At his home on Necker Island, entrepreneur Richard Branson gathers his team for a brand meeting. It’s a creative brainstorm held around a campfire as the sun sets over the crystal blue water in the British Virgin Islands. Branson is a big believer in the power of ideas to change the world, and an even bigger believer in the power of storytelling to draw out those ideas. The campfire plays such a critical role in the meeting, Branson commissioned a local artist to build a beautiful fire pit so his team could sit around it and do what people have been doing for half a million years — tell stories. “The art of storytelling can be used to drive change,” says Branson. “Today, if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you also have to be a storyteller.”
Branson is right. In the past ten years, neuroscientists have learned more about how the brain processes information than we’ve known since humans began telling stories around a campfire 400,000 years ago. Just as a handful of songwriters have mastered “the hook” in popular music (90 percent of music revenues come from 10 percent of pop songs) so, too, do we know how stories hook our audience. We know which stories work, why they do, and how to tell stories for maximum impact. While the tools have changed (PowerPoint has replaced cave drawings), our desire to hear captivating stories hasn’t changed at all. In fact, storytelling is hardwired in our DNA. Those who have mastered the skill of storytelling can have an outsized influence over others.
“Most people — most listeners — don’t concentrate, or they tune out, or they have short memories,” billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz told me. “So burning the message into their skulls is a rare art. In order to do that, the message must be memorable, clear, vivid, and have an element of emotion.” Moritz is a master of the narrative. Before he made the initial investments in Apple, Google, PayPal, and Yahoo, Moritz was a journalist — a storytelling professional. “As a journalist at Time, I became increasingly interested in the ways one person can shape and influence an organization, particularly the handful who maintain their hunger for success and can coax others to perform at high levels for prolonged periods,” he says.
Moritz is just one of a growing club of venture capitalists who base much of their investment decisions on an entrepreneur’s ability to communicate a clear, compelling vision and inspire others to join the journey.
“Storytelling is everything,” says Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran. “Show me an MBA and your sales numbers, that’s fine. But tell me a great story about how you got started and your vision, and we’ll talk.” Corcoran’s personal story is well-known: the story of a waitress who turned a $1,000 loan from a boyfriend into a multi-billion-dollar real estate empire. Less well known is the fact that Corcoran was terrified of public speaking and volunteered to teach at a local college to overcome her fear of speaking in public. It was in that classroom that Corcoran honed her own ability to craft a story around a piece of real estate and to confidently sell the idea. “Communication is 90 percent responsible for my success. There’s no doubt about it,” Corcoran told me. “People are not as interested in you as you think they are,” she said. All the more reason to craft your idea into a story that resonates with your audience.
“Storytelling is the most underrated skill,” says Ben Horowitz, general partner with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “The company story is the company strategy. If don’t have a clearly articulated story, you don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist.”
“Did a compelling story inspire you to invest in a company?” I asked Horowitz.
“Absolutely. I invested in a story that evolved into a company called NationBuilder.”
NationBuilder is a platform used by political campaigns and non-profit organizations to raise money, engage supporters and mobilize volunteers. Founder Jim Gilliam tells the story of how he contracted life-threatening cancer. He survived and became an activist, producing documentary films, and using the Internet to organize people to take action for the causes he believed in. Several years later, the cancer treatment Gilliam had received damaged his lungs to the point where he needed a double lung transplant. Finding a donor is risky and rare, so Gilliam started a movement to find two lungs and a doctor who would perform the surgery. “Organizing people to save his own life profoundly impacted Jim’s view of how he should spend the rest of it,” according to Horowitz. Gilliam created the company NationBuilder to organize communities as a direct result of his own personal experience.
Although the company’s early results showed positive traction, Horowitz acknowledges that he didn’t invest because of numbers on a spreadsheet. “It was Jim’s vision that compelled me to invest. As he told his story I thought of every musician that needed to organize her fans, every author that needed to reach readers, every pastor that needed to encourage his members, and every person who wanted to make a difference, but didn’t know how. And then I thought of Jim’s personal story and I was in.”
Getting people to buy into an idea is a competitive advantage. Stories inform, illuminate and inspire. Your story is your secret weapon to stand apart in the war of ideas.
Carmine Gallo is an internationally admired keynote speaker and the bestselling author of The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speaker To Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On And Others Don’t.
