The Scoop: Astronomer skyrocketed to fame as an embarrassing meme. What now?

It’s the kind of crisis that can make any PR practitioner break out into a cold sweat. Your CEO is caught on a Coldplay kiss cam with the chief people officer in what appears to be not only an interoffice romance but also an affair. They react comically, over-the-top. It becomes an instant meme and a joke that appears on news broadcasts and is lampooned at events around the world.

That’s the situation that Astronomer, an obscure, 500-employee data-driven SaaS company, found itself in.

Today, let’s not focus on their HR troubles, though those are immense. CEO Andy Byron has resigned from the company, but surely an investigation will be ongoing into the extent of this relationship and how it may have impacted other areas of the business.

But 500 employees woke up this morning and went back to work at a company in chaos. Customers who rely on the company for software solutions are now wondering if it’s safe to stay with such a tainted company or if the organization can continue to prioritize their needs amid such distractions.

Astronomer addressed this in the same X post that announced Byron’s resignation.

“Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI. While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not. We’re continuing to do what we do best: helping our customers with their toughest data and AI problems.”

Why it matters: This embarrassing situation will echo for some time. It may have legs as a pop cultural moment, perhaps becoming part of the standard “turn the camera on the audience” moment beloved at minor league sporting events and concerts. It may continue to resonate as a meme online, circulating in social media responses for years to come. But right now, a company has to figure out how to keep working, serving customers and keeping employees happy amid incredible distraction.

This statement is a solid first step. They took a moment even amid all the noise to introduce themselves to an audience who did not know what Astronomer was. They acknowledged that suddenly, far more people knew who they were, but not necessarily what they do. And they ended by refocusing on their most important stakeholders: customers and employees.

There are certainly far more communications happening today at Astronomer via email, townhalls and other private channels. But the company cleverly took this moment to subtly introduce themselves. They’re right: their awareness has gone through the roof. While that’s a liability now, once they’ve righted the ship with a permanent leadership change, the name recognition may help close deals — if they lay the proper groundwork now.

It’s far from certain, but with careful management, this could lead to growth moving forward.

Or ruin.

Editor’s Top Reads:

• In April, Amazon pledged that it would hold the line on prices amid tariff increases. But months later, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that prices have risen significantly on hundreds of products — even those that are manufactured in the U.S. or which haven’t increased their sale price to Amazon. For instance, a can of Campbell’s Soup, which is manufactured in the U.S., has seen a 30% increase in cost. A stackable wire storage basket doubled in cost, though the manufacturer says they’re still charging Amazon the same price. “We have not seen the average prices of products offered in our store change up or down appreciably,” Amazon said in a statement to the Journal. “Our commitment to offering low prices — not relative percentage changes — is what delivers the most value to our customers.” This statement isn’t likely to reassure many. Is 30% not “appreciable” to most people? Their attempt to play off the Journal’s investigation as a gotcha by referencing “relative percentage changes” is also ineffective, especially when you note that the same investigation found that Walmart had lowered prices on similar items by 2%. This is a reminder that your statements and actions must align or you wind up with a headline worse than simply raising prices in the first place. Additionally, even though journalism may be struggling, they’re often still watching what you do.
• The hot new Silicon Valley buzzword is “best in breed,” according to the New York Times. The jargony phrase, obviously borrowed from the posh world of purebred dog shows, attempts to position companies as the best at doing one specific thing, rather than megacorps like Microsoft or Google, which do many things pretty well. “They are selling by first appealing to frontline employees, who then put pressure on an organization,” Andy Wu, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, told the Times. While the term itself may quickly become played out, the strategy itself has appeal. Rather than trying to be the everything company, focusing on the one thing you do better than anyone and the bespoke service your organization can provide. Avoid jargon — but steal the vibes.
• Agentic AI — that is, AI that can move outside of a chat window and perform tasks — is one of the next big trends. ChatGPT has just made a big step toward making this form of artificial intelligence more accessible and useful with a new model that can create PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets and more. In a video announcing ChatGPT agent, a developer describes asking AI to pull budget data from a PDF on the city of San Francisco’s website and reformat it into an Excel sheet meeting his specifications. While the agent works, the dev went for a coffee. Eventually, it was 98% correct, he said. This could promise big time savings in building decks, cleaning media lists and more, but again, we must worry about job loss. Think of what you can do in those down moments instead of getting coffee to continue to prove your worth as a human.

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.