We like to talk a lot today about how great it is that we don't see ads. That's kind of lie. They are certainly there and we see them everyday, it's just now em

We like to talk a lot today about how great it is that we don't see ads. That's kind of lie. They are certainly there and we see them everyday, it's just now embedded in the content itself. The journos can't compete, because the PR firms block access to coverage unless the story is preconceived. Paul Graham wrote an essay about how everyone should get a PR firm to...let's be honest, lie, about their startups. Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html He leans really hard on the idea that it's not lying, but he doesn't make a great case for it to be anything less. See: Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.