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David Senra: Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra

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Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder of Rostra and one of the world's most trusted communication strategists, supporting companies such as Anduril, Shopify, Cognition, and Coinbase. In 2016, she co-founded TrailRunner International with Jim Wilkinson, who had just run corporate affairs for Alibaba's record IPO. She had never done comms in her life. One of her first clients was Anduril, in the company's first year, when Palmer Luckey had just been pushed out of Facebook, and no reporter would give him a fair hearing. So they stopped asking. They went to Quantico, to Camp Pendleton, to the CIA, and showed people the technology directly. She left to run communications at Substack, then joined the board of Activision Blizzard—and in October 2022 stepped off the board and into the company as chief communications officer. Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition was under attack from the FTC. She fought back in public, under her own name, which almost no executive in a deal that size is willing to do. It closed in October 2023. In March 2024, she started her own firm, Rostra, and published Go Direct: The Manifesto. The first project out the door was Cognition's launch of Devin, the first AI s

David Senra: So, you were born in China, yet you speak Norwegian. Can you explain what occurred in your life between these two points? Lulu Meservey: Yes. I was born in rural China. I was born in a little village where, I think, my mom didn't even know whether I would come out as a boy or a girl, or in 6 months or 12 months, or there was very little knowledge, and so I emerged. And we were able to leave China because my father was sent to Germany to get his PhD in astrophysics. I think at that time the number of people who wanted to leave China far exceeded the number of people who were…

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