Below are my notes, and video, from the keynote address I used to kickoff Technically Builders Conference. It informed this story we published on Technically. My slides are here.
Maria Romero has 90 days to find a job — or she gets deported.
In December, the Mexico City native completed her MBA in marketing analytics at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. She’s young, educated, with in-demand skills. The kind of immigrant Americans across the political spectrum say we want.
And yet: Maria is worried. It’s February 2025 when the Technical.ly newsroom first meets her — 30 days left, tick tock tick tock. Higher interest rates have ended the tech hiring boom. Volatility is everywhere. Her STEM degree and F1 visa gives her years to work like any American citizen — no quirky paperwork, not even modest immigrant sponsorship costs. But she’s nervous anti-immigrant rhetoric is making a tough hiring climate worse for her. Forget about paying bills, if she doesn’t get a job she’ll get kicked out of a city, out of a country, that she was ready to call home.
She applies to more than 500 jobs. She does coffee meetings, texts friends, has her story told by a news outlet and responds to inbound outreach. She also keeps on living — she walks her dog, she goes to restaurants she loves.
The thing we do before our life changes forever is almost always mundane.
Maria’s story can be about tech jobs, immigration policy and local economies. It also can be a story about storytelling.
Because if you were paying attention at all just now, your brain did something remarkable. When we listen to a story while hooked to an fMRI machine, our brains light up as if we are living that story — not observing it. Dopamine is then released with a satisfying ending, because we evolved to seek information that will help in our survival. Fiction or nonfiction, our brains see no difference.
We don’t rely on storytelling to escape reality. Storytelling is how we learn to navigate reality.
This idea helps us define what storytelling is: Storytelling is a practice (of using character and plot) to share ways to navigate a complex world.
This is so ancient that one theory argues storytelling didn’t follow language. Instead, humans developed language to advance storytelling — to share experience, survival tips and culture with one another.
And yet, we overlook it. As Daniel Taylor wrote: “We live in stories the way fish live in water.” It’s everywhere. It’s invisible. We launch a website, tinker with some code, rewrite another policy fix, tweak the accelerator program — and we forget the fundamental thing that moves people: the stories we tell. We say marketing will figure it out. Most of us think of stories as an output of stuff we do. That’s wrong. Story is an input. It’s how we make sense of a messy existence to inform our next move.
So anyone in the business of moving and motivating people — like entrepreneurs and economic development leaders but also, let’s be clear, everyone — anyone motivating people ought to recognize storytelling isn’t some new age bullshit. This is a main component of why it’s working some places and not others.
Storytelling is not just marketing. Great marketers understand storytelling. But storytelling is a practice just like being data-backed is a practice. It’s not a department, it’s a worldview.
Storytelling is the ancient, brain-wired practice of sharing how to navigate a complex world. Storytelling is an exchange: help an audience understand something new about the world, and you get our attention long enough to change our mind about something. For good or for bad.
At Technical.ly, we use storytelling in a particular way — rooted in journalism, driven by an ethical framework. But today, this isn’t a conference about journalism. It’s a conference about storytelling. About what it can do for entrepreneurs, for ecosystems, for our homes.
Fresh research backs this up, which is outlined in greater detail in a new story on Technical.ly published this morning.
First: A paper from March analyzed regional branding campaigns in Germany. Three clear points:
- Local stories change local identity
- Authentic people stories do this best
- Over time local stories shift a place’s reputation outside the region
Storytelling isn’t an output; it’s an input.
But most places lost most of their professional storytellers – we used to call them local journalists. The local reporters who survived and independent creators who are thriving aren’t likely to spontaneously solve the storytelling gap for entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders. So it’s up to us.
And, second, we can now document the impact. Technical.ly is today releasing our first analysis demonstrating what storytelling does for place-based economic development.
According to this new analysis, even a small news resource focused on and engaged in an entrepreneurship and tech ecosystem moves at least two quantifiable metrics: The amount of additional news coverage from other publishers over time, and overall ecosystem size.
The headline: A region with a dedicated ecosystem news resource can expect 60% more follow-on coverage from other publishers — and can expect its startup ecosystem to be larger too. And this compared to a peer of similar size.
Our analysis looks at six pairs of U.S. regions. In 2010, each pair had roughly the same population and economic makeup. The pairs also had in 2010 a similar number of local startup stories indexed by Google News, which is a decent proxy for high-quality national and local information providers. Over the next several years, one half of each pair got a news resource dedicated to its startup and tech ecosystem. Three of those were Technical.ly markets and three of them were not. Guess what happened next to them all?
By 2024, the places with a dedicated news resource had an average of 58% more stories about their ecosystems and homegrown startups. That includes twice as many mentions in national publications and industry resources. And the cohort spans market sizes: Philadelphia and Phoenix; Pittsburgh and Cleveland; Kansas City and Indianapolis; Delaware and Rhode Island and New Jersey and Connecticut.
Don’t care about story for the sake of story? Well, after 10 years with a news resource, those ecosystems were on average twice as big as their peer without one. That’s using Startup Genome Project data, which tallies up startups valuations and company exits.
No question there’s causation and correlation here. As an ecosystem grows and spins off more serious companies, it attracts more stories. But in the same way that venture capital will not just show up on your doorstep, neither will storytelling. Your economic development strategies invest in early-stage capital and programs for entrepreneurs. Don’t overlook storytelling.
Think about Maria Romero. If politics are downstream of culture, so too is economic development. Maria first visited Philadelphia because of a family connection. Opportunity. She came as a tourist, and was taken by the food and art and culture.
That was a great reason to choose to study here. But as she started to decide whether she’d look for work here, she did what any sane professional would: She googled stuff on her phone when she was stressed at 3am.
She saw there were tech jobs in Philadelphia. She read about employers. She got a sense there was the mix of culture and commerce that this urbane native of an international city wants in a place to call home. She told Technical.ly she likes Philly’s “underdog” spirit. There’s personality here.
She got that from living here, sure. But she also got it from neighbors, and social media and memes and, yes, news stories too. If you’re not telling your story, then someone else is controlling your story.
Let’s talk tactics. What specifically do we mean by storytelling?
Well, everybody recognizes the modern platforms for story: Live events, newsletters, websites, social media, podcasts and video. We know these because someone makes money when we use these.
There are at least two other big components of storytelling strategy: What we’re saying, and who is listening. Effective marketers are helpful. And I’ll be sharing more about this in my weekly Builders newsletter for Technical.ly over the coming weeks. Let me share a few points now:
- Storytelling is like diet and nutrition: You can’t spend months thinking about eating healthy, then do it for a day and expect your life to change. This is a lifestyle. Many small and consistent steps for the long term.
- Storytelling needs stakes: Remember that in whatever format, the only reason anyone is ever listening to a story is essentially to glean something that can help them in their life. In this sense, storytelling must be generous. This is why it’s so hard for brands to tell their own stories. They have too many competing interests and are often very selfish.
- Storytelling is an especially effective tool for entrepreneurship and technology. Many of us work in very technical, very complicated, very narrow fields. Ecosystem leaders and startups can always begin with the humanity of their entrepreneurs. The people growing companies in a place must have their story. Everything else can follow.
Speaking of humanity: Let’s return to Maria.
I texted her with only a few days left. She was still so determined, so optimistic.
In a low-growth state and a slow-growth region, Philadelphia’s population grew, largely because more young people stayed and more immigrants came. Over 15 years, Philadelphia’s tech and startup economy has credibly expanded. So losing Maria would be damning on all those accounts and more.
And then. She got a call: She was offered and accepted a marketing analytics job — at Anthropologie, part of URBN brands and an example of a big old corporate that now employs hundreds of technologists. She gets to stay. Her skills stay here. Her story reshapes her region’s future in a small but meaningful way — the data prove it.
Philadelphia can attract and retain graduate-level analytics talent from Mexico City. Universities matter. Arts and culture matter. Direct flights matter. Ecosystem building and entrepreneurship matters, with a mix of big and small companies growing together. Storytelling matters. Together, it’s an ecosystem.
- Storytelling is a practice of using character and plot to share ways to navigate a complex world.
- Storytelling is not an output, it’s an input.
- If you’re not telling your story, then someone else is controlling your story.
Local news has been gutted. National media is overrun. Content creators have other priorities.
An investment in storytelling gets your region, and your residents, more attention – and grows the economic pie. Our conference will explore how to do that better.
Our stories matter.