7 ms·
“As a startup founder, 90% of your job is storytelling”.. No it’s not. It’s solving a real problem.
by azifali 5y ago
“As a startup founder, 90% of your job is storytelling”..
No it’s not. It’s solving a real problem.
- reidjs 5y agoAnd selling the solution
- RussianCow 5y agoIsn’t sales just a form of storytelling?
- tlogan 5y agoNo - sales is much more than just nice storytelling. Much much more.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jjulius 5y agoHow do you get investors to fund your solution? How do you get the public to use your solution? Your solution is nothing if you can't build it, and nothing if nobody uses it.
- geoduck14 5y ago>Your solution is nothing if you can't build it, and nothing if nobody uses it. I know really smart engineers that would do well to internalize this.
- norov 5y agoThat 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.
- Animats 5y agoThat'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.
- amelius 5y agoChosen 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.
- exhaze 5y agoI agree with you about your point. In this case it sounds more like lying. I believe that the best stories are also honest with their listeners. Solving problems is incredibly important. You can often succeed with that alone. The most successful ventures do both.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoYeah but now you're saying,"Have an actual Pixar story" not just "use the Pixar story method to spin your shitty idea into a funding round."
- rdiddly 5y agoI dunno, battery swapping sounds like a good idea actually. If only the batteries were swappable...
- petra 5y agoBattery 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.
- qwertox 5y agoIt's probably related to the Pareto principle.
- DenisM 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bobsomers 5y agoThere 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.
- lvl100 5y agoInteresting. Please name me one great solution that failed because of a pitch.
- listenallyall 5y agoVincent 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.
- agonmon 5y agoWhat "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.
- dreyfan 5y agoThere'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.
- nowherebeen 5y agoI 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.
- cellis 5y agoI 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.
- dreyfan 5y agoAbsolutely, fundraising is often necessary. The problem is when it becomes the hallmark of success instead of simply a means to an end.
- geoduck14 5y agoThe 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"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- exhaze 5y agoWhy is storytelling aka communicating not a “real problem”?
- lpolovets 5y agoIn 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.
- tlogan 5y agoKind 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, …
- dfee 5y ago> 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.
- sgustard 5y ago> jobs of the CEO: hire and sell I would add identifying a market, conceiving a product and achieving product-market fit to that list.
- crazygringo 5y ago> 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.
- goatherders 5y agoLol. Most startups don't solve any problem, and many that do are solving a problem advertiser's have (not users).
- cvwright 5y agoThe first 90% is solving the problem. The next 90% is telling the story so people can understand how you can help them.
- motoxpro 5y agoAnd this is why companies still fail because the founders think that "If you build it, they will come"
- izgzhen 5y agoBoth 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.
- madrox 5y agoIt’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.
- spoonjim 5y agoProblems 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).
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> No it’s not. It’s solving a real problem. 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.
- halayli 5y agohow will you convince skillful and smart candidates that the problem you are solving is worth their time and risk?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 5y agoI 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.
- Applejinx 5y agoDefine '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.