How to make an audience care about your company

Shows you how to frame your company as the consequence of a change in the world, so the room meets the change before the product.

The lesson draws on an idea from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The story a room cares about is the shift in the world that makes your company necessary. A room has just met your product and has little reason to care about it yet. It already cares about the world it lives in and the sense that it is changing. The course calls that change the wave. Your company is what rides in on it.

The common mistake is opening on the company and its product. The weight goes missing because the speaker skipped the wave. Lead with the wave, and the company lands as the answer to a question the room is already asking. A throughline that works almost always has the wave folded into it, sometimes in a single word that says something just changed.

The wave sets the frame, and the opening can take several forms. Opening cold on a macro trend can sound like a consulting slide. Many talks enter through a person, an origin or a single scene, then widen to the shift in the world. The origin is a way in, and the room should finish the opening standing inside the wave.

Key ideas.

The story a room cares about is usually the shift in the world that makes your company necessary.
Lead with the change in the world, and the company lands as the answer to a question the room is already asking.
A throughline that works almost always has the wave folded into it, sometimes in a single word that says something has just changed.
The wave sets the frame of a talk, and the opening can be an origin moment, a concrete scene, a sharp question or the change stated plainly.

Questions.

How do I make people care about my company in a pitch?

Lead with the change in the world that makes your company necessary. A room has just met your product, so it has little reason to care yet. It already cares about its own world and the sense that it is shifting. Name that shift clearly, and your company arrives as its consequence. The course From Story to Stage calls this finding the wave.

How should I open a talk about my company?

Open on a door that leads the room into the change in the world your company belongs to. The door can be an origin moment, a concrete scene, a sharp question or the change stated plainly. A cold macro trend can sound like a consulting slide. An origin works when it widens to the shift. An origin that stays put turns the talk into a memoir.

Lesson 2.4 of From Story to Stage, a free written course by Aaron C. Leaman, published by Brighter Future. The terms it uses are defined in the glossary.