How to Spot a Generational Company
Hint: look at who tells their story, and how
Amjad Masad, Replit’s CEO, delivered a harsh truth on a16z’s podcast recently: “Replit would have probably died if I wasn’t telling a story that is larger than the company itself.”
It’s nice to see a leader acknowledge that storytelling is make-or-break, as opposed to the ‘nice to have’ some mistakenly characterize it as.
Here’s the test for companies who want to stand the test of time: how do they approach storytelling?
The clearest signal of a generational company is how much ownership they’ve handed the person responsible for their communications, and whether that person has a seat at the table or is simply taking orders.
Those who treat comms as an output function - a machine that churns out content - are missing the actual leverage: the ability to shape how investors, talent, and customers understand the company before the story gets told without them.
Conversely, those who hire a Chief Storytelling Officer, Head of Narrative, or Head of Storytelling tend to understand that narrative is a strategic imperative, not a deliverable.
And to be clear, titles are just titles. A startup can slap “Chief Storytelling Officer” on a role that’s actually thin, and an established law firm might never adopt that title even while taking narrative dead seriously, it just doesn’t fit their register. It comes down to whether the company hires storytellers in essence, however that shows up in their particular house style.
The ‘Chief Storytelling Officer’ title isn’t new
In 2015, one of my favorite authors, Mohsin Hamid, became Wolff Olins’ first-ever Chief Storytelling Officer. I highly recommend reading his interview with Fast Company that year on why companies need novelists.
On a personal note, I was an English major trying to figure out life at that point, and hearing about Hamid’s dual corporate/novelist career path inspired me to pursue a career in comms.
The market has caught up
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that companies are “desperately seeking storytellers.” LinkedIn postings mentioning “storyteller” have roughly doubled in the past year - around 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 under media and communications. Executives said “storyteller” or “storytelling” on earnings calls 469 times this year, up from 147 in 2015.
Google has a customer storytelling manager. Microsoft has a senior director of narrative and storyteller. Anthropic was offering up to $400,000 plus equity for a Head of GTM Narrative. Nike was ahead of the curve - they’ve had a Chief Storytelling Officer since the ‘90s.
Why now
Ironically, the AI era is proving how valuable the humanities are. We need human taste and judgement more than ever before.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, put it perfectly: “The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.” Jack Clark, Anthropic’s cofounder, has talked about his own literature background the same way - the discernment and command of narrative he built as a humanities student turned out to be directly useful for building AI. It’s not a coincidence that the same company is paying $400,000 for someone who can do exactly that.
The world is changing fast, and storytelling is how we make sense of the world. The companies that get this right will be the ones we’re still talking about decades from now.
If this resonated, subscribe! I’ll keep writing about corporate storytelling in the age of AI.
Originally published on Substack.