[lpolovets]

In many ways, storytelling IS a key part of a founder's job. You're often pitching your company to someone: a prospective customer or employee, an investor, a journalist, a vendor, etc. The better you are at this, the better your company will do. This isn't a hard rule, and there are lots of counterexamples on both sides, but this has been mostly true in my experience.

FWIW my venture fund is an investor in ~150 companies, and I've run correlations for company success vs. a bunch of company attributes. "Founder's ability to pitch and sell" is one of a very small number of positive correlations that I've found over the last decade.

[busyant]

I had this realization somewhere in life. Many jobs (not just CEO) are highly dependent on "story telling" in a general sense. Which is a stylish way of saying, "being able to explain yourself and your motivations."

In grad school (molecular biology/genetics), various lab members would return from scientific conferences and the most common comment was "You should have heard <so-and-so's research talk>. She had a great story."

It made an impression on me. You can do the best research, make the best product, write the cleanest code, etc. But you will suffer if you can't tell the story.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The famous ad agency Widen and Kennedy (they came up with Just Do It among other famous campaigns) has the slogan "The best story wins."

In the end doing anything non trivial requires collaboration, and the way to create that is to tell your story.

[cknoxrun]

There's an interesting book that discusses this, "To Sell is Human" by Daniel Pink that I think is worth a read.

[tlogan]

Kind true. There are only two jobs of the CEO: hire and sell. Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part. There are things like integrity, vision, etc.

So I agree but I’m concern that focusing solely on “pitch and sell” is what gave us Nikola, Theranos, …

[crazygringo]

> Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part.

I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the main part of hiring and selling.

Hiring is convincing the employee you want why this company is the next chapter in their personal story, and how they fit into the story of the company and the product. Storytelling is the creation of meaning, and people take jobs because of what they mean for your life. For some people, that meaning is about making the world a better place, while for other's it's about how this job will generate more cold hard cash than you could anywhere else.

Similarly, selling is telling and justifying the story of how this product will change the customer's life for the better.

Integrity? Vision? Technical specifications? All part of the story you're telling.

Not all jobs involve story. If you're building an algorithm, story doesn't really factor into it. But convincing people is always done through a story -- "here's why X is better than Y". So to whatever extent your job in convincing people, it's about communicating story.

CEO's do other things too. Deciding which strategy they want to pursue isn't story, it's strategy. But then convincing everyone else to go along with the strategy -- that's story.

[tlogan]

I guess I have much broader definition of sales and hiring. So I think we are saying the same.

Selling includes includes finding market, indetifing right people to sell to, product market fit, should we sell X or Y, etc. But the goal is to make money. If CEO does only storytelling then it is a scam.

Hiring is also much more complex then just convincing some person to join your company. Which person? How to find them? Location? Are they too expensive? Can they recuirt more?

Anyway my grandfather always told me that is you want to understand how companies work just like how the oldest profession in the world works. So what is responsibility of the pimp? Sell and hire.

[HWR_14]

> I beg to disagree -- storytelling is the main part of hiring and selling.

If your goal is to hire a person or sell a product, yes. I think what the OP was saying is that they are a small part because of other ethical concerns. Like, the OP was saying that selling many units of snakeoil is a failure because it's a scam. Or hiring contractors and motivating them to work hard and then using fine print to screw them out of their profit sharing (e.g. Hollywood accounting) is a failure.

[dfee]

> Sure hiring and selling need some storytelling but that is just a very small part.

I’ve always known storytelling to be fundamental to sales. So much so, that when I first went through sales training a decade ago it was predicated on “customer centrism” (as in customer centric selling) and punctuated by days worth of storytelling foundations.

[sgustard]

> jobs of the CEO: hire and sell

I would add identifying a market, conceiving a product and achieving product-market fit to that list.

[ipaddr]

They have one job important job. Keep the company funded. If that involves selling, great. If that involves opening up their own bank account to make it happen, great. Leveraging relationships, great as well.

[dustingetz]

what other correlations with success?