Welcoming Ilan Cedillos as Uncork's First Head of Communications

If you’d told me that our next great hire would be a flamenco guitarist with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek, I probably would have said “lovely, but can they write a seed announcement?”

Turns out, yes. And a whole lot more.

All of which is why I’m thrilled to announce that Ilan Cedillos has joined us as our (first-ever!) Head of Communications.

The story begins with our planning offsite back in January. Every year the whole team gets together in a room to figure out what would make the biggest difference to our founders over the next twelve months. Two days, a whiteboard, and a great deal of disagreement later, one priority had outlasted the others: storytelling.

I’ve written before that storytelling is one of the few real advantages left at the earliest stage. When it costs almost nothing to build software and five companies show up in a market in the same quarter, the one that can explain why it exists tends to win. We decided it was time to put real investment behind that belief, both for Uncork and our portfolio companies.

And so began our quest. I started describing our dream hire to Adriana, our Head of Talent. We’d need someone who’s worked both in agencies and in-house and who actually loves the chaos of early-stage. They’d have to be able to switch between working with our founders and shaping Uncork’s own narrative in the same week. Basically, someone who’d do for comms what Adriana does for our talent. I’m fairly certain I used the word “unicorn” more than once.

And then we found Ilan. We met a lot of impressive people, but after a few meetings it was clear he was the one. He’s a comms person at heart, but he’s also done brand and product marketing at early-stage startups, which is not something you find in one package. Most people pick a lane, while Ilan appears not to have noticed there were lanes at all.

He started on the agency side working with companies like Salesforce, and, as it happens, Segment, who liked him enough to hire him. He joined them when they were around 200 people (including Adriana!) and built out their comms function, running it all the way through a $3.2 billion acquisition by Twilio, and doing a lot of brand work along the way.

Most people who’ve ridden a rocketship through an acquisition like that spend the next chapter somewhere bigger and calmer. Ilan went the other way. He joined Attio, the London-headquartered AI CRM, at around 20 people, well before there was a public product, and helped shape the company’s story: the mission, the positioning, the narrative. Then he led the launch to market, built out product marketing, and ran comms as well.

At Uncork, Ilan will drive our voice and brand, and will be a trusted thought partner and advisor to our founders on everything from narrative to positioning to how they tell their story to the world. Several of our founders are already working with him.

Outside of work, Ilan is a Bay Area native, a Berkeley grad, a devoted dad, and (as previously mentioned) a long-time flamenco player and Trekkie of considerable depth.

Which feels fitting - the whole reason we made this hire is that the best companies aren't necessarily the ones with the best product: they're the ones that can make the world understand why they exist. Ilan is, in the most literal sense, our Universal Translator, turning what our founders build into a story people actually want to hear. I couldn't be more excited to have him helping our companies boldly go.

Please join me in welcoming Ilan to the Uncork team!

– Andy