Like many engineering-driven startups, Blue River Technology was founded to fix a conceptually simple problem. For BRT it was this: Industrial agriculture soaks entire fields with herbicides; wouldn’t the world be a better place if we invented a system that uses computer vision and machine learning to spray only the actual weeds?

That vision launched a 7-year odyssey for CEO Jorge Heraud and his co-founders to grow BRT from a Stanford research project into a thriving business that they sold to John Deere for $300m in 2018.

Let the story of BRT—and the stories that BRT told—inspire your own startup journey.

As Jorge explored his original vision, he realized that perhaps the precision of computers might eliminate the need for herbicides altogether: Couldn’t micro-targeted hot oil kill weeds? As part of researching his idea for a Stanford business school class (full disclosure: Jorge was a classmate of mine), Jorge interviewed an organic farmer. “It blew my mind to learn about the cost and complexity of hand-weeding organic fields, which limited how many carrots he could grow,” he remembers. “It cost over $1000 to kill the weeds in a single acre, which made organics cost so much more than conventional crops.”

Could their technology finally unleash organic agriculture to beat conventional farming?

That beautiful idea was enough to secure an NSF research grant. But challenges quickly arose: boiling and applying oil was technically complex, and additional customer discovery showed that hand-weeding was but one of the challenges faced by the small and fragmented organic produce market. Thinning conventional lettuce fields was a much bigger opportunity. And wasn’t the idea of reducing herbicide use by 90% in a $100 million market equally compelling?

Jorge pivoted the story. It worked. Renowned investor Vinod Khosla and other Silicon Valley investors lined up for a $3m seed round in 2012.

When it was time to raise the next round, Jorge found that the lettuce story sounded incremental and uninspiring to growth-stage investors.

After many unsuccessful investor meetings, Jorge and his team hired a storytelling advisor to rebuild their pitch. The result changed the trajectory of the company.

The company wasn’t in the business of improving lettuce. The company was saving mankind from modern chemical-based agriculture, whose indiscriminate herbicide use was merely accelerating the evolution of super-weeds. Instead of guaranteeing a future of plenty, the status quo was a death spiral that required ever more herbicides to counteract decreasing effectiveness at a time when governments, driven by environmental concerns, were making it harder to approve new chemicals.

“I got chills when I heard this new story,” Jorge says. “It had a villain and impending doom, a tidal wave landing on top of us, and we were the heroes that could stop this.”

Positioning the chemical industry as a “dead man walking” found a receptive audience in the venture capital community. Suddenly, the BRT story was electric, and Jorge raised an over-subscribed $10m Series A in 2014.

The new framing didn’t just help close that round. “It helped us all the way to acquisition,” Jorge says. The company was infused with cash and a powerful and energizing vision. Hiring and growth ensued.

But that very growth caused the next story challenge: the status quo came knocking. When John Deere approached BRT about an acquisition, the price was compelling, but the cost was high: John Deere had a deep and co-dependent relationship with the chemical industry, so out went the story of struggle between nature and chemistry. Instead, BRT messaging shifted to emphasize how the technology reduces costs and enables better stewardship of the land.

“Out went the villain and the negatives,” says Jorge, who transitioned out of John Deere last month. “Now we framed the positives.”

The BRT website underwent an even bigger makeover. Visit the BRT website now and the language is even softer: the company is working on “hard problems” with big vision. It hardly mentions chemical reduction at all. That’s not just because BRT technology has broadened its markets beyond agriculture and into construction, but because the site is now primarily an HR tool that is visited by potential hires researching company culture.

For Jorge and BRT, the reality of reality demanded flexibility. It was a long journey from empowering organic farming to “We are dedicated to solving hard problems,” as the BRT website currently says, but the impact is undeniable. “Our technology avoids millions of gallons of herbicides sprayed each year,” Jorge says. “That’s a clear win for everyone.”

Every startup is a chapter book of stories. You need one to get started, you need one to get big, and if you’re lucky enough to get that far, you’ll need one to fit into global capitalism.

Are you as flexible to find the new story each stage demands?