If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
I have to tell you that I deleted all my social media years ago. I occasionally lurk x/twitter, regrettably. One thing I’ve noticed is this trend of owning corporate narratives and going direct in tech. An unfortunate byproduct of this is a subculture of dunking on people for failing/trying. I’m specifically thinking of this pizza promo by Hark Labs and this OpenAI product demo for bots. In both cases, there’s a lot of valid criticism of the product/service. There’s also general nastiness and cynicism.
Related to this there’s been a couple of tweets around narrative roles and how to hire people to communicate this sort of thing so your company can attract the best talent, raise money and other useful stuff.
All of this to say, narrative doesn’t matter if you aren’t shipping fast and taking risks. In both cases, the mantra of any PR is good PR has done wonders. Mostly everyone on tech twitter talked about them. They both tried to doing something bold and slightly novel. That awareness will last and if the product becomes better more people will try it and have known about it. That familiarity in a sea of noise is hard-won.
Whether you have a corporate town-crier telling the world of all your deeds, it won’t matter if its the same stuff everyone else has been downing and if its low effort/risk.
One of the unique joys of tech is to be able to be have the support and encouragement to take bold risks, and potentially look stupid by trying and failing to do something outside of your ability. To make a promise and try to fulfill every customer desire. This is the most important muscle of everyone at a company that is doing things. Create narrative violations and work hard to make them a reality by incrementally improving each time. Then, have someone to tell the world what you see and learned.