3 ms·

"One way to think of this is that storytelling is an attempt to hack investors' evaluation function." Or maybe story telling is more useful than you think? Plo

"One way to think of this is that storytelling is an attempt to hack investors' evaluation function." Or maybe story telling is more useful than you think? Plot holes represent real business problems. Suspense of disbelief can allow you or investors to see the value just behind a hurdle. Giving employees a role to play keeps their focus, even if a plot twist is around the corner. And remember that founders don't do most of the work. A good startup has lots of people who do real work. But a founder does need to tie it together into something coherent and show the endgame. And that does appear to work a lot of the time, so there seems to be lots of evidenxe that founders telling stories is valuable, and little evidence that it's not.

smhost 5y ago
> there seems to be lots of evidenxe that founders telling stories is valuable, and little evidence that it's not. Storytelling is common to successful startups and to the mass graveyard of failures. The question isn't whether storytelling is necessary given the way things are done currently (it is necessary, therefore it is necessarily effective), but whether the gap between storytelling and the ground truth is necessary.
kragen 5y ago
> there seems to be lots of evidenxe that founders telling stories is valuable, and little evidence that it's not. Just to correct this misreading, I'm not saying that founders telling stories isn't valuable. I'm saying that the value of founders telling stories is already taken into account in the existing funding process, and if Ashwin is correct, it's overweighted. Theranos, Juicero, and Animats's example of Better Place are evidence that Ashwin is correct.