How do you go beyond the names and numbers with your startup pitch deck? For Doug Landis, the answer is a straightforward compound gerund: storytelling. It’s a word that gets thrown around late in Silicon Valley, but it could legitimately help your startup stand out from the pack amid the pile of pitches.
Landis knows a fair bit about the concept. He served as the “chief storyteller” at Box after stints at Salesforce and Google. These days, Landis is the growth partner at Emergence Capital, where he helps tell the stories of the firm’s portfolio companies.
Landis joined us on the first day of the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event to offer a presentation about the value of storytelling for startups, whittling down the standard two-hour conversation to a 30-minute version. Though he still managed to rewind things pretty far, opening with, “400,000 years ago, men and women used to sit around the fire pit and tell stories about their day, their hunt, about the one that got away.”
Connect the dots
More often than not, decks include a series of numbers and charts. The job of a story pitch is to weaving a good narrative around these figures.
If you think about storytelling and the physiological and psychological elements — what’s happening between the storytelling and the listener — we’re looking for the patterns. If you think about it, it’s why those jingles and commercials get stuck in our heads, and we can’t forget it, even though we don’t know much about the product.
But we remember the jingle, remember the commercial, we recognize the brand. Because, as humans, we’re looking for patterns in our communication. Our job is to connect the facts and fill in the holes. And from those connections, we create a story. We make a story in our brain because our brain processes information through story form. (Timestamp 3:20) Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups. Provide a recommendation in this quick survey, and we’ll share the results with everybody.
Get to the point
They don’t call it an elevator pitch for anything. And sometimes, even the best storytellers have a habit of rambling. Here’s an exercise for cutting away some excess when attempting to get your story in front of VCs.
When you tell the story at work, ask your peers or the listener to share back with you in one sentence what the story’s point was. Get immediate feedback, and you can then identify whether or not your account was on target. The story needs to be relevant to the audience there, but the reality is that you need to be very clear about the point you’re trying to make with a story. (Timestamp 6:33)
