivess: Thank you.