Duarte Guerra

America was always perceived as better at everything when it came to startups. Recently though, there's a movement happening of Europeans realizing that we are actually as good at almost everything (i tend to agree).

But there’s one thing Americans are undoubtedly better at: Building a narrative - and god they are good at this.

In my mind, the basic concept is that people, be it potential hires, customers, investors don’t have that much mind space. You need to capture it all and starve your competition of it. Employees need to believe that there’s nowhere else they could possibly work at. Customer need to believe that you are the only one that can solve their problems. And investors need to believe that you are the only company that matters.

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”  - Qi LU

The way I see it there’s a couple things you need to create a religion:

1. As with every religion in the world, you need a founding myth (story) and a prophet to spread the message (founder).

2. That myth has to bring out someone biggest hopes and fears. You need to explain it in a few clear words, make it seem inevitable but show what happens if you don’t achieve it. (“making life multiplanetary” / “earth is a single point of failure”).

3. Always stick with this same message and repeat it a million times.

4. To stand out from competition pick an enemy larger than all of your competition. Larry Ellison started a very public fight with Bill Gates, to get people to stop talking about Oracle and other database companies and to get them talking about Oracle and Microsoft. A David and Goliath narrative that was far more compelling.

5. You need people to hate you. While insiders have to love you, you need outsiders to hate you. 

Obviously you can't be faking any of this, people will know if you are. They’ll know if the founding myth is a complete lie (a slight exaggeration they might not). They will know if you don’t care about the vision. And they will know if you are being polarizing just because or if you are actually like that. Maybe not in the short term, but if you are thinking in the short term you already lost.

p.s. Anduril might have done this better than no one, here's the playbook that shaped their early communication strategy.  

When assessing talent, the “why” matters much more than the “what”. The signal you get from understanding why someone chose a particular city, major, college, or company is orders of magnitude larger than simply knowing what they chose. 

Specially when looking at someone early in their career, that still doesn't have that many data points. Which is the exact people startups (and VCs) should be looking for, undiscovered talent. People that have high potential but haven't been priced in yet.

Graham Duncan in “What is going on here, with this human?” says that the job when assessing someone is to really understand what is going on with this person, their intrinsic motivations and capabilities - hence the title. That’s the real question, and you start getting glimpses of that the more “whys” you answer about someone’s life. 

Take, Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia. He studied Actuarial Science in college, but not because of the subject itself. The deeper reason was that, at the time, it was unclear if South Africa (where he was born) would have a peaceful transition to democracy, and history suggested it wouldn’t. So, when choosing a major he looked for one that would allow him to work and live abroad — Actuarial Science fit the bill. Now, this is a very powerful signal. You can get a sense of risk taking (wanting to live abroad alone), ambition, and that he is calculated, all great traits. Plus, given how difficult that degree is, it also speaks to intelligence and hard work. All of these signals come from a single transition period in his life. Then consider his next move: joining McKinsey. This normally isn’t the greatest signal when looking for a great entrepreneur — it’s often a stable, low-risk path. But again, the real signal is in why he chose it. At the time, McKinsey had just opened its first office in South Africa, and joining the firm would give him the international opportunities he had been looking for — working with people people from all over the world and potentially joining an office abroad. By understanding this you would have more confidence that the early signals you found were actually real and not a fluke and discovered a new important one: determination. 

So, when assessing someone—whether as a potential hire or the right founder to invest in—go over their entire life and cover the most important moments, the experiences that define them, which in many cases are periods of transition, and look for signals of the traits you believe are most important. 

After that the only "what" that really matters is: "What was the most difficult problem you've faced and how did you solve it". 

You need the best team in the world to win. But in the beginning you can’t compete with Google on how much you pay to attract the best. 

And since, the best in the world can work anywhere they want - they either choose money or to work on crazy problems that can change the world.

So, to compete with Google, you need to have a crazy ambitious mission that smart people want to solve.

Everyone wanted to work at SpaceX in the beginning because their mission was so incredibly ambitious. Young (cracked) engineers are now joining DOGE and sleeping at the office because they can solve a crazy difficult problem and work along side Elon. But if you are building the next X for Y, you won’t be able to attract the best, and will ultimately fail.

[A plus: Having a crazy mission allows you to pay below market value for the best in the world, think Palantir or SpaceX, known for not paying the highest salaries, which is a big plus in the beginning] 




*Edit: In a conversation with one of the partners at Point Nine, he shared that he believes you can shape your narrative within a market, no matter how big, bold, or unconventional your mission is. He pointed to Attio as an example (one of their portfolio companies, which I use and consider a great product). At first glance, their vision might not seem particularly bold since they are ‘just’ building a better CRM. But in my view, taking on giants like Salesforce and HubSpot is, in itself, a bold and ambitious challenge—one that naturally attracts great talent.