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The framing and timing strategy only works because Sethi had the credibility to deliver it. If an executive walks into a Tier 1 outlet for the first time to announce an IPO, the message and the messenger are strangers to each other. The market has no context so the story gets written for you, not by you.
The 6 to 18 months before an IPO or a capital raise are the most underutilized brand and narrative-building window most executives have. By the time the announcement lands, the narrative is either already established or already out of your hands.
Institutional investors, analysts, and journalists research before they engage. What they find in the months before a raise shapes every conversation that follows — the questions they ask, the framing they use, the assumptions they bring into the room. Your S-1 doesn't introduce you, it only confirms or complicates what people already think.
The rest of your stakeholders are watching too. Employees make decisions about whether to stay through a liquidity event based on what they see publicly, as do potential employees about whether they want to spend their precious hours working for you. Customers and partners read the same articles and LinkedIn feeds as investors.
And the environment has shifted. Media coverage of CEOs has moved significantly toward the kind of attention once reserved for public figures outside of business. Axios noted earlier this month that the machinery tracking executives now looks less like Bloomberg and more like celebrity media — fast, opinionated, and interested in character as much as company performance. That's true whether or not an executive chooses to engage with it. The only question is whether they've built enough of a presence to shape the story before someone shapes it for them.
"Narrative ownership" is a phrase that can sound kind of abstract. In practice, it means deciding what the true story is and making sure that story is findable, repeatable, and credible before the defining moment arrives.
Investors need three things from a founder or CEO before they trust a raise or listing. They need a clear and consistent point of view on the industry, not just the company. They need evidence of operational maturity, the sense that vision is backed by actual judgment. And they need composure — the feeling that this person has thought through the hard scenarios and isn't going to be rattled by them.
All three can be built deliberately, over time, through the right combination of owned and earned media.
LinkedIn is the most underrated pre-IPO tool available to executives, and almost everyone thinks about it slightly wrong. The goal isn't reach or engagement as metrics — it's creating a searchable, durable record of how you think. An investor doing diligence will scroll your profile. What they find should feel like a body of work, not a highlight reel.
One substantive post per week over six months gets you there. The discipline matters more than any individual post. You're not trying to go viral, you're trying to demonstrate consistent, clear thinking about the space you operate in. While it can feel like it's not moving the needle, that compound effect is what gives you credibility when you need it.
The company blog and the founder's letter format serve a complementary purpose. Longer-form writing is where you can position your company within a category, take a stand on where the industry is going, and demonstrate the kind of strategic depth that a LinkedIn post can gesture at but not fully deliver. The best examples read like primary sources — something a journalist or analyst would cite — rather than press releases.
Podcast appearances deserve strategic attention also. A series of appearances — whether as a recurring guest in your space or on a circuit of shows your target audience actually listens to — builds a narrative arc. Each appearance reinforces the last so by the time you're in a Tier 1 media moment, you've had the conversation enough times that you sound like yourself, not like someone delivering prepared remarks.
Video is worth doing when it feels comfortable. Direct-to-camera content — even simple, unproduced — signals something that text doesn't: that you're willing to be seen. For an executive heading into public markets, that matters.
One principle ties all of this together: your owned content should reflect a perspective on the whole industry, not just your company. The executives who build the most durable pre-IPO credibility are the ones who have a view on where things are going — and say it out loud, consistently, before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
Owned media is what you say. Earned media is what others say about you, and investors weight it differently. A well-placed piece in a publication your investors read carries a different kind of authority than anything you can publish yourself.
The strategic approach to earned media at the pre-IPO stage starts with focus. Identify three to five publications that your actual investors, analysts, and future board members read. Build relationships with the reporters who cover your sector through genuine engagement over time. Respond to their stories. Send them useful context when they're working on something in your space. Be a source before you need to be a subject.
The exclusive is one of the most useful tools available in this phase. Giving one outlet a meaningful scoop — the way Sethi did with Semafor — creates a moment of controlled visibility. You choose the outlet, the timing, and influence the primary framing. That's a significant amount of leverage for something that looks, from the outside, like a straightforward news story.
Speaking engagements at industry conferences and panels serve a different function than press. They create third-party validation in a room full of peers, and they put you on stage alongside the people whose company you want to be associated with. Select these based on audience composition, not prestige. A smaller conference full of the right investors or operators is worth more than a splashy appearance in front of a general audience.
Credibility markers like awards and list placements — Forbes, Fortune, Time — are worth pursuing systematically and with significant lead time. They appear in due diligence materials, they come up in searches, and they carry authority precisely because they're not self-generated. Most of them require applications or nominations that close months before publication.
The thing to avoid across all of it: scatter-shot media activity with no strategic thread. A single well-placed, on-message appearance builds more durable credibility than five generic ones.
Working from the raise or listing date back, a rough framework looks like this.
At 12 to 18 months out, the work is foundational. Establish your point of view on the industry and start saying it in public. Begin a consistent LinkedIn cadence. Identify the publications and reporters you want relationships with and start building them. Get on the podcast circuit. At this stage, nothing should look like pre-IPO positioning, it should just look like a thoughtful executive with something to say.
At 6 to 12 months out, the owned content starts to cohere around two or three core narratives that connect to your raise thesis. Earned media placements become more specific and more intentional. Conference appearances start putting you physically in rooms with the people who will matter when the moment arrives.
At 3 to 6 months out, you're coordinating more carefully with legal around what can be said and when. Exclusives get used strategically. The goal at this stage is making sure your search footprint — what comes up when someone Googles you the morning before a call — reflects the narrative you've spent a year building.
By the time the announcement lands, it should feel like confirmation of a story already told. Sethi's Semafor moment worked because when he walked into that interview, the most valuable thing he brought was the credibility to deliver the news on his terms.
A few patterns come up consistently. The most common is waiting until the quiet period is almost over to start thinking about narrative — at which point the options are limited and anything you do looks reactive. The second is delegating narrative ownership entirely to a communications team. PR support is essential, but the executive's voice has to be in the work. Investors are evaluating the person as well as the messaging.
The third is staying inside industry echo chambers rather than reaching the crossover audiences — business press, general technology media, podcasts with a broader listener base — where the most valuable narrative work actually happens. The fourth is treating every media appearance as a product announcement rather than a character-building moment. Product news gets a day of coverage, while character compounds.
The best pre-IPO positioning doesn't announce itself as positioning. It reads like a leader who has been publicly, consistently thoughtful for a year or more before the moment that requires it. Investors see someone with a record, journalists have context, and employees have confidence. The announcement itself becomes a punctuation mark in a story that's already been told.
That's what Sethi walked into Semafor with. And it's buildable by any executive willing to start early enough.
If you're planning a raise or a public listing in the next 12 to 18 months and want to build the kind of narrative that precedes the moment, Cursive Media works with leadership teams on both strategy and execution. Get in touch.
