The rise of the “storyteller” role in startups feels deeply confused.
There's a paradox at the heart of this: the best storytellers do not want to write about B2B SaaS, nor do they want to crank out “5 things you need to know about AI’s impact on electronic health records.”
Great storytellers are temperamental, obsessive, nonlinear creatures. They work like lions—stalking, circling, disappearing for days—then striking. Founders want cows: mechanical, methodological, milked on schedule, and reared on process.
At the same time, most founders do not have the patience, stamina, or trust required to work with truly great storytellers. Storytelling requires ambiguity, dead ends, wasted drafts, tantrums, and an almost religious faith that something will emerge if you don’t interfere (See An Oral History of 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ from Vulture)
So we get the unstoppable force (companies desperate for narrative) meeting the immovable object (creatives who refuse to industrialize their soul).
The result? Much ado about nothing.
I’ve written about this dynamic before in a different costume:
“Silicon Valley has birthed another shiny acronym: the Forward Deployed Engineer, or FDE.
Sexy title, right? It sounds like digital soldiers parachuting into hostile corporate territories (behind customer lines!), armed with laptops and Stanley Tumblers. The reality is more familiar.
While the title is new and trendy, the job itself is an evolution of older roles: just with a sharper focus on rapid, customer-driven innovation and feedback
The FDE is, for all intents and purposes, the old solutions engineer/technical consultant in a fresh uniform. The tasks haven't changed: embed with clients, fix their broken systems, keep contracts alive through hand-holding. Same fundamental work, different wrapper. What changed was the story.
Give a role a new acronym, sprinkle in AI, and suddenly it feels scarce enough for every hiring manager's deck.
That's branding at work: turning the mundane into the magnificent through pure narrative perception.
In other words, rename the hammer and the whole market sees nails.”
“Head of Storytelling” risks becoming the same thing: a shiny title slapped onto fundamentally unsexy work, hoping narrative alone can alchemize the mundane into the magnificent.
Storytelling can’t save bad products, incoherent strategy, or founders unwilling to sit with discomfort. You can’t outsource meaning and expect magic.
If you want real storytellers, you have to tolerate lions.
If you want predictable output, don’t pretend you’re hiring poets.
If you want both at once, well, that’s how you end up with a title, a team, some ten-dollar words, and very little story at all.
Remind me of the “growth hacker” craze, and seems to be particularly common in developer tools world where “marketing” is a dirty word. It feels like a re-read of The Cluetrain Manifesto is in order for me over the holiday break…
a storyteller sounds more premium than a ghostwriter; it has this novel element where the terms original is way beyond the scope of the traditional technology industry.
First as head of marketing (we were bootstrapoed with no connections whatsoever) We had to tell our prospects what they wanted to hear, allow them say what they always wanted to say as regards our niche before we sold them anything.
2nd time Media startup (Once again, absolutely nothing as regards business coming rhrough the door, sitting ducks) I did it differently this time, we just needed the right opinions on the right trends.
It gets murky and as a storyteller im just glad we're in demand all of a sudden.
But you're right, a lot more can be done without the bruhaha of "Head of Narrative"/ "Head of Storytelling" titles.
The rise of the “storyteller” role in startups feels deeply confused.
There's a paradox at the heart of this: the best storytellers do not want to write about B2B SaaS, nor do they want to crank out “5 things you need to know about AI’s impact on electronic health records.”
Great storytellers are temperamental, obsessive, nonlinear creatures. They work like lions—stalking, circling, disappearing for days—then striking. Founders want cows: mechanical, methodological, milked on schedule, and reared on process.
At the same time, most founders do not have the patience, stamina, or trust required to work with truly great storytellers. Storytelling requires ambiguity, dead ends, wasted drafts, tantrums, and an almost religious faith that something will emerge if you don’t interfere (See An Oral History of 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ from Vulture)
So we get the unstoppable force (companies desperate for narrative) meeting the immovable object (creatives who refuse to industrialize their soul).
The result? Much ado about nothing.
I’ve written about this dynamic before in a different costume:
“Silicon Valley has birthed another shiny acronym: the Forward Deployed Engineer, or FDE.
Sexy title, right? It sounds like digital soldiers parachuting into hostile corporate territories (behind customer lines!), armed with laptops and Stanley Tumblers. The reality is more familiar.
While the title is new and trendy, the job itself is an evolution of older roles: just with a sharper focus on rapid, customer-driven innovation and feedback
The FDE is, for all intents and purposes, the old solutions engineer/technical consultant in a fresh uniform. The tasks haven't changed: embed with clients, fix their broken systems, keep contracts alive through hand-holding. Same fundamental work, different wrapper. What changed was the story.
Give a role a new acronym, sprinkle in AI, and suddenly it feels scarce enough for every hiring manager's deck.
That's branding at work: turning the mundane into the magnificent through pure narrative perception.
In other words, rename the hammer and the whole market sees nails.”
“Head of Storytelling” risks becoming the same thing: a shiny title slapped onto fundamentally unsexy work, hoping narrative alone can alchemize the mundane into the magnificent.
Storytelling can’t save bad products, incoherent strategy, or founders unwilling to sit with discomfort. You can’t outsource meaning and expect magic.
If you want real storytellers, you have to tolerate lions.
If you want predictable output, don’t pretend you’re hiring poets.
If you want both at once, well, that’s how you end up with a title, a team, some ten-dollar words, and very little story at all.
More: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/sexy-titles-unsexy-work
Remind me of the “growth hacker” craze, and seems to be particularly common in developer tools world where “marketing” is a dirty word. It feels like a re-read of The Cluetrain Manifesto is in order for me over the holiday break…
This was literally what popped into my mind when I read this
The WSJ article is a crock: no real evidence or insight about how narrative and story operate. I also make a distinction between narrative (spin) and story (searching and complex). https://storypower.substack.com/p/narrative-versus-story?utm_source=publication-search
a storyteller sounds more premium than a ghostwriter; it has this novel element where the terms original is way beyond the scope of the traditional technology industry.
I think the one hiring the storyteller may not be the best storyteller themselves, rendering the process moot.
Storyteller consultancy may be needed at McKinsey, if anything.
Having fulfilled this role mistakenly twice.
First as head of marketing (we were bootstrapoed with no connections whatsoever) We had to tell our prospects what they wanted to hear, allow them say what they always wanted to say as regards our niche before we sold them anything.
2nd time Media startup (Once again, absolutely nothing as regards business coming rhrough the door, sitting ducks) I did it differently this time, we just needed the right opinions on the right trends.
It gets murky and as a storyteller im just glad we're in demand all of a sudden.
But you're right, a lot more can be done without the bruhaha of "Head of Narrative"/ "Head of Storytelling" titles.