Ed Garsten’s guest is longtime PR pro/marketer and current chief marketing officer at Rendezvous Robotics Kim Jennett.
They discuss how Kim turned a single release into its own news cycle, how she works with influencers to build coverage, her approach to pitching reporters and of course, how she uses AI.
TTAC Creator Ed Garsten hosts ” Tales from the Beat,” a podcast about the automotive and media worlds. A veteran reporter and public relations operative, Garsten worked for CNN, The Associated Press, The Detroit News, Chrysler’s PR department and Franco Public Relations. He is currently a senior contributor for Forbes.
The TTAC Creators Series tells stories and amplifies creators from all corners of the car world, including culture, dealerships, collections, modified builds and more.
A transcript, cleaned up via AI and edited by a staffer, is below.
[Image: YouTube Screenshot]
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Transcript:
Can one release trigger a new cycle on its own? Kim Jennette says it can—and she’s done it. Kim is the chief marketing officer at Rendezvous Robotics, and she’s my guest on episode 129 of Tales from the Beat, where we look at news and PR from both sides of the scrimmage line. I’m Ed Garsten. Here’s Kim.
Ed: Hey, Kim. How are you?
Kim: Hi. It’s great to be here.
Ed: Thanks for coming on the podcast. We’re going to talk about this feat you pulled off, but first let’s talk a little about you and your career.
Kim: I started my career right out of college during the internet boom in 1994. In 1995, I quit my job and went to my boyfriend’s house—his friend was an engineer—and I said, “We’re about to create an agency.” I asked them how much money they had on their credit cards. That boyfriend later became my husband of almost 30 years, so I guess it worked out.
For eight years, we ran an agency that built startups and brick-and-mortar websites, going back to the Netscape 1.0 days. That’s when I got the bug for doing things that had never been done before.
From there, I moved into space tech. I got recruited into a company founded by the first employee of SpaceX and someone who had just sold his company to VMware. They teamed up to build smart satellites and small launchers—the CubeSats and small sats that companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab are now launching regularly. That’s where I started in space tech.
Ed: And now you’re at Rendezvous Robotics. You told me earlier you’re fractional. What does that mean?
Kim: I came out of ground transportation—somehow I went from terrestrial to orbital to lunar and back to terrestrial. I belong in orbit. While I was deciding what to do next, Rendezvous Robotics was introduced to me. Fractionally, I’m their CMO. They asked me to come on board even though as a small seed-stage company they don’t need to spend heavily on marketing yet. Working fractionally lets me take other projects while still giving them executive-level marketing support and building out their story and team from the start.
Ed: I’ve known a lot of people who’ve gone that route, and they love the freedom. You buried the lede, though. How did you turn a release into a news cycle?
Kim: It wasn’t pure luck, but there’s always some of that. I’d been seeing early hints—people talking about data centers in space. Jeff Bezos said something at a conference, and I told my company, “This is going to be a thing. This is going to go viral. This is our moment.”
We were partnering with a company called StarCloud—shout out to Philip, who’s great at social media. He and I went back and forth for a couple weeks on an announcement we had signed right before we came out of stealth. Rendezvous Robotics has only been out of stealth for two and a half months.
I chose a journalist I’ve worked with for years. I hadn’t given him anything on my current company yet, but this was the perfect story for him. Eric Berger—he wrote Liftoff and Liftoff 2. As soon as he published the story, Elon Musk responded, saying it made sense and that SpaceX would be doing this with Starlink. It validated everything we were doing. It’s a different play than ours, so it’s complementary, not competitive.
Then Google announced it. Amazon announced it. Sam Altman said OpenAI would be doing databases in space. The news cycle is still going—and it’s been three weeks. It moved beyond space tech into mainstream coverage.
Ed: Do you attribute that to picking the right reporter? Luck? Catching the right people at the right time?
Kim: A combination. Eric was the best possible reporter for the exclusive. This wasn’t big news—just an announcement between two small companies—but it became global. Philip was invited onto CNN and NBC News. It helped both companies. For Rendezvous, it opened a bigger conversation. This isn’t just about data centers in space; for us, it’s about infrastructure. The new frontier is about what we build once we get there. With New Glenn coming online, we now have two reusable U.S. rockets. Space access is no longer the story—space infrastructure is.
A lot of it was placement. But experience does matter—intuition, relationships, timing.
Ed: A lot of PR people are probably jealous right now. Many send out releases that get no replies or go nowhere. From your experience, what does it take for a release to break through the clutter?
Kim: PR people need to put the story together for the journalist. Reporters see so many pitches. If you don’t already have the story buttoned up—why it matters, why now, what the bigger picture is—they’ll swipe left. I spend more time on story development than on pitching. I’ll tell the journalist: “I saw this. I think it’s going to be a news cycle. You’re the right one for it.”
Ed: That’s true. So many releases have no news, or the news is buried. We’re all storytellers—PR or reporters. It’s like job cover letters: if you don’t tell your story effectively, it goes nowhere.
When you’re developing a story that can break through the clutter, how do you approach it?
Kim: You talk about “strings” on your podcast. I always called them “threads.” I like threaded, connected stories. When I build marketing teams, one of my frustrations is when things aren’t connected. I’m always collecting pieces of stories. When I see how they fit together into something bigger, that’s the pitch.
I sometimes include a quote or a detail that ties everything together, but I don’t send 20 pages. It’s a short, bulleted outline showing why the story matters and why now. I try to connect all the dots for them.
Ed: It’s very similar to how reporters gather string and weave stories together. We’re more alike than people think.
