How to be more funny on LinkedIn w/ Renée Shaw

Renée Shaw runs brand & social at tl;dv - an AI meeting assistant. She’s also one of the funniest people on LinkedIn. Her official job title is your mom @ tl;dv…

We talk about humor, how Renée runs her content strategy, information cascades, Linkedin’s algorithm, coming up with funny ideas, and why she has content scheduled our for 4 (!!!) months ahead.

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We discuss:

* Why there’s no strategy behind tl;dv’s comedy skits - and why that makes it work

* Renée's content system: Google Keep + Obsidian + Claude

* What “information cascades” have to do with LinkedIn’s algorithm and why some posts go viral, but not others

* How to correctly mention your product in comedy content

* Why AI can’t write jokes - but what it’s good at instead

* Her guaranteed ways NOT to be funny

* Andy Kaufman, Rick Rubin, and why the best creators eventually stop caring about the reaction

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Connect with Renée:

Renée’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneeeshaw/

Renée’s newsletter: unsupervisednewsletter.substack.com

tl;dv: https://tldv.io/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

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Some takeaways:

* Renee’s whole thesis is that people can feel when you want it too much. tl;dv’s content works because she’d be posting on LinkedIn whether or not anyone was paying her and the job didn’t change the energy, it just funded it. The second “being authentic” becomes a strategy, it stops being authentic. You can’t engineer nonchalance.

* When you mention your product, make it uncomfortably obvious rather than trying to blend it in. tl;dv puts tl;dv as a poll option in polls that have nothing to do with tl;dv, purely because it’s ridiculous. The logic: “If you ever need a meeting recorder, you’re going to think of us.” No faking excitement about features. No disguising it as content.

* Renee having four months of content scheduled isn’t a batching trick because the queue is her editing process. If she keeps pushing a post to the back, that’s the signal it’s not that funny. Three months in and she hasn’t touched it? It dies. No formal editing pass. The delay does that work automatically.

* You can’t take a real bet on being funny until you have psychological and financial safety. That’s Renee’s actual answer to “can you teach humor?”. If you’re in compliance or cybersecurity and a joke lands wrong, that’s a career problem. Wanting to be funny but also safe is a contradiction.

* Threads is Renee’s comedy club because its the equivalent of a small venue where comedians work out new material before the main show. One-liners go there first, no LinkedIn reputation on the line. If something does well, it moves to LinkedIn. Every creator needs a channel where they can safely bomb.

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