Spend five minutes with a Silicon Valley founder, and you’ll hear how their API is going to “change the world”, make a trillion dollars and put Google out of business. Spend the same time in Berlin or Stockholm, and instead of a bold origin story or world-changing vision, you’ll get a structured roadmap, cautious forecasts and a GDPR checklist.
Is this lack of ambition? No. Too heavy a dose of self-awareness? Possibly. An inability to spin a good yarn? Absolutely.
When it comes to storytelling — the ability to craft bold narratives that sell a vision bigger than a product or service — Europe still lags behind. While American startups launch with stories that take off like rockets, European ones often treat storytelling more like a pitch deck appendix.
Francesco Ricciuti, an Italy-based VC at Runa Capital, puts it bluntly: “That’s one of the biggest problems of our industry in Europe. We’re not good storytellers.”
This storytelling gap affects who gets funded and which products scale globally. If you can’t explain why your startup matters — in a way that excites, inspires and translates — you can’t expect anyone to bet on it.
A new kind of accelerator
US startups have long understood that narrative isn’t just marketing, it’s essential for momentum.
Take OpenAI, for example. Years before ChatGPT went viral, the company said its mission was to save humanity from rogue AI. Sounds ironic? Sure. But it’s also worth about $300bn now.
Other examples include SpaceX, which didn’t just build rockets, it spun a story about human destiny and colonising Mars, and Robinhood, which cast itself as the scrappy rebel shaking up Wall Street.
Over in the US, there could also be an interesting fix to the European storytelling problem. Founder’s Box is a new kind of accelerator created by ex-New York Times business journalist turned investment banker Katherine Tarbox. Her premise? Founders don’t just need engineers or advisors, they need editorial muscle.
And we’re not talking interns. We’re talking Pulitzer winners and magazine founders — the likes of John Battelle, the founder of Wired; Adi Ignatius, editor-at-large of Harvard Business Review; Gary Rivlin, a Pulitzer prize-winning former New York Times journalist; and Elizabeth Wollman, former editor of Bloomberg News.
One of the editorial fellows unearthed the Enron fraud, says Tarbox, referring to journalist Bethany McLean, who first reported on irregularities in the energy company’s financial documents in Fortune.
Tarbox’s programme (based in the US, but open to international founders) pairs technical founders with these heavyweight journalists to craft narratives that do what most founders struggle with — explain why the hell their product matters, and to whom.
“I have probably interviewed over 1.5k technical founders,” says Tarbox. “You will spend two hours with them and at the end of it you sort of understand what they are doing — but not.”
“Underpinning a very strong narrative will allow you to attract sophisticated capital, beyond your mother and your dentist, and that story might need to be reframed to then go to market, to get customers, enterprise customers, and then to engage with the media.”
AI’s rise has made the challenge starker. Founders are building impressive tools, but struggling to explain why they matter. Tarbox calls it a “glut of cool AI companies” that can’t raise a Series A because they have tech, but no story.
Flipping the script
Of course, some European startups have flipped the storytelling script.
Take DeepL, the German AI translation company, last valued at $2bn. No glossy campaigns. Just a simple message: “We’re better than Google Translate.”
Or Zoe in the UK, which has turned complex gut science into a human, media savvy story about better health through personal nutrition. Its cofounder, Tim Spector, is not just the public face of the brand, but the broader science behind it. For better, or, according to scientists in the British Medical Journal, worse, it blurs product, mission and public education.
In fintech, Monzo and Klarna have used storytelling differently. Monzo has leaned into emotional design and community while Klarna has (also perhaps for worse) reframed payments as a lifestyle product. Both recognised that narrative is how you stand out in a commoditised space.
Then there’s Elina Berglund, the Swedish physicist turned fertility tech founder. After working on the Nobel-prize winning discovery of the Higgs Boson at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), she coded an algorithm to track her menstrual cycle and ditch hormonal birth control. That became Natural Cycles, now valued at over $150m, according to Dealroom.
It’s a story of science meeting a personal need — and it resonates with a lot of women.
“It is important to tell the story because future women out there, they also need to find inspiration,” Berglund says. “It is taking a risk to quit your job and put all your eggs in one basket and try to create something new.”
Fact, not fiction
There are limits. Nobody wants a European Theranos or for journalists to describe the narrative of your company “perhaps for worse”. But storytelling doesn’t have to be fluff.
As Tarbox puts it, founders should find the sweet spot somewhere between the modest Europeans who downplay their wins, and the ambitious Americans who sometimes shoot for the moon a little too fast.
“In the US, you’ll have founders that are just putting up extraordinary numbers, especially in AI right now where there’s so much greenfield, but that doesn’t mean they’ll actually capture it,” she says. “A lot of times when I’m seeing European companies, I’m actually loving the believability of the numbers that those founders are putting up.”
So maybe the best pitch is a bit of both — a clear-eyed vision wrapped in a story that makes investors want to come along for the ride, without leaving them wondering if it’s all just a fairy tale.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/europe-storytelling-problem/
