Becca Chambers on Making Her Voice Heard

Mixing Board Studio Session

Becca Chambers is a marketing and communications leader who's shaped global media, communications, and brand strategies for enterprise technology brands and executives.

She recently started a new role as the CMO at Scale Venture Partners, and also regularly shares insights on communications, brand strategy, and more on her LinkedIn (her content averages 8M+ monthly impressions). She also co-hosts a new comms podcast, Under Embargo.

In this Studio Session, Becca and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about how to build consensus and create solid relationships, how to balance a strong personal brand with a corporate brand, how to create FOMO with execs to get them on board with your initiatives, any why you should always be the “I’ll figure it out person.

SG: You just joined Scale Ventures, how did you find yourself in this new place?

BC: I am now CMO of Scale Ventures, but I’d never considered doing VC marketing before. It had never even crossed my mind to look into that as a route, even though I live 10 minutes from Sand Hill Road and everyone I know seems to work at a VC. It wasn't on my radar. I started looking for a job and I didn't have a lot of inbound from recruiters, which I'm not used to. I'm used to lots of inbound recruiters, but this job market sucks. This recruiter reached out, and my first instinct was – not interested. CMO job, that's not my thing. I'm a comms and brand lady through and through.

Through each conversation, it became clearer to me what VC marketing is – it’s comms, brand, thought leadership, and content marketing. It's all the things that I'm best at. I liked the people and it was, as you would expect, a very long process. I spent time before I joined learning what to expect. But I had no idea six months ago what this looked like. Now every day, I’m like, "This is so cool. Is this real? Do I really get to focus on this and no revenue? I don't have people yelling at me about proving that my job matters because they get that brand matters." It's the best.

SG: I've been deep in the VC weeds for way too long, so I've lost my objectivity. You're coming into this fresh. What’s most interesting about it to you? What's challenging?

BC: In the VC marketing world, it's a very small community. All of the people who work as operators of VC firms all know each other and get together, and that's so cool. I come from cybersecurity where there is a similar community and I really value that. I've been missing that the past couple of years in my last couple of jobs. That's allowed me to just have these very frank conversations with peers right out of the gate, telling me, "These are our pain points, these are the things you should focus on, this is where you can win." And I'm hearing the same thing from everyone.

The hardest thing to do is have the attention of the investors, who you need for thought leadership, for content, to show up at events and speak at events, to do the stuff that you need them to do in order to start to create some momentum, build their brands, and build the brand of the firm. But what I do like about it is that I get to focus on the Scale brand, which, spoiler alert, part of why I was hired is to refresh the brand, and to create new messaging that we can all really get behind, and make it very clear what Scale represents. That is my jam. I love doing stuff like that.

On the flip side, I'm also helping the individual investors and their brands. That is just as important as the Scale brand itself because VC is so relationship-driven. All VCs are selling money, that's the product. The product is the people and the approach. How do you articulate that to the world? That's hard. But I'm up for that challenge. It's hard because you need to have all of these people participate, but there’s also so much freedom. As an outsider, I think there's a lot for the VC marketing world to learn from consumer or B2B marketing.

SG: While mimicry is often a prevailing marketing strategy of VC firms, the best ones always do what’s right for them. How are you finding your right thing?

BC: There's a ton of value in the really cerebral, hard-hitting pieces of content, but there's a ton of value on the flip side – the bite-sized, consumable, higher level content that doesn't always have to come off as “VC-smart”. This is true for all executives, this isn't necessarily a VC issue. There is a worry that if it's not a super polished, high production piece of content, then it's going to reflect badly. I would argue the exact opposite, the more real unpolished human content is really what moves the needle for personal brands and for corporate brands.

There are the VCs who are the big personalities, like that's their thing. I'm not trying to do that. There's a ton of white space between the super academic VCs, who are more quiet and then the very loud, in-your-face – I knew nothing about VC, but I know everything about Andreessen Horowitz, right? That's because their content is everywhere all the time. The white space in the middle is where I want to try to occupy.

SG: You can't be just a deep strategist, be great at narrative and be successful. The role requires that perspective but also the ability to be a taskmaster. Because you actually need partners to do stuff. They have to feel like, "Hey, I want to be part of this, and I'm going to actually spend X hours a week contributing to this because it's important," which is, for some, a new muscle.

BC: 100%. For most, it's a new muscle. Once you start doing something, it's easier to do more of it. But getting them to start is what's hard because it is scary, it's new, it takes time. There's the worry of what if I look stupid? All of those things create this massive barrier to entry for me as the marketing person. One of the major skills that this job requires is the ability to build consensus and create the relationships. Because there is no CEO – there's no one person who gets to ultimately make the decisions. Everything is decision by committee, or decision by a few people. The only way you get things done is to get enough people to get on board with your idea.

SG: Hopefully, you're in a situation where there truly is no CEO. Because sometimes, there's four people who think they're the one person.

BC: I don't know the politics well enough, but in my interview process, it was one of the main points they were looking for – are you able to build consensus? Brand is a perfect example. The investors are everywhere from 24 years old to probably 60. We span three generations. I'm somewhere in the middle. Getting everybody to agree on “what is the brand personality of this firm” is going to be a real challenge for me. How everyone is thinking about VCs is vastly different from one another, even within the same firm.

SG: One technique of getting people to do stuff is modeling that behavior. You've been modeling that behavior in spades on LinkedIn. We'll get into the actual personal brand stuff in a second, but just from a Scale Venture perspective, they're looking at you, they're searching your LinkedIn, they're like, "Oh, this is a lot." How was that conversation?

BC: My brand and my ability to build a personal brand was attractive to them from a, "We want somebody who understands how to build brands, both personal and corporate." Midway through my interview process, two months into it, I had a post go viral that I didn’t think was provocative. 20 million views later, literal death threats, emails, calls – I was getting calls to my cell phone with people threatening me because I had posted about “he who shall not be named” doing a Nazi salute. All I said was, "We shouldn't normalize Nazi salutes. This is disgusting, blah, blah, blah." That got brought up in my interview process, because it was, "Everyone and their mother has sent me this post that you've written. Are we going to see political posts?"

I have a large following and what I say carries weight. The answer is no, I don’t use LinkedIn for politics. And I learned my damn lesson even getting near it. I have strongly held views, that in that realm, but I just don't even want to touch it with a 10-foot pole. It was interesting to have that specific thing come up as, "We want to talk about your brand, but in this context. Because ‘CMO of Scale Ventures’ is going to show up with whatever you post." Somebody in that interview process asked me, "What is your brand?" I realized in that moment that I had never really articulated, even in my own head, what my brand is. It’s being the authentic-communications-lady-with-ADHD – those are the Venn diagrams, authenticity, ADHD, and communications, and then there's just randomness interspersed in there.

SG: Well, it was awesome that you were able to directly have this conversation in your interview process.

BC: Fair for them to ask. When that question came up, I didn't say, "Oh my god, I wish I hadn't posted that." I said, "I still believe in my intent for that post. I'm Jewish, I see rising antisemitism." Every person there, I'm sure, agreed. As a Jewish person, you are free to express your feelings about antisemitism. At the end of the day, I don’t think it was an issue.

I've only built this personal brand recently, so I've never really had to balance my personal brand with my corporate brand, and so I’m figuring that out as I go. There's opportunities where my personal brand will super help my corporate brand. My audience overlaps very much with the audience that Scale is trying to reach. How can I leverage that? That's great, but I'm still trying to figure out what the balance is.

SG: For your partners, sometimes just starting is the hardest part.

BC: On my third day, my boss had an article coming out in Crunchbase, he was going to share it online. I was like, "Look, I'm going to send you questions that are just questions teeing you up to answer exactly something from the article, so no new content. Just regurgitate what you say and I'm going to videotape you." He said yes and was a good sport. I walked into his office with a tripod and a mic and we just did an interview. It turned into an awesome video that he was able to share on LinkedIn. It got at least as much engagement as his normal posts do. I had a number of people say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you got him to do a video. I love that video, it's so good." It was not hard for him, it took 10 minutes out of his day. I did the editing and then gave him something to use.

SG: And hopefully the other partner down the hall is like, “How come she gets that? I want that too."

BC: For sure. That FOMO, that's worked in my past lives too. You create FOMO with the execs and then more want to participate and see. That's how it's worked. We'll see if that works.

SG: How did your own LinkedIn journey start?

In a previous role, I was hired to build a brand that sat on top of a portfolio of companies that had nothing to do with one another, B2B, B2C, all over the place. The brand that we built was all about flexibility and was all about leaning into doing work the way that you needed to do it. I started talking very openly about my neurodiversity, I have ADHD. I would use that as the, "This is why I need flexibility at work. If you tell me what tool to use and how to use it, sure, I can do something. But if you just say, 'Here's the outcome I want you to drive,' and let me do it, I'll give you something amazing." That snowballed into, "We should do research about this."

We put money behind a survey and did research that got picked up in the New York Post, really quality coverage. Not my favorite publication, but still. The fact that they were talking about neurodiversity was shocking. My brand then became – comms lady with ADHD. I just started talking about that on LinkedIn. As soon as I started talking about it, not in a polished way, but I write like I talk. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to follow me.

SG: Why do you think what you’re posting has so much resonance and gets so much feedback?

BC: Authenticity. That's it. There's no secret formula. I show up as I am. I'm a generally likable person. I show up as I am and I say the quiet part out loud. Those are the two pieces that contributed to my success. I don't have cool graphics, big billboards, quotes, and all of that. I post selfies and I post leadership things that I've learned along the way, or I post, "Here's something that I struggle with because I have ADHD, but here are the things that are awesome about me because I have ADHD." Whether you are a parent of a kid with ADHD, or dyslexia, or whatever, you're like, "Thank God, somebody is just showing up as their true ass, quirky self and still being awesome."

If one person sees that and feels like, "My kid's going to be okay," that means everything. I've had so many people reach out to me, I want to say hundreds who are like, "I could never talk about this out loud, but after I saw that podcast you did, I was able to bring it up with my manager and now I have the accommodations that I need." That is exactly why I show up all the time. That's why people follow me, because I say things that people aren't always comfortable saying themselves. If they see somebody else saying it, at least they feel like, "Okay, I can reshare that or I can like that, and I can feel like my voice is heard in the same way."

SG: You have a new podcast that you're doing, and the theme effectively is like, "Give comms people more credit. We're more valuable than you think we are and we're doing really important things. You probably should know that." This is a conversation we've been having in this industry for 20+ years. What about this moment is making it more timely and resonant?

BC: We have always had this problem. It has never been as acute as it is now. That is pressure for in-quarter revenue and when you need to cut something, it's really easy to cut the internal comms team. What do they do? They don't generate revenue. PR – what do we need another article for? We can cut them. The comms job landscape is driving a lot of my advocacy for communications and a lot of my snarkiness about communications. That's also why it resonates with people. I’m at a place in my career where I have privilege. I wouldn't want to go work somewhere where I couldn't be my unfiltered ADHD self. That means that I can say things that might offend some people. That is why people like me. Not because I'm saying things that offend people, because I can say things that they can't. It’s real stuff like, "Hey, you guys all undervalue us. Let me tell you why, and then let me tell you why that's stupid."

If I'm a comms manager, I can't post that. My boss is like, "Are you crazy? You can't post that because then are you talking shit about your executive team?" I feel like I’m painting a picture of that in a way that just feels refreshing. There's just not a lot of people talking about it. There's a bajillion marketing gurus out there building their brands. Other than Perry, I haven't seen a lot of people talking about comms generally. Perry is more PR-focused, but even then, he touches on a lot of the stuff that we feel in all of these roles.

There's a lot of people who are really niche, they talk about internal comms, brand stuff specifically, how to make videos. But the general “comms matters” argument – why do we let everybody make us feel like we don't matter? I would argue to say we matter more than just about any other function. What other function looks across the entire org, besides a CEO, who needs to understand every single function? Maybe finance, but they sure as shit don't understand comms. I have yet to meet a finance person that understands that we're not just a PR team. That drives me freaking batty, because who do you think makes culture? Who do you think helps your sales team close deals because people have actually heard of our company before? Who do you think makes you like the CEO after they've just laid off half of the staff?

SG: We started Mixing Board because of all these things. The more people who are more effective at communicating this, the better off we will be.

BC: All the conversations happening in MB are exactly the conversations that I'm having. It's just that it's happening behind closed doors because it's a safe space. We need safe spaces. We also need the people who are advocating for it out loud, because finance isn't in that meeting. Finance isn't there hearing how important comms is to the overall brand and future of the company.

SG: What kind of advice are you giving the more junior people who are hitting you up in your DMs?

BC: This comes up the most lately, and I do have a few pieces of advice. Number one, be the "I'll figure it out" person. Comms is always a scrappy team. Somebody says, "Hey, none of us know how to make a video, but we need to make videos for social because the COO asked for one."

"You know what? I'll figure it out." Be that person, because, one, you become invaluable, two, you learn all sorts of new shit that then makes you way better at your job, and three, everybody likes you. Everybody likes the person who is always like, "I'll do that. Sure." If you threaten to leave, they're like, "What can I do to get you to stay?" I've never not had a company try to get me to stay when I quit, and that is because I'm the "I'll figure it out" person. I cannot stress that enough.

Very much related to that – do things scared. You're never going to be ready for it. If you’re saying to yourself, "Once I do this, I'll be ready to do that." You're never going to be ready to do that. I said in 2015, I'm never going to be a VP because I'm going to go analyst relations my whole life and I'm going to work at smaller companies. There just aren't VPs of analyst relations, and so I'm just going to have to be happy with being a senior director. Two years later, I was running an entire comms organization.

That was because somebody I had worked with previously was like, "I want you to come run this comms organization. I trust you and I know you'll figure it out." I did, and there you go. I did it scared, terrified. I was faking it every day. I had no idea what I was doing. I'll figure it out, do it scared, and wear all the hats. If you're in communications, do exec comms, do analyst relations, do social media, make videos. That's how you get really, really good at your job.

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