Anna-Lisa Wesley, Entrepreneur in Residence at SETsquared Bristol, reflects on the power of storytelling and needing new founder stories for our time.

“Working in tech right now, we need some new heroes, heroines, new plots, new tools, new lessons. We desperately need new material.”

Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn… these business stories, the founders that sit behind them and their operating playbooks have become folklore in tech, bringing with them tales, myths, legends, lessons and famous characters that we have come to recognise as the archetypal story of success. Working in tech, we have used them as inspiration, gauge and guardrail for our own endeavours.

Meanwhile, data just out from Beauhurst has confirmed what we know from painful experience here in the UK tech scene – we are living in a new reality.

£1.48b invested in Q3 2024, £2.33b less than Q2 2024

291 deals done in Q3 2024, 282 less than Q2 2024

61% decrease in amount invested

49% decrease in number of deals.

Overall investment metrics are just one indicator of the market context. Stats around inequitable deployment of capital another. Status around reduced research investment pots another. Today, each entrepreneur is taking part in their own extreme endurance event.

During today’s tough times, those stories of starting lean, negotiating hard and blitz-scaling that drove our sense of collective belief and competence, are feeling lightweight and overworn.  Working in tech right now, we need some new heroes, heroines, new plots, new tools, new lessons. We desperately need new material.

“Imagine if we had a set of stories as relevant to builders in deep tech today as Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn were to the tech businesses of the ’90’s and early 2000s.”

The power of story telling

There is such benefit in sharing stories of success, and failure. Passing these stories down, using them to educate and advance. Stories of foreign lands, tools and ways passed around campfires – through the oral traditions of the time. It has driven our survival.

Imagine if we had a set of stories as relevant to builders in deep tech today as Microsoft, Google, and LinkedIn were to the tech businesses of the ’90’s and early 2000s.

These stories for our time would start in different parts of the ecosystem, with different characters, from all walks of life, solving a huge array of the most challenging, even existential, problems, with diverse and multidisciplinary science and technology – soft, hard and somewhere between the two. These would be stories of all sorts of people doing extraordinarily hard things. They would be stories of deep research, and partnership, trial and error and patience, care and a community of supporting characters.

With these new stories as folklore, we could educate and advance. Perhaps we could increase the chances of tech startup survival .

New stories for our time

Michele Barbour, Associate Pro VC of Enterprise and Innovation at University of Bristol, has done a brilliant job as storyteller through her Enterprise Sessions. Watch this captivating tale with Neciah Dorh from university spinout and SETsquared company, FluoretiQ. We meet Neciah – former postdoc researcher and CEO of a fast growth bacterial diagnostics business. We hear of the partnerships he formed, the opportunities he grasped, how he dealt with adversity, and his vision for the road ahead. It’s a well told tale that builds confidence and competence in all who listen.

A jewel in the crown of SETsquared Bristol’s incubation offer is the Business Review Panel. Here, members get access to a two hour ‘board’ with a curated group of critical friends from SETsquared Bristol’s leader database of more than 500 vetted profiles.

When chairing these sessions, which are designed to tackle the three toughest challenges the founder is currently facing with brutal honesty, I am always struck by the storytelling. The guest panellists are mustered from all corners of the tech ecosystem; from exited founders, to tech lawyers, to technical gurus, to industry advocates. They aren’t there telling the founder how things should be done. This is no Mary Schmich cautionary ‘advice’ “fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth” as enshrined in Baz Luhrman’s 90’s classic the Sunscreen Song. They are telling stories from their own journeys on the trail. What worked and why, what didn’t and why. And what they wish they’d known if only someone had been generous enough to share their own harsh reality.

We need more of these stories, and like both of these examples, we need this emerging oral tradition characterised by brutal honesty, critical friendship, humility, generosity.

We need new material and we need a new campfire.

SETsquared loves to be part of new stories. Get in touch if you’d like to be part of ours.

Anna-Lisa Wesley is co-founder of deep tech scaleup advisory Sapphire & Steel, and an Entrepreneur in Residence at SETsquared Bristol that supports technology founders to grow global businesses out of Bristol.

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