On sharing your story with other founders

There’s a version of founder community that is mostly performance. You go to an event, you give a polished two, five or ten-minute pitch, you collect cards, you follow up on LinkedIn, and rinse and repeat. It’s one of the most important things you have to do, and extremely useful but there is another kind of interaction as a founder that I have enjoyed even more.

Sharing your story without sugarcoating

Nucleate Switzerland invited me to pitch and share the inseit story twice. The PhD Coalition Leadership Lecture Series did the same. I want to be precise about why that felt meaningful, because it would be easy to dress it up as ego-tripping, and there is part of it, obviously. Everyone likes other people listening to their story with attention. But it’s not only that.

What it actually meant for me, was that the people who organize those programmes thought something of what I’d done, shared or talked about with them informally, was worth hearing by a different audience. And i’d like to think it’s because I shared with them genuine experiences , not just the linkedin story.

The first time you tell your story in a room like that, you’re mostly trying to communicate clearly and honestly. Trying to put there what makes people listen, you reflect on what questions come up that you hadn’t thought to address, what you’ve learned since the first time you pitched or shared that part of the story and how you’ve changed the framing of certain things.

What you give and what you get

The best of these conversations have a specific quality: they’re not pitches. Nobody in the room is a customer or an investor. The stakes are lower in the right way, which means people say things they wouldn’t say in another context.

I’ve been in rooms with PhD students who are a year away from finishing and wondering whether a startup is a real option, or whether they’re romanticising it. I’ve talked to early-stage founders who have more traction than me and are dealing with problems I haven’t hit yet, and founders who are earlier and dealing with problems I’ve already made mistakes on.

What you give in those conversations, if you try and answer them honestly, is a less edited version of how things actually went. The version where you describe the application that almost didn’t get submitted, the prize you were a finalist for twice and never got, the months where the forward motion felt mostly hypothetical, and also, the week where it all went right and gave you fuel for the next 6 months.

What you get back is the same thing from someone else. And that turns out to be surprisingly useful, not because it gives you a roadmap but because it puts in perspective what normal looks like.