Startups

Stephen Lee

As the Communications Strategy Director at San Francisco and the host of the “Get Known” media and PR podcast, Stephen Lee has insights and experience galore. Our CEO Ben had the chance to meet up with him at Slush 2022 to get his hot takes on the evolving world of PR & communication.

Tess Lawrence

December 2, 2022 · Updated August 28, 2026 · 2 min read

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Highlights

With a background in engineering, working for companies like General Motors and Bosch, Stephen moved to Helsinki to get his MBA at the Helsinki School of Economics.
Why San Francisco? Our CEO worked at Nokia in San Francisco and wanted to bring that spirit of communications back to Finland.
Where marketing is getting what you say about yourself out there, PR is about getting other people to talk about you.
One thing San Francisco has learned is how important it is to understand the media and where journalists come from.
Working with companies like Sulapac, trying to remove microplastics from the environment, is interesting because they’re not out there talking about the product all the time. The change and the difference here is about what the purpose is.
In addition, relevancy is added when Sulapac lines up with the Climate Summit (COP27) in Egypt going on right now.
To break through to journalists, they need to have 4 things: Honesty (realism), originality, relevancy, and humanity. When you maximize all four of these, that’s when you have the best chances.
Recently, San Francisco got an award for an amazing campaign with VTT coffee who made a bioreactor to duplicate coffee cells and avoid the environmental destruction of rainforests.
The most important thing I could say is to do is research the press you would like to be part of when attending conferences like Slush 2022.
Think about what it is that people want to hear and not just what it is you want to say. It’s the difference between really having someone remember you… or not.