How Bad Stories Kill Good Inventions
Source: Broadsides
Can funds can help make the unfamiliar Comprehensible?
In December 2023, a Nashville startup raised $10 million to put robots to work painting buildings. PaintJet had spent the previous several years developing a robotic system for commercial and industrial painting, an industry where companies were struggling to find enough people to do the work. Its machines could be deployed using equipment already common on construction sites, and PaintJet said they could complete projects with half the crew in roughly half the time while using less paint.
The Series A was led by @Outsiders Fund, with participation from Pathbreaker Ventures, MetaProp, Dynamo Ventures, and VSC Ventures. By then, PaintJet had already painted more than 1.5 million square feet of buildings and ships.
Internally, the premise for the idea was perfect; there was a labour shortage, and painting had always been repetitive work people wanted to avoid at all costs. The technology existed, and enough people to prove product validity were already paying for it.
Yet when PaintJet was trying to introduce the company to potential customers, there was one part of the story that always required particular care.
The word “robot”.
VSC, which had backed the company, described how PaintJet’s founder was initially hesitant to use the word because of the reaction it might provoke. While the machine and its core engineering were not the problem, negative associations surrounding robots have created signals that cause hesitation toward widespread adoption.
The first Broadsides Monthly Cover Story is almost here. Subscribe to receive it first.
After years of solving complex engineering problems to build a working machine, a founder often expects instant market adoption. For the customer, however, technology doesn’t exist in an engineering vacuum. They immediately picture what the robot represents; what it might replace, what it costs, and what it means for their existing workforce. Every new technology always arrives with an implicit narrative, whether the company intentionally shapes it or not.
PaintJet is an unusually clear example of this challenge many startups face early on: defining what to build before figuring out how the world will perceive it. Positioning a new technology becomes especially acute when entering an industry that has operated for decades with little reason to adopt a technology-first mindset. This is precisely the territory where VSC Ventures chooses to operate.
The companies that are hard to explain
VSC is a $20 million early-stage fund that invests primarily in North American companies and describes itself as a storytelling venture fund, which is relatively unusual for most funds. Alongside capital, it brings brand, media and storytelling capabilities into its relationships with founders. Its current investment thesis focuses heavily on companies using AI, robotics and automation to address labour and operational problems in what it calls “dirty, dusty, dangerous” industries.
Sesame Solar, for example, produces mobile nanogrids that provide power when conventional infrastructure fails or breaks down. The company’s origins trace back to Hurricane Katrina, which directly inspired founder Lauren Flanagan to create the solution. Depending on the audience, the product can be framed as disaster response, renewable energy, emergency power, or infrastructure resilience. While that wide appeal is an asset, it can also complicate how the company tells its story.
A solo customer looking for backup power does not necessarily think of themselves as a climate-tech buyer, an organisation interested in disaster preparedness may not be searching for a renewable-energy company, and a business looking at resilience infrastructure may approach the product from an entirely different vocabulary. A company that chose to build one core product has been met by a market interpreting it through several distinct lenses.
Then there is Multitude Insights, developing AI tools for law enforcement agencies, but operating in a field where technology vendors have spent years making claims about artificial intelligence, while the enforcement agencies work under intense public scrutiny where trust and credibility are paramount. Rather than build all of its communications around the product, VSC created The Innovators of Public Safety, a podcast that put people working in public safety at the centre of the conversation.
The company did not necessarily need another explanation of its software. It needed a setting in which potential customers could recognise their own problems and see the company as part of that world.
Such thinking requires a fundamental shift in how startups approach marketing, but more particularly, a fresh perspective on what venture investors can truly bring to the table.
The Fund’s Other Job
Jay Kapoor’s Newsletter, a General Partner at VSC, didn’t get into venture capital through the traditional tech path. Rooted in international relations, his background focused on how people with competing priorities find common ground, a perspective that directly shapes his approach to startup communications today.
The critical question for Jay is always “What must happen for an outsider to care?” which, in his experience, is a common bridge between technical validity and market relevance for founders to overlook. Immersed in years of development, failure, and iteration, a founder’s core assumptions feel self-evident. Still, customers, investors, and potential hires don’t share that history and could, genuinely, care no less. To buy into the vision, they must form a mental picture of the company from scratch before ever experiencing the tech itself. When a product is technically sound yet commercially ambiguous, decision-makers hesitate, and momentum stalls right when it matters most.
The investor’s role is changing
Masha Bucher, Founder and General Partner of Day One Ventures, entered venture capital after a career in PR and communications. In a 2025 conversation with Rebecca Bellan for TechCrunch’s Equity, Bucher described communications as a way to solve business problems and create opportunities for companies rather than simply as a mechanism for securing publicity; ergo, redefining communication as a crucial part of every company’s operations.
At 645 Ventures, Meredith Tibbals, Vice President of Portfolio Success, has written about rebuilding the firm’s value-add programme around resources founders can actually use. Founder thought leadership is one example. The idea is to give founders a system for developing their voice and publishing rather than leaving that work to occasional advice or introductions.
Venture firms have begun taking their approach to communications differently, with Day One coming at it through communications expertise, 645 Ventures turning portfolio support into more repeatable systems, and VSC going further to make storytelling part of the fund’s identity.
None of these firms is stopping at the usual post-funding press release. They are responding to something that becomes more apparent as startups move into unfamiliar markets: getting the market to understand the company can be a prerequisite for many of the things investors already claim to help with.
Who Else Needs A Good Story?
In a Forbes interview, Robbie Crabtree , a former litigator and the founder of Founder Fundraising, described the importance of separating the founder’s personal story from the story of the company’s vision.
According to his argument, an investor needs to grasp three distinct elements: what the business is pursuing, why the founder is pursuing it, and why this particular opportunity deserves attention. Founders live with their ideas for years, seeing obvious connections, but the investor only has minutes to put the pieces together. This is why the strongest fundraising stories have never been about re-echoed pitch deck content.
The same is present in sales and hiring, with stakeholders relying on the narrative given by the company to make decisions before experience can. This makes storytelling a more consequential part of a startup’s toolkit. For companies changing how people think about a problem, storytelling can influence whether the business gets understood well enough for the underlying product to receive a fair hearing.
Ultimately, this is not only true for startups, but also crucial for venture capital funds and managers.
A fund can have a strong thesis, unique network, and a track record worth paying attention to, yet still be overlooked if it cannot clearly communicate why any of those things matter. Storytelling is therefore not just a portfolio support function, but a part of the fund itself, shaping how founders, LPs and the wider market understand its edge.
In venture capital, the firms that tell their story clearly are the firms that get remembered, trusted and chosen.
https://broadsidesvc.substack.com/p/how-bad-stories-kill-good-inventions