the largest truthful version of your company
“I don’t have my pithy version yet.”
A founder said that to me, in front of four other founders he barely knew. We were running our narrative office hours at the early-stage VC where I’m an Operating Partner.
This founder was building in a regulated, slow-moving industry. He realized halfway through his own pitch that he didn’t know how to tell the company story without turning the incumbents into the villain.
Two language systems run in every company.
The first one gets rewarded in customer conversations: what it is, how it works, why it’s faster, cheaper, more reliable.
The second is the macro vision. It’s the VC who’s deciding how to price an investment round, it’s what a senior hire needs to hear before leaving a secure job, and what a board member repeats to herself after the meeting ends.
Name the bigger narrative
When the company outgrows its language, the default move is to upgrade the messaging.
Better words. Tighter pitch. Cleaner deck.
The move that compounds is one layer down. Upgrade the ontology. The category of thing your company actually is. What kind of game it’s playing. What scale of problem it’s solving. What category of value it produces.
Every company sits inside an industry-scale narrative whether they have the language for it or not.
Insurance is the global flow of money in moments of crisis. Water is the infrastructure of survival for the towns that depend on it. Retail is the unsolved discovery problem at the scale of how people find what they want.
What’s the largest truthful version of your company?
The work is to claim what’s actually there, at the scale at which it actually lives.
The bigger the narrative, the more room there is for people to locate themselves inside it.
A few examples from inside our portfolio.
One founder is building real-time payments infra that moves money to people in 50 countries the moment something goes wrong. He pitches it as a discrete revenue wedge. The work itself is building the rails for insurance flows at planetary scale.
Another is making public utility software that lets small operators keep water flowing through emergencies. The functional pitch describes integration and modularity. The actual promise: water keeps flowing for the towns that depend on you.
A third is solving the discovery problem for retail stores. This is more than a product feature. It’s solving a category-level problem that the industry still treats as a merchandising issue.
Each one was already operating inside an “industry-scale” narrative.
They just didn’t have the language for it on demand.
The bigger story is the moat
Functional utility is a commoditized race to the bottom that AI will continue to automate over the next 12 to 18 months.
Anything that can be described as what it does and how it works is collapsing in price and time.
Customer conversations reward functional precision. Recruiting and investor conversations punish it. People stay through the hard quarters when the promised land is worth the journey. Talent shows up when the size of the pursuit matches the size of their ambition.
Capital follows when the partner deciding the round can find herself inside something at a planetary scale.
When in doubt, zoom out
Create a paragraph that names what you’re building at the scale it actually lives.
Bigger than your elevator pitch. Built for the moments that decide things.
A few AI prompts to reach for it:
The category you might be redefining
The quadrant of life you might be reimagining (work, health, learning, how people connect)
The civilizational layer you might be building
The planetary-scale problem you might be solving
Then test the paragraph.
Read it to a senior hire reading it cold and watch their face. Read it to a B2B customer and notice whether the bigger frame changes how she hears the product. Read it to the investor who would lead your next round and see whether he can find himself inside it.
Read it back to yourself thirty minutes later. Can you say it without notes?
If yes, you have the version you reach for when the functional pitch needs a higher altitude.
When in doubt, zoom out.