America was always perceived as better at everything when it came to startups. Recently though, there's a movement happening of Europeans realizing that we are actually as good at almost everything (i tend to agree).
But there’s one thing Americans are undoubtedly better at: Building a narrative - and god they are good at this.
In my mind, the basic concept is that people, be it potential hires, customers, investors don’t have that much mind space. You need to capture it all and starve your competition of it. Employees need to believe that there’s nowhere else they could possibly work at. Customer need to believe that you are the only one that can solve their problems. And investors need to believe that you are the only company that matters.
“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.” - Qi LU
The way I see it there’s a couple things you need to create a religion:
1. As with every religion in the world, you need a founding myth (story) and a prophet to spread the message (founder).
2. That myth has to bring out someone biggest hopes and fears. You need to explain it in a few clear words, make it seem inevitable but show what happens if you don’t achieve it. (“making life multiplanetary” / “earth is a single point of failure”).
3. Always stick with this same message and repeat it a million times.
4. To stand out from competition pick an enemy larger than all of your competition. Larry Ellison started a very public fight with Bill Gates, to get people to stop talking about Oracle and other database companies and to get them talking about Oracle and Microsoft. A David and Goliath narrative that was far more compelling.
5. You need people to hate you. While insiders have to love you, you need outsiders to hate you.
Obviously you can't be faking any of this, people will know if you are. They’ll know if the founding myth is a complete lie (a slight exaggeration they might not). They will know if you don’t care about the vision. And they will know if you are being polarizing just because or if you are actually like that. Maybe not in the short term, but if you are thinking in the short term you already lost.
p.s. Anduril might have done this better than no one, here's the playbook that shaped their early communication strategy.