What Yuval Harari Can Teach Us About Startup Storytelling

"Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively," writes Harari.

Nobody does a better job of describing the power of storytelling than he does.

According to him the power of storytelling is its ability to bring people together around shared beliefs in ideas that don’t physically exist. Stories make people trust in things they can’t see or touch, like democracy or money. Democracy is a story we believe about freedom, equality, and collective decision-making. And money is a story we believe about paper (or now, numbers on a screen) holding value.

An early-stage startup is similar. It’s a collection of ideas that exist only in someone’s mind—ideas about a name, a product, a brand, a mission—but nothing tangible for people to grasp and make sense of, let alone believe in.

That’s where a story can help.

Just as democracy and money exist because people believe in the stories behind them, a startup succeeds when people believe in its story. Customers need to believe in the story of how the product will help them. Investors need to believe in the company’s potential. Talent needs to believe in the mission in order to join the company.

A story makes this all happen.

But perhaps the most useful Harari quote on storytelling is the simplest one: “Humans think in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and the simpler the story, the better.”