In many ways, storytelling IS a key part of a founder's job. You're often pitching your company to someone: a prospective customer or employee, an investor, a journalist, a vendor, etc. The better you are at this, the better your company will do. This isn't a hard rule, and there are lots of counterexamples on both sides, but this has been mostly true in my experience.
FWIW my venture fund is an investor in ~150 companies, and I've run correlations for company success vs. a bunch of company attributes. "Founder's ability to pitch and sell" is one of a very small number of positive correlations that I've found over the last decade.
I had this realization somewhere in life. Many jobs (not just CEO) are highly dependent on "story telling" in a general sense. Which is a stylish way of saying, "being able to explain yourself and your motivations."
In grad school (molecular biology/genetics), various lab members would return from scientific conferences and the most common comment was "You should have heard <so-and-so's research talk>. She had a great story."
It made an impression on me. You can do the best research, make the best product, write the cleanest code, etc. But you will suffer if you can't tell the story.
Kind true. There are only two jobs of the CEO: hire and sell. Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part. There are things like integrity, vision, etc.
So I agree but I’m concern that focusing solely on “pitch and sell” is what gave us Nikola, Theranos, …
> Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part.
I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the main part of hiring and selling.
Hiring is convincing the employee you want why this company is the next chapter in their personal story, and how they fit into the story of the company and the product. Storytelling is the creation of meaning, and people take jobs because of what they mean for your life. For some people, that meaning is about making the world a better place, while for other's it's about how this job will generate more cold hard cash than you could anywhere else.
Similarly, selling is telling and justifying the story of how this product will change the customer's life for the better.
Integrity? Vision? Technical specifications? All part of the story you're telling.
Not all jobs involve story. If you're building an algorithm, story doesn't really factor into it. But convincing people is always done through a story -- "here's why X is better than Y". So to whatever extent your job in convincing people, it's about communicating story.
CEO's do other things too. Deciding which strategy they want to pursue isn't story, it's strategy. But then convincing everyone else to go along with the strategy -- that's story.
I guess I have much broader definition of sales and hiring. So I think we are saying the same.
Selling includes includes finding market, indetifing right people to sell to, product market fit, should we sell X or Y, etc. But the goal is to make money. If CEO does only storytelling then it is a scam.
Hiring is also much more complex then just convincing some person to join your company. Which person? How to find them? Location? Are they too expensive? Can they recuirt more?
Anyway my grandfather always told me that is you want to understand how companies work just like how the oldest profession in the world works. So what is responsibility of the pimp? Sell and hire.
> I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the main part of hiring and selling.
If your goal is to hire a person or sell a product, yes. I think what the OP was saying is that they are a small part because of other ethical concerns. Like, the OP was saying that selling many units of snakeoil is a failure because it's a scam. Or hiring contractors and motivating them to work hard and then using fine print to screw them out of their profit sharing (e.g. Hollywood accounting) is a failure.
> Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part.
I’ve always known storytelling to be fundamental to sales. So much so, that when I first went through sales training a decade ago it was predicated on “customer centrism” (as in customer centric selling) and punctuated by days worth of storytelling foundations.
They have one job important job. Keep the company funded. If that involves selling, great. If that involves opening up their own bank account to make it happen, great. Leveraging relationships, great as well.
That's so last-cen, when stuff actually had to work.
Pixar's story approach is all "I am the chosen one". It's not about someone who worked to make it happen. This came from George Lucas, whose stories are all about "the chosen one". His success changed film storytelling. Too much. Before Lucas, there were more "clawed their way up from the bottom" stories.
I've seen "I am the chosen one" pitches. The CEO of Better Place (electric cars using battery swapping stations) comes to mind. He was a really good speaker, he was really good looking, he knew several national leaders, and his business plan was total bullshit. Better Place went bankrupt.
Chosen one is good enough if investors can successfully bootstrap a ponzi scheme based on your persona.
The trick seems to be to create a dream, let the perceived company value increase based on that dream, and then pull out at the right moment, leaving the losses to investors who came too late.
It does. But in practice you'd have people trading their 6+ year old battery for a nearly-new one (even if it took them a dozen tries) to avoid the $12k expense of replacing it. You'd have to build that scenario into your business model somehow.
I think a better business might be battery pack refurbishment. Buy dead/worn out packs from mechanics, replace any bad cells or fuses, reseal them, and sell them with a 90 day warranty.
Why not treat it like a propane tank exchange? The company owns all the tanks(1); you don't own the tank(1) and aren't paying for the tank(1) (other than maybe a deposit to ensure you'll return it someday). When you swap it, you pay only for the propane(2) inside; you're just buying more of the contents.
You'd need the deposit to be the price of buying a battery, because unlike a metal tank a high capacity lithium battery is pretty useful if you never use that company's charge facility again, but if the status quo is that the company only swaps their own serial numbered batteries within certain time frames, the whole notion of swapping an old one for a new one is meaningless. Sure, sometimes people will wreck a battery but return it anyway, like any lease business, but there's no way of using them as a general bad battery disposal service
Swapping old for new IS meaningless and not the goal. In fact some swaps would inevitably be new-for-old. The company would own both, so who cares. This idea is only about swapping depleted for charged, so you don't have to wait around while it charges. Obviously the only way it would work is if swapping were made easier and faster than charging. As for abnormal or unusual occurrences, if a battery is nearing end-of-life the customer can do the company the favor of reporting it, or the company can find out themselves by testing it. If you demonstrably wreck one, or just keep it, the company has your deposit (which I agree should be close to the price of the battery), and you just bought a battery.
It's early and people still fetishize the batteries a bit, but they're really just containers for the thing we actually want - the charge.
A propane tank can have a useful life over 20 years, while a battery pack will wear out quicker than that. Or become obsolete because new technology is developed, or the vehicle manufacturer changes the design making older ones incompatible. So you'd have to account for that possibility in what you charge.
Battery swapping could have been a good idea, if instead of telling a story:"We'll replace all the cars in the world, we are already talking with heads of state", they've said:"As a first step, let's concentrate on a small niche best fitting for battery swapping, like Taxis[1], Build a network/business, and expand from that".
[1]Taxis drive a lot, so the savings from battery swapping are much more compelling compared to the car costs. And many taxis drive only within city range, so no range anxiety.
Tesla beta tested this in California a few years ago - between LA and Santa Barbara. I received an invite to try it out but never did. They shut it down a year or two later.
I think they are making good strides on fast charging and decided not to lean into the swap.
I suspect that for every problem there are dozens of teams capable of solving it, but only one or two will receive enough funding and attention to reach the escape velocity. Investors know it so they want to bet on the team that other investors will want to bet on.
Ergo your job as a founder is to convince the investors and the journalists that you are the chosen one. Either that, or bootstrap.
There's a large body of people, particularly here, who measure success by how much money you can raise, and nothing whatsoever about actually running a viable business.
I think part of the problem is motivation. I equate the people that strive for VC approach just want to get rich. They don’t care about their employees or their users; they are a means to an end. Raising money assures them no matter what happens to the company they will have a payout even with liquidation preference. Not all VC raises are bad given the right motivation, but more often than not greed comes into the calculation.
I mean, the alternative is to grind out an eking existence on nights and weekends until you're bootstrap profitable and then a "Chosen One" gets funding, or a FAANG comes along and eats your little niche for breakfast...the motivation for raising funding comes from survival instincts.
The CEO of my old Fortune 500 laid out our Foundations thusly:
"Make money". This isn't the most important thing, but it is the means by which all of these other things are done... then he listed the "things that are important"
That is what we're told before entering academia and small business/non-profit ownership. But lo and behold in reality most of one's time is spent chasing grants, contracts, and other funding.
I have worked with founder-CEOs who saw their roles as solving all the problems. The message was, if anything is ever not going by the book, call me, I'll come look at it myself. Not only does this alienate smart employees, but it grinds the company to a halt once it's at a scale where two or more of these situations can happen concurrently.
The best leaders I've worked with have (implicitly) spun narratives about the problems we're solving, the ways we're approaching them, the kind of people we are, etc. which lead everyone to find within themselves the (mutually agreeable) answers about what to do next.
Problems have lots of solutions. Often a company looking for say “SaaS application to streamline expense processing” has 50+ options. How they pick one from that 50 has more to do with how memorable the company is (storytelling) than the features (engineering).
Define 'startup' and 'founder'. These are not necessarily useful things compared to 'inventor' or 'coder'. But the job is most definitely founding a sort of cult around whatever you say you are, and getting other people to imagine pretty things about what you haven't done and maybe never will do. That's a startup founder.
In a sense, this too is a real problem. People will burn a lot of money, time and resources as long as their fundamental motivation is to chase a pipe dream.
Both options work, but you have to choose one style depending on the stage and type of the startup.
If you are founding a new coffee shop, or a trading company, probably you should spend more time working on the actual problem. But if you are founding a future tech (eg SpaceX at its beginning) or anything that requires huge capital or fast scaling in team size, you should spend more time on getting everyone buying the story and provides you with talent and capital to actually solve it.
Effective leaders tell the stories that attract and retain key people, enable them with resources and put their works into the world. This is a key difference between ventures and small businesses. If the CEO thinks that is beneath them, they’re micromanaging a glorified one-person shop.
The technically-superior badly-coördinated solution losing to a well-communicated one is a Silicon Valley, business, political and military trope for good reason.
There are plenty of "real problems" whose solutions failed not because they didn't work, but because the founders couldn't communicate effectively.
A great solution without good communication is just as worthless as an aspirational pitch deck with no solution. Both result in a problem not getting solved.
What "real problems" are these? Speaking from the side of software Product Management it is far, far harder to make a pitch deck into a solution. Orders of magnitude more brainpower, effort, discipline. Easiest thing to do is sell tech that is already working and solving a pain point.
Vincent Van Gogh. During his own lifetime, he failed at communicating or expressing the features and techniques and genius of his own work. But later artists and critics recognized and acknowledged it, and could effectively communicate its genius and importance to curators and the public. The work itself, obviously, didn't change, only the story around it did.
It’s remarkable how many real problems can be solved with a good story. Storytelling is how people who don’t do things themselves can direct larger numbers of people to do what you need.
