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Hi friends 👋, 

Happy Monday!

I spend 90% of my time thinking about stories and narratives, and like so many other things, narrative formation is getting decentralized. This is my attempt to figure out what’s happening and where it’s heading.

Let’s get to it.

Story Time

Crafting and telling stories is part of what makes humans humans. Stories let us coordinate across time and space. Stories are undeniably important.

But as things get more and more abstract, as we move evermore towards a world of abundance, and as more and more of what we do and buy is for things beyond survival -- like social capital, entertainment, and utility -- the ability to weave a good narrative out of a tapestry of little stories is more valuable than it ever has been. How best to do that has changed and gotten a whole lot more complex.

Imagine, as a quick and extreme thought exercise, that you lived in a tribe of hunter-gatherers 12,000 years ago. There were about 100 people in your tribe. Many were family members. Food was always the #1 priority. If you needed to convince the men of the tribe to hunt, what kind of story would you need to tell and how would you get the message out? 

Something pretty simple like, “We need to go hunt now or we will not have meat and we will die,” spoken directly to your fellow tribespeople, probably worked like a charm. 

Everyone heard the message -- there were no distractions or competing messages -- and everyone understood the immediate importance. So you went out and hunted. 

Things are obviously not that simple anymore. For one, most people never have to be bored unless they consciously choose to be. There are a million demands on our attention. Plus, we don’t need to hunt for food. We open DoorDash or UberEats or Instacart or GoPuff or Farmstead and food magically arrives at our doorstep in no time. 

Imagine coordinating 100 people to decide what to eat for dinner tonight. Puja and I have a hard enough time deciding among all the options ourselves. Life is easier, but deciding is more complex.

I was reminded of how hard it is to spread a message in a conversation I had at a wedding last weekend. A few friends were talking about why the Olympics’ ratings were so bad. Sure, it was weird not having fans, and sure, America’s best athlete competed less than expected, but the real challenge was, we didn’t know any of the other athletes’ stories. In the past, there would have been months of build-up, with profiles on America’s athletes all over ESPN and The Today Show and in the local newspaper. We all would have been watching the same shows, and those shows would have told stories that convinced us to care. They would have crafted a narrative.

One smart friend who works in media asked: “How would you get those stories out to everyone today?” Hint: you can’t. And that’s the Olympics! It’s bringing one of the world’s most beloved brands to the table. 

On the other hand, in my small corner of the internet, NFTs have completely dominated the conversation. Not everyone in the world is talking about NFTs. Even in the midst of NFT-mania, only 109k people have bought an NFT on OpenSea this month, according to rchen8 on Dune Analytics. 

NFTs have owned the conversation in a small-but-growing niche, and they’ve done it not by telling one, consistent story -- there is no NFT, Inc. -- but by giving people the tools, ownership, and incentives to go tell the million little stories about NFTs that build up to one loud narrative.

In a post last week, The Opening, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson wrote:

I am not saying NFTs are the next big thing. I am saying that consumer experiences built on a crypto stack are the next big thing. I am saying that NFT experiences are showing the way.

The same applies with modern storytelling and narrative-building. I am not saying that NFTs are the next big thing (although I’m bullish). I am saying that the way NFT owners and supporters tell stories is showing the way. 

In a world of abundance, attentionis the scarcest resource, and peoples’ attention is hard to earn. It requires new tactics. 

I’m seeing the same shift play out in the areas we talk about so much in Not Boring -- tech, venture capital, markets, and crypto -- from top-down storytelling to bottoms-up narrative building. Owning the narrative can be self-fulfilling, helping companies: 

• Acquire customers more cheaply 

• Hire stronger employees

• Create better partnerships 

• Attract follow-on investors at a lower cost of capital

Similar dynamics apply to VC firms, crypto projects, and even stocks. Stories turn into narratives, and narratives have real, measurable impacts. 

That shift is the foundation of both Not Boring the newsletter and Not Boring Capital. I’m obviously biased regarding the importance of storytelling, but I’ve spent every day for the past 15 months doing it and watching how others do it. Studying narratives has been my fascination.

So how do you build a modern narrative? 

Today, we’ll cover: 

• From Storytelling to Narrative Building

• Narrative in Venture Capital and Startups

• Lessons from Crypto

From Storytelling to Narrative Building

Every day, thousands (millions?) of companies and VC firms launch in-house essays into the abyss. They want to “own the conversation” around X, and so they write about X, and … crickets.

They were told content is important, and they made content! Why didn’t it work? 

Corporate essays are kind of like sales, and according to Alex Danco, we’re past sales and on to something better: world building.

(Note: this is separate from the Not Boring concept of Worldbuilders, although successful Worldbuilders certainly use story to great effect.)

In World Building, Danco argued that yes, everything is sales, but sales isn’t enough. You need to build worlds. In a world of “abundant narrative and complex choices… You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there.”

That means telling multiple, related stories, and telling them over and over again. It means making your overarching story clear enough that others can repeat it themselves. 

In a follow-up conversation with Jim O’Shaughnessy on Infinite Loops, Danco provided more color on why world building is important today. There are two reasons, both of which come down to abundance.

One reason is practical. There are too many people to sell to directly. 

The other is strategic. What’s constrained in a world of abundance, when you can read, watch, or listen to anything for practically $0? Attention. 

Or, as Danco put it, “What is starting to become scarce is people’s actual interest in you.”

Stories form the foundations of worlds in which people can spend time without you. In an age of abundant things, and even abundant stories, the ability to tell a great story is a crucial building block. But stories alone aren’t enough. You need to let your community join in painting a narrative.

Stories and narratives sound like they’re the same thing. So much so that Writer suggested I drop the “and narratives” because it’s redundant. 

The dictionary agrees with Writer. Story and narratives are synonyms, according to Merriam-Webster. For our purposes, we’ll distinguish between the two: 

• Stories are discrete. One essay, one event, one customer experience. Someone might say, “Did you hear the story about Company X doing thing Y?” 

• Narratives are made up of all of the stories about a company, which crystallize into what people believe and say about the company as a whole. The narrative around a company is similar to its reputation or brand. 

If a company writes a blog post about its origins, that’s a story. If an investor goes on a podcast to talk about the company, that’s a story. If the founder writes a thread on Twitter, that’s a story. If a customer tells their friends about a good interaction they had with customer service, that’s a story. If a developer tells other developers the company’s APIs are clean, that’s a story.  If TechCrunch reports on their latest funding round, that’s a story. 

These individual stories add up to form a narrative, which constantly changes and evolves, but has a direction, size, and tone. 

But a narrative also compounds. Positive stories add up, particularly when they’re positive for the same reason. Stories reinforce stories reinforce stories. A narrative forms. There’s no formula, but the ingredients are:

• Number of stories told 

• Ratio of positive to negative stories

• Consistency of positive or negative attributes 

• Number of different storytellers

• Credibility of storyteller to the target audience

• Confirmatory updates

• Persistence of stories over time

The best thing for a company or project’s narrative is to have a lot of people with credibility to the target audience tell stories with roughly similar positive themes again and again over a long period of time, with new examples of the same positive themes added in. The more authentic and the less coordinated it all seems, the better. 

It’s hard to pull off, particularly because so much of it needs to be organic, seeded with just the right amount of direction from the company or team and its core supporters. When it works, though, it’s a powerful thing, the benefits of which compound over time. 

Benefits compound because narratives are Lindy. The longer people believe something about a company, the longer they’re likely to believe something about that company. 

A great current example is Apple vs. Facebook. 

The narrative around Apple is that it’s a world-class design-and-privacy-first company whose products say something good about the people who own them. That narrative began, very intentionally, under Steve Jobs, and it carries through to today. It’s armor. Anything that doesn’t fit the narrative practically bounces right off; anything that feeds the narrative gets added.

Claims that the App Store’s 30% take is anti-competitive have barely grazed the company. Apple’s recent decision to put backdoors in iCloud and iMessage has caught the ire of the privacy-passionate, but hasn’t dented the company’s sterling reputation. 

Facebook’s narrative was formed in articles about its brash and awkward founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in the film The Social Network, in the company’s old “Move Fast and Break Things” motto, in Zuck’s sweaty and stuttering speaking appearances, and in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook’s positive impact on small businesses, and free WhatsApp messaging service that connects over a billion of the world’s poorest internet users, are rarely discussed. 

If you looked at both companies’ activities over the past couple of years with fresh eyes, you might think that Facebook is the good company and Apple is the evil company, but we don’t look at anything fresh. We look at everything through a preexisting narrative. Those take time to shift. 

Zuck hydrofoiling is a step in the right direction, but once a narrative is set, it takes time to shift. The respective narratives may be one reason that Apple, largely a hardware company, trades at a 29x PE, while Facebook, a software company, trades at 26x. 

These are extreme examples involving two of the world’s most valuable companies, but smaller examples of the same phenomenon play out all of the time. Stripe is a fantastic modern example of a company around which such a strong narrative has been built that it achieves the holy duo: 1) people love talking about Stripe, and 2) they give it the benefit of the doubt when they do. 

Apple, Facebook, and even Stripe all built their narratives during a time when the competition for attention was less fierce. The tricks that got them here probably won’t work for you. 

The old way to build a positive narrative was to tell a consistent story about yourself over time. The new way is to have other people tell your story for you, either directly or by association. 

To learn about how narrative formation is shifting in VC, Startups, and Crypto…

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Thanks to Dan and Puja for editing!

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