Building your startup requires a story about how you will, against all odds, change the future.

Explaining the successes your startup has already had requires a tight story about how you got here.

Projecting certainty in either of those stories might seem the epitome of hubris, but today I want to explore why you should tell them confidently.

Looking backwards: The human mind wants to see order in chaos, so a story of inevitability finds a warm reception. Looking forward: History is chaos that can be shaped, so that predictions influence outcomes.

Let’s explore in turn.

Revisionism

Successful founders are revisionist historians. You live your startup forward, but never forget that the outside world will experience it in reverse. Every new customer, partner, investor, or employee enters your world only after you fought to survive until that day.

You’re basically an inverse Benjamin Button—everyone experiences your startup history in reverse except for you.

So as you hit milestones, be sure to adjust your story in a way that makes it look like it was inevitable that you’d get there.

You’re not just doing yourself a favor. You’re doing everyone else a favor too. The human mind is always trying to find logic in the random walk of history. It seeks causality.

True stories: YouTube started as a dating site. Twitter was a podcasting platform. Android began as an operating system for digital cameras.

For the founders, those false starts and wrenching turns undoubtedly remain vivid and visceral experiences. For the outside world? They never need to know they happened.

Amazon doesn’t talk about how it started as a bookstore. They don’t worry about consistency, and neither should you.

Present the new like it’s always been that way. Did you suddenly pivot to a different business model? Enter a new market? Discard a feature or initiative you loudly touted just a few months earlier? You’re the only one who really cares. Move confidently to the new. Change your messaging.

Inevitability

Inevitability is essentially forward-looking revisionism.

History is chaotic, which is both a challenge and an opportunity. History is a Level 2 chaotic system, which means that it reacts to predictions*. The prediction itself changes the likelihood of the predicted outcome. In contrast, weather is a Level 1 chaotic system—no amount of forecasting will change how sunny it is tomorrow.

The opportunity is that you should make it look (despite your gravest 3am doubts) like your startup is foreordained for success—and you can be confident that the world wants to be complicit in this white lie.

Look at any successful startup and their story tends to sound like it was a greased chute to success. Sure, the founder might have some tidy anecdotes about early failures. But they know, as you do, where it all led. So let’s turn that on its head and start projecting inevitability going forward.

In an odd characteristic of Level 2 chaotic systems, it is more provable to create than to avoid, so be sure to present your story as what you’re building, not the world we’re escaping. A clear analogue is in politics, which is also Level 2 chaos. Investing to avert the worst of climate change is bound to be thankless; If the terrible outcomes don’t come to pass, the other side will just say, see? Nothing bad happened and you wasted our money! So talk about the world your startup is creating, not the bad outcomes it helps us avoid.

If the tendency of the human mind is to seek determinism looking backwards, the mental corollary is that we tend to project progress as a straight line into the future. Just look at the brilliant minds who saw the growing piles of horse poop on city streets in the late 19th century and confidently extrapolated that every London street would be buried under 9 feet of manure within 50 years.

The lesson: every piece of traction and social proof that your startup accumulates builds the inertia of your success. Gather and tout.

Like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse 5, help your startup become “unstuck in time.” Channel your inner Kurt Vonnegut as you talk about the history of the future and your predictions of the past.

Let’s build,

Otto

*I learned about the levels of chaos in Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. Drop everything, amazing book