I Am Terrible at Communicating

I have a secret and embarrassing confession to make to you. I am horrible at communicating.

Here is what happens whenever I try to communicate an idea.

Original Idea 
    → Form Words
        → Speak or Write
            → Hear or Read
                → Interpret Words
                   → Final Idea

Humans are terrible at every one of these steps.

  • When forming or interpreting sentences, we taint our ideas with
    • our mood - (eg. I am angry/bored/excited/tired)
    • our relationship - (eg. oh mom)
    • the situational context - (eg. pretty girl walking by)
    • the environmental context - (eg. man it is hot)
    • the cultural context - (eg. he didn’t say thank you)
    • much more - (eg. I can’t remember that word)
  • When speaking, we may not speak loudly enough, or too loudly, or not enunciate
  • When hearing, our ears fail us, and our brains play tricks on us
  • When reading we skim

If you imagine communication like a shopping cart, every stage has a huge drop-off rate. When you combine drop-off rates, any success seems amazing!

In fact, there is actually an academic “law” for this called Wiio’s law:

All communication fails by default, successful communication is an accident

Wow. Sucks to be a CEO.

A startup CEO has three primary jobs:

  1. Lead a team
  2. Fundraise
  3. Manage the board

Great communication is essential for success for all three jobs.

So what is a startup founder to do? Try telling stories.

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Let me tell you a story.

Three years ago, I was just a programmer. A pretty good one, because I had been doing it for 20 years. But I had never professionally been anything but a programmer. Usually, I would work alone or in small teams.

Then I started a company and became a startup CEO. I tried to treat every CEO problem like a programming problem. I thought that if I just said the right words in the right order in an investor meeting, I would get a big check.

I was very wrong.

Investors are not compilers looking for perfect code without syntax errors. They are people, who invest in people. They want to get to know you, build trust with you, understand what makes you tick. 

So I started telling my story of how I had been a programmer for 20 years and that my new company was changing how a new generation of programmers wrote code. And I showed data that kept backing up my story. And I showed passion for what I was doing.

Sometimes I realized that my story wasn’t ambitious enough to be investable, and I made corrections, and my ambitions grew. And the data to back my ambitions grew too. Pretty soon I had $10M in venture capital and a team of 40.

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Stop. Did you see what I did there?

Stories are the best form of communication we have.

  • To navigate the Pacific Oceans, the Polynesians used stories and songs to remember important facts and stars
  • The new testament of the Bible wasn’t written until 100+ years after Jesus died. That was over 100 years of oral story telling keeping it alive. 
  • Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey were passed down orally in their entirety long before they were ever written down.

There is even speculation that our brains become more active when we hear and tell stories.

A startup CEO has three primary jobs:

  1. Lead a team
  2. Fundraise
  3. Manage the board

Great communication is essential for success for all three jobs.

So what is a startup founder to do? Try telling stories. Need help? Read a book.

P.S. Repetition doesn’t hurt either.

P.P.S. Here is one of my better VC story-based pitches that has been recorded. I had recently gotten into story telling as a communication method here. I attribute this very pitch as a formative moment for landing my $8M Series B investment since it was the first time my Series B investor had seen me. He was sitting in the audience.

PHP Fog Presents at Under the Radar

Tags: communication