Storytelling
“Storytelling” – a cartoon that illustrates the importance of telling a convincing story and yet how so many business people do such a bad job at it.
Steve Jobs didn’t sell computers, he sold simplicity with a beautiful user intereface. When Apple launched the iPod, the headline wasn’t storage capacity or codecs, it was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” When the iPhone arrived, Jobs framed it as three familiar objects, a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator, collapsed into one. The technology was complex, but the story removed the need to think about it.
Elon Musk does something similar at a different scale. SpaceX is not sold as a rocket company, it is sold as the path to making humanity multi-planetary. Tesla is not about battery chemistry, it is about ending dependence on fossil fuels. Musk rarely leads with specs. He leads with a mission, then walks backward into concrete steps, timelines, and visible progress.
Most companies fail because they reverse this order. They start with features, acronyms, and internal logic, assuming the audience will assemble meaning on their own. The enterprise blockchain industry is a prime offender, selling consensus mechanisms to financial institutions that actually care about workflow efficiency and risk containment.
Meanwhile, if founders get storytelling right using a clear narrative structure, research on startup pitching shows that these founders raise meaningfully more capital. The Journal of Business Venturing found that crowdfunding campaigns that included a clear founder origin story were over 50% more likely to succeed than those that did not. Investors still want data, they just need a narrative spine to process it.
At Christmas time, families tell stories naturally. We already know how this works. Many of us just forget the moment we step into a meeting room.
11
–
1
Sources:
Akram Akallah (Mar 21, 2024) – The Art Of Storytelling In Business – Forbes
Kimberly A. Whitler (Jul 28, 2024) – How AI Is Impacting The Art And Business Of Storytelling. – Forbes
Matt Durot (Dec 19, 2025) – Elon Musk Just Became The First Person Ever Worth $700 Billion After Delaware Supreme Court Restored His Voided Tesla Stock Options – Forbes
