Oh, and you’ll need to raise from investors with long term horizons and attract rare talent along the way.

The silent tax of skipping storytelling

If my years as a CMO in high-growth deeptech companies taught me anything, it’s that storytelling is an accelerator for founders who want to change the world.  

Don’t get me wrong; it’s perfectly possible to build a successful deeptech company without using any of the techniques of storytelling. I know many founders and companies that have done it and are doing it. 

But when they look back in a decade’s time, they might reflect that their journey could have been easier. That fundraise could have been quicker. They might not have lost out on a transformative hire – and maybe, when they exited, they missed out on a multiple or two. 

Storytelling: the original viral technology

Storytelling isn’t a fluffy marketing tactic or something for ‘the crayons department’ to worry about. 

Storytelling is the original technology. It’s as old, maybe older, than rubbing two sticks together to start a fire and the ochre handprints on cave walls. 

I say technology because storytelling is an extremely efficient way to codify and transmit complex information. It’s viral. And, at its best, storytelling is unparalleled in its ability to drive action – rewriting the way people see, understand and engage with the world. 

They say good technology never dies – and neither do good stories. That’s why humans invented storytelling all those millennia ago and why the world still depends on it. 

Stories disarm deeptech disbelief  

In deeptech and in early-stage, storytelling holds a special power. As tiny humans, when we listen to a story, we learn to suspend our disbelief. And disbelief is the silent killer of momentum in your deeptech go to market. 

Wrap your deep tech innovation in a bigger narrative and you can disarm the sceptical customer CTO, the hesitant hire, the disinterested investor. With storytelling, your company doesn’t just win customers, it creates believers.

People trust storytellers innately because we’re programmed from our earliest years to feel safe and valued when someone tells us a story. The storyteller has everything under control. They know where they are going with this. That’s a powerful frame for a founder to take into any meeting or onto any stage. 

Founders as modern-day heroes

Storytelling also lets you plug into a modern phenomenon. Founders are the Greek heroes or Victorian explorers of our age. As a society, we are obsessed with what makes these extraordinary outliers do the hard thing about hard things. If you’re a founder and you are not leveraging storytelling, you are fully not engaging your Founder Mode.

The hero’s journey (deeptech edition)

Storytelling is ideal for founder-led companies. A common storytelling framework used in pretty much every legend, novel and movie is the Hero’s Journey, first mapped by mythologist Joseph Campbell. Here’s a cut down where I’ve swapped “hero” for “founder”: 

• The founder receives a call to adventure: this Eureka moment could happen in a university lab, in a garage, from a personal experience. At some point for every founder there is a moment of departure from the everyday and the journey begins
• The founder moves beyond the threshold of the known: to boldly go where no-one has gone before is the definition of deep tech exploration
• The founder embarks on a transformative journey: the founder assembles a team, and together they take their innovation into the world. As they make this journey, the company, its technology and its proposition transforms, adapting to customer needs and market insights
• Gifts – tangible or figurative – accumulate from the journey: funds are raised. Awards are won. Customer deals are landed and recognition grows
• The founder brings about positive change in the world: the best founders set out with the goal of changing the world and when they fulfil their mission, they can change the course of history, even humanity

Steal these storytelling hacks  

In storytelling, it’s go big or go home. No-one wants to sit through a long and inconsequential story, or one we’ve heard before. At ThoughtLDR, we work with founders to figure out what’s the biggest possible story they – and only they – can authentically and credibly tell. 

When cybersecurity Darktrace (acq. $5.3 billion Thomas Bravo) was founded in 2013, they didn’t position themselves as yet another cyber solution in a red ocean. They didn’t just stick “AI-enabled” onto their platform. They launched the world’s first “immune system for the enterprise.” QuantumScape develops solid-state batteries but doesn’t talk about energy density. They’re “reinventing the foundation of the electric era.” SpaceX makes reusable rockets and satellites. They could have laddered up their storytelling to reaching Mars. But that’s not the biggest story they can tell. They’re on a mission to make humans an interplanetary species. 

Boom.

These aren’t marketing messages. They are the cornerstones of great storytelling, and building your company on these foundations will elevate and accelerate your marketing. If you think your deep tech innovation is small in comparison or doesn’t have potential to transform the world, think again. 

Your story is bigger than you think

Johan Valer’s invention of the paperclip in 1899 transformed the way information was shared in the 20th Century, and in ways he might never have imagined. In the Second World War, Nazi occupiers banned Norwegians wearing anything with the likeness or initials of their King Haakon II. Instead, Norwegians signalled their allegiance and resistance by wearing the humble paperclip. 

Innovation is, in so many ways, a revolution against an unsatisfactory – and sometimes unbearable – status quo. It is the age-old art of storytelling that helps the revolution spread.  

For more startup news, check out the other articles on the website, and subscribe to the magazine for free. Listen to The Cereal Entrepreneur podcast for more interviews with entrepreneurs and big-hitters in the startup ecosystem.