We need better stories about the future.

Tech’s biggest players have boxed themselves in. Startup founders: it's up to you.

It’s not just capital that is concentrated in a handful of hyperscalers, but attention. The companies driving the AI platform shift dominate with weekly and even daily news cycles. For most startups, it feels impossible to break through the noise.

But while the tech industry celebrates model improvements alongside record-breaking revenue growth and valuations, the headlines that reach mainstream audiences range from depressing to doomsday: rising electricity prices, chatbot-assisted psychosis or suicide, showdowns with the Pentagon, and the coming obsolescence of white collar jobs. It’s hardly surprising that the United States is clocking a miserable approval rating for AI.

As an industry, we’re collectively failing at our primary narrative objective: to give people a reason to root for the future.

Normally we’d look to our most visible leaders to drive this message, but the tech industry’s most powerful are either keeping a low profile in today’s hyper-politicized environment, or they’ve already boxed themselves in with a narrative crafted for very different objectives.

Which means there’s a surprising bright spot for the rest of the startup ecosystem. When it comes to telling the story of the future, startups have multiple structural advantages over the incumbents.

Structural advantage #1: Audience. Startups have to care about customers more than investors — and that’s a good thing.

In the world of communications (where I spent the first chapter of my career, before starting Coalition), everything starts with your target audience. Who are you trying to reach, and what do you want them to believe and do? To understand why Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman claimed that all white collar work will be automated within 18 months, or OpenAI’s Sam Altman declared intelligence will be a utility like water or electricity “and people buy it from us on a meter,” you have only to decipher their most important audience for these messages to make sense. And in both cases, that audience is investors.

The biggest players in AI need to justify unprecedented capex to their shareholders. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have to raise tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in the private markets, while warming up the public markets for record-setting IPOs. The only way these figures make sense is to insist that the world is on the verge of profound change. Investors need to believe that nearly everything about how we live and work will be upended, and that the value in this new paradigm will be captured by these businesses. When this worldview fails to resonate with individual consumers and knowledge workers, it’s not because these companies have incompetent or evil PR departments, but simply because this narrative isn’t crafted with them in mind.

And it’s not just the architects of this platform shift that are playing to an investor audience, it’s also those on defense. When Jack Dorsey announced that he was laying off nearly half of Block’s staff, he was praised for the human tone of his note to employees—but it was ultimately crafted to appeal to the shareholders of a struggling stock (and it worked). Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are fighting to stay relevant in the AI race, and the company’s rumored layoffs of 20% of its workforce are likely an attempt to course correct their story to investors. Whether or not these moves are actually a result of AI automating work is very much up for debate, but the positioning appeals to shareholders who need to believe that these businesses will do more with less. How these messages land with talent is a distant consideration.

Startups, however, can afford to be more expansive with their audience. In fact, their survival depends on it. Startups don’t have a business (or a credible story about a business!) without customers who believe their products will make their work or lives better. They don’t have teams without early hires who buy into their potential and mission. And venture capitalists in these initial stages bring a very different lens than the kingmakers allocating billions. As early stage investors, we are looking for evidence that those first users or customers will give this company a chance to one day build something massive. In the initial years of company building, the stories founders tell to customers, talent, and investors are generally aligned.

Structural advantage #2: Narrative. Startups at their core are stories about the future — and they are wired to embrace both optimism and uncertainty.

The biggest players will of course try to tell positive stories. And some will be quite compelling, even heartwarming! But people are smart (cardinal rule of comms), and they’ll eventually notice if you’re predicting widespread labor dislocation in one place, and painting a picture of human productivity and empowerment in another. This is why always knowing your most important audience is so crucial—there will invariably be tradeoffs.

Many of this technology wave’s most impressive companies have also made what I believe is a profound narrative error. They’ve cast themselves as the heroes in their own stories, and in doing so, risk becoming the villain in everyone else’s.

Historically, the best brands have made someone else the hero of their story. Apple was in service of the creative misfit, Nike celebrated the everyday athlete. When you build a story around your company as the hero, you risk turning your customers or users into NPCs. It signals an inherently transactional relationship, or worse, predatory (in the case of AI or robotics: we’ll replace you, just give us time).

I bet most instances were unintentional: a function of mindblowing revenue growth outpacing carefully considered brand strategy, combined with a tech audience primed to celebrate all things acceleration. Growth was really the only story that mattered in the startup world in 2025, perhaps best embodied by Hemant Taneja’s claim that tripling your business is no longer interesting; 10X year-over-year growth is the new bar. This was the year that charts showing record-breaking paths to $100M ARR (and beyond) reached meme status. These growth-driven stories were thrilling to a startup audience, and since many of the breakout startups (Mercor, Cursor, Windsurf, etc) were selling into tech companies or developer audiences, that growth story did a lot of heavy lifting.

But as these headlines extend beyond tech, they shed their narrative-audience fit. If anything, they’re just further proof of tech’s massive wealth and power grab, and a bellwether for the coming disruption and dislocation.

For startups with a clean narrative slate, this is where I’d encourage you to think deeply. Beyond your cap table, who wins if you win? It can be your customer in a broad or narrow sense, it can be your customers’ customers, it can be an industry, it can even be an idea or ideal (like privacy or creativity) that your customers care about deeply. When you construct your narrative with someone or something else as the hero, perhaps counterintuitively, your own growth story becomes much more powerful. It’s no longer just impactful for your team and investors; it’s evidence that the world is getting better in some way that lots of people care about (and will root for). And in a moment when the headlines are decidedly doomsday, optimism is what’s contrarian and interesting.

Of course, telling a story about the future isn’t easy. We live in non-linear times. AI is non-deterministic, and there are no neat and obvious predictions.

Which leads me to another structural advantage startup founders have when it comes to narrative: startups can afford to embrace uncertainty. Just like early startups should be marketing a problem more than a solution (especially when the latter is quite nascent), startup founders should lead by asking interesting questions, not delivering absolute answers.

The biggest players can’t really do this. The CEO of a trillion-dollar company can’t admit to uncertainty without generating dozens of headlines and potentially sending the stock price tumbling. That person’s job is to know the future, or at least, to give the impression that he does.

But startup founders can jump headfirst into the inherent messiness of this era. And by embracing the unknowability, and by acknowledging what everyone is already thinking but is maybe afraid to say, your ideas about the future become more credible, not less. This is the narrative foundation we need to build stories that tap into the abundant (but not broadly apparent) imagination and creativity in our industry.

Structural advantage #3: Channel. Startups can thrive in old and new media — with an LLM search bonus.

As we parse startups’ structural storytelling advantages, we are following the default comms strategy flow: you start with your audience (who do you want to influence), then you figure out the story that will most resonate given your goals for that audience (what do you tell them), and only then do you decide which channels will be most effective for reaching that audience with that story (where do you tell it).

Put simply: your audience and narrative should dictate where you tell your story. And yet, it feels like we’ve abandoned this simple logic amidst the thrill of “going direct.” The embedded idea is that you’re going direct to your target audience, but as an ecosystem, we’ve fallen in love with engagement-maxxing. Engagement from whom? Do your customers care about your tweet about working 996? Are those customers even on Twitter/X? I regularly see LinkedIn posts celebrating new fundraises (and new valuations) where I have to click a few times to figure out what the company does. Will potential hires or users take the time?

As noted earlier, many of our recent startup success stories are companies that sell into tech audiences, so these defaults have largely worked for them. But the playbook doesn’t translate for companies that are focused on other industries or user groups.

Most startups aren’t using one of their biggest structural advantages. The media fragmentation we’ve seen over the past decade has broken the old playbooks, but this plays to a startup’s advantage: startups don’t have to optimize for volume the way bigger companies do. There are pockets of the exact people you want to reach if you’re willing to take the time to find them.

Perhaps counterintuitively, I also think startups have an unfair advantage when it comes to working with legacy media. Yes, it’s harder in general to get their attention: no one is on the [insert your startup name here] beat like they are with Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic or SpaceX.

But founders have a few key advantages, if they’re willing to deploy them. When the macro narrative is doom and gloom, credible reasons for optimism are what’s interesting. For instance: when everyone is talking about job loss, a credible story that’s counter to that can break through, even when it’s not tied to a big/known name. And of course, there’s the classic David and Goliath dynamic, at a time when our Goliaths have never been bigger (and in some people’s minds, scarier). We are in a moment where there’s very little critique of power from within the tech industry, so if you’re willing and able to do it thoughtfully, you’ll stand out.

And if you’re successful in working with legacy media, there’s a bonus: today’s LLMs love to source from traditional news. People are bending over backwards to generate massive amounts of owned content (much of it slop), which will invariably have diminishing returns. Meanwhile, traditional PR can be shockingly effective, despite the “go direct” mania. I have a pre-seed startup in my portfolio that has broken through LLM search in a big way just by being scrappy on the PR front.

Last but not least: remember that most reporters aren’t anti-tech by default. Their job is to question power. No offense, but most startups are not yet powerful, which is to the founders’ advantage. If you can get on their radar, and if you can tell an interesting, credible story that breaks with tech’s default assumptions (we all love a narrative violation), you are likely to have positive outcomes, even in tech’s “villain era.”

Founders, it’s your move.

Tech’s narrative crisis isn’t necessarily moral; it’s structural. The biggest companies have to cater to an audience that has very different incentives. Our collective failure to paint a better picture of the future is a huge risk for our ecosystem, but it’s also an incredible opportunity for startup founders who see the world differently and dare to lean into this moment.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Today’s regulatory environment is quite permissive, and the fears around AI-driven job loss are more acute in tech than in other sectors. But that won’t last forever. Tech is a natural populist punching bag for both sides of the political aisle…unless we start giving people a reason to root for the future.

This isn’t some elaborate PR campaign to distort reality. If you work in the startup ecosystem as I do, you’re confronted daily by the dissonance between what founders are actually building and the dystopian headlines about our industry.

Startup founders: it’s up to you to close that gap.