Origin stories can be powerful and effective. 

I spent the week working on a project to help two founders craft their origin story.

I told them that a successful origin story has three criteria: 

-It has to be true 

-It needs to be simple 

-It must be memorable 

The story shouldn’t be an exhaustive list of the steps that preceded the coming together of the co-founders and the details of everything that was required to launch. 

It should be one anecdotal yarn that is evocative of the character and spirit of the people and the culture of the company. 

I cited three three widely known examples: 

AMAZON: Jeff Bezos left his Wall Street job at D.E. Shaw in 1994 after seeing that internet usage was growing over 2,000 percent a year. He famously took a walk in Central Park with his then boss David Shaw and shared his vision for building an online bookstore. He wrote the business plan during a road trip from New York to Seattle. He named the company Amazon to evoke the vastness of the Amazon River and to appear early in alphabetical lists.

CITADEL: Kenneth Griffin began trading convertible bonds in 1987 as a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, running a small hedge fund out of his dorm room equipped with a fax machine, telephone, personal computer, and even a rooftop satellite dish he convinced maintenance to wire down to his room for real-time quotes. Between classes, he built a track record that attracted the attention of Chicago investor Frank Meyer, who offered seed capital. 

NVIDIA: Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem over a late-night brainstorming session at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, sketching the initial design of their revolutionary graphics chip on a napkin. Frustrated by the limitations of existing 2D graphics processors for gaming and workstations, the trio envisioned a dedicated 3D graphics chip that would accelerate rendering and transform computer visuals..

It’s interesting that none of those widely shared origin stories include the actual incorporation and launch. What they do instead is set the table and provide the context. 

They are effective because of what they leave out as much as what they include.

As with many things, less is more.