Founder Story vs Company Story: What ERS and Eeden Make Clear

A founder tells a moving account of the moment they decided to act. The audience understands the commitment, remembers the person and still struggles to say what the company exists to do.

The reverse happens too. A company describes a market gap and a technical response so neatly that the people, doubts and choices behind it vanish.

Both accounts can be accurate. They answer different questions.

A founder story helps an audience understand one person’s relationship with a problem. A company story explains how a group of people came to organise around it. Knowing which one the reader needs changes where the story starts, which details earn space and where it ends.

Two of our published interviews make the difference easy to see. Thibault Sorret describes the beginnings of Ecosystem Restoration Standard, and Steffen Gerlach describes the beginnings of Eeden. Both are historical accounts that reflect the organisations at the time of the interviews. ^{1 2}

The founder story gives experience a consequence

In our September 2023 interview, Sorret described a family trip to Panama in 2018. His travel reading was E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth, about the relationship between the land left for other species and the rate of extinction. He connected that trip to further study and to a decision to work on restoration. ¹

The trip matters because something follows from it. An experience changes what a person notices, raises a question and shapes what they choose to do next.

Here is a short editorial retelling of his published account. It is our summary, written for this article.

In Panama, Thibault Sorret saw how far the natural world he was reading about sat from the degraded land in front of him. The experience made restoration a problem he wanted to work on. Study and research followed, and eventually an organisation was built around it.

The retelling keeps the line from observation to action. A longer version could carry more of his background, but each extra detail should help explain the change in direction.

Emotion has a place here, and so do doubt, ordinary work and decisions that took time. A founder’s history loses credibility when every earlier experience is rewritten as an inevitable step towards the company.

The company story explains what people chose to build together

A company origin has to make room for more than one person. Co-founders, researchers, early employees, customers and partners may all have changed the direction, and their part matters even when the first idea came from someone else.

Eeden’s published origin has a clear progression. In our March 2024 interview, Steffen Gerlach credited his co-founder Rainer, who had studied at a textile university, with the starting question of what the most sustainable T-shirt would look like. Looking into the materials led Rainer to research chemical recycling of blended textiles. He then asked Gerlach to join him on the business side to test whether there was a market. ²

An illustrative company version, again written by us for this article, could read like this.

Eeden began with a question about making a more sustainable T-shirt. Investigating the materials led its founders to a wider problem, recovering value from textiles that combine different fibres. Technical research and commercial exploration came together around that challenge and set the company’s direction in textile recycling.

That passage describes the beginning as told in the interview. The company’s current readiness needs its own account.

The centre of gravity has moved. The story now follows the question, the work it demanded and how different contributions became one undertaking. It gives the organisation room to grow beyond one founder’s biography.

Give every contributor the role they actually played

Origin stories quietly drift when they are shortened.

A later chief executive becomes the inventor. A co-founder’s discovery is credited to whoever gives the presentation. Years of research collapse into a single flash of inspiration. An early customer who changed the application drops out.

Each edit makes a smoother paragraph and a weaker record.

Build a simple chronology before writing. Note who noticed the problem, who developed the work, what already existed, who joined and which decisions changed the direction. Where accounts differ, settle them with the people and records involved.

Treat starting the research, founding the organisation and leading its next stage as three separate events. They can be equally important and still be different things.

Choose the version around the reader’s question

A founder story often earns its space in an interview or a talk because the audience wants to understand the person. In an investor conversation, the relevant part may be the insight or commitment that explains the team’s grip on the market. A moving history still needs a credible commercial case beside it.

A company story is especially useful when recruiting, introducing the organisation to partners or explaining why it took a particular direction. A prospective colleague needs to see how different people shaped the work and what that history means for the decisions they will make after joining.

A customer usually has a more immediate question, which is whether this organisation understands the problem in front of them and can solve it. Include the part of the origin that helps answer that, then move to the product, the evidence and a practical next step.

Nothing requires a presentation to open with either origin. The audience’s decision should set how much history they need and when.

Write a deep account before asking it to become short

Gather more material than the final page will carry. Ask about the first attempt, the assumption that failed, the conversation that changed the plan and the contribution someone else made.

Specific details earn their place when they explain a choice. A place name on its own is scenery. A place where someone met a problem they had only understood in theory can be part of the causal story.

Once the account is clear, write two versions. In the first, follow the person’s shift in attention and commitment. In the second, follow the problem and the organisation forming around it.

Compare what each makes easier to understand. The comparison usually shows which one belongs on a given page. It may also show that the best account is a brief personal opening followed by the collective work.

For the full method of building the deep version first, see How to Write an Origin Story.

End where the organisation can take over

A useful origin leads into the company that exists now. Show which question still matters, which assumption changed and which principle still shapes decisions.

The history can establish why people began. Claims about performance, readiness, scale or impact need their own evidence. If the organisation has changed substantially, explain the change instead of stretching the origin to suggest the present business was always fully formed.

ERS and Eeden are useful because they take different routes from attention to action. One begins with a person confronting ecological loss. The other follows a product question into a wider material-recovery problem. Neither needs a generic line about being passionate about sustainability to make the concern visible.

Start with the part of the history that explains the choice. Give the people their proper roles. Then let the company’s work carry the story forward.

If you are working out which story your organisation needs, Brighter Future develops positioning and narrative from the people, evidence and decisions behind the work.

Sources and further reading

1. Brighter Future, Thibault Sorret, ERS, interview published 20 September 2023
2. Brighter Future, Steffen Gerlach, Eeden, interview published 14 March 2024
3. Brighter Future, How to Write an Origin Story for a Climate or Science-Led Company

First published 27 February 2024, revised and restored at its original address. The two indented passages are our editorial retellings of published interviews, written in our own words.