Staking your ground

Why startups should push an ambitious public-facing agenda from day one.

Hi everyone,

As the AI world navigates through a choppy public market backdrop, I wanted to share an essay I wrote over on Air Street Press about why companies should push an ambitious public-facing agenda from day one. We’ve previously covered a range of vibe shifts at big companies in the last year, including those of Microsoft and Google and Intel. In this piece, I focus more on startups. Hope you enjoy.

The next Guide to AI will be published in a fortnight.

Nathan

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A few months ago on Air Street Press, we wrote that strong storytelling is essential for company building. Whether a startup is creating a new category, battling incumbents, or facing regulatory uncertainty, hoping that its technology will speak for itself just isn’t good enough. Great examples of strong, always-on startup comms include Anduril, ElevenLabs, Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic who each announce something new on a quasi-weekly basis as they aggressively compete for mindshare.

The motivation for this essay came from hearing founders—particularly highly technical teams—say they’re uncomfortable talking about their products before they’re (essentially) perfect. And God forbid hyping them…

Science vs. startups

Many founders who build companies in and around AI were educated through high-caliber graduate school programs in computer science, life science, and engineering. As a PhD grad, I empathise with the scientific method teaching us to not overreach on conclusions that aren’t explicitly supported by empirical evidence. It’s important to call out caveats behind experimental results. Research is heavily scrutinised internally and by external committee before it sees broad distribution. And even when it is, the academic community’s hawk eye doesn’t abate.

But building a startup is somewhat different: their existence is precarious from day one. Each week, startup teams must design, run and analyse experiments around their market, product, and growth levers. They must make decisions with imperfect information in rapid succession. The more shots on goal per unit time, the faster their learning rate. And, critically, they must attract financial resources, talent, and market attention. There isn’t really time to get everything right before the grand release. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say.

So while perfection is rewarded in academia, it is a death sentence for startups.

Narrative unlocks mindshare

A startup’s story isn’t just marketing—it’s how it attracts talent, capital, and customers before it even has a finished product.

Consider that the narrative arc of a startup can be viewed as a novel. Startups have a mission (the novel’s title), they develop products as they learn, mature and evolve (the chapters), they fight with competitors and develop relationships with partners (the characters), and eventually reach their grand master plan (the conclusion). Like an AI model refining a blurry image, a startup’s early direction is far clearer than its distant future.

It is therefore critical from day one to clearly and loudly articulate the scope of the startups ambitions in order to captivate the audience’s attention and harvest necessary resources for the rest of its journey. What markets, customers, technologies and products are in-scope for its ambitions? How will it get there? Why does it matter at all?

Carte blanche to competition

If a company doesn’t signal to the market that the whitespace they’ve found is theirs for the taking, it’ll leave the door open for competitors and investors looking to get exposure to the opportunity. For example, a defense tech startup that sets out to build a new platform that’s explicitly needed by the Army or Navy but doesn’t publicly project it’s doing so will invite competitors into the market who only see whitespace with no existing actors in their way. By the time the company might be ready to talk about their product, it’ll no longer be that coveted n=1 company, but will be compared to n=x alternatives.

Consider the famous story of General Magic, the startup that essentially invented the smartphone before Apple and Google. Formed in the early 1990s as a spinoff of Apple, General Magic basically pioneered touchscreen interfaces, mobile apps, and personal communication devices. But instead of aggressively shaping the public narrative and rallying industry support, it operated in secrecy for years. By the time it finally launched, the market had shifted, and its once-revolutionary ideas had been overtaken by nimbler, more public-facing players. When Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, it succeeded not just because of technology but because it owned the conversation around what a smartphone should be. General Magic had the right vision, but it stayed quiet—and in doing so, it lost the chance to define its own category.

Anointing winners

Modern venture capital thrives on identifying proto-winners, anointing them, and rapidly weaponizing their balance sheets to starve competitors of oxygen. Recent examples include OpenAI (AI), Wiz (cybersecurity), and Anduril (defense). Projecting your grandiose ambitions from day one is similar to effective patent writing, in which new inventions include as broad claims as possible to stake their turf. And this tends to work best when you’re the earliest in your peer set to do so.

Put another way, being first (and the most visible) is a moat. If you don’t own your narrative from day one, someone else will—and when the market moves, it won’t wait for you.