All founders need to become master storytellers. Storytelling can help you build connections and your business.
Having a tricky time nailing your founder story?
What can you do to engage your audience?
How do you know the best channels and ways to share your story?
Lyn Graft is passionate about helping people, specifically founders, learn how to use storytelling to grow their business.
Lyn Graft is the founder of Storytelling for Entrepreneurs and he's picked up tips and tricks that leaders can use to develop their business narrative.
🎬 Rather watch? Catch the video recording: https://bit.ly/2VzIfhj
💡 Key insights: https://bit.ly/3jHYr91
🗣 Have feedback? Connect with Scott Case on LinkedIn
💙 Visit foundersfocus.com to connect with other founders and see what topics are up next.
✈️ This episode is brought to you by Upside Business Travel. Upside offers a free platform that allows you and your team to book, manage, and track business travel in one place.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside. And we created Founders Focus to share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by the awesome team at Upside.
Scott Case 0:27
I am delighted to introduce our co-host for today. Lyn Graft is the founder of Storytelling for Entrepreneurs. And he's also the author of a best selling book called Start with Story, the entrepreneur's guide to using story to grow your business. And if the lovely and talented Julie has not already posted a link to it in the chat, you'll see it. And with that, Lyn, why don't you tell us a little more about yourself and then we'll dive in.
Lyn Graft 0:59
You bet. Just to give you a little quick background. Grew up in New Mexico. Had four sisters by the name Cindy, Lindy, Mindy and Wendy. I'm Lyn, had been a girl I'd been Lindy just to kind of give you that insight. Started out as an engineer, quit that, became a ski instructor for four years, then got my MBA, went into the startup space, worked for American Airlines in there as well, and got enamored with entrepreneurs, founders, and just the whole idea of creating startups, companies from scratch. And it's one of those things that over time, as a startup founder, I kind of started out in technology and then worked my way into specifically software, then got into writing business plans, and then lost another company in a failure to upstart and everything else. And lo and behold, my best friend asked me to help her with an idea for a television show. I knew nothing about television. And that was about 18 years ago. And on that journey, I've now produced about 1,000 videos, television shows and documentaries in that timeframe and filmed about 1,000 entrepreneurs. So one question, you've asked how I got started, I kind of fell into it. But the one thing I'll never forget was being around really energetic, inspiring entrepreneurs and hearing their founders story.
Scott Case 2:19
That's awesome. Well, you talked a little bit about your journey, so take us from doing all that production into deciding to first write a book about how important story is and then starting your own business and running it now.
Lyn Graft 2:39
Well, what happened was because of the type of founders I was filming, these are the founders of Starbucks, the Harley Davidson family, Michael Dell obviously here in Austin, Texas, and really high level folks, because we're doing video and production work for television. So they wanted it for CNBC or were doing things for Microsoft, or other corporations – I got access to a lot of really successful founders. And so many of them are really good storytellers. Or even if they're not great orators, they're actually really good at telling their story. And over time, I wouldn't say they became kind of similar, but sometimes you're not necessarily getting impressed or it's not jolting anymore if you've been around a couple 100, 400, 500.
Lyn Graft 3:25
But one specifically, it was the last night of a week-long conference here in Austin. And it was Gary Keller, and he's the founder of Keller Williams, which is now the number one real estate company in the entire world. And he just got done writing a book, it was called the One Thing. And I was at a point in my life, right place, right time, I was open to it. And he has a really specific delivery style of whenever he's presenting, he really gets the audience engaged, used a lot of NSL type programming. And I just remember just being wow, this guy, he's got something to say. And if you've ever read the book, for me, it's the top five business book I've ever read, called the One Thing, and it's essentially, if you ever want to accomplish something big in life, all you really need to do is focus on it every single day, it's the first thing you do, it's a big priority and just orient your day around that one thing. And that concept really stuck with me. And he shared a lot of stories that brought that concept to life.
Lyn Graft 4:26
And for me, I had been thinking, How can I capture a lot of the ideas that I've been exposed to by these really successful founders over the years. And I was like, I can write scripts, but I'm not an author, not like a writer per se in that instance. But he really got me believing the idea of why don't I just focus the first hour every day working on my book, and I did that and I decided I'm going to commit for 40 days and see what happens. And on day 31 it came to life, the idea, the concept, the book it just kind of fell apart or just delivered itself to me and I saw the entire table of contents, I saw the idea, the concept. And it didn't happen right away. But it was a six year journey, Scott, and it was one of the most rewarding and challenging things I've ever done. Because for six years, every single day, the first hour of that day, I dedicated myself to writing that book. And luckily, one of my good friends had a publishing company, his name is Tucker. And he was telling me what I had done wrong and done right. And I said, why don't I just let you write a book for me or get a service that does this. And that intervention that he had with me just allowed a lot of the ideas and concepts to flow, and specifically it was, how do I help entrepreneurs create a story from scratch? And that is what the first book is about.
Scott Case 5:51
So let's start with story then. So what are those one or two or three things that you think are most important? We have a lot of storytellers. We have a lot of entrepreneurs here who need to tell this story. I do one on ones with lots of founders, I'd say 25 to 50% of them have storytelling issues, where that's their core challenge is that they can't actually explain the problem at the basics. Like what problem are you solving? Who are you solving for? And what's your solution? So to talk a little bit about what you think, what does it mean to tell the story, what kind of stories do you focus on for entrepreneurs and where do you start?
Lyn Graft 6:38
And I'll share with you a little bit my own experience with that, because I was writing scripts and I was filming, we have a lot of control over the content, what people say, I can make you sound good and look good, whatever, because I'm controlling it all.
Scott Case 6:51
I'm not sure that's true. But let's come back to that.
Lyn Graft 6:54
We can test that. But it was a whole different ball of wax. If you really want to learn something, teach it. And I was having to teach people about the concept of storytelling, for founders specifically. That's my sweet spot. And it really forced me to dive deep. And when I dove into this concept, I went back all the way to Socrates and the Greeks. And then I studied Gustav Freytag, who's a really well known playwright and all these concepts. And there's a hero's journey, which is a very popular way for storytelling, what a lot of movies are based on. And the problem was, I got lost very quickly. It was so much information, they were talking about concepts and ideas, and using terminology I'd never heard of before or that I would never use. And I was always getting confused between the protagonist and the antagonist. So I just threw it all out the window.
Lyn Graft 7:44
And what happened was, as I was thinking about this, I thought what if I just go back to the entrepreneurs that I've been filming over the years. And there was one in particular that struck me so powerfully, and it was named Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. And he talks about how he got Starbucks really off the ground. He originally was working in New York for a kitchen appliance company. And he flies to Seattle to visit this company selling coffee beans. And he became enamored by this company in Seattle. So he moved there very quickly and decided to work with them. And they're selling coffee beans at the time. He flies to Milan to go to a coffee conference where they're selling machines, everything else and he goes there. And one day, instead of using a taxi, he decided to walk home from the conference to his hotel, and we're talking the back streets of Milan, I'm talking about romanticism, and it comes across something he'd never seen in the United States before. And that was an espresso bar. And he talks about what he saw in that moment was people at the bar, and everyone's talking Italian so it sounds amazing, even if they're yelling at each other. And you can smell the aroma of all the different espresso and the coffee beans and the croissants, and there was a couple speaking and they looked like they were in love. There's a guy reading at his table. And he describes the sights and the sounds and everything about that, and he goes oh my god we have to take this concept and bring it back to the United States. Fast forward, that was the birthing of Starbucks. That's how it came to be.
Lyn Graft 9:18
And what the principle that I always share with entrepreneurs is no different than what he shared, was he's taken an experience that meant something passionately to him, this espresso bar, something that was beautiful and sounded amazing, smelled good, and he brought that experience in his verbal communication with his team in Seattle and says we have to get this concept going. We need to launch these espresso bars all over the country. He used that experience to share to raise capital, to recruit people to come work for him, to get press for the company, to develop the culture, was all centered around the experience that he had in Milan, Italy. And it's as simple as that, Scott.
Lyn Graft 10:05
As an entrepreneur, each of us has something that happened to us, something probably pretty meaningful that directed us to go in this crazy direction of launching a company because one of the hardest things you'll ever do is build a company. And you do that because there's something that happened to you that has meaning in your life that triggered you, that sparked an idea, that motivated you to go out and launch it. And so as an entrepreneur, the thing I impress upon them the most is think about an experience you had that has a direct meaning to the business, it's going to inspire you, that puts you down this path, and surround your story around that concept. Because a couple things are going to happen when we talk about that, Scott. Three things specifically.
Lyn Graft 10:50
Number one, it's something you know a lot about. You experienced it. These are your feelings, your ideas, your concepts. And the second part about that, that truly differentiates it. And the reason is, there's nobody in the world that's had your set of experiences, that knows the people that you do, and has the knowledge that you do. So by sharing a personal experience, you're automatically differentiating yourself. And then three, whenever you talk about something you're passionate about, it shows up on camera, it shows up when you're talking in person, it shows up in your email. So you're bringing that energy about your passion, your desire, your why, that why you're doing this all centers back that experience that you had that put you on this path to launch this company. So those three things are really why I tell entrepreneurs to focus on that meaningful experience that relates directly to your business.
Scott Case 10:51
So as you think about the storytelling piece you're drawing from lots of experiences that put you there. So are there some elements about those, that the story inspiration that are particularly important? Listening to you tell Howard Schultz's story, you talked about the sights, the sounds, the observations, those things, there's a richness to the story. What are some of the things that as you identify what that inspiring point is, what are the elements you're looking for that will make it not just to bring your passion, but to liven up the audience to hear it and to see it and the smell and to experience it?
Lyn Graft 12:44
There's a couple things you want to start out doing. And I called it the Story Asset Inventory. And essentially, what you want to do is look at your history going back. You want to be a chronicler of your own life. And as you take that chronicalization of things that have happened to you, and they typically should center around the time that you started your company. It's what we call the origin story is a very common name for this. And there are things that happen around that moment in time that put you down this path. Now, for a lot of people. It's never like one moment, it's as you mentioned earlier, it's a series of things that happen and all of a sudden, you're building a company. You may not be able to trace it back. But if you're able to do this kind of asset inventory chronicalization, you're going to find there are certain things that speak to you and speak to others, more so than others. And a lot of times this is an opportunity to ask people – what do you find interesting about what I'm doing? Or do you remember when I started this company, why I started it? You can get your family and friends to help you with that as you build that story asset inventory, if you will. And the third thing that you're looking for is that we are all great critics, every single day we make a decision on what we wear, what we watch, who we call, who we email, what interview we take, what we decide to do. So we're constantly using our own critical analysis to make life and business decisions. You can take that same perspective and apply it to that story asset inventory, so that you can pick out the things that are rich, that bring the idea of those concepts to life. And as you do that you're going to find because we're great critics, if you look at it with that honest eye, you're able to pull those gems out and understand what are the things are going to have meaning.
Lyn Graft 14:28
I'll give you an example with Howard Schultz. If you read his book, you'll learn so many things about his background history. For instance, he grew up poor in the projects in New York City. So does that relate to the story about the building up of Starbucks necessarily? If you have a lot of time to explain what that connection is, yes. However, if he was going to tell you about why healthcare is so important to his company, he's going to share with you what happened when he was a young child his father got into an accident, and he could no longer work driving a truck like he did. And the reason that he provides health care to full and part time employees is that because he experienced that setback, his entire family experience, they couldn't pay for things, had to move into an even worse place because of that. So what you're doing is you're using that chronicalization and finding things by critical analysis that not only are inspiring, but relate directly to what you're doing. So it's going to connect with your audience. Because ultimately, Scott, storytelling is about connection. I'm trying to relate to my audience in such a way that it's going to resonate with them, it's going to be relative to their life, or somebody they care about. So you're trying to build that emotional bridge to them to make that connection, so that they're going to listen, and hopefully buy from you, write about you or invest in your company.
Scott Case 15:52
So you brought up a couple of things there that are really important. And I want to probe on one of them. So the first is, it's not just one story, that might be the origin story for your company, but to your point, you can use storytelling from your own life to explain or advocate the priorities for the business or why healthcare is so important to a company and those kinds of things. So part of having that inventory, if you've mapped it out, allows you to draw on that as you go. And I know for when we talk about Upside Business Travel, a big reason why we started the company was that we've been business travelers ourselves and we've traveled constantly throughout our experiences, and all you need to do is to pick on that you know that one story where you know, the flight got delayed, or you missed your kids baseball game, or whatever it is that's there, and everybody nods their head.
Lyn Graft 16:55
Oh Scott is frozen. Welcome back. Can we hear you?
Scott Case 17:10
You can hear me now. I don't know what happened.
Lyn Graft 17:12
So I don't know that I heard a question.
Scott Case 17:15
It said that I'm unstable, but I knew that already. So the software is clearly behind.
Scott Case 17:22
And my question for you is, given the inventory of your stories, you can use them and apply them in lots of ways, not just the origin story but other stories. My question then becomes – if there's both story selection and then there is where and when do you tell those stories? So let's take the where and when first. And then we'll use that as the vehicle to get after the story selection. So there's lots of places. You could record them and post them on YouTube, you can be in a meeting where you're presenting, you can be talking to your team, you can be on clubhouse, you could decide to be on a podcast. How do you decide the right where to tell your story? And then we'll come back to how do you select what from your story inventory to bring?
Lyn Graft 18:20
Essentially, this is something that a lot of founders struggle with, is having too many stories and they don't focus in on that one core story. And don't get me wrong when you do this story asset inventory, you're going to create multiple stories, there's no way around it, just like the experience you talked about with business travel.
Lyn Graft 18:38
So what you really want to think about – what is the one story that I'm the best at telling? And make that story just so compelling that you can use it any time, place or wherever you go. And one point I'll make on that – simpler and shorter is harder. It takes longer, more work and more effort to create a simple, compelling story. So don't think that the simple stories eventually just pop out. Rarely does that happen. It's like making a sauce. You just keep condensing that sucker down until it gets better and tastier. And just becomes so good that people want to hear that story over and over.
Lyn Graft 19:16
Now, once you get that one core story, Scott, I recommend starting out with at least two other stories. One could be a customer story, something how you help them, that's more like associated with the heroes, you're making your customer a hero because they bought your product or service, something that simple. You're talking about someone else, you don't have to talk about yourself in that way. And the third would be something that's really deeply personal to you. And the reason is, I share that with you is that coming up with a personal story and the feelings you have with that association are what I call emotional facts. They're your emotional facts. Meaning I love my mother more than anything, you cannot argue with that stuff, because that is my own emotional belief. So when you talk about your personal beliefs in that way, people can't argue with that. They can't say that somebody loves their mother better than you because they don't, because you own that. So I figured having like that origin story, having a customer story and something really personal that relates to the business, you know, we don't want to know about your breakups and stuff like that, we want something as personal as it relates to business.
Lyn Graft 20:28
So once you've got that core inventory of 1, 2, 3, you can have more, but don't have too many, then you want to think about where to use them. And this is a great concept to start thinking about your target audience. Specifically, if your audience is investors, they have different motivations than someone that is in the press or reporters versus customers. Customers, they've got a hair on fire problem that hopefully your product or solution will solve. So the story is going to relate about a problem maybe one of your customers have had, or something that they're going to relate to in that instance. So you want to figure out a story that's going to be targeted towards hopefully solving the problem for that particular customer. When it goes to the case of the press, the press what they're really wanting, they want a story for their audience, it needs to be compelling, inspiring, emotional, entertaining, something along those lines. So that's where you can use that more personal story to sell it to the press, because they want to know the things that nobody else knows about. They want to be the first to get it out there. So you associate that personal story with them. Now investors, they're more cared about, I'm going to put my money in you, I need to make sure I'm going to make good money, make great money. So hopefully, maybe you have a story that's about – could be about the size of the market, it could be about maybe your credibility that you have because they're betting on you, the entrepreneur, they're not betting on your product or service in the early stages, they're betting on you that you're going to make this happen and go through brick walls. So you might share a story of examples of challenges that you faced and overcame, maybe examples about it took you five years to come up with this concept for this product that I don't care, nobody's going to be able to catch up in that five year window for the next two years so you explain a level of different competitive advantage. So what you're looking for is identifying the needs, the personalities, and the overall kind of characteristics of your target audience – and then look at your inventory of stories and you apply each one of those.
Scott Case 22:32
So okay, you've applied the story to the audience. How do you choose the channel side of that? Is it where the audience is? Do you explore new channels, so clubhouse is the new kid on the block and before that Tik Tok, and then you've got Instagram, and you've got Facebook, and you've got YouTube for video, and you've got podcasts and there's like 1,000 ways to pick someplace. Is there a strategy or an approach to deciding where to go and why?
Lyn Graft 23:05
This goes back to understanding where your strengths are. You need to know what you're good at. If you're good on camera, you want to gravitate towards video. If you got this deep bellowing voice, Clubhouse or the new Racket is coming out. There's like 33 audio apps that have been launched over the last year because of the explosion of Clubhouse. If you're a great writer, you want to think about using more of a digital type of sharing where it's written, maybe it's an PowerPoint, could be slides, emails, things like that.
Lyn Graft 23:35
The reality is you're going to need to use every channel because that's where audiences are. But I would gravitate towards focusing on those ones that are best suited for your skill sets. So those are the three that are the most common. Well, actually there are four that are the most common right now.
Lyn Graft 23:52
In person number one, there's nothing better than an in person opportunity to share your story. And that's because the physical mannerisms, the tonality of your voice, the eye contact, they can see how you feel about your company.
Lyn Graft 24:06
Number two, video is the closest to that because they're able to still see you, to hear you, they can't feel your presence, but they can see it and sense it on video and the number one most searched search engine in the world is Google. The second is YouTube. So you want to take advantage of that concept.
Lyn Graft 24:25
The third most common is written and that's PowerPoints, emails, we're still in this digital world of communication. You're trying to get that first meeting, that first interview, that first zoom call, and it typically happens through written communication or referral. And a lot of times you are helping write that referral.
Lyn Graft 24:43
And then lastly, this new medium is called Racket and I just did my first post on it last night. It's essentially a Twitter for audio. They have a nine minute limit and you basically record whatever it is and you post it on that stream then it gets shared with the other mediums, so I think that's a really powerful medium. And the reason is there's 55% of U.S. individuals have listened to a podcast. Radio has been around longer than television, so audio is an incredible medium that you're going to want to use.
Lyn Graft 25:18
And again, it goes back to you, if you're going to select which of those four, which ones are you best at. And at the end of the day, there's nothing better than in person. But as we've learned over the last year, COVID has changed what in person means – a zoom is now just as good as in person for at least for that type of thing.
Scott Case 25:37
I think the live interaction versus asynchronous, so live over video or live in person versus content that you're creating that's asynchronous. I think that's part of the reason clubhouse has worked is that it's a synchronous experience, we're all here together, we're all experiencing it. But that also means one of your skills needs to be being able to speak kind of extemporaneously, right, you're reacting to what's going on. And that's a different skill set than somebody who's giving a TED talk, which is more of a performance art.
Scott Case 26:08
And I really like your point about what you're good at. And you said something earlier about asking other people. One great way to figure out what you're good at is to ask the people around you, Hey, what do you think I'm most capable of and where do you think it's there. The other part about it is time because this stuff takes time. And so if, for example, I struggle to write, I can do it, it takes me time, but like, it might take me an hour to write something that my co-founder can do in 10 minutes. But I know I can do things on camera, and just out of my brain into somebody much, much easier, it just comes more naturally to me to do it live. And so finding those skills that play up to your time too, because it's not just that you're good at it, but it's also that you can do it quickly.
Lyn Graft 27:00
Now, let me interject there for a second. I've got to help people with this specifically, because I've got clients that I've worked with over the years as I was writing my book and learning kind of how do I package this content in a digestible format, I would help them with their story. And I have had clients that were great writers, I've had clients that were only good in person, I've had clients that just audio everything, they just want to do phone calls. And now youtube. So two clients specifically, I kept asking them, Hey, can you give me some background chronicalization, when did the company start, challenges you faced, and for the life of me, they would not get it done. But this one particular guy would leave me like 60 seconds to three minute voicemails on my phone all the time. I don't know about you, it's a long time since I listened to that long of a voicemail. So I told them, Look, I don't want you to write anything down. I'm going to give you a topic and I want you to call and leave it on my voicemail. Eventually, we switch to a video recording and then I transcribed all of those recordings and it was amazing. He was so free flowing. So one recommendation I'll give any entrepreneur that's having trouble writing, use a recording device. Use a microphone, every phone now has a recording app on it. Every computer application, there's a zillion out there. If someone asked you a question about your company and just vomit it out, just spit it out and record it from an audio standpoint.
Lyn Graft 28:30
I had a second client, I'm helping him right now because they're getting ready to do a wefunder campaign. He wasn't good at any of those. He would send me YouTube videos. And I'm like, Oh my god, the time that it takes to record a YouTube video, that's not trivial but he loved it. That was how he wanted to communicate. So essentially, we built his entire value proposition in the form of 20 different slides, all starting from a video recording. He would just sit there and he's talk and he'd go Lyn, Okay, so what happened was I used to drive Lyft to help pay for bills when I was launching my first company, and he would just go off, he just loved being on camera talking to the camera, not to me, talking to YouTube. So there's all different ways that you as a founder can figure out how to solve these mental roadblocks you might have by simply recording it and getting it to transcription. A great tip there's something called temi, which is what we use in the video world for creating transcriptions of all our interviews, amazing tool, 25 cents a minute. So you know, four minutes will cost you $1. That's it. You can go out and record all these things. That's how we record all these meetings, videos and everything else that we're doing, and to help you go from what's in here to a written idea, concept and story.
Scott Case 29:50
I love transcriptions. I think it's a really, really powerful thing and it's something that I've used even internally with our teams when we're working on a new project and it's like, let's just record this and then we'll get it transcribed. And that way people who aren't in the room can just quickly read through. And it's a really powerful tool. And your point about voicemails, there are people that's how they prefer and so meeting them where they are is really important.
Scott Case 30:20
I want to turn to – you're working on your next book. So I'm curious about, if you can tell us, what's volume two of your thinking here? And what have you learned and where are you going?
Lyn Graft 30:41
So the first book was about how to create a story from scratch. You don't have anything and we all need a story. Stories are your number one asset as an entrepreneur because you use it for every facet of the business. Now, once I got the fundamental of that down, now it's the second book is how to tell your story. And that's not just the oratory ability about it. It's a lot of things that we've been discussing, Scott. It's there are so many different ways to get your story out there from video, from email, to zoom calls to YouTube, think about Instagram stories and Tik Tok stories, this whole generation that's coming out, they're using technology in a way that we've never used it before. And they're taking these mini stories, these kind of little montages to communicate their life, their business, their ideas, their hobbies, everything along those lines. And there's also there's chapters in the book that will cover concepts that relate to the oratory ability, like being on stage or being on camera, but it's also more about understanding that there's power in words.
Lyn Graft 31:47
So I'll give an example. If I wanted to describe a product that was for food specifically, and maybe it was around protein, something I might tell you about I'm in the kitchen right now and you can hear the bacon sizzling. The minute I say bacon sizzling, there's triggers going off in your mind and you start visualizing images of bacon in the kitchen in a frying pan with the oil bubbling up. So your word selection is incredibly powerful whenever you tell your story. So this idea of this book is all about the different ways, the different channels, the different mediums, the different styles, tonality, if I get really energetic and I kind of come forward that's kind of bringing me more and I'm capturing your attention. Or I can do what they call a pregnant pause. And that's a very uncomfortable period for most people, people don't like pregnant pauses but it's a way to make a point. So you want to use silence in the same way that you use noise and volume and audio. And there's a lot of other things too. I teach in the next book, there'll be a chapter specifically on VAK, visual audio kinesthetic visual, is what we see. About 65% of the US population are visual learners. About 30% are audio learners. And about five to 10% are kinesthetic, they want to feel things. So you can use words to do that. You can use motion to do that. So this second book is all these different ways, techniques, mediums to tell your story to the target audience.
Scott Case 33:32
That's awesome. All right, we're gonna go to our speed round here. We got a few questions that popped up. When you talk about a story asset inventory and creating it, is that something that you've outlined in the book, and is there a 30 second version of it for our audience?
Lyn Graft 33:50
Actually what I did was I created a template that you can download. Specifically, I'll have to give that to you later. I don't have it memorized. I don't have a link to but I'll get the link to Julie where you guys can download it. And it's for free. It basically gives you an outline for what I call the chrono history, that's the chronological history, for you to start building those assets. And it goes back from where you're born. I start with where were you born and what date? So at least you can get started on something, that's something we all know, right? And it just kind of breaks it down over the course of life. It's like, it's through school, after school, and then right to the point you start your company, so I'll make sure Julie has that link, and she'll share it with the audience if that's okay.
Scott Case 34:32
That's awesome. Yeah, we love that stuff. I'm gonna ask you - there's a quick question here around lots of stories from Starbucks founders or Michael Dell, like, super successful entrepreneurs. Is there a big difference for somebody who hasn't made it yet or maybe has a series of ventures, some have worked and some haven't? Is there any difference in the way to think about that from a storytelling standpoint?
Lyn Graft 35:01
Technically, no. There really isn't. You're generally going to start with that origin story, which is the most powerful. That's the one that's the easiest to kind of center your idea around. So the starting point, not really. The difference with the folks that are incredibly successful and well known is that they've had years and decades to refine that story. And one interesting thing, you may get sick of it, but you better get used to it because you're going to tell that story over and over and over. One of my friends, I asked her if she had been in business for five or six years, I said, how many times have you told that story? It was a really good one about how she came up with this product. It was one of those aha moments for her. And she goes about 10,000 times. And I'm like, really you know? She said, yeah, at least 4,000 were on QVC. Because every time she was on camera pitching her product, she told that origin story. So you better get used to it. Basic ideas are the same, you start with that experience that has a deep meaning to you that relates to your business and go from there.
Scott Case 36:02
Alright, well, you obviously were traveling a lot to collect these stories. So I would be remiss if I didn't ask you, as you're looking out at 2021 and 2022, how are you thinking about taking more business trips and getting more of those in person interactions yourself?
Lyn Graft 36:20
Yeah, what I find incredibly fascinating is that you have an opportunity as a founder, and Upside as well, is to almost start from scratch. I've been to happy hours, in person meetings, a couple of birthdays over the last two weeks, and oh my god, people are so joyous to meet one another. They're so excited, like, Oh it's so good to see you. And they're like, let's plan something again. There's this energy and this excitement that I want to leverage over the next few years that I think it's going to be almost impossible to recreate again. And it's all about the excitement, the exhilaration. If you remember the first time you ever took a flight, or I remember the first time I flew first class, I'll never forget that experience. They gave me that warm towel. I didn't know it was to wash your hands. I put it on my face. I thought it was to make my pores open or something along those lines. So there's that first impression opportunity we all have in the business travel world to go back to the roots of the glory, the excitement and the opportunity that business travel lends. And that's what I'll be trying to capture over the next year when I have opportunities to meet with business transaction folks.
Scott Case 37:34
All right. The last opportunity I'm going to give you before we wrap up is to say again, who the most important person in your life is so we can grab that clip and send it to your mom?
Lyn Graft 37:44
The most important person in my life is my amazing mother, Eva Alonso Mendoza Graft. She is my inspiration. My reason for being and the one that calls me if I'm not doing it right. So I know love you, mom.
Scott Case 37:59
Brilliant. Excellent. Lyn, thank you so much for being here. And Mom, thanks for being a good mom.
Scott Case 38:05
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Founders Focus. We love getting feedback. So if you've got a topic for us that you want us to discuss or you've got a founder you want to hear from, hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case, or you can always grab one on one time with me at foundersfocus.com. Stay awesome.