At pre-seed and seed stage, many scientific and technical startups don’t have a comms specialist on board. So pitch decks are puzzled together in endless iterations, website copy is written off the cuff, and the founders just riff in interviews.
That may work out fine until the company starts truly scaling and you may face a growing amount of media interest and scrutiny.

In this episode you will hear from Sarah Rall, Vice President of Communications and Brand at Cherry Ventures. Based in London, Sarah has faced journalists digging for dirt and media crises, been through the communications journey of a startup all the way to IPO, and supports startups across their portfolio. Cherry’s 2022 fund is 320M large, with 50% of their fund reserved for supporting their founders on their growth journey.

In this episode, you will find out what comms pitfalls to avoid on your startup growth journey, including an essential tool for aligning your growing

Links

Connect with Sarah Rall:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahrall/

Check out Cherry Ventures

https://cherry.vc/

Connect with the host:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/⁠⁠⁠

marina@wearekinetik.com

Could use some help with your comms?

Check out https://www.wearekinetik.com/

How can you adapt your pitch on the fly to a potential customer, to an investor, or to a generalist audience? Today you can listen in on a live consulting session where I help a founder crack this question.

In this episode, I'm consulting Oliver Siegel, the co-founder and CEO of the deep tech startup Magmatic Bio. Magmatic designs synthetic proteins that separate critical metals from each other.

Connect with the host:

⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/⁠⁠⁠

marina@r2g.media

Need help communicating your tech?

https://www.wearekinetik.com/

Check out Magmatic

https://magmatic.bio/

Connect with Oliver

https://www.linkedin.com/in/siegel-oliver/https://www.linkedin.com/in/siegel-oliver/

If your startup needs to speak to very different audiences — investors, corporates, consumers — this episode lays out why that skill matters more than most founders think.

How you explain your work changes depending on who’s in front of you, and that can decide whether people actually understand what you do. If you’re selling cookies, fine. If you’re building a complex solution to a complex problem, communication becomes core to the product.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Nina Mannheim, previously the co-founder and CPO of Klim. Klim started back in 2019 in Berlin, when “regenerative agriculture” was still a barely known term. The team had to figure out how to make a complicated topic land with groups who had completely different levels of context and completely different interests. Not easy — but they still managed to raise a 22M Series A in 2024.

What Klim learned applies far beyond agriculture.

00:00 – Why stakeholder communication matters
00:42 – Klim’s origin and early challenges
02:23 – Business model and stakeholder map
03:41 – Why consumers still mattered
06:26 – Building credibility as a tiny startup
09:07 – Which stakeholder group was hardest
12:20 – Early communication mistakes with farmers
23:45 – Tailoring communication for investors

Links

Connect with Steve Molino:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamannheimer/

Check out Klim

https://www.klim.eco/

Connect with the host:

⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/⁠⁠

marina@r2g.media