Finding Genius

by Kunal Mehta

  Entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson tell the world a story of intergalactic, commercial travel and continue to make monumental accomplishments in achieving that story. While few people believed them when they told it, Bryan Chesky and Joe Gebbia imagined a world, with Airbnb, in which strangers would open their homes to other strangers. Adam Neumann of WeWork told creators and creatives alike a story of how people should ‘work’ and live, and he helped bring that future to life. Compelling stories are a founder’s strongest asset in their war chest, and if told the right way, possess an infectious energy to attract investors, employees, and customers to bring a vision to reality.

  charity: water, a non-profit headquartered out of New York City, has become a stand-out organization in the technology and social impact communities for its ability to capture, craft, and convey a meaningful story. The organization has moved millions of people and investors globally to support a cause by consistently delivering on its promise of creating a better world for people without access to a basic and elemental human need: clean water. charity: water’s meaningful campaigns can move audiences to tears, but also inspire hope to spur them to take action around the solutions being implemented by the non-profit. While charity: water’s mission is to provide clean and safe drinking water in developing countries — a bold vision that countless nonprofits have worked toward — its founder, Scott Harrison, has a unique entrepreneurial talent for storytelling that has led the organization to compounding success, where others have failed. Through its novel business model, brilliant media campaigns, and grassroots support, the organization has been supported by everyone from CEOs like Jack Dorsey and Sean Parker, to venture capitalists like John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital. Scott Harrison embodies the entrepreneurial traits of a ‘future-maker’ introduced by Fred Wilson and Andrew Parker in previous chapters.

  In 2014, I met Scott Harrison and documented his inspiring story for Disruptors. I subsequently left my job on Wall Street and went on to work for charity: water for several years to help realize Harrison’s vision. While there, I learned that charity: water’s persisting success, where most non-profits in the U.S. fail, has been largely due to its ability to be an organization of storytellers. In meetings, the underlying thread behind new initiatives, projects, and ideas rested in our ability to tell a good story that was uplifting and focused less on the problem, and more on the solution we hoped to enable. Each asset we put out into the world was a story of its end user: the beneficiaries celebrating access to clean water or the donors in cities across the U.S. campaigning their communities to support similar communities in another country. No story went untold, including the story of a child in the middle of America who donated her $8.50 in savings to the clean water crisis and inspired a national campaign of donors donating in her name.

  While charity: water is not venture-backable in the traditional sense and Scott Harrison is not the typical founder seeking venture financing, the metrics and performance of the organization mirror the story of a high-growth startup. charity: water raised over $70 million in 2018 to support over a million beneficiaries across 26 countries such as Ethiopia, India, and Kenya. Since being founded in 2007, over 29,000 water projects have been funded, providing over 8 million people worldwide with clean water. Like a venture-backed company, charity: water’s board demands high-growth to prove that the dollars they have invested in the non-profit are creating a meaningful impact. The organization works with technology organizations such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube to ensure that the impact is scalable. The team leverages the latest technology across motion sensors, virtual reality, tracking, and audience engagement to bring their goals to reality. While many of charity: water’s supporters are compassionate donors from across the country, a series of well-established entrepreneurs and investors donate to the non-profit’s operational budget through multi-year donations. This funding is used to support the fight for clean water in developing countries through a unique operational model furthered by Harrison — a model in which 100% of donations go towards funding clean water projects.

  Crafting the Story

  The story of charity: water is a growth curve that goes up and to the right, but the story of its founder is choppy and erratic. Scott Harrison is a reformed nightclub promoter who spent his twenties abusing alcohol and drugs and living lavishly in the present. Harrison’s redemptive story from a drug-induced, nightclub promoter who found meaning through a crisis he witnessed first-hand is one that investors have rallied around. He is the hero, working towards a solution, who they want to win and back. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, a current partner with Greylock (a venture capital fund behind investments in companies such as Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Workday), and the host of a popular podcast called Masters of Scale, interviewed Harrison to better understand this ability to tell a story. Hoffman reiterates the point made by most investors throughout this book that a founder’s ability to tell a compelling story ranks among the highest traits of a genius founder. A story, according to Hoffman, has three parts: a character or a founder, the trouble in their lives, and their path to a solution for that problem. All great companies have problem-solution structures, and Harrison’s is no different. About the compelling founders who tell good stories, Hoffman says:

  “A good storyteller draws you in, a better one puts you in their shoes, a great one makes you feel the pain from every jagged rock, stone, and piece of gravel they clamber across while also filling you with the hope of redemption. Scott Harrison is amongst the greatest I know… I believe great companies are built on great stories, and great stories are transparently honest.”

  As with most stories shared by charity: water, Harrison opens up about his troubled past. He recounts how his childhood and personal journey relate to his current mission. What were the forces that drove him to make certain decisions? What makes him compelling to invest in or be the person to change the face of this monumental crisis facing humanity? After leaving a decadent lifestyle behind, Harrison volunteered as a photojournalist in Liberia where he came face-to-face with what happens to humans without access to clean water. Children drank from dark, muddy water infested with insects, mothers and young girls walked miles every morning to fetch water instead of going to school, and individuals in these countries suffered from ailments — tumors, diarrhea, dysentery — all caused by bacteria in dirty water. Harrison documented this, believing that visual storytelling, for most problems, is more effective, as it allows your stakeholders to buy into what you want to solve. Harrison says that by simply telling a story of a tumor on a child, you may spark empathy, but readers cannot relate to it. Harrison says an image evokes feelings and tells a more powerful story:

  “I’m a visual learner and visual communicator. For me, it is show don’t tell. I was given the role of a photojournalist. I had 15,000 people on my club emailing lists. Open rates were 100% back then. The only thing I knew to do was to share these images that I had captured in Liberia and hope people would be keen to learn more about this problem. I knew photos would move people the way words could not. The pervasive health problems in the developing world link back to the lack of access to clean water and I could show them the issue through their mobile devices or computers.”

  In the elements of a successful story prescribed by Hoffman, Scott Harrison had found his problem. In the months to come however, the concept of a non-profit did not resonate with donors immediately. There was distrust, as donors saw non-profits as a black hole for funding, with misappropriated funds shuffled to internal salaries or wasteful spending. Most genius founders will encounter this fork in the road and be tested on how to proceed. For many, the lack of enthusiasm for the non-profit can be a crushing moment of despair; but Harrison saw an opportunity to bring transparency to an industry that had none. Why were Americans, who were known to be some of the most philanthropic people, cynical of non-profits? Harrison realized the issue was that non-profits we
ren’t successfully telling stories with transparency in a way to build trust with the customer.

  Harrison made this transparency a cornerstone of charity: water. He showed donors, through GPS, which wells their money had built and allowed them to find them on a map. Eventually, charity: water would also be transparent if wells had broken down and needed repair. The 100% model for donations lifted the veil for donors and allowed them to wholly fund the cause they cared about. This transparency and storytelling won over early charity: water supporters and the founder of Beebo, Michael Birch, who committed $1 million when the organization was struggling to survive in the early days. Since that point, charity: water has grown its impact to provide millions of people with clean water across 26 countries. Today, 129 families including those of operators and venture investors like Jonny Ive, Daniel Ek, Jack Dorsey, John Doerr, Chris Sacca, and others, support charity: water’s operations account. And 10 years later, storytelling remains a key element to the non-profit’s growing success.

  The final element that Hoffman details as essential to a good story is that of the solution. Hoffman says:

  “People respond passionately to solutions, not problems. Problems can inspire outrage and guilt but they also trigger compassion fatigue. Solutions inspire hope and motivation. Solutions are an invitation to work together to make a difference and the key is to get people to say yes to that invitation… That is where the power of inspirational storytelling comes in. It creates a loop that feeds into people’s desires to share and they open their networks to the cause and the inspirational story.”

  Giving people a taste of what it feels like to provide one person with clean water through a story of redemption from dirty water to clean water, charity: water gives humanity a taste of what the world would be like if all people were given access to clean water. This positive messaging is similar to that of the future makers discussed earlier in this book.

  Pitching

  The future makers featured in the first section of this book are storytellers who demonstrate their genius by gripping an investor’s attention around a vision for the future in which their startup will not only exist, but be undeniably valuable. A founder’s vision for the future should be powerful enough to recruit high-quality talent to take a risk with them instead of pursuing other lucrative roles. The fundamental differences in vision between investors and entrepreneurs begin to appear during the pitch for a startup opportunity. In his podcast, Hoffman has weighed in:

  “As a leader, you need to be a master storyteller. You need to craft a compelling narrative that engages your employees and customers, builds a community, and infuses people with purpose. You have to be willing to tell the same story to bring new people into your tribe of believers. You also have to recognize when it’s time for the story to evolve. But more important than this, you have to avoid the trap of stretching the truth. As a founder or idea sparker, you’re competing with a cacophony of other stories, some of your less scrupulous rivals may tell stories that sound more like fiction than fact. Fiction is fine when your aim is simply to spin a yarn but when you want to build a real connection with your audience you need to make honesty the cornerstone of your story.”

  As revealed through Scott Harrison’s journey, storytelling requires convincing someone across the table of facts you already know. Secondly, it is about convincing them that your story, your vision for the world, and your cause are more worthwhile of their time or money than another story or future being offered by another founder. This requires confidence to present the facts based on deep knowledge of a problem or issue, presenting a convincing argument, and sparking empathy or passion about this new future. Josh Nussbaum of Compound discusses this in the context of investments he is making in industries he’s less knowledgeable about:

  “A good storyteller, as a CEO who is fundraising, has an intuitive sense of the market, based on something they’ve done before. They have an intuition and want to share that prediction with us. We have conviction because based on their ability to share this intuition and vision, they are able to recruit people. They have a lens or a sense of where the industry is headed. For example, with a founder operating in healthcare, or a similarly regulated industry, the compelling founders have a sense of where regulation might be headed. They know their barriers and have compelling answers to all our questions. Having a strategic answer on where the industry is going and being able to articulate that is most valuable.”

  Beyond conveying the problem that drives them and the solution they are chasing, founders should place an emphasis on the story that their users are telling them. The concept of ‘theses’ in this book have thus far been presented from the investor perspective — a detailed perspective on industries and landscapes or deep-dives into technological or platform shifts that drive change. Genius founders, however, present their stories through a different lens: a problem-solution lens with a heavy emphasis on the people — the users — they are building for. Rick Heitzmann discusses his thesis around investing in companies such as DraftKings, Uber, and Pinterest and the difference between how founders who exhibit genius pitch their value proposition versus how investors interpret the vision:

  “Founders mainly focus on the problem side. A genius founder, in my experience, tends to be product focused and user focused. They have such a deep understanding of the user experience and journey and are loyal to that. When they share that vision with me, they will tell the story from a user perspective. They will discuss each individual user and what made them tick or what problem it solved for them or where they dropped off from usage. They will obsess over their users and we want to see them do that. As investors, we see it as a mirror image and will place their user experience into how we see trends or theses play out more dynamically or across an entire industry.”

  Heitzmann elaborates on the experience of having the founders of Pinterest pitch their story to FirstMark Capital:

  “The founders were focusing on acquiring users that wanted to share the things they like with their friends and with the world. They knew that users want to see what other people think about those things or those collections. It’s similar to why humans scrapbook. We save collections when we’re moving into a new apartment with furniture or scrapbook for a wedding and then show these things off to our friends or families. They saw this user behavior in the offline world and wanted to translate it to the digital world. They believed that users are excited by social endorsement when someone likes their stuff or wants to buy it. So they took this behavior online and said people can now do this by phone when they’re sitting on the train or on the bus. I met with the Pinterest founders several times before investing and every time we met, they talked about how their users were taking this offline behavior and bringing it online. It was impossible not to invest at that point. It was radically clear that these founders would figure it out and they told a very clear user story.”

  As a founder, the skill of storytelling is one that is not only important during the first conversation with an investor, as evidenced by the relationship between FirstMark Capital and Pinterest or as seen with Scott Harrison and charity: water. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners believes that storytelling is also one of the most underrated skills needed to raise capital. He says:

  “Given enough runway, a lot of smart people can build a company. Companies are often just not given that chance because the founder is not a compelling presenter or storyteller. We work with our portfolio companies so often on crafting their story at each step of the way so they continue to evolve as their company moves forward. The worst thing as an investor or as a founder is seeing that often there are competitive companies in your market with a worse-off product, growth metrics, revenue traction, timing, etc., but they’re able to raise more and get to the Series A financing before you can because the founder is just a damn good storyteller.”

  As I noted earlier, there will often be storytellers in your market who will not be transparent or who will be l
ess than honest with their numbers, but often the customers or investors are able to see through that. It is imperative to craft a story that is transparent, genuine, and meaningful. Beth Ferreira of FirstMark Capital emphasizes this trait of transparency between founders and investors:

  “It seems obvious but the biggest thing I want to see in a pitch is the truth. How do I get comfortable with what you are building and what is the path for it to grow? If you can be transparent about problems you are facing, it makes it easier for me to have the full picture and the full story before seeking investment approval. Anyone can be good at sales and beautiful decks.”

  In addition to hearing a story for the future, investors such as Taylor Greene of Collaborative Fund and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures are eager to hear the story that has brought a founder to their current predicament. What is driving them to want to build and create this future? For Scott Harrison, it was his experiences in Liberia. Greene uses preliminary meetings to understand a founder’s personal story and his questions become more psychographic in nature to understand what makes a founder tick, what motivates them, and why they have chosen the irrational endeavor of starting a business. Greene expands on this in describing his experiences with the founders of companies such as Casper and Warby Parker:

  “It’s important to gauge an entrepreneur’s inspiration to start a company and I often look for that in their own personal stories — where they grew up, what decisions they made, and why. The questions become less about the business model but more psychographic in nature to get to the bottom of what makes someone tick, what motivates them, why they are doing this… a series of questions to understand their personal journey.”