How Startup Narratives Form: Frontier Tech Case Studies
When trying to understand how to build a lasting frontier tech business, stakeholders (investors, employees, customers) and founders alike often swing between ‘data-driven’ analysis and cultural/circumstantial analysis.
These two pieces united form common narratives. Narratives are the prominent stories within markets tied to successes and failures that are half data points around the commercialization of these technologies in the past (the novel GTMs, pricing structures, and unexpected hitches in developing brand new science), and half built off of the particular circumstances and culture that they took place within.
For founders commercializing new technologies whose growth and potential market is often not as well understood as SaaS sales, studying the two of these in combination and how they form common patterns is important when building a lasting frontier tech business. By analyzing the past of frontier tech commercialization, stakeholders and founders can make educated hypotheses about how these patterns may play out in the future, or can be harnessed in your favor.
In a world where the state of the market a frontier tech company might be building within could change heavily in 5 years due to new technology or inflections in cost, the cultural/circumstantial portion of narratives are especially important.
