Geoff Ralston: The Story of Your Startup

Yeah, I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about something that I think is absolutely vital to startup success. But although it's fundamental, it is often somewhat overlooked, and that is really the invention, the creation of the story of your startup.

This might sound obvious or basic, but it turns out that getting this right is actually not intuitively important. The reason it is so important is because startups are so hard. They're so very, very hard. It is almost certainly going to be the hardest, most difficult thing you will do in your professional career. If you don't create a story, the right story, that you can tell yourself to keep going when things go wrong, you'll quit, and your startup will die.

So, it's worthwhile. My YC partner Aaron Harris, who's going to be giving a lecture later on in startup school, thinks and talks a lot about stories, and I'm indebted to him for a number of the ideas in what I'm about to say. There are stories, and there are stories.

The famous author Ian Forrester maybe said it best many, many decades ago when he gave this example: "So the King died, and then the Queen died" is certainly a story, but it's not a very interesting story, is it? It's not a story that grabs you. It's not a story you necessarily care about. But "the King died and then the Queen died of grief"—well, there's something there. There's something that grabbed me. There's something human there. There's something in that story that seems to matter.

It turns out founders spend a lot of time telling stories. They tell stories about what they're doing. They tell stories about the future that they're trying to create. They tell stories originally, maybe to their parents, to their friends, to their family, eventually to co-founders, potential customers, partners in the company, investors. But most of all, they need to tell a story that resonates with themselves.

It's the story of your startup that will nourish you, that will keep you going through hard times and setbacks. It's a story that will persuade you to actually do this crazy thing, and it's the story that will maybe just for those other Persuade them to join you on your journey. How crazy it is to convince someone else to follow you on such an uncertain path—it's not easy.

So, we actually spend a lot of time at YC helping people craft and sometimes even reimagine their stories.