(The Power of Stories in Teams)
Turning a Monkey into a Kamikaze
Have you ever wondered why there’s always that one bar—often mediocre, noisy, even a bit shabby—where everyone goes, while just a few steps away there’s a beautiful, well-designed place… completely empty?
The answer isn’t the coffee. It’s not the furniture. It’s not even the price.
It’s the story.
The same phenomenon repeats in startups, in teams, in companies. I’ve founded more than one startup: many worked well, one worked very well. And for years I kept asking myself why.
I wasn’t the smartest person in the room. But over time I understood something simple and uncomfortable:
Humans don’t follow logic. They follow stories.
From Monkeys to Kamikazes
What do monkeys and kamikazes have to do with each other?
They are two extremes of the same spectrum.
On one side, there are naked apes—biological creatures, often irrational, chasing immediate pleasure, making trivial mistakes, behaving, let’s be honest, quite stupidly.
On the other side, there are individuals willing to sacrifice their lives for an idea.
Biologically, they are identical.
The only difference is the story they believe in.
If the story is powerful enough, a naked ape can become a hero. Or a fanatic. Or a kamikaze.
And without going to such extremes, the same dynamic governs every team, every company, every human group.
Willpower and Vision
My mother used to tell me: “Willpower can part the seas.”
As I grew older, I added something for my daughter:
If you have a correct understanding of the world and the willpower, you can achieve anything.
Better a “fool” with willpower and direction than a genius who is stuck.
Worse still: a brilliant genius with a great idea that’s completely out of context.
The first will eventually get somewhere through persistence.
The second will stay still.
But there’s an important clarification:
willpower is the engine of execution, not execution itself.
Because without direction, without the ability to adapt to reality, willpower alone only creates noise.
The Real Topic: Culture
This is not an article about startups. It’s an article about culture.
Think about religion. With the right narrative, people are willing to fight, suffer, and die. Not for money. For meaning.
And yet, in business, we keep telling ourselves a simple story: “Pay people more and they’ll be motivated.”
Does it work? Sometimes.
Is it enough? Almost never.
Because humans don’t work just for money. They work to feel part of something that makes sense.
The Leader as a Storyteller
A leader is not, first and foremost, a strategist.
A leader is a storyteller.
The difference between a boring story and a compelling one isn’t in technical details. It’s in whether people can see themselves in it. Whether they can feel they are on the right side.
Since childhood, we are told simple stories: good versus evil. And if the story works, we are always the heroes.
The same thing happens in startups and teams.
But there is a crucial difference:
in companies, stories must meet reality.
When Story Meets Reality
In the startup that worked best, I didn’t take a salary for more than two years. I lived off the few savings I had left.
Our story was simple: bring a configuration system entirely to the cloud.
To us, it was obvious. To the world, it wasn’t.
The term CPQ, as we understand it today, didn’t even exist yet. We were early. Or completely wrong.
At some point, we were about to shut down. Me, my three co-founders, and one employee paid only in stock options.
It wasn’t a technology problem. It was an energy problem.
Then one of my co-founders brought in a book: Our Iceberg Is Melting.
We stopped. We talked. And for the first time, we gave clear shape to our story:
why it was urgent, what would happen if we succeeded, and most importantly, how we would get there.
Nothing changed the next day.
But we started moving in the same direction again.
Some moments are invisible from the outside. They make no noise. But they change everything.
It worked also because, in the meantime, the world was moving toward us.
At some point, Steve Jobs stood on a stage, talking about iCloud, and said: “It just works.”
In that moment, I realized we were no longer trying to convince the world.
The world was beginning to tell itself the same story.
The Limits of Stories
A story without reality is just an illusion.
But reality without a story doesn’t move anyone.
And this is where things get delicate.
Stories can inspire. But they can also trap.
That’s why the ethical boundary is not just transparency.
It’s freedom.
A story is healthy only if people are free not to believe it.
To challenge it.
To walk away.
I never had to convince anyone to stay.
The story was clear, and everyone was free to choose.
Without that freedom, it’s not culture. It’s ideology.
The Project Is Secondary (But Not Irrelevant)
The idea is just the beginning, and it is almost always wrong.
But you still need to start from something that makes sense.
The project evolves. Changes. Fails. Transforms.
What holds everything together is not the plan. It’s the direction.
And direction comes from a story that can survive reality—not ignore it.
When the Story Ends
There’s something I only understood later.
When the dream becomes reality, some people lose their energy.
Because they weren’t there for the outcome.
They were there for the journey toward something.
Humans are not built to “arrive.”
They are built to “move toward.”
And when a story ends, you need the courage to start another one.
Conclusion
This is not a manual. There are no universal rules here.
It’s the story I tell my daughter.
Everything else—the techniques, the tools, the details—she will figure out on her own.
Because if you understand how stories work, you understand how humans work.
And then something strange happens.
You’re no longer building a team.
You’re building meaning.
And that is how, for millions of years, simple naked apes have been transformed… into something far more powerful.
A blog of AI, tech, and mixed stuffs 
Leave a comment