99% of founders SUCK at storytelling. Here's the pro who taught Slack & Salesforce how to do it. | Matthew Dicks, professional storyteller & bestselling author of Storyworthy.

There is no better storyteller in the world than Matthew Dicks. He tells stories for a living. He gets paid by the world's biggest brands to create stories for them. He's won Moth StorySLAM (a storytelling competition in NYC) a record 59 times. 

Every founder knows storytelling is a critical skill. But 99% of founders I meet are terrible storytellers. They overcomplicate, they include too much information, they try to convince with data. 

Like Matthew says, "Most of what people say in business is forgettable". 

Whether you want to close customers, investors or employees, you need to stand out and be remembered. And the best way to do that is to tell compelling stories that resonate.

Here's how to do it.

Why you should listen

• Why the key being remembered is being different
• How to use stories to stand out and resonate with customers, investors and employees 
• Learn how to tell an effective story that is relatable, creates suspense, and includes personal connections.
• How to use personal stories to sell more product. 
• Why you often shouldn't start a story at the beginning.

Keywords

storytelling, business, relatability, suspense, personal connection, Slack, Salesforce, communication, connection, simplicity, contrast, value proposition, trust

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:52) A Story About Why Storytelling is Important
(00:11:18) Deconstructing the Story
(00:15:07) Keeping a Story in Present Tense
(00:16:58) Start With Location and Action
(00:20:41) When to Tell a Story Chronologically
(00:28:13) The Story for Slack
(00:35:33) Making a Pitch with No Data
(00:41:51) It's not B2B or B2C-- it's H2H
(00:47:57) The Goal is to be Remembered
(00:52:23) Use Truth in Your Story for Relatability
(00:55:11) Making up stories on the fly for portfolio companies

Chapters

• 2:52 A Story About Why Storytelling is Important
• 11:18 Deconstructing the Story
• 15:07 Keeping a Story in Present Tense
• 16:58 Start With Location and Action
• 20:41 When to Tell a Story Chronologically
• 28:13 The Story for Slack
• 35:33 Making a Pitch with No Data
• 41:51 It's not B2B or B2C, it's H2H
• 47:57 The Goal is to be Remembered
• 55:11 Making up stories on the fly for portfolio companies

Transcript

Matthew Dicks (0:00:01) 

You know, the value of being different, I think, can't be undersold as well. And most of what people say in business today is forgettable. It's convenient for a lot of people because they're so bad at presenting their information that they should be forgettable. They should be grateful that no one remembers what they say because it's so ordinary and terrible. So our brains have developed evolutionarily to pay attention to stories. When I begin telling you a story, when I actually told you that story about the blood draw, Without you even wanting it to happen, I changed your brain chemistry entirely. I released chemicals, oxytocin in your brain, the empathy gene, which made you feel closer to me, even if you didn't want to, improved your cognition, endorphins made you feel better about the world. All of those things happen when we tell a story. 

Pablo Srugo (0:00:43) 

Before we start today, could you just do me a really quick, really small favor? Can you just take your phone out of your pocket, open up Spotify, open up Apple Podcast, open up whatever player you're using and give the show five stars. You can think of it as like your good deed of the day because it's not just for me. It's for all other founders. If you like the show, if you get value out of this show, when you review the show, other founders are way more likely to find it. So this is like your philanthropic moment of the day. And yes, if you're thinking to yourself, is this really for me? Is he really talking to me? He must be talking to somebody else. No, I'm actually specifically talking to you. So please take a handful of seconds. If you like this show, rate it, give it five star, write something, whatever you do, you're gonna be helping not just me, but so many other founders. Thank you and I hope you enjoy today's episode. This is a very different episode than we normally do, but I'm so excited for it because they say that storytelling is such an important skill and I can tell you firsthand that 95, maybe 99 % of founders that I speak with honestly suck at storytelling. And so we went ahead and we got Matthew Diggs, who as far as I'm concerned is the best storyteller in the world. There's this thing called Moth Story Slam where people go on stage and they tell stories in New York City. Matthew Dicks has won this a record 56 times. He's written a book called Storyworthy that I read that I consider the best book in the world about storytelling. And in this episode, Matthew is going to break down exactly what a great story is. He's going to talk about what he did for companies like Slack and Salesforce to help them tell compelling stories that truly resonate. And we're going to end it with the rapid fire where I share with Matthew three different portfolio companies of ours, and he on the spot rewrites their entire stories. So with that said, let's get into it. Matthew, welcome to the show. 

Matthew Dicks (00:02:31) 

Thank you so much, I'm thrilled to be here. 

Pablo Srugo (00:02:33) 

So rather than tell people what a story is, let's just go ahead and show them. Can you share with us one of your favorite, I mean you have thousands of these stories, maybe share with us one of your favorite kind of five to seven minute stories, and then we can go ahead and deconstruct it so people understand what a story even is.

Matthew Dicks (00:02:48) 

 Sure, I'll tell you a story that sort of talks about why storytelling is important, I think. It's a Saturday morning and I'm walking across this empty parking lot towards this awful edifice of a building. It's poured concrete, it's brown, it's that brutalist architecture of the 1970s that tells me that the people of the 70s hated themselves and everything that they were building. And I hate being in this parking lot right now, not because of the building, because of what's going on inside. Somewhere on the third floor of this building, down a long hallway and a little room. There's a person sticking a needle into another person's arm right now, drawing out blood. That's why I'm here. It's a simple blood draw for a cholesterol test, but I'm terrified. I have been thinking about this blood draw all week long and I cannot believe that this moment has finally come. Usually in these circumstances, my wife is with me. She holds my hand, she squeezes it at the right moment. She tells me everything's going to be okay. But this terrible thing has happened. We had a baby. Her name is Clara. And on a Saturday morning to wake up your wife from bed and say, Hey, can you get the baby out of bed? And can we bundle up the baby? And can we all go down to the blood draw place so that you can hold my hand? Will I have my blood drawn? I did that this morning. And she said, no, she said, I am not getting out of bed and waking up the baby for this. You need to go do it by yourself. And I get it. She's not wrong. She loves the baby more than me. That is what happens when you become a mother. Before my wife, I would actually ask, nurses to come in and help me. I'd say, we get a second person in the room to hold my hand while you're going to draw this blood? And that used to work. But the last time I had a blood draw, the nurse told me that I'm a father now. She said, you need to grow up and get tough. Like, this is unacceptable. And I said, I'm tough. Like, I wear sweatshirts and sneakers in New England winters, and I don't complain about it at all. When the toaster oven goes off for my son's waffle, I don't use the sticks to get I reach my hand right into that toaster oven and put like I'm tough. I am a tough guy who's willing to put up with a lot of stuff, but this, this is something different for me. So I'm here alone on this day and I can't believe it. So I entered the building, I pressed the button for the elevator for the third floor. I'm waiting for this carriage of death to descend. I'm remembering the last time I was with my wife or the first time I was with my wife for a blood draw. It was actually for a student of mine who had cancer. I went to Sloan Kettering to donate platelets, which is even worse than a blood draw, because they essentially take all the blood out of you.

remove the platelets and then put the blood back in. It's like an hour long process. And they try to make it great. They put you in a comfortable chair, they give you a television, they say nice things. But when it was all over and I was in a little room eating cookies and drinking orange juice with my wife, the nurse popped in and she told my wife, she said, I have been doing this job for 32 years and your husband is by far the worst patient I have ever had. So this is like a no joke situation for me that I'm walking into. The elevator door is open. walk down this hallway. I enter this little room. It's surrounded with people who are here for the same reason. They're all here for a blood draw. And I hate every single one of them. They're all relaxed. They're looking at their phones. They're reading Highlights magazine. They're acting like this is nothing and I cannot stand it. So I put my name on the list and I just wait. I just wait and wait. And eventually my name is called. It's a young man. He says, come with me. And he leads me down to this little room. and I sit down and he starts opening up these packages and I do this thing that I always do. I tell them, these phlebotomists and these nurses, I say, listen, I just need to let you know that this is really hard for me and that means it's probably gonna be really hard for you and I wanna apologize ahead of time for what's about to happen, because I'm probably gonna be the worst patient of your life and I'm just, sorry about that. And this man, this young guy, he stops everything that he's doing. He puts everything down on a tray. and he's on this little rolling stool, so he rolls right up almost between my legs. He takes his hands and he puts them on my knees and he says to me, why is this so hard for you? He's the first person who has ever asked me this question in my life. And so I tell him that when I was 10 years old, I got stung by a bee and I had an allergic reaction. I didn't know it at the time, because it was the 1980s and no one was allergic to anything. But I got stung by a bee and suddenly I couldn't breathe. And I ended up in my home alone on the kitchen floor. And when the paramedics finally arrived, they found me not breathing and without a heartbeat. And they used CPR to bring me back to life. They rushed me to a hospital where they injected me over and over and over again with epinephrine to keep me alive. And then for the next week, every single night, that venom that was still in my body, it would cause another reaction. and I'd be rushed back to the hospital again where I get injection and injection and injection again. And then because it was a time before auto injectors, I would have to practice giving myself shots, needles with sterilized water that I have to inject into my arms in case I ever got stung again and needed to do it for myself. And all of that has caused me to hate needles and be terrified anytime someone's gonna stick me with one. That guy looks at me and he says, that makes sense.

He says, what you have is a negative feedback loop. And then he touches his chin. He touches this tiny white line on his chin that I didn't even notice until he pointed it out. And he says to me, when I was a kid, I came into my friend's house and his dog, for reasons no one ever understood, attacked me. I was the only person this dog ever attacked. And he bit me in the face and left me with this scar. And he said, to this day,I never feel safe in a room with a dog. He says when he goes to his friend's house, if they have a dog, they have to put the dog in another room or put it outside or he can never get comfortable. He tells me, I understand what you're going through. We'll do this together. It was the best blood draw I have ever had in my life. When I get back into my car in the empty parking lot, I'm crying over how lucky I feel to have met that man and had that experience. And so today when I take my students camping in the fall and a little girl tells me she's afraid of the dark, I don't tell her to suck it up and go to bed. I tell her that I understand how terrible fear can be. And when my son tells me that he got hit by a pitch in the last little league game, he's having a hard time getting close to the plate again, I say, I get it because that's real. And when my peanut allergic daughter tells me that she's afraid to try a new food because she's afraid to have another reaction. I tell her I understand. That I understand that fear is real and sometimes it's incapacitating. But oftentimes it can be conquered when we conquer it together. All right? so I like telling that story though because it's a story about a story. Like that guy tells me his story about getting bit by a dog and that changes everything for me. It's that idea that when someone tells you a story and they express empathy, through storytelling, suddenly things just shift enormous ways.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:09) 

 Well, that did not disappoint. I'm listening to the story attentively and I'm also in the back of my mind. And I stopped myself because I was deconstructing it a little bit and I'm like, let's just get fully sucked in by it. At the end of the day, it's a story about, and you talk about this in the book, Everybody thinks a story needs to be about something crazy, like something insane. And that's definitely how I went into it. Like what are some crazy things that have happened to me? What are the most attention grabbing things? And that's gonna be the best story. It turns out those are, as you mentioned, like some of the hardest stories. And the easiest ones to tell are about the simplest mundane things, like in this case, a blood draw, which everybody's gone through, everybody kind of gets it. And a lot of people know somebody, at least, who's really scared of them. But what makes that story so powerful? mean, let's maybe, I don't know how you what the best way to deconstruct it is. But obviously it resonated, at least for me, I'm sure for most people listening. There's a point at which I was really drawn in. It starts off and you're like, do I really care? And then you kind of get sucked in and sucked in and sucked in and all of a sudden you realize you're fully in it. So yeah, it would be great to kind of start deconstructing it and just what are some of the key pieces that make that as powerful as it was?

Matthew Dicks (00:11:17) 

 Sure. Well, I mean, first it has to be relatable. You know, if we're telling a story that's sort of like a crazy thing happened, but no one can really understand it, it has no universal appeal, it's not gonna land very well. So, you know, whether you're afraid of getting a needle stuck in your arm, you probably were afraid at one point in your life if you're not now, but you understand what an irrational fear is, because it is irrational. Like I should not be afraid about getting a blood draw or a vaccine, you know, a flu shot, all of these things. those needles don't hurt people. And I know that sort of on a cognitive level that it should not frighten me and yet it still frightens me. And I think we all sort of have those issues in life. So there's a universal appeal to it that I think makes sense to a lot of people. I think it also works really well that that's essentially a story that takes place over the course of five minutes of my life. I provide some backstory and some context, but really what I'm saying is I walked across a parking lot. I went up three floors. I went into a waiting room, put my name on a piece of paper, and then I had a blood draw. And while I was there, a guy told me a story about getting bit by a dog, and it made me feel better about my blood draw. Like that's the bad version of the story, but that's all that happened, right? So it's five minutes that I use five minutes to describe, but the purpose of a story is essentially to land a singular moment of change or transformation. So that means 95 % of a story is designed to make the 5 % at the end the most sense to your audience. So we're really just building an argument. You know, in the end, I am building an argument so that when that guy says that thing to me, and suddenly the blood draw gets easier to me, the audience says, yes, of course it got easier for you. Damn, that makes a lot of sense to me. And then in the perfect version of it, they go, that makes sense to me. And I can now think of the world a little differently as well. That's not required, but that's sort of the platonic version of storytelling. Not only does my story linger with them, but it changes the way they see things in a little bit of a way. 

Pablo Srugo (00:13:14)

Well, it's funny when you talked about it, as you were telling the story, the question, we're kind of alluding this to earlier, we talking about bad interviews and how a good interview is one where the interviewer asks the question you were thinking the whole time, right? And your story, the whole time I'm thinking to myself, man, why is this guy so scared? What is it that's making him so scared? And so finally, when within that story, that nurse, that person asked you why, It just kind of, I don't know if it was purposefully designed that way to get the listener to kind of be thinking that, you know, the whole time, but that's definitely what was accomplished. 

Matthew Dicks (00:13:47) 

Yeah, it's essentially suspense, right? I tell people that as a storyteller, what you don't say is more important than what you do say. You know, we're the cinematographers of our stories, which means we get the lens and what's on the outside of the lens, what's beyond the lens is the thing that keeps people listening. The problem with storytellers is so often they feel like in order to grab the audience's attention, they have to say everything. They have to say all the good stuff right off the bat. When ideally we wanna save that and preserve it as long as possible. My goal is that you're always wondering what I'm going to say next. Whether that is you're in suspense, whether you know there's a surprise coming, even if I'm making you laugh. If I'm making you laugh, you wanna know what I'm gonna say that will make you laugh next. So as long as I keep you wondering about the next sentence. I know I'm succeeding. So getting you to wonder why is this guy so afraid of needles, if I save that till the end, I'm pretty sure most people are gonna stick with me till the end because they want that question answered. 

Pablo Srugo (00:14:46) 

On that point, this is something you mentioned in your book that I never thought about but is the use of the present tense and I noticed you were doing it here as well. Why do you use, like normally you would say, so I pressed that button, so I did that thing and in your case, it's I press that button and you kind of feel the moment but why is that so important? in storytelling, why does that help keep kind of that suspense going?

Matthew Dicks (00:15:07) 

Yeah, well, it does a couple things. I think it tricks the brain. It almost makes it feel like it's happening a little bit right now. It adds urgency to a story. And I think it helps me to create a movie in the mind of the audience rather than me speaking after the fact, which means you're listening to the current version of me. In the present tense, you're forced to imagine me at a different time. And I think that allows you to leave the time we're in. You know, in the perfect version of the story, as your audience is listening, I want them to stop seeing what they're seeing. And I want them to see my story in their minds instead. And I think the present tense encourages that more. It also affords me the past tense. And that story, I use the past tense a lot. I open in the present tense, I'm walking across a parking lot, but then I say to ask my wife to wake up in the morning and wake up the baby, I did that. Meaning I did that in the past, but now I can come back to the present. If you're always in the past tense, you can't shift to a paster tense, right? So it becomes harder for an audience to keep track of what's happening now and what happened previous to the now. So by opening with the present tense, I get to tell backstory in the past tense and that just aids in comprehension.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:18) 

 Well, that includes, I guess, the story of you when you were 10 years old, which is like a kind of punchline story, the defining story, because it lets you shift back and shift forward. So that was one thing I noticed. The other thing I noticed, at some point I'll let you just tell me all the things that I did notice, I mean, this is so powerful, the other thing I noticed is you started off with action, which was another kind of, you know, these are small things in the sense that they're so easy to implement. Like, hey, just whatever story you're tell, tell in the present tense, it's gonna be better. The other one is whatever story you tell, find a way to start with action, with movement. again, what's important about that? Why does that tend to resonate to grab attention? Because in your case, it's, I'm walking across the parking lot, or was something like that, I think, that it started

Matthew Dicks (00:16:58) 

It's always location and action. So it's action because people want stories to get started. And most people start stories by teaching something. You know, if I'm to tell you a story about my mother, for some reason, people feel like we need to know your mother before the story can begin. And that's the worst way to tell the story. Instead, allow the story to begin and teach us about your mother as you go along. The same way in a movie, right? They don't open Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks explaining how 1960 space travel works. Right. That would be a bad way to begin the movie. Instead, They open the movie with him in a convertible listening to Neil Armstrong land on the moon. And eventually we will learn how 1960s space travel works, but it doesn't open the movie. So people want stories to get started. So action draws them immediately in. And then location is fantastic because location often doesn't require any adjectives. And I hate adjectives. I hate describing things unless there's a specific purpose to it. So when I say I'm walking across an empty parking lot, that's all I need to say for you to see me. Your empty version of a parking lot is very different than mine. Like maybe you pictured little saplings and you little islands or maybe pictured like an old parking lot or a brand new, whatever it was, it doesn't matter to me. I'm not going for verisimilitude. I don't want you to see my parking lot. I just want you to see your best version of a parking lot so it feels the realest to you. So unless I'm trying to lend specificity to something or like I described that building. in the beginning of the story, the Brutalist architecture, just to make you laugh. Because I know if I make you laugh in the first 30 seconds of a story, chemicals get released into your brain, which make you like me better, improve your comprehension, make you feel better about the world. So if I can make you laugh about the fact that people in the 1970s built terrible things that look terrible even today, and you laugh a little bit about it, that makes me as a storyteller winning because that laugh is so assistive to me. But if I wasn't trying to make you laugh, I never would have described that building to you.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:50) 

For contrast, what might have been a bad way or a classic way to start a story like this? 

Matthew Dicks (00:18:53) 

Someone would have started with, I hate needles. I can't stand blood draws. They're the bane of my existence. They ruin every day that I have and I cannot stand even thinking about a blood draw coming, which was really hard for me on a Saturday morning when I was walking across a parking lot. At that point, you've actually told half the story and… We still have a long way to go. Dripping out information a little bit at a time rather than loading up the front would be a bad version of that story. Or telling it chronologically, which would be, so I wake up on a Saturday morning, I'm lying in bed next to my wife. I shake her and ask her if she'll go to the blood draw with me because I don't want to go alone. Right? That would be a bad place to start too, because that means I have to now get dressed, get my ass in a car, drive down to a building. All of that stuff is I call process language. which is useless. It's the language that is required to get us from point A to point B. And I want to get rid of all process language unless it's serving a purpose, like walking across a parking lot. And while I'm walking, I'm explaining why this walk is so hard. Most people probably would have started chronologically with them opening their eyes or with some explanation about how afraid they are of needles.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:09) 

I get that because chronologically is just reciting things like the way that they happen. The problem with the other one.You're putting all, like you said, the punchline first and you're giving it to me before I care. And so you're taking all of the upside that you would get from delivering that punchline. Once I'm sucked in, you're just taking all the power away. So, so I understand that now having said the wrong way to do it, if chronologically is not the right way to tell most stories, like what is the right framework to think about how to tell effectively a series of events, but so that it actually has, you know, resonance the way that this story did. 

Matthew Dicks (00:20:41)

 Well, about half the stories I tell are chronological. So it does make sense a lot of the time, particularly in short stories that don't require a lot of backstory. So if something happens to me a couple nights ago, I'm at a minor league baseball field with my son and my wife and my son is spilling ice cream all over his shirt. And I'm watching it happen and thinking, why is my 12 year old boy such a fool? Like, why can't this kid figure out how to eat? And I'm about to say something when my wife says it for me, she says, what is wrong with you, Charlie? Why do you have ice cream all over your shirt? And he says to her, he says, mom, It's called childhood. Just like that, I realized, damn, he's right. He's 12 and he's supposed to get ice cream all over his shirt. Like that's the job of a 12 year old. I think I actually have my expectations for my son might be a little too high. Like that is actually what he should be doing. That is a story that can be told chronologically because I don't require any backstory. I don't have to make an argument to you. I don't have to prove anything to you. In this story. I can't tell it chronologically because really chronologically, I'd have to go all the way back to that moment at Sloan Kettering with my wife, right? That's actually the, actually I'd have to go all the way back to when I was 10 years old and get stung by the bee. So because this story has so much backstory that I have to bring in, I don't wanna tell it chronologically. So I wanna choose a spot that allows sort of maximum wonder. And for me it is, I'm walking towards a building that frightens me. And it frightens me cause somewhere on the third floor, people are sticking needles into other people's arms. Those sentences, I love those sentences, because those are the sentences that make people go, what the hell is going on here, right? And that's what I want. So oftentimes, if we're not gonna tell a story chronologically, we wanna find the moment that we can grab an audience's attention the best. And movies do this all the time. Movies often start somewhere in the middle, and then you eventually gotta figure out how the hell we got here. And that's sort of the great version of a story oftentimes, which is, I'm in the middle of something.

I wanna know what's gonna happen next, but at the same time, I'm also wondering, how did we get here to begin with? And that tension between what's going to happen and what has happened, that causes an audience to be wrapped in a story constantly. 

Pablo Srugo (00:22:47) 

Maybe the most important question, if stories aren't about crazy things, outlandish things, what is the essence of a story? 

Matthew Dicks (00:22:54) 

So it has to be change over time. Every movie you've seen, every book you've read, every Broadway show you've attended, ultimately it's a protagonist. a person or a group of people or sometimes it's a product or a service or a company that has changed in some fundamental way. So in this story, I go from a guy who's terrified of blood draws and basically misunderstood by the world to a guy who manages to have a reasonably less frightening blood draw because someone chose to stop for once and actually engage with me and tell me a story. It doesn't mean every blood draw since then has been wonderful, Honestly, every single one has been a little better than the ones previous because of this moment I have with the guy. If I don't have change over time though, if I don't fundamentally shift in a positive or a negative way, then it's just reporting on your life. Then it's just some stuff happened and I'm gonna tell you what happened. And those are great stories for spouses and mothers and no one else. No one has ever said, hope he reports on his life today. They wanna know, did something meaningful happen? And if so, then you get to speak.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:00)

Well, even in your short story about your son, there was that change moment, which I think could have gone unnoticed. went from thinking, you your of your expectations changed or the way that you thought about where your son was in his in his life changed. And that's what was the kind of key moment of that story, even though was like a what? 30 second story. 

Matthew Dicks (00:24:20) 

Now, I'll probably stretch that because, you I told that to someone the other day and I realized, that that's like I knew it was a story because I knew I had changed. on reflecting, which is what storytellers need to do. We need to be obsessed with our lives in a positive way. Most people don't spend time thinking about their lives or giving themselves time to think about their lives. They sort of just keep moving. And so that moment happened at the minor league park and Charlie said that great thing and I thought, have my expectations for him are too high. And then in thinking about it over the last couple of days, it also occurred to me when I grew up, I didn't really have parents who were taking very good care of me and I was the oldest of five. So in a lot of ways, I was the parent to my brothers and sisters. And in a lot of ways, I took care of myself. And it occurred to me just over the past 48 hours while reflecting, the expectations I have for Charlie are actually the expectations that were required of me as a child. So I keep thinking to myself, like, I used to make my own lunches. Why can't Charlie do that? I'm like, well, I actually had to make my own lunches because no one else was making my lunch, right? I did my own laundry at 10. Well, that actually was because no one else would do my laundry. So I've now been thinking about how that's actually gonna end up being a story about how I didn't have so much of a childhood because my parents required me to be more responsible earlier than I needed to be. And I've been sort of thinking that about Charlie and that moment in the baseball park made me realize, I'm trying to treat him or expect of him the same thing that I did as a kid. But what I had to do as a kid was inappropriate. Like I require my son to be as responsible for his life as I needed to be. So now you can feel it's becoming much more of a story. But that's only because if you're a storyteller, you're actually interested in your life and you spend time thinking about it. Most people don't, they just move on past those moments. go, here's a funny thing that my son said. And that's the end of that story is here's a crazy thing my son said. I heard the crazy thing and then said, what the hell does that mean to me? And I finally came upon

Pablo Srugo (00:26:19)

That's a really good segue because obviously here we're talking to an audience of startup founders and it's all about how to use it. Everybody talks about this. Like you want to be a good storyteller as a founder because the Don Valentine quote that I actually mentioned even the other day talking to a different guest is, you know, money flows to the best storytellers. And I think that's very true, especially in the early stages, which is most of the people that are listening. so every now and then, like very rarely, I will meet somebody who is truly a great storyteller and they will start talking and I am just sucked in, right? Fully sucked in, fully immersed in the story they're telling me, which is a business story about customers. Most of the time, it's not that way. Most of the time, the analogy to the story you're telling, but your child, which would be like, customers have these problems, blah, blah, blah, right? And it sucks, and yeah, I'm gonna fix it. And whereas, in your case, you kind of had this discovery moment that changed your expectations, and a lot of it would be like, how do you find those moments that you've had as a founder and the reflection comes into this because of how you're moving at a hundred miles an hour. You're doing all these things. You're learning all these things. You don't even realize that you're learning. Then you go out in front of somebody who doesn't know your market, you know, 1 % as well as you do, doesn't know your customer's said 1 % as well as you do. And you try and just dump it all on them. And it's just nothing sticks, nothing resonates. And the problem is that if you don't get that across the room, if the other person doesn't resonate, then they're just going effectively ignore you. Like they just feel like the value that you're providing is just not that important. The problem you’re solving is not that important. And so you failed, you know, effectively as a job, as a founder in the context of fundraising or in the context of to be clear, storytelling is not just fundraising, it's landing customers, it's hiring people, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe just shifting to that, like you've worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. You've worked with, and you were mentioning Slack, Salesforce. What are some kinds of stories you can share, maybe some case studies of things that you did with them just provide some context for founders to understand how you could use everything that we just talked about in a business context. 

Matthew Dicks (00:28:13) 

A lot of times, I think what we need to do is, especially in tech, we're trying to make things as relatable as possible to people. And we want to touch people in a place that they'll both understand it and also say, yeah, I get that. That's me too, right? So there was a moment when I was working with Slack and they were trying to segment their audience. They were trying to say there's three different types of customers that we have. We've got these we've got these technologists and companies who like secretly bring in slack to their one little division and they're kind of using it privately and it's limited to this one little scope. Right. And those are great. Those are people who sort of bring it in. And then there's the companies that say we're to get slack. We're going to institute it. We're going to follow all the rules. Everyone's going to have it. And then there's that customer that gets slack and then actually takes advantage of all

all of its tools and they actually begin to modify it to fit their company. And they said, we wanna make it clear to customers that you might fit one of these three categories, but you're all our customers. You know, they came to me and said, what story can we tell? And I always think, we're not gonna tell that story. We're gonna tell a different story that relates to that story, right? And it's always just, or it's almost always just my story. You know, there's a company that actually calls me metaphor man, cause they always think I have a good metaphor. I never have a metaphor. I have a personal story and all we do is we pull me from the story and that creates the metaphor. So in the Slack example, I said, it was during the pandemic, I said, well, listen, I used to be able to cook one thing, macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, which sounds ridiculous, but my foodie wife thinks it's fantastic. She's like, I can't believe I've never had macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs in it the way you make it. It's fantastic. That was my one thing. So that

technologists bringing slack into the company and doing one thing really well in a small way, right? But then the pandemic hits and because we don't wanna go to the grocery store so often, we start to get HelloFresh meal kits. And weirdly those kits teach me how to cook. Suddenly I'm like zesting a lemon, I'm seasoning chicken. I like learn all the terms to cooking which I never learned in my life. And that's essentially the slack customer that says, we're gonna put slack into our business, we're gonna tell everyone how to use it and we're gonna teach everyone to use it the right way. That is me learning how to cook. Like from HelloFresh meal kits and eventually actually cookbooks that I can actually open and understand what they say. And then there was a day post pandemic when I didn't have a HelloFresh meal kit and I opened up the fridge and I remember going, well we have like pork chops and I actually have a lemon. I know how to like make lemon and pork chops go together and taste good. And if we have some of that green stuff that I can't remember what it's called, but that stuff that I sprinkle on the pork chops. And then I was like, we have potatoes.I can actually, I can do something beyond just mashed potatoes. Like I can make stuff without a meal kit, right? That's the slack version of the customer that says we're gonna take your thing, but we're gonna make it our own. And we defined it that way as like, how do you cook your meals? Are you a person who specializes in one thing, macaroni and cheese and hot dogs? Do you follow a cookbook? Are you the kind of person that can open the refrigerator and make a dish? Whichever type of slack customer you are. We want you to be one of our customers, right? And so when we define it that way, people identify with it. They relate to that story. go, yeah, I do make one really good thing, right? I'm known for my this, and now they can see themselves using Slack in that way. So what we wanna do, especially when we're not selling brooms, know, when we're not selling jello, when we're selling things that are a little harder for people to understand or understand why they need, we take it out of the realm of technology for a moment and make it relatable. And when we can personal, I'm always encouraging businesses to have whoever's speaking, speak in a way that the human being who's talking actually becomes a person in the process. If you're creating a keynote or a sales pitch or a marketing plan that anyone can deliver, then no one should be delivering it. Because essentially you're just creating. something that a corporate spokesperson could speak for you and no one has ever in their lives said, boy, I hope I can get a corporate spokesperson to deliver this pitch to me today, right? They actually want a human being to do it. You my favorite example of this, my friend Masha, she was working for Slack at the time actually and we were trying to compete against Microsoft Teams. She came up with this amazing campaign which totally did the job, she crushed it. But her campaign, the idea for it came on a Tuesday and She's on her third glass of wine. She's sort of sad because her boyfriend has broken up with her. She's in the middle of a pandemic. She can't see people. And she has this moment of inspiration. She writes a few words down on a napkin. And that napkin becomes the basis of the strategy that Slack uses to fight against Microsoft Teams. And when it comes time to present that, I say to Masha, you're gonna talk about the napkin and the Tuesday night and the three glasses of wine, right? And she's like, no, it does not belong in a marketing pitch to like my bosses. I think it does, right? She doesn't use it then, but about a month later when she's reporting to a smaller stakes audience, I get her to agree to talk about it. And as soon as she's done, she calls me, she's like, I cannot believe what just happened. I used the napkin and the wine and the loneliness on the Tuesday. And she said, suddenly people wanted to talk to me when I was done. Like people actually came up to me to speak to me because she wasn't Slack's corporate spokesperson, the director of corporate communications. She was Masha Reutovski, a human being who is here presenting an idea to you. So the more that we can just drip a little bit of ourselves into the content that we're presenting to customers, potential investors, the more we become people to them, the more people will buy into it. Because people believe in people with ideas more than they believe in ideas. They want the person behind the idea to be a person and not just a resume.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:08) 

And how do you like taking to the Slack story and the three types of cooks, like how do you deliver that story? Like, are we talking about this is like a post on their website? Like, is this a marketing presentation they're doing or are they making like YouTube videos with this story? Like how do I, I'm just curious how that actually gets delivered to the end customer.

Matthew Dicks (00:34:26) 

 Yeah, I would say all, ideally I would say all of that should be the case. I don't remember how far that went at Slack, but I know it became, it became the marketing pitch for sure. and I think it landed on the webpage. Basically that says like, you know, what kind of cook are you? You know, it doesn't take long to say, are you this, this or this, right? You can say it in a few sentences and it says, depending on which one you are, click here and we'll tell you why Slack is for, you know, good for you. Ideally, if you have a good story to tell, you should be putting it in every channel you can. You want a unified message as much as possible. 

Pablo Srugo (00:35:02) 

And so what's another one? Like let's take us and I like Slack and I like Salesforce because Frankly, they're pretty boring. One of them is like a chat, and then the other one's a CRM. It doesn't get more boring than a CRM that's like over 20 years old. And actually even on that, like 20 years old, mean, you figure they figured out all the ways to talk about Salesforce at this point. Everybody knows what it is. Everybody knows what a CRM is. Anybody that might be a customer, at least, you would think. So I'm curious what you can even bring to the table. Which parts of it are you transforming and changing through stories? 

Matthew Dicks (00:35:33) 

Well, I think my most boring example and my favorite example is I was working with a biotech and they sell tubes. I don't really understand what they sell completely, but they sell tubes to companies that need to use these tubes in their manufacturing processes. And essentially the company I'm working with, they make 18 different tubes of different sizes and lengths and things like that. And all their competitors make one tube and the one tube you have to retrofit. So if you buy their one tube, which is a lot cheaper, it's not gonna fit what you need, but you can sort of make it Right, but the company I'm working with says we sell 18. It improves the efficacy of your manufacturing. It's definitely more expensive, but you should get R -tubes. And so I'm prepping some scientists to go to a conference to get some sales leads and I'm teaching them how to tell stories. And they all tell stories, they do a great job. But the one guy, his name's John, he goes to the conference and he's a scientist, but he presents no data whatsoever. He goes to the conference and essentially he says, when I go grocery shopping every week, I have to buy apples for my family. but no one in my family can agree on what apples they want. And it makes me crazy. So I gotta get four Cosmic Crisps for my son. And my wife needs like three Macintosh for a pie and four Red Delicious. And my daughter wants Yellow Delicious, which you can never find. And so he says, I spend 15 minutes every Saturday picking apples out and putting them in individual bags so they don't get confused. And it makes me crazy. But he says, my family deserves to get what they want. And he says, our company feels the same way. Our competitors say, here's a Macintosh, make it work. Doesn't matter if you're making pies, doesn't matter if you're making juice, doesn't matter what your kid's like, here's a Macintosh, it's all you get. He says, my company believes you should have all the apples. And that's gonna cost a little more, but it's exactly what you need, what you want, and what you deserve. And that's all he does. He doesn't talk about the data, he doesn't talk about anything sciency at all. He tells that story. He goes back to the office. He ends up with more leads than the other four scientists combined because he tells a story. Now the thing John didn't understand and the company didn't understand until I explained to them later, the best part about his story is because he lands the idea of his company with a physical object in the world, like apples in a grocery store, that means that every single time someone in that conference goes to a grocery store and they're standing in front of those tables of apples and trying to find the right one, they're thinking about John and his company and they're thinking about it in a positive way. So when you tell stories, especially stories about things that exist in the world, you create these personal totems that can stand for your company. They don't cost you any money. You're not buying a billboard. You're not buying airtime. You're just saying our company thinks you should get all the apples. And now when you see all the apples, you think about his company. And that's why he ends up with those leads. Now the vice president of marketing was not happy at first, because she found out about it she said, we can't send scientists to scientific conferences and not report on science, right? And she was really pushing back hard. And I said, well, he got more leads than all the other scientists combined. And now on those follow -up calls, I'm sure they're gonna wanna hear the data and they're gonna wanna know the science. But the goal of a story isn't to like teach us everything, right? When Steve Jobs said an iPod is a thousand songs in your pocket, he didn't say a thousand songs in your pocket. Now let me open it up and explain to you exactly how it works. Cause that would have killed the story, right? The story is you get to own all the music you've ever loved in your pocket instead of dragging it around in cassette cases and know, racks of records, right? That's the story. The story is you get joy in your pocket. Like you get apples whenever you want them. Those follow -up calls can all happen. There's definitely like some Apple nerds that wanted to know how the iPod worked and all the details, but most of us don’t , And most of us don't need to know how the tubes work. We just need to know that's the company that cares about us that wants to give us what we need. There'll be follow up for sure. But eventually that VP relented. She threw a paper actually on the table and she said, damn it, I think he's right. But you understand her problem because she's the VP of marketing for 20 years probably. She's been doing it one way. And then some idiot walks in the room and says, actually, you should do it this way. And he proves that it's it works. Right. And so essentially I'm threatening. the work that she has done all her life doesn't invalidate it in any whatsoever. It's sort of an additive. It's like, keep reporting on your data, but maybe we could attach a story to it as well. Those scientists are the best examples because they're so boring. 

Pablo Srugo (00:40:07) 

I love that. And I think like it's kind of the way, the thing that comes to my head is you've got it, like people think, data is going to convince somebody to take an action. So especially in the B2B world, like in consumer, think more people get it. Like, okay, nobody buys, you know, a Mac versus a, how many people buy Mac versus let's say a PC because of the actual specs. mean, few, the engineers are really technologists. Most people, it's just because they're buying a Mac, because they love it, because whatever, right? And so the data is more supportive. But in the B2B context, I think a lot of people lose that. Like all of a sudden they think, no, no, I gotta dump all this data. They'll see that it is like factually better, and then they will buy it. And the thing is, data doesn't matter unless I care. Like it just doesn't, it just goes in one ear, out the other. Even if I'm in that conference, supposedly I care, because I've taken time out of my day to be. I actually still don't really care about most people presenting. I've got other reasons to be there until you can really hook me and really get me to that point where I'm like, huh. That makes a lot of sense, which is what that Apple story did. That that's really all it accomplished was like, first of all, I'm sucked into the story and second one, like, huh, he's got a point. Like I kind of, you know, that's true. You do need an Apple for each person. I can relate to that. It's got that added value that you said, which is a physical object in the world. All those things are happening. But the biggest thing for me at least is it's got me hooked. Now I'm thinking  to myself, I wonder if it's backed up, Yeah, sure, before I press buy, especially on a big order, I'm gonna wanna see the data, I'm gonna wanna see, but I'm going into it already, let's say, like lubricated, already ready to buy and almost finding, trying to look for supporting reasons for why I should actually make that buy decision versus total standstill, zero momentum, and the data's just not gonna be enough, I think, to get me from not interested to sign an order. You gotta get me interested, you gotta get me hooked, and Data can get me all the way through. 

Matthew Dicks (00:41:52) 

I hate the phrase B2B, because it's weird when people say B2B, it's as if there aren't humans in the B and the B, right? I always say it's H2H, always. It's always human to human. Like it might be a business, but in the end, there's actually a person somewhere in that building, probably at a desk, who actually has a heart and mind who will ultimately make the decision. So when we think about we're selling to a business, I think we're making a mistake. We're selling to human beings and probably to a small number of human beings in that business. And those are the people we have to reach. I was just working with an educational company. They sell curriculum essentially. And we were realizing that we were selling to superintendents and not teachers. Teachers don't get to choose what their curriculum is gonna be. It's a superintendent. And so when we realized that, we suddenly shifted the story. Because we knew that the way to touch the heart and mind of a superintendent of a school district, is very different than touching the heart and mind of a teacher. But in the end, we're not selling to a school, we're selling to someone in a school district who is responsible for one billion things. And our pitch ended up being, we actually can solve a problem for you. How often does that happen? Has anyone ever walked into your office and said, we know you have a problem, we can solve it and it will never be a problem again. We guarantee that, right? That's the way to touch the heart and mind of a superintendent who has All the problems and none of the solutions right will present a solution that's different than selling it to a teacher which says hey do you want to walk into your classroom on a monday morning and know exactly what to do without any preparation feel good about what you're doing two different stories right but ultimately it's people we're selling to and so b2b i always push it aside and say stop saying that it's h2h we're looking for a human being that's who we're selling to. 

Pablo Srugo (00:43:38) 

You know, you mentioned something in the beginning of that biotech story, is like, you didn't even know, like you talked to, they do, they sell tubes that you dont already get for what. And we were talking before, you said, oftentimes when you get engaged with a company, you don't actually want to know all of the details. And I can hear in back of my mind, you know, founders saying, okay, I get it, but, but mine's different. Mine's different because like I'm selling such a technical product, such a technical audience, they all get it. So my consumer, my customer, my human already gets all this stuff. So I might as well kind of speak that super technical language. I'm thinking to myself, Well, that would have been the case for the scientists too, right? They would have sold science to a science audience. So how come you would still think in that context it's important to keep that distance and why does an Apple story still work with such a technical audience? 

Matthew Dicks (00:44:22) 

When we think about storytelling, there's a whole bunch of elements involved. One of them is when you tell a story, it's just remembered. If you're competing with a bunch of scientists and they're presenting data and you're telling a story, you will always be remembered. You know, it is why we can recite the plots of 100 or 200 movies that we've seen over the course of our lifetimes, books and musicals and plays, we remember that. And that's only because human beings for almost all of our existence, all until the last one quarter of 1 % of human existence, we couldn't write. It is only in the very, very briefest moment of time that we could communicate from generation to generation through the written word. So prior to that, the only way we passed information from one generation to the next was through storytelling, oral storytelling, which kept us alive. It was the stories that said, don't eat the berries from that bush because it killed Uncle Dave, or that water over there made Aunt Janice sick, don't drink from that water hole. That's literally how human beings survive for almost all of our lifespan. So our brains have developed evolutionarily to pay attention to stories. When I begin telling you a story, when I actually told you that story about the blood draw, without you even wanting it to happen, I changed your brain chemistry entirely. I released chemicals, oxytocin in your brain, the empathy gene, which made you feel closer to me, even if you didn't want to, improved your cognition, endorphins made you feel better about the world. All of those things happen when we tell a story. If I had just given you data, if I had just told that story in a data way, which I could have done, I could have said, listen, I'm afraid of blood draws. And it's because when I was a kid, I got stung by a bee and had to have a lot of epinephrine. And because of that, when I was at Sloan Kettering, I was the worst patient ever. And I have nurses holding my hands and my wife used to hold my hand. And on this day, I'm still afraid. That's the data version of the story, which is forgettable. And most of what people say in business today is forgettable. It's convenient for a lot of people because they're so bad at presenting their information that they should be forgettable. They should be grateful that no one remembers what they say because it's so ordinary and terrible. But when we tell a story, we get to be remembered. In that same way, I can't remember the four other scientists, what they said that day. Now I helped them. I helped them prep their talks and they had storytelling in their talks, but it was not primarily their talk. They dripped a little storytelling in which felt very frightening for them. And yet, you know, it was a huge step for them. But the one I remember is John. I don't even really know what his company does for sure, except I know that I will do business with John. We choose people. almost always to do business with more than the product, right? It's like, believe in that person. I'm not so sure about the product, but I think he's gonna get it there. Like he doesn't have it figured out yet, but I believe he can get it there. And that's coming through storytelling and being remembered. So I think that's why that works. Even if your company is technical and your audience is technical, you're just assuming that people are attracted to graphs and charts and data and spreadsheets. No one has ever been attracted to those things. No one brings that to a first date. What do you bring to your first date? You bring stories to a first date, right? When you sit down across from someone who you wanna have a relationship with, you do not bring your 401k. You don't bring like sort of a timeline of your history. You don't bring your diploma. You bring stories about your life that you think will be remembered and will touch someone's hearts and mind. It's the same thing for investors. They're on a first date. And so often they think, well, here's my diploma, right? And here's my report card from fifth grade. What do you think, right?

And none of that's really going to land in the hearts and minds of people. It's a story that's going to land.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:58) 

 I think that it ties into something critical, which is when you tell these stories in a business context and in the startup context, what is your goal? And you might think you're going into it and your goal is to convince someone, right? Your goal is to get somebody to buy, you're to walk into this meeting and they're going to, you know, walk out with a purchase order, walk into this meeting, walk out with a term sheet, whatever. And I would almost argue based on what you just said, like change that whole goal and just have the mindset of My goal is just to not be forgotten. mean, if I'm telling something that just keeps me in somebody's mind for much longer than others, I win. Like, that is a huge win in a world where there's so much stuff being thrown at you. If you can be, think about it, like you're a potential employee, a candidate, and they're still thinking about you a week after the interview, right? An investor's still thinking about you week or two weeks after that first meeting. Customers, et cetera, et cetera, like, that is all tailwind. That's all momentum. Some of us will make it all the way through the funnel, others won't, but huge win if you can just be remembered.

Matthew Dicks (00:48:59) 

 Yeah, I was working with a contract manager at a, we'll say a company that you have probably already touched today. I don't know if I can tell you the name of the company, but he wanted to infuse storytelling into a contract conference that he was attending. He had to talk to his people about adding specificity to contracts. Essentially his people were not being specific enough in their requirements for their vendors. And he said, I want to do that through storytelling. want to be remembered. So I told him, I said, again, creating a metaphor, I said, well, listen, when I go to a restaurant and I order a hamburger or a hot dog or anything, I always tell the server, I don't want any pickles on the plate because I hate pickles. And for some reason, pickles are the only food item that are arbitrarily applied to plates. Like without any announcement, like you'll order a hot dog and fries. And then there's just a giant pickle the size of the hot dog sitting next to it and I can't stand the smell of them, the taste of them. And the worst thing about pickles is they infect everything on the plate. You put a pickle on a plate with a hot dog, the hot dog tastes like pickles, the french fries tastes like pickles. So today when we go to a restaurant, my wife and I, no matter what I order, I always say, and if you're gonna put a pickle on the plate, don't please. I ordered clam chowder once with my wife and I told the server, said, and if you're gonna put a pickle on the plate, please don't. And she said, you're ordering clam chowder, right? I said, I am, but I don't know what you're gonna put a pickle on, because you guys just think you can put pickles everywhere, right? And I told them that story. said, so what I would do is I would tell them that story, make them laugh. And I'd say, that's what you need to do. You need to be as specific with your contracts as I am about pickles in a restaurant. And then I asked the guy, what are you gonna use? What are you super specific about? And he said, I'm gonna use your pickle story. And I said, do you like pickles? And he said, I don't like them anymore. And so he went and used my pickle story to make his point. And it actually became part of the language at the company. He actually uses the word pickle now. If he sees a contract that doesn't have enough specificity in it, he says this contract has a pickle in it. You need to get the pickle out. So it actually becomes that memorable thing. And like I explained to him too, when his people go out to dinner and they order a cheeseburger and they find an arbitrary pickle placed next to the cheeseburger, they're gonna be thinking, right, contracts, specificity, I got to do my job well, right? He is reinforcing that message and becoming unforgettable simply by applying a story, my story in this case, to his message. And suddenly it becomes something we don't forget. As opposed to what he planned on doing which was, we need to be more specific. Let me give you two examples of how we weren't specific and how it sort of let the company down. You could put that away and in five minutes you can forget about that forever. But the pickles, you. Like you will be thinking about me, everyone listening to this right now, the next time they see a pickle on the plate, they're going to think, that storytelling guy who I listened to on the podcast, right? I've created that in the minds of your audience. Now it won't last forever, but it's going to last a little while. And that's what we're looking to do as storytellers.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:57)

 I want to move to the last part of this podcast, but I have to ask this because it just came up in this in a story, which is, you know, this guy, Sean Perry from my first million, he has this quote, says, never let truth get in the way of a good story. So what do you think about that, especially in this context where he borrowed your story, made it about him, he likes pickles, now he doesn't. What's kind of like the gray zone, or what's the never get to this, cross this line zone? 

Matthew Dicks (00:52:22) 

I'm a little opposed to that quote really. The problem is I'm a novelist too, so I'm a professional make -or -upper of stuff. So when I'm telling true stories, the thing I love about it is I'm burdened with facts that I have to sort of organize like a puzzle. What I will do is I'll throw out facts that don't help me. So some random person is in a story that doesn't really do anything. They're gone. You know, I'll compress time, something that takes place over the course of three days. I'll make it three hours. So it's easier to understand, but I never put anything into a story that didn't exist. My problem with that guy and the pickles is when I tell you the pickle story, you now know something about me that you didn't know before. And I have become more human to you, more authentic, right? He's just adopting my story, which is to say he's not really sharing

himself to his people. He's sharing a fake version of himself to his people. It's gonna land the message. But I also think as anyone in business and particularly anyone in leadership, our job is to sort of become more known to the people who we work with, the people we're selling. In the same way, if you were in school, the teachers we tend to get most attached to are the ones who we actually get to know. You know, as a kid, there were some teachers that like operated in a black box. I didn't even know if they were parents. I didn't know if they were married. know, they were just, it was Mr. Moran. I knew nothing about his outside life. And therefore I didn't feel very close to him. Whereas Lester Moroni, my French teacher, I knew his wife's name, I knew his kid's name, I knew he had a swimming pool in the backyard. Like I knew the things he loved, I knew the things he hated. I won the French award as a senior because I loved Lester Moroni because he let himself be known to me. We need to do that as business people. So that guy, he stole my pickle story about what I would have loved for him to do if he had been a storyteller. I would have said, just spend a little bit of time. I am sure there's something in your life that you're super specific about. And I actually gave him other examples. I said, like when I was like 19 and 20, I color coded my hangers. Like that was stupid to buy colored hangers to match my clothing, right? That would have been another story I could have told, right? And that would have made people laugh. And he's like, I don't have those stories. And I said, you only don't have them because you haven't thought about it. Like you haven't walked away and spent two days looking at your life and going, where am I kind of crazy? Right? I'm crazy about hangers and pickles or I was hang crazy about hangers and now pickles. Find your stuff. So I prefer when people are truthful because I think it reveals a little bit of us and the more we reveal of us, the more people believe in us.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:49) 

 let's, let's move on to this last part. Maybe the best part, I think you saved the best for last, which is kind of seeing this in action because it's a lot, it's a lot, it's, it's easier even like, I mean, there's the, kind normal stories and then you got to case studies which you know they're handpicked from a bunch of different situations but you're a founder you're like okay but here's my thing like here's my business here's my pitch what do I do to really transform it so let's let's make that happen so I'll tell you about a company this is a portfolio company of ours company I work closely with called visual ping and what they do visual ping is they are to website where if you need to know that another website changes you go to this website put like a screenshot of the website you're trying to monitor as an example. like, let's give you like a consumer example. You want to know there's a shoe, there's a pair of shoes you want to buy from the Nike website or some other website that doesn't have like an out of stock email notification. So you'll take a screenshot of this website, you'll go to visual ping and you'll kind of highlight the part of the website you want to change. And when that part goes from out of stock to, you know, showing you a bunch of sizes, you get an email notification, right? It's used in that consumer world. It's used actually mainly in B2B for several different things like monitoring your competition, monitoring the pricing of your competition. It's used by lawyers to monitor regulatory changes. So they have to look in a bunch of different places to see if some sort of law, some sort of regulation change. So they'll get pinged when that sort of thing happens. So those are a few different, it's used even by like sometimes hedge funds to monitor as an example, the team page of some company and the team changed, maybe that's a signal for stock buying or selling, these sort of things. So anyways, I'll stop there, but that's what the company does.

Matthew Dicks (00:56:32) 

So let me just give you a couple stories I might tell that we would eventually sort of maybe spin into that. The purpose of the company, I'm always thinking in terms of theme, meaning or message, the purpose of the company is to make sure you're aware of things you care about changing when they change, right? So I instantly started thinking in my mind, When was I wanting to know about a change in something that I cared about? I don't know if these would be the stories we'd use, but this is the process I would go through. I'd say, all right, when I was 19 years old, Kristen Sloan called me and she said, I have great news. Peter's out the door. Peter's out the door are the words I was waiting to hear for a long time. Because when Peter's out the door, that means Kelly McDonald is now single. And I have basically spent the last two years monitoring Kelly McDonald's like relationship status, waiting for the moment when I might have a chance to date this girl. And Kristin Sloan was the person I put in charge, her friend. When Kelly's available, call me and let me know so that I can see if I can date Kelly McDonald, right? We are the Kristin Sloan of the B2B, you know, purchasing world. We are the people who are gonna let you know when Kelly McDonald is available. That's one of them that I was thinking about. The other one I was thinking about was, I don't miss many of my son's little league games. I try not to. I've missed like a tiny handful over the years. But every time I miss one, my wife starts texting me what's going on in the game. And of course, the first game I ever missed, I'm away doing something. I get a text and she says, he just got a hit, solid hit to center field. I'm like, that's great. Right. And then a little while later, made a great play at first base, double play, then another hit to left field. By the end of the game, he's gotten his first game and I missed it. But I was being pinged the entire time by my wife because she knew I didn't wanna know tomorrow how the game went. I wanted to know how the game was going on a minute by minute, second by second basis. That's what we do for you. We're not gonna tell you three days later that the price went down. We are in the business of letting you know at the moment you care about something that something is changing, right? We are gonna be the wife informing the husband of the son's baseball success and breaking his heart that he wasn't there at the time. Those are immediately two stories I think about and that's just matching theme meaning a message. It doesn't mean they're the right stories, but I feel they're on the right track to telling the right story. And then basically I do is whoever I'm talking to at Visual Ping, I'd be like, what stories do you have like that? Can we weave one of those stories into the pitch you're giving? And that can be like 30 seconds at the top of the pitch to an investor. I would do like, if I was pitching the company, would tell the Kelly McDonald story for sure.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:17) 

I like the Kelly McDonald one, yes, because it also humanizes visual ping as like this agent who's, you know, constantly working for you. 

Matthew Dicks (00:59:24) 

But ideally what I would want is for them to not take my Kelly McDonald story and take their own, although I will tell you about 75 % of the time they just take my story. I have watched my life be used to sell product for a long time, but that's what I want them to do. And like I said, it's not a five minute story like the one I told you at the top of this podcast, right? It would be 30 seconds and then say, that's what we're doing for you. But at that point I've told a story. So I've changed brain chemistry. I've probably made them laugh, which changes brain chemistry even more. And now they know something about me. They know that I'm like a romantic. They know that I'm the kind of guy who's willing to wait for a girl for her to become available. I'm not like a, I'm not the kind of guy who like tries to divide a couple. I'm a decent man who's paying attention and waiting his moment, right? All of those things begin to just make me a more endearing person who is trustworthy to the people I'm speaking to.

Pablo Srugo (1:00:17)

 And they're listening. That's the part that I think a lot of people forget is just because you're on a call with someone doesn't mean you have their full attention. Just because you're in a room with someone, unfortunately, doesn't mean you have their full attention. And when you're pitching, like in talking about the context of fundraising, which obviously I'm closest to, I can tell you like, and I've been on both sides because we also have to raise by the way, like we have to fundraise for our funds. We have to raise funds. I've, and I've been a founder as well. I've, I've been on the fundraising side on the receiving end and I've also been kind of the one that hears stories. You're not like, many times you're not fully paying attention. So when you tell a story like that, even if it's 30 seconds, you've maybe at least a given a. sense of what it is the company does, but maybe even more importantly than that, you've bought yourself time. You've bought yourself attention. so that everything you're gonna say from here on actually gets listened to. And the odds of then somebody getting the value proposition and thinking and understanding why this is so important just went up dramatically. 

Matthew Dicks (1:01:18)

Yeah, and you know, the value of being different, I think, can't be undersold as well. No one's going in and telling a Kelly MacDonald, Kristen Sloan story, right? you're the only one doing it. You can choose to fight on the same field that everyone else is fighting on, or you can go fight on your own field, and I'm always choosing my own field. just walking in, and the way I started that story, I'm not sure if I would start it initially, but essentially the phone rings, and Kristin tells me Peter's out the door, right? That can't help but make you wonder, what is he talking about? Right, because most people walked in and said, hi, right, I'm so and so, and I'm here to talk today about so and so, right? And what you said is totally true. My first principle of all storytelling is no one wants to hear anything you have to say unless you give them a reason to listen. And that is an attitude I have when I take a stage and I perform or when I'm pitching a client or when I'm talking to my kids, when I'm talking to my own children, I assume that my own children never want to hear anything I have to say. 

Pablo Srugo (1:02:14) 

true. Yeah. Most applies. 

Matthew Dicks (1:02:16) 

But you're right. . Like when someone has a microphone or they're standing at the end of a conference table or they're standing on a stage, You know, I was talking to a vice president and he literally told me he's speaking at the Javits Center to 8 ,000 people. He says, well, they're my people. They're all my employees. They're gonna listen. And I said, are you crazy? I said, no one will listen to you. Like no one in the world will listen to you unless you give them a reason to listen. It doesn't matter. I said, in fact, I think they're less likely to listen to you because you're the boss. You have to say something that means something to people quickly. or you will lose them forever

Pablo Srugo (1:02:48) 

 I think the bar is as high as it's ever been because you have so much at you. Like if you can't get my attention, believe me, there's a bunch of other things that can. And even if I'm like on a zoom call with you, I've got this thing open. I've got that thing. I'm in an audience. Forget I got my phone. As soon as I'm bored, I'm my phone out. I'm checking whatever like some thought I had in my head. So there's a lot of competition for attention out there. And I don't think in any context can you assume that you got it unless you've earned it. 

Matthew Dicks (1:03:13) 

I completely agree. Your pedigree disappears. You know, someone Someone once said to me, well, Barack Obama, everyone's listening to him, and I said, they're not unless he's good. Your pedigree ends the moment you open your mouth, and if Barack Obama takes the stage and he sucks, people stop listening, even if he's Barack Obama. It does not matter who you are, if you suck, nobody cares.

Pablo Srugo (1:03:33) 

 So let me do, let's do one more, this other company, this is like maybe even an easier one, but a company called Roam, and what they do is they sit between… Hertz and Avis and these car rental companies that are perfect if you need a car for like a weekend or a week. And financing or leasing a car, which is the way you do it if you want a car for usually three years plus. What Roam does is a car subscription and it's a car for a month, six months, 12 months. It is your car so you get it, like you can use it all the time, but you're not locked in into some long -term contract. used by consumers obviously who want a car for the summer for golfing, who just got a new job, who just moved to a new country, but also now used by businesses, by enterprises. As an example, movie studios who will have like a production that takes X number of months, 50 different people, 100 different people need access to vehicles to get around from place to place. And so they'll work with with Rome to get that because unlike some of the more traditional car rental companies, Rome also kind of this back -end data that gives them visibility into who's driving cars, where the cars are, emissions, and these sort of things that are important to enterprise customers.

Matthew Dicks (1:04:46) 

 So are we selling to customers or are we selling to Hertz and Avis? Who are selling

Pablo Srugo (1:04:51)  So we're selling direct to consumers. Like, you go on the website, Roam, and you can get a car, and to enterprise customers as well who will come in, not through a website, they'll call and have a discussion and end up with 50 cars, 100 cars, or whatever. 

Matthew Dicks (1:05:06) 

So when I'm thinking about theme, meaning and message, I'm thinking about, in this case, it sounds like the value of having something very good, but on a temporary basis. Like I need something good, but I don't need it for long, you know? So again, right off the top of my head, my first thought was, my wife and I, when we had our baby Clara, we got a crib and it was a rocking crib, but you had to physically rock it. The first night I realized this sucks, because my daughter wakes up if she stops rocking and I can't sleep if I'm rocking. This is a bad combination. So I go online to try to find a self rocking crib, which 15 years ago there was one on the market. It was the ugliest thing you have ever seen in your life. It was like the anti crib, the crib no mother would want, except my wife was now a mother. She experienced a night of sleeplessness and she was like, you get that broke ass crib into this house right now. So I went and I bought. It has like a mattress from Guantanamo Bay. It was like, it's the worst thing. You would never put your kid in it except if you wanna sleep and you want your kid to sleep, you just let them sleep. So it was great. For four months I used it. And then I was done with it and I put it in the basement. And then my friend Erica had a baby and she came to work and she's like, I am exhausted. I said, listen, I have something for you. It's fantastic. It's temporary. It absolutely gets the job done. You will not wanna own it forever. It is the ugliest thing in your house, but you'll wanna own it forever. And she said, bring it on. I brought it to school. She's like, cause I work at a school. She says, I can't put my kid in that. And I said, listen, take it home. I think you're wrong. Two days later, she's like, yeah, I'm using that crib. That crib is amazing. That is the greatest crib on the planet. Right? So that's the value of sort of it's temporary. You don't want to own it, but you need it for a while. And it's going to be absolutely essential to your life. That was the first thing that came to mind. I don't think it lands well. Cause it just seems too complicated to tell, you know, when you want stories that have simplicity. But if you follow at least the process that I'm taking, it's theme, meaning, and message always. So this is the story of a company that provides a much needed service on a temporary basis. You want it to be reliable, you want it be there for you, but you want to be able to let it go at some point as well. It's actually kind of like a prom date, right? Which is like, I don't have a girlfriend, so I need someone to bring to the prom. I need someone who I enjoy spending time with.but I need to be able to release that person at the end of the prom and not make them feel like this is a relationship. 

Pablo Srugo (1:07:31) 

Well, I think just to bounce back, like on the crib one, if the crib wasn't an ugly crib, it was just a normal, fine crib, the rocking crib, that might reduce some of the complexity and also obviously the disassociation between, know, rolling cars are fine, great cars, right? So maybe get rid of that part. And then maybe more about kind of how now it sits in your basement. It's untouched,unloved and you know, full of dust, was amazing until it was completely useless and that's, you know, most cars. And so that's what we do, you know, like something like that, but, but I could see how that would tie in

Matthew Dicks (1:08:02) 

And that's the kind of lie that I'm fine with, which is that I don't need to tell you it was ugly. I'm willing to throw facts out that are inconvenient. I just won't make up facts. but that was, know, what's important to remember is the process I take with the company is we're going to brainstorm for an hour. I'm going to say, let's think of all the things in the world that we have used on a temporary basis that we love to have in the period of time we had them, but then when we were not needing them anymore, we were so happy to be able to release them and not have them burdening our life. We don't wanna have a three year lease. We wanna rent a car for six months and be able to let go of it. So we would go through that process and pick out all the things. And sometimes it becomes a collection, right? If you do in a commercial, you can do a commercial about one story or you could do a montage, right? I could say there are lots of things in our lives. that we need for a short period of time and then we need to let go of your baby's crib, your prom date, right? And we could do a whole list, right? And then it could be welcome to Rome, right? It is the car version of all those things, right? And that might be a great pitch too, because sometimes a story is a long in -depth story. And sometimes it's, I often think of it as skipping across a stream, little steps along the way that build the argument instead. In fact, I kind of like that one better for this, collecting. bunch of things that are used temporarily and then released but we enjoy the time we spend with them. That might be even better and it can be funnier because you compare a crib to a prom date already that's funny because when you push two things that don't go together together that creates humor. So I'd be like let's just make the biggest list possible and then we'll pick the ones off the list that all work the best together and maybe we'll have six and we'll go with those six. There'll be the opening of the pitch. There'll be the commercial that we're going to run on television. We could even have a billboard with the six things and then Rome in the middle of it. Like we could do all of those things. So I'd be thinking along those lines in terms of telling the story. 

Pablo Srugo (1:09:52) 

Well, it's good because again, it's, it's memorable. And the other thing is it like convinces by association, like your, your mind, part of it is laughing, but part of it is saying, that's true. You definitely only need a crib for a while. Yeah, it's true. You definitely need this thing for a while. maybe you actually do only need a car for a while. Cause a lot of times you tell this and you're like, why would I need a car for a few months? I don't really get it. So that, that shifts the mindset into more of an accepting mindset by the time you get to the car. you're already kind of warmed up to the idea, yeah, there's things you need for a while and I could see why a car might be one of those things.

Matthew Dicks (1:10:20)

 It's nostalgia too, which is so powerful. If you put a crib in front of me, I'm thinking of my kids and now I'm thinking about my kids when they were little and now I'm thinking about my kids when they were little in association with your company and whether I want it or not, I know you like your company a little bit more because they made me think of my little kids. And when you say prom date, I had great, I actually went to a million proms and loved all of them. And so now I'm thinking about proms and being a teenager again, I'm feeling good about that. And all of those good feelings get associated with the company that's pitching those good feelings to me. So all of that's gonna work really well in terms of getting people to believe in a company, trust the company and say, that's the one for me. I I think most of these decisions people are making, they tend to be unconscious. I think I think about Coca -Cola in a certain way, not on a cognitive level and not because of one commercial that I saw. I think it is sort of just seeped into my pores by the way Coke has made me feel about America and being an American and, you know, living in the world. And I think the same thing happens with most of these companies. So sometimes it's a direct one -to -one argument in terms of a story, but a lot of times it's hitting them again and again. I think those apples in John's case makes people feel good about a company that says you should get all the apples. It's not really a logical argument when it comes to tubes, but it's just the way you feel about a company that makes you take that second meeting. And then a second meeting, you can bring in the person who's really good with numbers and they can convince you that not only do we have all the apples, but we have the numbers too. 

Pablo Srugo (1:11:47) 

Maybe let's do just one last one. I think this is actually the hardest. so I saved this for last called a company called Salus and they sell safety software for construction companies. So construction companies now more than ever, they get fines frankly, when they don't follow certain safety protocols. And what that's led to is more and more mountains of paperwork, people signing forms, storing forms, et cetera, et cetera. What Salus does is it digitizes all those processes. So you have an app and you have a web app and people kind of sign things digitally and all of your kind of safety infrastructure as a construction company lives in one place. 

Matthew Dicks (1:12:23) 

Is this a company that's keeping construction workers safer or sort of mitigating the litigious problems in the future for the company? 

Pablo Srugo (1:12:32) 

It's ultimately a combination of both. I mean by helping companies follow these protocols, it does actually reduce safety incidents and they have that data to support it. And of course also helps companies avoid potential lawsuits or fines or things like that down the road. 

Matthew Dicks (1:12:46) 

Well again, thinking about theming in a message, it's the theme of safety and keeping people safe and making sure that when things aren't safe that something's gonna be covered, that you're not gonna be in a pickle we'll say. and having a problem with that. So contrast works really powerful in storytelling when you can contrast two things that are like opposites but not necessarily the opposite. My instant feeling is something to the effect of when I was a kid and I rode my bike, I did not wear a helmet and no one knew where I was. And it's a miracle that I'm alive today. Today when my kids go out, every time they go out they're wearing a helmet. and they've got a bike that's safe that actually has reflectors. My son has a light on his forehead in case it's dusk that he likes to wear, because it makes him feel safe. We're making the world a safer place for our kids. But there are places where we're just not actually doing that for other human beings. We're willing to put a helmet on our kids, and yet across the street a building's being built, and there's 37 people working on building that building and because we're not focused on the safety of those folks people get hurt on those places all the time like Why are we investing so much time in building a safer world? And I again I pick out a whole bunch of safe things like here's the way we're making the world safer You know where we're not making the world safer oddly the people who are building the stuff that we walk inside We make sure the building is super safe, right? we make sure that it has you know, it's gonna fire off foam when there's a fire and there's exits You know, there's alarms, everything in the building is safe for human beings to exist in. And yet the people who are building the buildings, we are not making the world safer for them. They're getting hurt making the world safer for us. Let's fix that, right? And you know, when I was a kid, my family actually didn't have medical insurance. So when I got hurt, I remember it was always like, shit, is it broken? Right, should we bring them to the doctor, right? That's not gonna be the case in the construction site anymore either. If someone gets hurt, Like everything's gonna get taken care of. We're taking care of the front end and the back end, that kind of a thing. So again, I'd be thinking contrast. I'd be thinking about how– 

Pablo Srugo (1:14:55) I like the building, the building contrast and I wondered, like, Dave, the CEO, he was in the construction industry before, ran like a construction company and I wondered if there's a story of– or he can tell a story, maybe mixing things together but like, while I was walk– walking through a completed building and– and realizing like, the things you were mentioning, right? Like there's four exit doors. There's, you know, all these sprinklers. There's all these things. Like if this happened, that happens. This happens, like– whatever, a bunch of safety precautions. And then the next day or whatever goes into the building site and just that contrast, right? I think that could be an interesting one. 

Matthew Dicks (1:15:28) 

The guy installing the sprinklers is getting hurt, right? While installing the sprinklers. Exactly. we're not taking care of him. I like how we're talking about it too because sometimes I think people think you need to have some technical expertise to talk about it. You use the word whatever three times. You're like, whatever the, and I was doing the same thing. was like, I don't know what they do to keep building safe these days, but I'm sure they're doing a lot more. You and I landed on like the few things we know, like exits and sprinklers. I'm sure your founder could list like 50 things that are happening in buildings todays that are keeping them safer. And that would be better, right? In this case, a list would be great. Here are the things that my people do to build, here's the things we're putting in buildings today to make them safe. You know what's not safe? The actual building of the building, right? While all these, people are invested in building places that are super safe for us. They're actually getting hurt while building those things. That's messed up, which is why our company is gonna take care of those people.

Pablo Srugo (1:16:22) 

 Love that. Well, listen, Matthew, this has been amazing, kind of beyond my already high expectations. So thank you for taking the time.

Matthew Dicks (1:16:30) 

 It was my pleasure. This is some of my favorite stuff to talk about. really, I can't tell you how much I enjoy it. And I love the fact that we're going over businesses that I have never heard of before. Like I told you before, I love being hit with a problem and sort of trying to find storytelling as the solution. I think the more you become a storyteller, the more these solutions are findable. So I loved what we did today. 

Pablo Srugo (1:16:55) 

Well, I'll mention because I think it's worth mentioning that I actually suggested, let me send you ahead of time these companies so you kind of warmed up to them and you told me you'd rather just do it live. So here it is and I would say it turned out great. 

 Matthew Dicks (1:17:07) 

Yeah, thank you. Thanks. It was a lot of fun.

Pablo Srugo (01:17:10)

I just gave you content that you liked so much, you actually listened to the end. And guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face. So you just got a bunch of content for free. And now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It's actually going to help you because it's going to help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you liked so much that you listened to the whole thing.