storytelling is the moat
a collection of notes and links I shared with my companies recently.
Every so often, I come on here and compile the most important things that I’ve recently shared with my founders/team.
This week’s list is for anyone thinking about starting something this year - or already in the thick of it.
“Head of Storytelling”
Vanta pays their head of storytelling $274k. a16z launched an entire New Media team. Fortune 100 CEOs are going on TBPN as part of their earnings calls.
Here’s why.
Engineers build incredible products, but they can’t make people care about them.
They explain features and make technical demos.
But a founder with a taped-together product and great storytelling can raise $10M+ and get millions of downloads in their first year.
A few years ago, traditional media would have handled this for companies. TechCrunch would write about you and make it interesting. But that hardly works anymore.
Now, companies have to tell their own stories. And most founders have no idea how.
The best ones are figuring it out in public.
They’re hiring storytellers as early employees. They’re learning to tweet. They’re incentivizing team members to post on LinkedIn.
It doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the world if you can’t make anyone care about it - that’s why it’s called “best-selling” author, not “best-writing” author.
The conviction gap
One of the questions I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how much does a company’s valuation impact my conviction in backing them? How big is the gap between a company raising at $5M vs at $12M?
On paper, the earlier deal is better. We get more ownership for less capital. The math is simple.
But the reality is messier.
At $5M, we’re betting on the founder (and the market they chose). At $12M, we’re betting on something that should be working - real customers, real momentum, a real founding team.
The problem is that by the time we have that conviction, we paid for it in valuation.
The best investors I know figured out how to have conviction before the proof. They see the founder, understand the market deeply enough to trust the direction, and write the check before the metrics catch up.
This is the gap most people never close. They wait for certainty, then wonder why they’re always paying up.
Interesting miscellaneous links:
Alif Tournament Grand Finale (1/18)
A pitch competition we’re hosting after the Alif x Replit Tournament.
Chat is the interface that will stick around
Reflections on the future of how we interact with AI
Claude Code for Everything
Claude Code 101 (and why you need it) - shared with Heads of Marketing
How to change your entire life in 1 day
An X article on goal setting by Dan Koe