In late September, former journalist turned angel investor Alex Roy, previously colleague of mine at defunct self-driving automotive startup Argo AI, published a chunk on the web site of his newly launched boutique deep tech VC firm, New Industry VC (NIVC), entitled “Narrative Command”
Roy, a former street racer who set a brand new Cannonball Run cross-country record in 2006, co-founded NIVC and acts as its General Partner alongside fellow co-founder and GP Patrick Hunt, former early strategy leader at Rivian. The duo plans to take a position in “deep tech” hardware startups corresponding to those in robotics, aerospace and defense, and clean/green tech. The company has yet to announce any investments or its portfolio.
Roy’s piece made the rounds amongst his followers on X and was shared favorably by other tech investors and founders, and for good reason: in it, Roy elucidates a brand new concept that recasted the thought of startup communications — and specifically, the narrative startups offer about themselves, their vertical/industry, and their place in it — as intrinsic to the success of the business, alongside “Operational Mastery,” or a “disciplined approach of addressing risks in structured stages.”
As Roy states:
“
In the aftermath of the 2024 election that pre-vote polls suggested can be close but ended up being a “red wave” that handedly elected former President Donald J. Trump to his second, non-consecutive term, Roy observed on X that the election result, and specifically Trump campaign backer Elon Musk’s desired final result of getting his preferred candidate elected “” connecting it back to NIVC’s investment thesis.
I called Roy up earlier today to debate Narrative Command and what impact it can have had on Musk’s role within the election, and Trump’s victory, in addition to how business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders can apply it themselves. As he summarized: The following is a video of our conversation and edited transcript below.
Carl Franzen, Venturebeat: Hello, that is Carl Franzen, executive editor at VentureBeat. And joining me right away is Alex Roy, founder — and I should say, actually, former colleague of mine — current co-founder of NIVC, and esteemed autojournalist and former Cannonball Run racer and automotive collector. And so, a really storied history, but correct me if I got anything there fallacious in your intro.
Alex Roy, NIVC: Nope. You got all of it correct.
Franzen: Pretty recently, Alex, you and I spoke since you launched a brand new company called NIVC, which invests in deep tech hardware startups on the very starting. And a part of your VC’s differentiation from others in the sphere is that you just apply something called narrative command. You wrote an important piece plenty of weeks ago whenever you launched your recent company. We’ll obviously put a link to narrative command so that individuals can read it. But I suppose just in a high-level view, how would you summarize narrative command?
Roy: Narrative command is the concept that in every recent market there’s a startup that defines a vision of the longer term… which becomes the default future for that vertical. They define the language of the vertical, forcing everyone else to make use of that language. They define the seminal experience or final result, after which give audiences or customers a taste of that have.
Once one is defined, or seize narrative command for a brand new vertical, competitors, whether or not they are pre-existing or recent, must live contained in the narrative and discourse that you’ve gotten created.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it becomes self-sustaining, where stakeholders, fans, customers, allies, investors perpetuate the narrative. And the very best example of that is, after all, Tesla, who possesses narrative command of each electric and autonomous vehicles.
And yet whose reality command does not likely meet their narrative — not taking anything from Tesla in any respect. Narrative command is a vital part of any startup’s success within the twenty first century, which brings us to our discussion today of whether or not it will probably be applied to other things: mature markets and politics.
Franzen: Yeah, in order that’s a brilliant interesting distinction. I’m really glad you pointed that out. I believe the temptation can be to use narrative command— especially for me: I’m a journalist, we’ve worked together before, and I’m excited about storytelling, each fictional and non-fictional, the concept that a single company’s narrative, the story that they tell about themselves to an audience, can define not only them and their customers’ experience but additionally all the market, after which solidify their place inside it as a frontrunner, is a extremely cool and compelling idea.
And I believe that’s partially why your narrative command essay that you just did publish initially a number of weeks ago did go viral to the extent that it could within the midst of our election, and it was so compelling, you and I began talking about it back then.
But today I believe, we’re speaking on November 6, 2024, the Wednesday, the day after the US presidential election. So, Donald Trump has been declared the winner already. Based on a bunch of the reporting that’s come out from the states, the early vote totals, it appears that evidently he’s about 4 million votes ahead and has all of the electoral votes essential to reassume the presidency.
On the one hand, we don’t weigh an excessive amount of into politics normally at VentureBeat, but however, to your point, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (although I believe he uses a special title now) and in addition an owner of X, the social network, was a really energetic participant on this election on the side of Donald Trump, donating through his political motion committee, personally appearing at Trump events and speaking on behalf of Trump and in addition urging his followers and all the electorate of the United States to vote for Trump.
And because it seems, once more, Musk, who many criticize and doubt — I’ve had my very own disagreements or issues along with his positions — once more proves the naysayers fallacious and is in a position to get this preferred candidate elected.
So, you probably did post, I believe recently on X that the true lesson isn’t the election. The real lesson is whether or not or not the Democratic party will learn from it. And this was with regard to Biden’s failure to ask Elon Musk to the 2021 White House Electric Vehicle Summit. Is this an example of narrative command that Musk was in a position to take a number one role in helping to shape the final result of this election?
Roy: Taking that one example, the tweet in regards to the Electric Vehicle Summit 2021… So, that is interesting because in 2021, and today, Tesla as a automotive company had absolute narrative command, nevertheless it also possesses then and now reality command of the American electric vehicle market.
When narrative and reality meet, and other people know they’ve met, (Wall) Street knows, popular consensus knows, it’s inconceivable to fight that. One could potentially fight reality command with an important narrative, nevertheless it’s hard. When the 2 are one and the identical, you’ll be able to’t fight it.
So when Biden got up there and said, “Mary, you’ve led the way in which,” referring to Mary Barra, CEO of GM, who had only sold a number of hundred cars and Tesla had sold hundreds of thousands of cars, that serves no purpose apart from to illustrate to friend or foe that the speaker of that narrative either doesn’t know what the truth is or has chosen to disregard it. That is the message it sends.
And I’m not saying this as a political statement about Biden. This is only the science of narrative and crowds, and reality and crowds. If Musk had been there, with all of the political complexity and tension it might have introduced, it might have, I believe had the alternative effect — whereas a Democratic president invites someone who’s a technology leader to face next to people they oppose outside the White House.
But contained in the White House, contained in the cradle of American democracy, those distinctions don’t matter. But they took the alternative bet that individuals wouldn’t pay attention to the truth, and as a substitute, he set off a series of events that has led Elon Musk to where we’re today.
And I believe it’s really essential to know the difference between narrative command in a tech startup environment versus politics because in tech startups, you don’t know if things work until the market tells you, and that may take many, a few years. One will be dominant for many years until a wave builds after which the landscape inverts.
But in politics, now we have fixed election dates. And so, every 4 years, in a presidential cycle, a narrative gets spun. And in case your reality doesn’t catch up at the tip of 4 years or doesn’t favor you, you’re out. If reality sort of does, you might keep that narrative going one other 4 years, and also you’ve had your eight-year cycle.
Now, there’s a second dynamic in the applying of narrative command theory to politics, which is that there’s a narrative beyond any president: that’s the narrative of the United States as a nation.
In the nineteenth century, we were a brand new nation, and that was one narrative. In the twentieth, there have been other imperial powers, and lots of great nations had great nation status, but within the twentieth century, it was the American century, and any American, left or right, would inform you that was true. There was absolute confidence of America’s decline. It was all ascendant. And so, the United States had total narrative command of really the world.
And yet, for the last 15-20 years, there have been debates contained in the United States whether that narrative stays true. This introduces a dynamic that may change the course of world events, because it did last night, which is whichever candidate’s narrative aligns with the narrative of America maintaining its command goes to live on the nexus of half the populace, and whomever else in the opposite half desires to imagine that’s true. And there’s absolute confidence that Elon Musk understood this. Some elements contained in the Republican party understood this. And the combined forces of messaging between those two meant that the Republicans were aligned with the vision of the American twentieth century being carried into the twenty first. And the Democrats didn’t have a narrative either as powerful or countervailing.
I could inform you off the highest of my head exactly what the Republican party has said they’re going to do. I could kind mostly inform you what the Democrats are going to say they’re going to do, but by way of power, everyone on each side of the spectrum and everybody outside the United States lives contained in the semantic landscape defined by Donald Trump since 2016.
And so, whenever you live contained in the narrative and discourse and language of another person, you’ll undoubtedly lose to that person. And so the excellent news, regardless of what your political viewpoint is, is that now we have elections every 4 years. And so the truth in American history is that we’ve all the time had oscillations of mood and narrative and reality. And this may reset once more in 4 years — or no less than there’ll be the chance to reset it, if the Democrats can define a narrative aligned with the truth the people want that is healthier than the truth than the Republicans can deliver over the subsequent 4 years.
Franzen: Thank you. That’s a brilliant helpful lens. And to your point, I’m not suggesting that your narrative command thesis — the temptation is perhaps you apply it in all possible contexts, and in some, it might not be as applicable as accurately because it is in the brand new vertical space. But to your point, I absolutely see in my head a reference to the formation of a brand new nation that’s in a way a brand new vertical, right? We’re all experiencing and anybody that’s around for the formation of a brand new nation and its development is participating in a vertical in a political space and in an economic space. Right?
Roy: I agree with you. Look, I mean, I believe the brand new space during which the United States has been living for several months no less than is an area during which there’s a debate over what the American narrative shall be within the twenty first century.
Because up until 2016, there was only one, and there was a debate over whether we were in decline.
But with the rise of China and the China narrative as a threat to the American narrative, there’s a resemblance to how I wrote about narrative command within the context of mature technology markets.
So when you’ve gotten a market during which there are two that’s mature with two dominant players, let’s say Boeing and Airbus, they usually’ve been dominant and it’s been a bipolar marketplace for many years, it is rather hard for an organization to seize command because their narrative is identical. We construct planes. They’re all very secure. There is likely to be some details about price and features but for the tip user, they do the exact same thing — regardless of which one you purchase.
And there have it might although every election cycle the vote each party says the opposite one goes to alter the whole lot fundamentally the world will ever be the identical again, for a very long time that wasn’t quite true. Each party ascending to the presidency was like a trim tab on a ship. They could make minor course corrections, however the grand motion of the truth of the United States and its global domination has generally trended the identical direction.
In this case, on this election, for the primary time in an extended time, you had one party espousing a narrative of change and the opposite failing to articulate why the present narrative should proceed or there ought to be an alternate. And that lack of focus was, on this case, suicidal to the Democratic party.
An incredible example of that might be Boeing has had issues now — structural issues probably for many years and severe questions of safety for several years now. Statistically, they’re not that significant, but by way of their narrative, Boeing’s in decline. Airbus has not stepped up to say their superiority technologically or narratively — they’re sitting passively and waiting, which is interesting.
As Donald Trump and the Republicans defined the semantic landscape and the language and context during which all political discourse would occur, there was no figure on the left emergent to match Donald Trump and the system of communication that exists that he brought with him and that he created. And one cannot take a look at the election without taking an in depth take a look at Elon Musk himself, because he became a proxy for Donald Trump and brought with him all of the narrative command within the verticals during which his corporations operate, after which brought that support to the Republican party. There was no countervailing force.
Jeffrey Bezos was, until the very end, absent from the election. Amazon is as significant as any of Elon Musk’s corporations, but was not a player in any of the discourse. And so the Democrats principally brought loads of knives to a gunfight. They fought the last war and won, then brought loads of knives to principally a rocket launch. There were not one of the tools of narrative command or supremacy and even equilibrium were delivered to the table by the Democrats. There must be radical reset here.
And should you could distill it right down to two moments on one bookend you’ll have the shortage of an invite for Musk to the Biden EV summit of 2021 and the opposite bookend can be Harris’s people selected to place her on SNL — an audience that was precaptured to vote for her. So, no there that might not move the needle. And she was on the show — what, a number of minutes? I don’t know what the SNL audience It’s not that big. I mean, whatever size it’s, it’s dwarfed by Joe Rogan.
And so, there have been individuals who snickered and said Rogan should fly to Harris. On the contrary, knowing that Trump and Vance and Musk had all flown to Rogan, previously, the optics of Harris going would have served her before she opened her mouth. And then after all her ability to hold a conversation with Rogan and make and state her case, tell her narrative would the worth of that might have been incalculable. And so those two bookends are write the book of how the Democrats allowed a narrative to evaporate and… the American narrative to turn into that of the Republicans.
Franzen: Yeah, and I believe that’s thoroughly put and I believe it aligns with, other things that I’ve seen other reflections of Democrats, left-leaning folks, leftists, those within the media who do are inclined to vote or align themselves democratically. I voted for Harris as well, I’ve made no secret about that.
But again looking forward, looking ahead, and trying to know where we go from here as a rustic and particularly a technology industry…
It’s super interesting because prematurely of this particular election I recall voting in the course of the Obama years, I recall Obama having a really strong narrative if we’re talking about applying this narrative command lens to politics and clearly he had that narrative command down so well that he won two elections quite handedly popular vote and electoral college.
Obviously quite a bit has modified since then, nevertheless it is striking to me and I’m hoping that you just may need some thoughts about this, is back then I took that Obama being a powerful narrative performer also his ability to articulate and achieve this through recent media — on the time Facebook was very talked-about. Right now we’re seeing complaints that the Democrats have sort of lost their edge that they once had in online communications in get out the vote online and in online messaging somewhat than going and knocking on all these doors, we heard all these stories of Harris and her supporters doing that.
But I just got a message from any individual that links to a post by Kate Starbird on social network Bluseky and she or he says:
I believe that sort of aligns pretty much with what you’ve just talked about here. I’m just curious as to how we got from a celebration that understood the web, could use it, and was actually aligned in loads of ways with science and technology — I remember Obama investing in Solyndra, It was actually an enormous scandal, a solar company, and investing in starting green energy grants — and now abruptly it looks as if all that has evaporated each on the policy side and within the communication side that the Democrats are not any longer aligned with either the technique of communication, technological communication, nor the ends of what we are able to construct. And do you see that what do you see whenever you take a look at what happened?
Roy: No, I absolutely agree. I mean, look, should you’re not using the newest most successful technology to amplify your efforts, you’ll lose to someone who does, which is identical analogy used for AI and each other recent technology.
Fundamentally, people admire consistency and also you don’t should agree with what you’re hearing, but whether it is consistent and there’s a cadence to it and it becomes ubiquitous, those are the structural elements of narrative command.
There are too many internal tensions amongst individuals who would claim to be Democrats for the Democrats to do that to have executed a successful strategy and won because their narrative was dominated by internal conflict primarily issues around LGBTQ rights and Israel and Gaza. It doesn’t matter what your viewpoint is — like people, a celebration have to be united otherwise you will lose.
All of that is elemental within the absence of a narrative and for a lot of many years for the reason that end of World War II the American narrative was that now we have a system of values: liberalism, free speech, entrepreneurial spirit, science, we go to the moon, we won the Cold War. We built nuclear power and so we guaranteed freedom of safety of shipping lanes which enable unlocked global trade and so these were things each parties agreed on and amongst implicit in that American native command.
Implicit was that we’d openly or covertly encourage other nations to follow us down that road and protect nations that believed in that system. NATO is the final word expression of this and so the notion of protecting that system and other nations what is crucial for that narrative to survive.
So when there’s debate over whether or not we should always protect Taiwan or debate whether or not we should always support Ukraine that narrative begins to return apart. And so if the policy of the Biden Administration was to support those nations then one has to return out and make the case actually state how does it fit into the broader narrative and reality of American supremacy for the last hundred years?
If you execute policies which type of support those countries but you never elaborate why, you allow the semantic and discourse environment open for an opponent like Trump to are available in and take it. And I don’t know if any Democrat effort in recent media would have been successful in the event that they had not entered the landscape with that “here’s why America attained narrative command. Here’s the way it attain reality command. The two met and proceed to fulfill in our policy decisions. You don’t should agree with them. This is what they’re.”
No one ever got here out and said that. And so here you’ve gotten Donald Trump, he is available in and I imagine it was actually JD Vance who elucidated the platform for the longer term. It’s space, re-industrialization, friendly tech environment, open markets, free speech.
Now, Joe Biden has had some great policies just like the CHIPS Act is the center of reindustralization of essential industries within the United States. I live in Arizona where the TSMC plant is here now they usually’re operating, at high capability. We need that. It’s a national security issue. And yet at no point did the Left come out and explain why that’s an important convergence of narrative and reality command. And so people admire consistency, clarity, and strength — real or perceived — they usually voted for it.
Franzen: This idea — I believe you articulated rather well — is that the Democrats and their supporters have to have that internal that messaging consistency regardless of what methods they select to precise it. But, to your point earlier in regards to the Rogan podcast and Harris’s communication after which ultimately unwillingness to go on Rogan her willingness to go on Fox yet at the identical time and older media. Is it essential, do you think that, for a one that’s looking for narrative command in any sort of vertical, politics or business to be leveraging recent media tools like these Rogan podcasts, streamers, Aidan Ross — I believe any individual shouted him ou, I do know Trump appeared on his show — is that going to be a essential precondition for either a political figure or a business leader in the event that they’re looking for to determine narrative command to go to those recent media sources?
Roy: Absolutely. Yes. If you’re not appearing on the innovative, the forefront of latest media, you’re DOA. It’s done. I mean, imagine happening, you’re running for president 1965 and also you go on the opposing party’s hottest radio show, but you don’t go on television because you wish the TV crew to return to you. It’s the exact same thing. it’s outrageous.
Look, Rogan is the Johnny Carson of our time: you don’t go on his show, you’re not on the playing field. And do people think that having a budget for marketing and ads is a technique? No, those are tools. Those are tools. if the goal is to win you then execute in every dimension on the trail to winning — and the Democrats didn’t.
But, there are such a lot of errors baked into the party and their strategy that I don’t know the way they may have won. I’ve seen on Twitter (X) and (Meta’s) Threads today people debating small things, “oh, if Kamala had chosen Shapiro as a substitute of Waltz (as her vice presidential candidate), could he have delivered Pennsylvania?” Maybe. But such a call could only have flowed from a holistic and total strategy, with one goal: win. A piecemeal approach of small silo decisions and pieces doesn’t get you to big goals — it doesn’t get you to autonomous vehicles, it doesn’t get you to Mars. One should have a complete approach. And so anything less is table stakes and table stakes doesn’t win.
Franzen: And is that what you’re saying whenever you say in your post, you mentioned this on Twitter today, “Open the iris otherwise you won’t ever see.” What should we be seeing after we open that iris? Is it a Democratic failure to have that messaging consistency an that internal consistency or is it…?
Roy: Let’s walk backwards. I’m going to make use of something near home: take a look at the history of autonomous vehicles. There have been multiple corporations attempting to construct them — there’s Tesla who owns the narrative and there’s everybody else and everybody else says has the identical narrative: “We’re going to make the road safer, traffic shall be reduced and pollution shall be reduced.”
And then behind that, you wish the whole lot else. None of those corporations own the landscape of the language. One of them, Waymo, has the seminal product experience and just about nothing else. Waymo is the very best product out there without query.
My old employer, Argo AI, great company, great technology, the leadership was shy about speaking in public. If you’re shy about speaking in public, you shall be defeated by someone who isn’t shy. And that’s it. That is all it’s.
So the Democrats could have had the whole lot. They could have had total reality command, I believe they still would have lost since the messenger wasn’t doing the messaging. Biden and Kamala weren’t on the market doing the work. As an investor, I even have 50 plus at angel investments and most of them the technology is sweet and interesting and a few of them are executing and a subset of them have a dynamic charismatic leader. I’m quite confident that the startups with a dynamic charismatic leaders, so long as there isn’t an excessive amount of of a niche between their narrative and reality, those corporations will crush — crush!
And so I can be very hesitant to take a position in any company, regardless of willing and excellent the execution, whose leader is unable to make the case within the room unscripted. Because in the fashionable media environment, there are lots of examples of this, the unscripted dynamic leader who gets on stage either defeats everyone or buys enough time to figure it out. In some cases, the clock runs out. Elizabeth Holmes: there’s nothing there, but she could talk. Elon Musk: there’s divergence between reality and narrative for Elon, but there’s quite a bit more reality than divergence. And that has bought him enormous time, power, and influence, and money to get his reality closer to the narrative, which is why he’s an important person, probably within the West today and perhaps on this planet today after Xi and whoever is elected after Trump
Franzen: Xi being the premier of China. Knowing what everyone knows now and coming at it with the approach that you’ve gotten, you mentioned are these your individual investments or are these through your firm?
Roy: I’ve made dozens and dozens of angel investments. I can’t talk in regards to the firm, if you ought to study it, I like to recommend going to our website: NIVC.US.
Franzen: Can you share in any respect about what you’re taking a look at on this recent paradigm that we’ve entered into, either as an investor or simply as the person who coined this term narrative command, what are you in search of next?
Roy: So my partner on the fund is Patrick Hunt who was previously Rivian worker number 15, he ran manufacturing strategy and loads of foundational elements of the corporate and is a unbelievable person. So he’s an authority in the opposite half of our thesis which we call operational mastery. That’s principally reality command. You got to construct stuff. Do you understand find out how to construct?
And so we’re taking a look at American and American-allied and adjoining corporations that do robotics, supply chain, elemental energy as Josh Wolf from Lux calls it., clean tech, green tech, aerospace, space and defense. So robotics and autonomous vehicles fall in there. So hard tech, deep tech stuff that’s physical. And we’re in search of operational mastery, which is: can you truly construct it regardless of how good your prototype is? And then after all, are you able to achieving narrative command, which is my half of the thesis. These are some pretty tough filters, but without each, corporations don’t scale. They don’t win.
And I believe the evidence is should you take a look at corporations which have succeeded in recent verticals, they’ve possessed each these items. Anduril is an important example. Uber, Airbnb, there’s Fervo Energy, Redwood Materials, and clearly Tesla.
So, I couldn’t be more optimistic in regards to the future, But the businesses that may win in that future are those who glue reality command to narrative command because without that narrative command, they’re going to lose.
Franzen: We are entering the second Trump term, is there a world during which founders, either those that you just put money into or those that shall be successful applying narrative command and operational mastery, can they achieve this while disagreeing with the Trump administration and… with their narrative for the world and for America?
Roy: Absolutely yes, if the founder is mature enough to know just the forces of history and the passage of time. This is what I meant by “opening the iris.” I even have friends who’re Left and Right, but my best friends are united in ideas of health, quality of life, work, and abundance are best in the event that they’re shared amongst all people. They disagree on the trail to get there. But if we are able to agree on end goals, then we are able to debate find out how to get there while working on getting there. And so the very best founders understand this.
If your startup, the success of your technology depends upon an election, for 99.9% of founders, you’re within the fallacious business.
In the case of Musk, I actually don’t imagine that the election was existential for him. A Democratic win may need slowed him down, but what he’s doing is so successful and so powerful, his narrative so strong that I mean his corporations will weather any election. But fundamentally — we’d like some level of regulation, safety matters whenever you’re constructing autonomous vehicles — but we’d like founders coming to the table with corporations and technologies that transcend politics and once they enter the market truly do profit all.
Almost every technology we use today — the computers that we’re talking on right away, cell phones, none of those were built as political products. They were utilized by people to make political statements but they’re not political, and fundamentally the United States is the very best example in history of what happens whenever you unleash freedom, ingenuity, creativity, innovation in an open environment. So people can disagree, debate, and construct. And so so long as people think put that the highest of mind as they construct their corporations, this country will remain the best nation on Earth due to those freedoms, that openness.
I’d encourage everyone to think very rigorously about what’s most vital: is it the tip goal or is it expressing your political viewpoint today? It’s the tip goal: the betterment of all humankind.
