Realizing how incredibly autistic our early board meetings were for Spellbook: 1. I declared the meeting a “story free zone” because I was worried that stories were too psychologically persuasive, and that they would pull us away from hard data-driven reality 2. Meetings would largely consist of scrolling through like 40 slides of charts sifting for signal. I called this “soaking in the data” 3. In the search for PMF I wanted us to think like a hedge fund making many bets. While we knew the problem we were solving I didn’t want our team to get too tied to any single narrative because I thought it would reduce agility. 4. I never allowed us to think about us as “a company”, but instead as a SWAT team searching for a company to build 5. This approach enabled us to launch over 100 different landing pages with different angles on the way to PMF Honestly, I think it’s a really good approach pre-PMF. Too many companies get attached to a singular story too early and quit when it doesn’t work out. Startups are 3D chess. There is always a move. Slack was a game company. However, at Series B/Series C scale you really need stories to align both your team and customers, and you can think much more longterm after PMF. But I still believe stories are a dangerous dark magic. You can craft an incredibly persuasive story for almost any position. They’re more of a marketing/comms tool than a reasoning/understanding reality tool.