What 94 Founders Teach Us About Origin Stories

Johnny Drain, co-founder of Win-Win, which makes cocoa-free chocolate, traces the company to three old potatoes. In our interview with him, published in March 2024, he described the moment. “I was at my parents' house and I boiled these three slightly old potatoes. When I smelt the steam I realised they smelt like hot chocolate.” The smell turned into questions about why chocolate tastes like chocolate at all, and whether that flavour could be made from something else.

Then he corrected the record himself. “Now, we ended up not making it from potatoes, but that is what started us on this route to Win-Win.” That sentence shows what a useful origin story does. The origin records the moment attention changed and the question it opened. The product came later, from work the potato could not predict, and the story is stronger for saying so.

Brighter Future published 94 founder and leader interviews between March 2022 and April 2024, 32 of them in 2022, 46 in 2023 and 16 in 2024. They cover climate, food, nature and impact organisations, including funds, non-profits, studios and consultancies. This is a qualitative reading of an uncontrolled archive. We have not coded the interviews against a written rule for any pattern, so nothing below is a percentage about climate founders. The original interviews remain published, and every observation here can be checked against them.

The origin is the moment attention changed

The useful material in these interviews usually sits in what a person started noticing and what they did next. Kalle Nilvér, co-founder of the carbon footprint service GoClimate, was halfway down a glacier ski run in Chamonix when a guide explained why the train station sat so far up the hill. “So every year, they would add one step to the staircase going up that hill because the glacier won't be there much longer.” Richard Hardiman, whose company RanMarine builds autonomous vessels that clean plastic, algae and oil from ports, marinas and rivers, saw two men clearing a stretch of water with a boat and a net, assumed it was a local problem and then found that “trash in water was being collected by two guys in a boat in various formats” wherever he looked. Aarav Chavda, co-founder of INVERSA Leathers, which makes leather from invasive species such as lionfish, brought scuba diving and material science together and “sat down with the invasive lionfish problem that had lived in my brain for years”. Each is the founder's own recollection, given in our interviews.

None of those moments names a product. A staircase, a boat and a fish are each the point where a familiar thing stopped looking ordinary. Founder stories weaken when they are retrofitted to the current proposition, as though the founder always knew the exact product that would exist. The real paths keep the sequence of attention, question and work, and that sequence explains why this team kept following the problem when somebody else would have moved on.

An origin also has a place in a pitch. Kanop uses AI agents and satellite data to assess and monitor risk in nature-based investments. In the investor deck we rebuilt with its founders, the origin comes first and stays short. Romain Fau, its CEO and co-founder, explains in his own words why they started the company, and the deck then turns to the case for investing. The origin opens the pitch and hands over to the evidence.

Founders, companies and leaders enter at different moments

Not every interviewee founded the organisation they lead. At least three of the 94 lead an organisation that someone else founded, and a fourth joined as a co-founder after the company was incorporated. David Henstrom, who leads Unibio, a company that brews protein from methane, says so directly in our interview with him. “The business was started by the founding CEO, whom I succeeded.” He joined after the technology had been piloted and demonstrated, bringing almost 27 years at Cargill. Wolfgang Baum joined Fairventures Worldwide, a non-profit that plants trees and crops with farmers in Indonesia and Uganda, “as an intern” and eleven years on is one of its two CEOs. Andrew Behar describes becoming chief executive of As You Sow, a non-profit that uses shareholder resolutions to change corporate behaviour, after its founder, an old friend, asked him to write a strategic plan. Liza Altena describes hearing the pitch of repath, a climate risk software company, while scouting startups for Deutsche Bahn, and joining three months later as its fourth co-founder.

Each of those people has a legitimate story, and none of them needs to borrow the founding one. Henstrom’s credibility comes from an operating career and the commercial phase he was hired to lead. The company story explains where the gas-fermentation technology came from, and his story explains why he is credible for what comes next. Companies that change chief executive, spin out of universities or acquire technology should keep those entry points separate. Brighter Future will not write a hired chief executive into a founding story, and will not retrofit an origin to fit the current product.

When a founder and a hired chief executive both speak for a company, our leadership communications work writes the company’s origin at depth and maps which leader carries which story.

Purpose cannot do the product’s job

Climate founders often have moral or ecological reasons for the work, and those reasons can make an origin memorable while leaving the commercial proposition unexplained. Christoph Pitter, co-founder of ProteinDistillery, which makes egg-like protein from brewer’s yeast, names morality as his own driver and builds the company on a different motive. “Most people are not motivated by moral concerns alone,” he told us in an interview published in November 2023. He also explained why the company moved away from precision fermentation. “It was also hard to sell the story to investors.”

Pitter keeps his own reason and his customer’s reason apart, and the proposition is clearer for it. The Story System, our framework of six company stories, separates the same jobs. Origin explains why this began. Purpose explains why the organisation chooses to exist. Vision sets a direction. Customer, product and impact stories carry the rest of the case. The origin grows stronger once it stops trying to explain the whole company.

New categories need a temporary bridge

Several founders use analogy well because their technologies sit outside familiar categories. Florian Tiller describes the direct air capture of his Berlin startup, Ucaneo, as technology “that mimics the way humans breathe”. Henstrom gives Unibio’s gas fermentation a familiar process when he says “we're brewing protein for global consumption”. Chavda describes INVERSA’s approach to consumers as “always changing just one thing at a time, because the consumer needs to be brought along gradually.”

The bridge should be temporary. Once the audience can place the idea, the case has to move to performance, cost, evidence, integration and scale. An analogy that stays the main explanation becomes a slogan. The origin explains why the team followed the problem, and the product story explains what exists because they did.

Customer contact tests the story early

Steffen Gerlach makes one of the more useful admissions in the archive. He co-founded Eeden, which developed a chemical process to recover cotton and polyester from blended textile waste, and spoke to us in March 2024. Eeden’s direction turned out to be right, and he still names late customer contact as a risk the company ran. “Today, I would have started that talking process earlier.” He learned the investor version of the same lesson after a first pitch, when a man from an established company took the founders aside. The lesson was that “presenting to investors requires addressing a different persona and telling a different story in a specific order.”

Leah Bessa’s team at the precision-fermentation company De Novo Dairy, now De Novo Foodlabs, chose which protein to make after a single call with a dairy company, as she recounts in her interview. Customer contact matters most where there is little else to test the story against. Jennifer Cote describes Opalia, which cultivates milk from mammary cells in Montreal, working with “limited academic research on our topic”. That is the position of a first mover, examined in why nobody wants to become the precedent. Customer discovery belongs in the history of the company, because what buyers resisted and what they needed before moving can confirm the proposition or change it.

Keep the detours

A polished company history straightens the path. The interviews keep the turns. Gerlach describes one plainly. “We initially believed that launching our own fashion brand and managing recycling and everything in between would be essential.” The company soon found it needed to work with others instead, and that turn explains more about Eeden’s position than a straight line would.

Detours belong in an origin when they explain why the company changed. Late customer conversations, failed assumptions and leaders who joined long after the original idea are part of the record. Drain’s potato is the clearest case in the archive. Win-Win left the potatoes behind and kept the question, and an origin story told honestly keeps both halves of that sentence.

Sources and further reading

• Johnny Drain, Win-Win, founder interview
• Kalle Nilvér, GoClimate, founder interview
• Richard Hardiman, RanMarine, founder interview
• Aarav Chavda, INVERSA, founder interview
• David Henstrom, Unibio, leader interview
• Wolfgang Baum, Fairventures Worldwide, leader interview
• Andrew Behar, As You Sow, leader interview
• Liza Altena, repath, co-founder interview
• Christoph Pitter, ProteinDistillery, founder interview
• Florian Tiller, Ucaneo, founder interview
• Steffen Gerlach, Eeden, founder interview
• Leah Bessa, De Novo Dairy, founder interview
• Jennifer Cote, Opalia, founder interview
• Kanop case study
• How to Build a Story System Across Investors, Buyers, Partners and Employees