storytelling Archives - Startup Economist

The Year Apple Was Founded, a Supercomputer Changed Science, and Nobody Called Any of It a “Startup”

Thursday, 21 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

A birthday note for everyone who loves someone who never stopped building things The year I was born, two college dropouts sold a Volkswagen bus and a programmable calculator to fund a company they built in a bedroom and later a garage. They didn’t have a pitch deck. They didn’t have a term sheet. They

Published in Economic Development

12 Comments

San Marcos Startups Sit on Top of Texas’s Biggest Problem

Friday, 01 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Humans have lived in San Marcos, Texas, longer than they have lived almost anywhere else on the continent. An archaeological fact, I might concede we can’t be sure, but that fact doesn’t matter to what got my attention; it should matter to entrepreneurs, investors, and economic development professionals. People have been here for 12,000 unbroken

economic development policy san marcos storytelling texas water

Published in Regional Development

5 Comments

The Startup Framework: A Better Pitch through Storytelling

Sunday, 29 March 2026 by Paul O'Brien

You learned something in elementary school that ruined your ability to communicate as a founder: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. That’s the order they taught you, and it’s wrong. Not wrong in the sense that those aren’t the right questions (they are, and they’re the First Principle questions that matter), but wrong in

framework narrative narrative design pitch deck pitching startup framework startup pitch storytelling

Published in Startups

6 Comments

Your Startup Has a Story Problem

Wednesday, 25 March 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Congratulations! You have a pitch deck. So does every other founder about to fail. Provocation aside, let’s take that thought seriously, that roughly 90% of startups die, and the overwhelming majority of those dead ventures had a pitch deck, went through an accelerator, followed a template, and still couldn’t get anyone to care. CB Insights

narrative design pitch deck pitching startup narrative storytelling

Published in Startups

5 Comments

How Streaming Shows That AI Is Making the Product a Commodity, Here’s How Startup Founders Survive

Sunday, 01 March 2026 by Paul O'Brien

I find myself more oriented to media than most. I am a huge live music fan extending well beyond concerts and festivals into even musicals and Broadway. My career started in advertising by way of Yahoo! when “online” was little more than a concept. I was among the first with Netflix, familiar with The Pirate

ai distribution marketing mediatech musictech spotify storytelling streaming

Published in Startups

7 Comments

The Better Startup Pitch Test: Why Most Decks Fail Before Investors Ever Say No

Monday, 09 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Most pitch decks don’t fail because the startup is doomed (though I’ve explained how we know that’s the case just from how you pitch, here). They fail because the founder is thinking in PowerPoint instead of economics, incentives, and narrative logic. Every founder asks for the template to follow, as though there is some magic

fundraising pitch decks pitching slides storytelling

Published in Raising Capital, Startups

8 Comments

Willy Wonka Inspired a Generation of Founders

Wednesday, 29 October 2025 by Paul O'Brien

He was no wizard. Magic is the soft word we use when we can’t explain how someone bends the laws of reality. Willy Wonka bent them with sugar, steel, and science. His factory wasn’t a place of spells, it was a cathedral of chemistry, a machine that turned the imagination of children into industrial-scale production.

entrepreneurship film inspiration movie startups storytelling

Published in Startups

19 Comments