SBS Comms

It “sounds good on paper, but the devil is in the details”, said Matthew Prince, chief executive of digital services group Cloudflare.

SBS Comms said ahoy to Seattle! ⚓️ This year, our entire team embarked on an adventure to the Emerald City for our annual retreat, and here's a behind-the-scenes look. We watched fish fly at Pike Place Market, took to the waters with boating, canoeing, and swimming, and enjoyed the finest company this side of the seven seas aboard a pirate ship. Seattle brought us closer together, beyond the realms of Zoom and Slack, as we celebrated our wins from the past year and created new waves of treasured memories! 🏴☠

In our line of work, few skills are more pivotal than strong and concise writing. August’s SBS for Good donation goes to 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization supporting under-resourced students with their creative and expository writing skills, on behalf of our Account Coordinator, Ella Rehman. 📖 Ella shares: “As a teenager, I attended writing classes at 826 Valencia, and in college, I supported younger students as a summer intern. I’ve seen firsthand how 826 Valencia cares for the local community, providing under-resourced students with a safe, supportive environment to foster creativity and build self-confidence.” 826 Valencia’s community services extend to three writing centers across San Francisco, in addition to programming in classrooms at over ten schools around the city. We’re proud to use this donation to support the next generation of communicators, playwrights, authors, speechwriters and storytellers.

"The U.S. Department of Defense is a mammoth organization. It not only employs millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, but also has the world’s largest military budget that’s used to buy and maintain more equipment than can likely fit into a single paragraph. It’s a lot to coordinate. Operators within the various agencies of the DOD must make decisions about how to plan their operations, coordinate resources, and stay within budget for events that are likely contested — whether that’s from a hurricane or an adversary. Two years after it was incubated, Virginia-based startup Defcon AI has raised a $44 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Fifth Growth Fund and Red Cell Partners, among others, to solve this seemingly intractable problem." https://lnkd.in/gTATA3yf

Love when a reporter surprises even him/herself by biting on a story. Congrats to our friends at AstroForge for raising Series A, turning skeptics into believers, and making real progress on the seemingly impossible. https://lnkd.in/e4tUvX4Q

Our client, Vimeo, is solving complicated and expensive problems with just a click of a button. 👆 Read the full Fast Company profile via the link in the comments to learn more about how Vimeo is using AI video translation to help teams expand their reach into dozens of different languages. 💬 Ashraf Alkarmi, Vimeo’s Chief Product Officer, summed it up best, “The goal is to democratize the use of really powerful AI capabilities.”

Join us in welcoming Amelia Frampton to the SBS team as our newest Account Manager. Amelia completed our Fellowship program in 2022 and we couldn’t be happier to have her back! 🎉 Amelia is a passionate public relations and communications professional with a love of crafting compelling narratives for companies across the technology industry. With a diverse portfolio spanning AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing, sustainability, manufacturing, IT, and cloud services, she excels in helping technology companies stand out in competitive markets. Amelia resides in Los Angeles, CA with her partner, dog, and guinea pig. 🐹

"Ramp is banking on AI to fuel its growth in the future. Cofounder and CTO Karim Atiyeh sees Ramp’s moonshot as eventually creating AI agents to serve as executive assistants or business negotiators. “I'm looking forward to the day where I could just tell Ramp, ‘Book my flight back home.’ And it knows where home is, when my last meeting is, what the policy of my company is, it’s all taken care of,” Atiyeh said. But for now, they’re focused on the nuts and bolts of daily business. For instance, the service can help businesses analyze vendor contracts by pulling out key details like pricing information and account seats. Then it compares prices and other information with aggregated vendor data from the more than 25,000 companies on Ramp. The software can also review compliance requirements, produce weekly digests about how the company is spending, and make sure customers aren’t wasting money on redundant tools from other vendors or duplicate account seats." Richard Nieva profiles Ramp in today's Forbes Daily Cover as part of the company's debut on the Forbes Cloud 100:

🗣️ One year ago, we launched OnBoard, a branch of SBS Comms designed specifically to provide strategic, scalable communications support to early stage startups. Today, we’re excited to announce that Mikaela Street is joining as a Vice President of OnBoard, marking a new chapter as we continue to increase our capabilities to provide support for the most exciting startups in tech. Mikaela is a punchy communicator with a soft spot for ambitious entrepreneurs and startups. As Vice President of OnBoard, her passion lies in working directly with founders, unearthing and crafting brand narratives and telling impactful stories so that people care. Mikaela’s experience spans the US, UK, and New Zealand, where she has worked both agency-side and in-house for the world’s most prominent brands such as Microsoft, Xbox, and Mastercard. She has also been responsible for crafting and leading numerous successful integrated campaigns for local and global startups in their infancy, through to those who have gained household-name status – including Slack, Uber, and Hinge. Cheers for what’s to come! 🚀

Robert Brooks IV, one of Lambda co-founders and vice president for revenue, told VentureBeat that the service works for companies building their own model to spin up the GPU power they need only when they need it. “Training is really computationally an engineering challenge from a hardware and software perspective,” Brooks said. “If you start an AI company right now, you need to get a lot of money to get a large cluster of GPUs and it takes time to even begin spinning that up.” https://lnkd.in/gGeq_jbr