Priscilla Barolo on “Dating First” as a Consultant Before Going In-House
Mixing Board Studio Session
Priscilla Barolo started her career in non-profit programs and fundraising, and then got her MBA at Santa Clara University and made the transition into tech. She was employee 11 at Zoom where she spent the next decade building and running a world-class communications organization. As Head of Communications for Zoom, she owned the communications strategy through every major milestone and transition of the company during her tenure, including funding rounds, IPO, acquisitions, partnerships, investments, product and campaign launches, executive transitions, re-orgs, COVID-era expansion, and high-profile litigation. This September she started as the Head of Marketing & Communications at Neat, a company that designs simple and elegant video devices that make virtual meetings feel as engaging as face-to-face.
In this Studio Session, Priscilla and Mixing Board Founder, Sean Garrett, talk about how to maintain objectivity and honesty once you go in-house, why it’s important to focus on privacy and security as you scale, and the importance of connecting your work to cross-functional needs and overall company goals.
SG: You've gone on this typical Mixing Board journey from in-house, to not in-house, to in-house. Tell us about what you’re up to now – how you found Neat or how it found you.
PB: I'm not surprised to hear that a lot of people move in and out of being in-house. Comms is one of those “always on” jobs. You need those gaps to catch your breath and do something else until you’re ready to dive back in.
I’ve been connected with the Neat team for the past four years because of their partnership with Zoom. We collaborated on Neat’s launch and since then on several announcements. I knew their team and I knew their tech. They were also among my consulting clients in the past year; I helped them with a launch over the summer. When we started connecting about this role specifically, running marketing and comms, obviously I was very excited. I started there in September and have mostly been ramping up and teeing us up for a big 2024.
SG: Let's talk about dating first, as a consultant, and then joining a company. What are the benefits to getting to know a company from the inside before you decide to join them full time?
PB: If you have the kind of flexibility in your finances or your schedule to be able to take some time and get to know a company before jumping in, I think that's great. Particularly in a market like this, where a company will get really hyped up, but then there's not as much behind the curtain as you think. It gets really hard to pick winners, especially if you're looking at earlier stage companies. Getting to know a company before you jump in and devote your work to them is ideal.
From time to time, when I was talking to companies over my time consulting, they looked really cool – the website's cool, the team is smart… and then you dive in. One cautionary thing I saw, is the founder aligned with the concept of marketing and communications? If they don't understand it, are they willing to learn? Are they curious? Are they excited about it? This can sometimes be hard with technical founders. You often know within the first couple meetings – are they engaged in this and are they willing to put in the time and the effort it takes to get this right?
SG: How do you know that for sure? What's the difference between them saying that they get it and are engaged and them actually doing it?
PB: Are they giving you time and mind share? If I'm sending five Slacks and they're not responding, or I'm saying, "We need to get this done, can I get approval of this?" If they're not responding, you can figure that out pretty quickly even as a consultant. And honestly, it's time to move on. Even if they're giving you money, you should be thinking about who your next clients are going to be. Because this one's not going to last past a few months if you’re not able to execute on anything for them.
The other thing is product market fit. I remember I had one client say to me, "People think we're a vitamin, but we're really a medicine. They think we're not necessary, but we're really necessary." Once I start digging in, well, I can write that messaging, but I'm starting to think maybe you're not actually necessary. It’s not a messaging problem. You have to ask, is this business necessary? Is this business healthy? Sometimes you can only figure that out when you start digging deep.
Consulting was just great for me because I saw those fundamentals really line up at Neat. They're a little bit further along than a lot of companies I consulted with, and in terms of product market fit, traction, talent, product – it all lined up to be a great opportunity.
SG: In comms, you have people who have two sides of their brain, the in-house brain and the consultant brain. The in-house brain understands things deeply, it really gets in and understands sales, engineering, product and all the complexities that are behind the scenes, that unless you're in there dealing with them on a daily basis, it's more theory than reality. But the consultant brain is super objective. It's no bullshit. It's “tell it like it is,” and it doesn't play any politics. Do you think that's true? What do you feel like you give up when you transport yourself from consultant land into in-house land? How much do you try to retain that consulting brain?
PB: That is completely true. One of the things that I found hard about consulting was trying to get in and understand everything about a company and their customer. It requires a lot of time, on the part of your client, to really explain it all to you. In the end, you're still just missing so much context. And if you have multiple clients, you're just not thinking about their business as much as they're thinking about their business. Sometimes I felt like they never had my A-game. Even if I knew I was being additive, it wasn't quite the same as waking up and going to sleep thinking about one company. But often I was able to add value because I could step back and say, “you think everyone understands this, but no one understands this, let’s work on it.” And to a certain extent, you are in your bubble when you get in-house.
At Neat, since I'm still new, I'm still able to have that objective consultant brain and go, say, "I don't think outsiders understand this thing we’re trying to say," or "I think this is an asset that we're underplaying." I also try to listen to colleagues who are very close to customers, like CSMs and salespeople. Or even get directly with customers at trade shows and other events. When you come in-house, you have to find ways to get outside your bubble and really listen. That all said, overall for me personally, I find it more rewarding to be in-house.
SG: What was hard for you as a consultant? There are a lot of longtime in-house people who are now going into consulting for the first time. What advice would you give them?
PB: You have to step back and ask, what do I want to get out of this, how hard am I willing to work on this, and what is my offering? Consulting was great for me because I wanted to take my foot off the gas a little bit, but still stay engaged, network, and learn.
My husband still works full-time and has a great job, so we had that flexibility where I could take several months to really build a book of work. And I could say no to projects. You have to be honest with yourself about the kind of flexibility you have in your situation. You have to ask, if this takes months to figure out and make work, can I do that? Not only that, the people I know who are really successful at this, they still work eight, nine hours a day. The benefit of consulting for them is the flexibility, but it’s not less work than in house. Are you willing to do that? I was looking for more like three to four hours a day until I was ready to jump back in-house.
The offering part is hard. I would caution people against telling themselves – people will just pay to talk to me or for my brainpower. That's what I had hoped, but at the end of the day, clients have to justify this expense. I had to come up with a work product that felt more tangible than just, "Oh, hey, you can talk to me for several hundred dollars an hour." I ended up with tangible offerings like messaging guides or documented plans that people could have.
Another thing I created was inspired by meeting that a lot of early stage startups had these very expensive PR agencies they were working with, but they weren't happy with them. And so I would help startups find a great agency or freelancer, contract that agency, manage that agency, and manage expectations on both sides. I didn't think I was going to come in and do that, but I listened to people over the first several months and that became a part of my offering.
So ask yourself these questions, and then just start to network, listen to people, and talk to people. That's how you're going to figure it out. But don't expect immediate wild success. I did go in with flexibility – if I love this, I'll keep doing it. If something else incredible pops up, that's great because I stayed fresh and I can hop into it. That was the right way to do it for me.
SG: You started in 2013 and spent nine plus years at Zoom. What was it like when you started?
PB: Oh it was very, very early. I can track the stages of my time at Zoom from when I would first say, "I work at Zoom, it's kind of like Webex, but it's better." Then I could say, "I work at Zoom, maybe you've heard of it. It's a video conferencing company." Then I would just go, "I work at Zoom."
Early on, it was literally just 10 guys – all guys – in two rooms. But even then, the product market fit was clear. Every week we'd get together and there would be new wins, new customers signed up. I'd get in with a customer to do a case study, they'd say, "I've tried dozens of solutions. Nothing I've ever seen has worked this well, please keep going." They'd say stuff like, "Tell me how I can help you get more people onto Zoom." The traction was clear to me very early on.
It was just that no shortcuts grind, day in and day out. Let's do this trade show, let's do this blog post, let's try this press release – for years and years. Janine Pelosi joining, that Series C, and then series D funding, those were the catalysts on the marketing side. Until then I was plugging away and trying to do my best. But I was still quite junior at that point, we really needed a strategic leader who was more experienced and we found that in Janine.
SG: You start with all this planning and then at some point you’re just riding the wave. Was there ever a moment where you were like, okay, I feel like we're in control of this story. I feel like we're able to tell it the way we want to do it? Or are you just surfing the entire time?
PB: Janine is fond of saying, "You don't own your brand." We spent a lot of time listening to our customers and then taking what they said and turning that into brand marketing. So for example, our first billboard was "Video conferencing that doesn't suck." That came from talking to people at trade shows. They would walk up to me and go, "We use XYZ solution. It sucks. Why would I try Zoom?" And then I would say, "Well, it doesn't suck." The happiness brand, “Meet Happy,” also came from the culture of delivering happiness. Customers would tell us, "This works and it just takes a lot of pressure and stress off of me." We were focused on customers, listening externally about what our brand was. And then connecting that to the brand campaigns versus the other way around.
SG: Obviously Zoom becomes a darling, especially in the tech world, and grows even more in the broader business world. Then you have a successful IPO. And then boom, COVID. All of a sudden your mom is on Zoom, kids are on Zoom, going to school on Zoom. People are doing golf lessons on Zoom. The world is on Zoom. You're mentioned on Saturday Night Live. I just want to know as a human, what was that like?
PB: It was crazy. Underlying this, we were all experiencing the collective global trauma of the pandemic of course. I was actually on maternity leave, December 2019-March of 2020. I went back to work a little early because we were getting thousands of articles written a month about Zoom, a hundred media inquiries a day, a million social mentions a month.
Then the other shoe dropped with various privacy and security concerns. And if you think about it, when you scale 30X in meeting participants in three months, it's scale, but it’s also the types of users. It's not just people having their board meetings. It's people having these public events, they're publicizing them on social media. Something's got to give when you scale that quickly. And it wasn't the infrastructure. That held up because of all the amazing partners and amazing employees we had. But these new use cases opened up a spotlight on some weaknesses. We had to deal with them one by one – it was a crash course in crisis comms and accountability. We came through, but it was several months of 16 hour days. You would never know what you would wake up to. You had to take it one thing, or ten things, at a time.
SG: All along you're operating as this new wave, but still buttoned down, enterprise communications. And then you suddenly have the consumer involved – for better or for worse. As a team, how did you guys think about that response? How did you deal with an entire new set of media that were covering you? Or entirely new communication channels? What was the conversation there?
PB: I give Janine and Eric a lot of credit here. They recognized that we had been working on brand awareness for so long, and suddenly brand awareness is not a problem. Signups are not a problem, revenue is not a problem. We have to set that aside. Now it’s all marketing engines towards user education and brand perception. We had to educate and take care of these new users as best we can – get on TikTok, get on Reddit, get on Good Morning America, do whatever you need to do to reach people so they better understand how to use your product. There were no in-person events anymore. So that entire team just got completely repurposed into doing social media and creating resources, and they understood their responsibility and were totally game.
On the other side we had to take care of our enterprise customers. We had to work with our frontline, our sales team, and our support team and let them know, here's the message on this, let's get this out. Here's the fix, please tell your customer. We were doing a very proactive, accountable kind of communications.
Janine was basically a wartime general, redeploying troops and keeping an eye on all these big picture things that for a lesser leader, maybe would've been paralyzing.
SG: You left in 2022, late stage pandemic. What was the big takeaway from the pandemic that you learned, as a comms team?
PB: I wouldn't have left any earlier. I knew what I had to do. Other people knew what I had to do, I had a clear remit and people respected that. Before I left I put in a really good leadership team in place. I left feeling like the team could handle this.
I learned a lot, specifically around crisis comms. That was an area where I had zero experience prior to Zoom. I learned some fundamental things, like put out your holding statement and get your facts in order before you start really talking. Or see if you can deal with something in a narrower capacity – if a customer's asking about this, we don't have to go publish a blog or tweet. Of course there are times when you need to act very widely, but when can we deal with a group of people first, take our time, that is best. Now, more so than any other general marketer you'd probably meet, I have my ears up for anything that could be a potential issue across the company. I don’t think of any area of the company as “not my job.” I'm much more interested in things like security and privacy than I was several years ago, because I know what can happen if you take your eye off the ball.
Also scaling that quickly – I had a team of seven when we IPOed and I had a team of about 35 a couple years later. These aren't huge teams, but having to scale quickly and also having to manage things that I don't have personal experience with, people who work for me understand them better. I was hiring people in social and PR that were much, much more expert in their specific field than me. How do I listen to them, consider my expertise at a strategic level (and my understanding of the company), understand the priorities and goals, and marry those together so that I can go and unblock things and make things happen when I'm not the subject matter expert myself.
I've really taken all that over in my new role because I'm running a full marketing team, which is not something I had at Zoom. So now I'm thinking about how to lead that team while I’m learning.
SG: What is it like going from a rocket ship company, now into an earlier stage startup?
PB: Frankly, I really enjoy this stage. I was looking for post product market fit, solid growth, fantastic culture – and that’s exactly where Neat is. Still pre IPO, still growing and getting there. That's where I can be most additive, and it's just more fun. Because I've seen things be built from an early stage to world class, whether that's operations or PR or whatever, I know what good looks like and I know what the end goal looks like. And not everyone I work with has seen that. I’m able to say, I can see the end here, let me describe what this could be like. And now let's figure out how we get there.
SG: What have you done differently in this role that you learned at Zoom? How are you applying lessons that you've taught yourself?
PB: One mistake I have made in the past was hiring someone even when my gut told me it was a risky move. I used to think that getting a person in was better than having no one. But the wrong person's actually worse than no one. It creates a lot of cycles and toxicity. So as we start to scale the org, I’ve learned to be very careful about who I bring in, that it’s actually better to lose it than use it when it comes to headcount, if it's the wrong person. You want to feel really comfortable and excited about the person before we bring them into the team. Because at the end of the day, the team is everything.
The other thing is where I keep my focus. There's times where you have to dig into the weeds, I’m doing that right now on a couple projects, but I really need to keep a lot of attention at the strategic level. I need to stay thinking about how to unlock resources, unblock cross-functional dependencies. Even if I go deep here and there, if I keep my eye on that, that’s going to be how I'm the most effective leader. Even at Zoom, once we got out of our battle fog, that's where I kept myself focused.
SG: If you were entering into comms now and really excited about doing comms for video companies – whether it's luck or not – what's your advice for young comms folks who want to walk in your shoes and follow the same path? You didn’t take a traditional path, how did that help you?
PB: I took a completely circuitous route and there was a fair amount of luck involved, so it's not like I’ll ever say, "Get this specific major, start in this specific role, do it the way I did it." But I can say, early on, I learned to listen to people all across the company. I focused on making sure I understood what the company's priorities and objectives were, because that helped me make better decisions even as a junior employee. So try your best to understand what the company needs to get done that year and align what you're doing to that.
Another thing I see all the time with younger employees where they don't know why a cross-functional partner wants some sort of specific thing, such as putting out an announcement on a tight timeline or some other ask that seems unreasonable. The younger employee will just gripe about how it’s unreasonable and push back. Instead of saying, “no, this is crazy,” step back and ask a lot of questions. Figure out people's priorities and motivations and the company’s priorities, and if something makes sense for the company even if it’s hard, try to find a way to get to yes. And if something doesn't make sense, find a way to push back but give them alternatives that solve for their root motivation. So, for example, “I know you want a press release about this customer. A press release doesn’t make sense for these reasons, but let’s do a case study!” It’s important to work on that cross-functional stakeholder engagement and really understand what your company needs from you.
And, finally, there's no shortcuts or hacks for building expertise in a subject matter area. It's just the time and the work, and the years (not months) that it takes to get really good at something.
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