This is the second part of a two-part interview with Avery Chenoweth, a writer and Spanish language translator based in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can see Part 1 here.
In recent years you have used your storytelling chops to develop a business. HeresMyStory.com engages students and others who use historic sites, but getting them to interact with Augmented Reality characters who come into view on their phone at these sites. To pursue this business project, you participated in a special business-development program at U.Va.’s Darden School of Business, the i-Lab How has learning about business informed your life as a writer and storyteller? What do you now know that makes you a better writer and storyteller?
What I came away with was complicated–but it seemed to me that in business we were all talking past one another, and using English differently enough that it was a dialect, or pidgin, that we were speaking.
As an older entrepreneur, I had a hard time being heard by younger people. The business people would listen to me as if I had slipped into Mandarin (what, again?), and I found myself at times listening carefully to professional jingo and admiring how well it telescoped ideas into verbs, like some verbal vortex opening over a conference table. It was also interesting how everyone had a story, and that everyone spoke in a story, or in a case, which acted like parables–encoding a message in the action so that, even if the interpretation eluded you, the fall out of bad decisions did not.
How do you train for that?
In the i-Lab at Darden, we were called on to pitch routinely and unpredictably, as a way of finding ourselves doing an elevator pitch in a heartbeat without prep. So it was a magical story, with a mysterious and compelling opening, and not unlike a Wall Street Journal story with an anecdotal opening, followed by a nut graph. If you were lucky, you’d get a card and invitation to follow up. And if something was wrong with your pitch, everyone would coach you to start on another point, or at a better selling point.
Pitching depends, of course, on who’s catching. Some don’t and others won’t. That’s good: they’re honest. The worst are those who spend all your time window shopping because they like the attention, feel powerful as they dangle a check out of reach, or merely enjoy the sadism of passive aggression, the one cultural monument here in Virginia that cannot be moved.
Standup comics can be harassed, berated, or torn up by furious drunks, and singers can get booed, writers and directors can get diced by vicious critics, and worse yet by nasty trolls posing as critics. But when you’re pitching investors, it’s all interactive. If I ever thought a creative writing workshop was tough, I had zero idea of business pitching. Investors can lean in; lean back; chill you with silence; badger you with irrelevant details to show you that they’re the smartest guy in the room; and then lead you on with meetings, suggestions, name dropping, money dangling, all just messing around because it alleviates their soulless boredom.
Quick example: I used to start my pitch this way: imagine you come up to a huge battlefield. You get out. The kids mill around. All you see is a field, well mowed into stripes like a ball field. A cannon. And a plaque. There is “nothing” there. The kids are bored and want to leave. Then your phone pings. There on your phone is a civil war soldier, standing right before you. And he says, “They shot me over here. Come on, I’ll show you…” He walks into the distance, and as you scan your phone, the field disappears, and you see on your phone see a Matthew Brady landscape all around you, as you follow him into American history. That possibility would light up people–in the beginning, in the i-Lab, back when this was still an idea. As for story-telling: I am telling them a story. It is not the one in their heads. They are looking for a denouement; I am managing their expectations. As we got closer to making a product, the illusion faded, and rather than look at the meadow, they gazed into the weeds. They ask, who is the market for this? Is this an App? Are you using AR, or VR? Is it triggered by GPS, or beacon? Is the site you mention nearby? What person is stopping there? How much do they spend a year on vacations, how long do they go? If they have 350k people visiting every year, how are you going to market to them and monetize the app, by subscription, rev share with the park, sponsorships, or advertising? Cause I don’t see advertising working here. Who’s your law firm, who’s doing your contracts? Do you have employees or are they all consultants; are they getting paid, working for equity, or a cash-equity split? What kind of network support will you need to launch this? Are you going to build your own platform, because you will need at least $400 thousand, and what kind of revenues are you projecting over the next five years, and when do I see my ROI?
What happens with dilution? You’re offering a convertible note at a 30% discount, but can I really protect my position in future rounds at that discount? Are you now planning to go to institutional investors, philanthropists, and how much have your raised, and how much of the company do you own, and is this your series A? And, of course, are you paying yourself? You need to be putting in sweat equity–this from the millionaires, that the impoverished entrepreneur had better damn well be working slavishly so that they can become still richer on your ingenuity.
A pitch is just a story, with a different purpose.
Interestingly, the pitch parallels Freytag’s pyramid: they like the hook, they invest and cross the dramaturgical climax, they cannot go back, and look ahead to their own denouement, with a return on their investment (ROI). If all goes to plan, they will find the pot of gold, and return home wearing a golden fleece, with chests full of gold and jewels; if badly, they will reap the wind, or, a tax write off.
Storytellers can tell the same story to different audiences, though, and get different results that arise from the regions where they try to cast their spell. A successful entrepreneur once explained it to me in terms of coastal cultures: People on the West Coast fall in love with the vision. They love the story, see the possibilities–and want it to happen for their children and in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the East Coast gang are strictly ROI, and don’t care whether you are selling marshmallows or machine-guns. They just want their return–fast, or else. As it turns out, startups are falling into this sophomore slump after their first product launch–if kids don’t start weeping and screaming “Ringo!” “Paul!”, the investors freeze them out, and figure it’s all over.
Charlottesville has many lovely festivals in film, photography, books, and entrepreneurship and music–which that puts most people into the audience, and that’s where they love to remain, among the informed cognoscente of the coffee shop–well-read, insightful, and full of discernment. We analyze politics for its art, and art for its politics. They are my people. My tribe. My peeps. And when I leave their steaming midst, and come to the business community, I find others from the festival audience from the business world. Yet, in spite of our hip rectitude, there is still a whiff of Zenith, Ohio, in the air. I’ve met with some country club brothers of George Babbitt. They play us for weeks, months about investing, then switch away from investing to making introductions, and then merely fade away to the first tee, and are not heard from again–but for the faint sound of their slapping someone else’s back for a change.
A few years ago, something like $29 million came into local startups, making us town the best town for startups in the US that year, according to the media. Our local media gushed. The locals knew what the writer didn’t: every dime came from out of town, and went to two companies. Call it an absurd generalization, but that is a story, too, one that Charlottesville sells every day, and that journalists repeat in national magazines–while we laugh. To be sure, our investors were NOT as I’ve described above, but staunch and helpful, all the way–many great people helped us. And still with us, I’m sure.
With their backing, we were able to bring history to life at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, hosting 2,500 4th and 5th graders, adults, families, and college students. We might have changed the lives of who knows how many kids by sparking a new interest in history, and by changing how and where they see and encounter history. That’s great. That’s what we wanted to do. We launched our app in the Apple Store in May/June 2017. We got glowing local print and TV coverage, and a terrific piece in the New York Times. As I write this, the last field trips are going through our app games there in the park this fall.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
