Grant Lee@thisisgrantleeJul 17

📝 The story is the alpha Every successful product eventually becomes a story. People stop talking about its features and start telling other people what it represents. That’s when growth compounds. Cursor cofounder Michael Truell has said the team spent months in “monk mode,” focusing almost entirely on the product while developers told Cursor’s story for them. By the time the broader market noticed, half the Fortune 500 was already using it. Sundar Pichai casually mentioned using Cursor to build a personal project. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy publicly credited it with helping drive the coding agent wave on AWS. Those endorsement stories carried more weight than any marketing campaign because they came from people the market already found credible. By the time Elon Musk acquired Cursor for $60 billion, the product had already won something money couldn’t buy. A story of inevitability. Features are copied in weeks. Models catch up. Pricing changes. But a story that customers genuinely believe and willingly tell on your behalf becomes part of the product itself. Storytelling is one of the highest-leverage skills a founder can build, yet surprisingly few treat it that way. A compelling story spreads before the product does, and it keeps spreading long after competitors have matched the features. Bet on the narrative Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, has spent sixteen years defining what he calls his real value to the company. Tobi Lutke is the product visionary who builds the technology, and Finkelstein's job has always been to take what Tobi builds and tell the world about it. He has said directly that storytelling is the skill he wants to be best at, more than any other in his toolkit, and his mentors on this include Seth Godin, a relationship that shows up across years of conversations about marketing, mentorship, and how to make a business memorable. Shopify did something subtle and incredibly important. It taught the market to stop seeing it as a website builder and start seeing it as infrastructure. On its investor site, Shopify describes itself as a “operating system powering the future of commerce.” That language forms the story. The company started getting valued on control, durability, and strategic importance. And it's working. Shopify reported Q1 2026 revenue of $3.2 billion, up 34% year over year, and GMV of $101 billion. In All Marketers Are Liars, Godin wrote: "A great story is true. Not necessarily factual, but true to your worldview and true to the worldview of the people you are telling it to. A great story makes a promise. A great story is trusted. Great stories are subtle. And great stories rarely aim at everyone." People rarely adopt a new belief when they hear a good story. They usually recognize a belief they already held, and the story simply gives them permission to act on it. The biggest checks follow the story Margit Wennmachers built the marketing engine behind a16z from its earliest days and has a line worth writing down: you cannot market a company without a character, and every company needs a personality. She has talked about the exact moment a casual lunch conversation turned into the phrase "software is eating the world," a single sentence that reframed how an entire industry understood itself. Marc Andreessen argues that winning in what he calls New Media means being genuinely interesting and saying what you actually mean. The corporate version of it is always overlooked. A great example video by a16z is this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2067027773764620646?s=20 In 2018 Stripe launched Stripe press, its own publishing house. It has since put out more than fifteen books under the banner "Ideas for Progress." Stripe could have easily paid influencers to talk about payments infrastructure. But the company went in a different direction, and built a permanent, physical, beautifully designed body of work that signals the kind of company Stripe wants to be associated with: one obsessed with progress, rigor, and long-term thinking. Every book sitting on a founder's desk with the Stripe Press imprint on the spine is doing brand work that no performance ad campaign could replicate. They own the narrative, the taste, and have a means to showcase their worldview. Stripe built the infrastructure to control its own narrative permanently, on its own timeline, disconnected from any single product launch or funding round. Founders are storytellers Storytelling gets better the same way judgment gets better. Through exposure, repetition, and taste. Founders who want to improve should spend less time reading generic marketing advice and more time studying people who explain complex businesses clearly under pressure. A founder’s story should travel further than the founder does. When that happens, customers explain the product to other customers, investors retell the pitch in partner meetings, and recruiting starts to compound. That is when storytelling stops being a soft skill and starts acting like distribution. Because the story is basically the company itself, told out loud. http://x.com/i/article/2077838499706028032