Anyone who has met me for more than about ninety seconds knows that I am not short on words. So, when Rice Engineering reached out to talk about communication, I braced myself for a gentle roast. Instead, we ended up in a conversation I have been chewing on ever since, and the result is now live: Serial entrepreneur depends on communication to lead teams, startups.
The framing they chose is one I have come to believe in completely: that the job of a founder or CEO is, above all, the job of chief storyteller. That sounds like a soft skill, but it is not. It is the hardest, most consequential thing I do all week, and it is the thread that connects every venture I have ever been part of, from a scrappy energy software startup to Third Derivative to my current role at DexMat.
How I Got Here
The article walks through the path, which regular readers of this blog have watched unfold more or less in real time. Three Rice degrees in computer science and electrical and computer engineering, eight startups, and Rick Smalley’s call to work on something that matters, which I heard and could not un-hear.
That call led to founding Third Derivative and then, from that vantage point, to noticing a gap I could not ignore:
“Third Derivative quickly became the world’s largest accelerator focused on sustainable energy and climate technologies. In two years, we looked at thousands of proposals and funneled nearly $1 billion into 150 promising climatech startups. From that perch, I could see solid progress in batteries and storage. But there were still huge gaps in heavy industry, and materials used in industry. Most people imagine we’ll just get better at using and recycling the same materials we’ve tapped for centuries like copper and steel. But what if we could come up with new, better materials to replace those that are old and dirty?”
If that sounds familiar, it should; I wrote about the biggest unaddressed challenges in climate tech more than a year ago, and materials sat right at the top of the list. Seeing a gap that clearly and then doing nothing about it was never going to be an option, which is roughly the story of why I left D3 in the first place. Two Rice alumni who were my entrepreneurship students were working with Matteo Pasquali on a material built from a patent Matteo developed with Smalley himself. We looked at it together and concluded that it could be the next steel industry. Nothing I had ever seen came close to that level of impact potential, so I stepped into the CEO chair at DexMat.
The Chief Storyteller
The part of the article that I would tattoo on the inside of every first-time founder’s eyelids if the practice were legal (and hygienic):
“Your primary responsibility is to convey an inspiring story to captivate your audience. From the media to prospective employees, you’ve got to get your story out there and do so in a way that prompts others to tell it and become part of that story.”
Note the second half of that sentence, because it is where most founders stop too early. A story you tell is worth something. A story other people repeat without you in the room is worth an order of magnitude more. That is the difference between marketing and momentum.
But the punchline of the whole interview, and the part that took me twenty years and several humbling failures to learn, is this:
“The best storytellers are also the best listeners. Know your audience and what matters to them. You’ll often tell the same story using different metaphors or analogies that better suit the interests and needs of each audience. The DexMat story we tell to an early investor like Shell is not the same story we tell a customer like the U.S. Air Force. They are interested in different outcomes, so I focus on the part of our story that will be meaningful to them. But you won’t know what they need until you ask them. So, in addition to being the chief storyteller, I must also be the chief listener.”
Chief listener. For a person as constitutionally loquacious as I am, that has been the discipline of a lifetime. Talking is the easy part. The hard part is shutting up long enough to find out what the person across the table actually cares about, and then having the humility to reshape the story around them rather than around me.
Where I Learned It
The article gives credit where it is due, and I want to underline it here. At Rice, John Bennett’s computer architecture class had us spend an entire semester solving a real customer’s problem in teams, which meant learning to ask the right questions and integrate the answers into the design. Putting myself in the customer’s shoes was the most durable thing I took from that course. John is now one of DexMat’s advisors, which is a full-circle moment I still find delightful.
Tracy Volz taught us that an engineering solution is only as good as our ability to explain it to non-engineers. Every presentation went through rounds with Tracy before it ever met an audience. That iteration loop is a habit I have never lost, and it is why I keep coming back to Rice to teach and mentor whenever they will have me. Being named an Outstanding Engineering Alum last fall meant a great deal precisely because of teachers like these.
Graduate school added a layer: my MBA communication training came from coaches out of the theater world. Learning to hold a stage in front of thousands turns out to be excellent preparation for holding a boardroom of twelve. And then there is the training program nobody warns you about:
“If you can’t get an MBA, get a kid. Now that I’m a parent, I am always storytelling, and the message is constantly evolving as my children grow. Taking a complex question and distilling it down to the level of the audience is a life lesson you can use to rise or improve in any role, from individual contributor to entrepreneur. Keep learning. Stretch yourself to be a better communicator.”
I stand by this. My children are the toughest audience I have ever faced. They have no patience for jargon, zero tolerance for a boring second act, and an unerring instinct for the moment you start faking it. Every investor pitch should be so rigorous.
Lead the Audience, Don’t Lecture Them
The article also gets into TED Talks, a skill I picked up during my time as Rice’s Entrepreneur in Residence. The conventional advice is to tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. It works. It also bores everyone involved.
What I have found far more effective is to lead an audience on a journey of discovery: reveal facts along the way, ask provocative questions, build a little mystery, and let them arrive at the conclusion themselves. A conclusion someone reaches on their own is one they will defend. A conclusion you hand them is one they will forget by the parking lot.
Which, not coincidentally, is also how I try to lead teams. My job is to frame the problem sharply and then get out of the way, not to push my view and call it alignment. I’ve written before about how much of leadership is about creating the conditions for other people to do their best work, and this is the communication expression of that same principle.
The Counterintuitive Part: Be Vulnerable
The advice in the article that surprised the interviewer most is the one I feel most strongly about:
“We entrepreneurs have a tendency to communicate from a position of invincibility. ‘Everything’s great. We’re crushing it.’ But anyone in that world knows that kind of talk is all BS. Entrepreneurship is hard, and we’re dealing with one crisis after another.”
Everyone in this ecosystem knows the invincibility act is theater, which is exactly why it builds no credibility. Communicating from humility and vulnerability does. You are running on a hypothesis rather than facts. That is fine; say so, and then show the plan for testing it, the track record that says you finish what you start, and the team that turns hypotheses into facts. That is a story worth believing.
If you want a worked example, look no further than the week Silicon Valley Bank failed with most of our fresh funding inside it. I open-sourced my crisis communications with the team and our investors, warts and all, precisely because pretending everything was fine would have been both false and useless. That transparency bought more trust than a year of “we’re crushing it” ever could.
The last bit is the one I wish someone had told me at 25:
“Also, people want to work on things that are challenging. Instead of talking about crushing it, concentrate on how hard the problem is. That is what attracts investors and employees.”
The hardness is the pitch. Nobody who is any good wants to join an easy fight.
Bringing It Home
Read the full piece over at Rice Engineering: Serial entrepreneur depends on communication to lead teams, startups. They did a lovely job, and it is strange and wonderful to have my alma mater trace a line from a computer architecture classroom in Houston to a nanomaterials moonshot founded on Smalley’s own patent.
What I keep circling back to, though, is that Galvorn is a physical material with physical properties; you can measure its tensile strength and its conductivity on a bench. Yet DexMat does not run on Galvorn; it runs on a story about a world that no longer needs steel, aluminum, and copper – a story that has to be true enough to withstand scrutiny, vivid enough that a chemical engineer leaves a stable job for it, inspiring enough that an investor writes a check into it, and certain enough that an Air Force program manager stakes a program on it. The material gets us to the table – the story is what gets everyone else to pull up a chair.
Every founder is building two things at once: the thing, and the story of the thing. Neglect either one and you have nothing. So talk less than you think you should, listen more than feels comfortable, tell the truth about how hard it is, and then invite people into the hardest, most important story you can find.
That is the job, and it always has been.