Narrative Command: NIVC’s Alex Roy explains election 2024

In late September, former journalist turned angel investor Alex Roy, previously colleague of mine at defunct self-driving car startup Argo AI, published a piece on the website of his newly launched boutique deep tech VC firm, New Industry VC (NIVC), entitled “Narrative Command”

Roy, a former street racer who set a 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 invest in “deep tech” hardware startups such as 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 among his followers on X and was shared favorably by other tech investors and founders, and for good reason: in it, Roy elucidates a new concept that recasted the idea 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:

“Great storytelling isn’t art, it’s math. It’s the sum of hook, anticipation, and resolution, multiplied by the skill of the storyteller.

But even great storytelling is worthless without story-audience fit, which requires the right story, at the right time, heard by the right audience.“

In the aftermath of the 2024 election that pre-vote polls suggested would 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 outcome of getting his preferred candidate elected “wasn’t luck. It was many things. Also, NARRATIVE COMMAND is self-sustaining,” connecting it back to NIVC’s investment thesis.

I called Roy up earlier today to discuss Narrative Command and what impact it may have had on Musk’s role in the election, and Trump’s victory. As he summarized: “Narrative command is the concept that in every new market there is a startup that defines a vision of the future that becomes the default for that vertical.” The following is a video of our conversation and edited transcript below.

Carl Franzen, Venturebeat: Hello, this is Carl Franzen, executive editor at VentureBeat. And joining me right now 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 car collector. And so, a very storied history, but correct me if I got anything there wrong in your intro.

Alex Roy, NIVC: Nope. You got it all correct.

Franzen: Pretty recently, Alex, you and I spoke because you launched a new company called NIVC, which invests in deep tech hardware startups at the very beginning. And part of your VC’s differentiation from others in the field is that you apply something called narrative command. You wrote a great piece a number of weeks ago when you launched your new company. We’ll obviously put a link to narrative command so that people can read it. But I guess just in a high-level view, how would you summarize narrative command?

Roy: Narrative command is the concept that in every new market there is a startup that defines a vision of the future… which becomes the default future for that vertical. They define the language of the vertical, forcing everyone else to use that language. They define the seminal experience or outcome, and then give audiences or customers a taste of that experience.

Once one is defined, or seize narrative command for a new vertical, competitors, whether they are pre-existing or new, must live inside the narrative and discourse that you have created.

Taken to its logical conclusion, it becomes self-sustaining, where stakeholders, fans, customers, allies, investors perpetuate the narrative. And the best example of this is, of course, Tesla, who possesses narrative command of both electric and autonomous vehicles.

And yet whose reality command does not really meet their narrative — not taking anything from Tesla at all. Narrative command is an essential component of any startup’s success in the 21st century, which brings us to our discussion today of whether or not it can be applied to other things: mature markets and politics.

Franzen: Yeah, so that’s a super interesting distinction. I’m really glad you pointed that out. I think the temptation would be to apply narrative command— especially for me: I’m a journalist, we’ve worked together before, and I’m interested in storytelling, both fictional and non-fictional, the idea 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 also the entire market, and then solidify their place within it as a leader, is a really cool and compelling idea.

And I think that’s partially why your narrative command essay that you did publish initially a few weeks ago did go viral to the extent that it could in the midst of our election, and it was so compelling, you and I started talking about it back then.

But today I think, 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 seems that he’s about four million votes ahead and has all the electoral votes necessary to reassume the presidency.

On the one hand, we don’t weigh too much into politics usually at VentureBeat, but on the other hand, to your point, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (although I think he uses a different title now) and also an owner of X, the social network, was a very active participant in this election on the side of Donald Trump, donating through his political action committee, personally appearing at Trump events and speaking on behalf of Trump and also urging his followers and the entire electorate of the United States to vote for Trump.

And as it turns out, once again, Musk, who many criticize and doubt — I’ve had my own disagreements or issues with his positions — once again proves the naysayers wrong and is able to get this preferred candidate elected.

So, you did post, I think recently on X that the real lesson isn’t the election. The real lesson is whether or not the Democratic party will learn from it. And this was in regards to Biden’s failure to invite Elon Musk to the 2021 White House Electric Vehicle Summit. Is this an example of narrative command that Musk was able to take a leading role in helping to shape the outcome of this election?

Roy: Taking that one example, the tweet about the Electric Vehicle Summit 2021… So, this is interesting because in 2021, and today, Tesla as a car company had absolute narrative command, but it also possesses then and now reality command of the American electric vehicle market.

When narrative and reality meet, and people know they’ve met, [Wall] Street knows, popular consensus knows, it is impossible to fight that. One could potentially fight reality command with a great narrative, but it’s hard. When the two are one and the same, you can’t fight it.

So when Biden got up there and said, “Mary, you’ve led the way,” referring to Mary Barra, CEO of GM, who had only sold a few hundred cars and Tesla had sold millions of cars, that serves no purpose other than to indicate to friend or foe that the speaker of that narrative either does not know what the reality is or has chosen to ignore it. That is the message it sends.

And I’m not saying this as a political statement about Biden. This is purely the science of narrative and crowds, and reality and crowds. If Musk had been there, with all the political complexity and tension it would have introduced, it would have, I think had the opposite effect — whereas a Democratic president invites someone who’s a technology leader to stand next to people they oppose outside the White House.

But inside the White House, inside the cradle of American democracy, those distinctions don’t matter. But they took the opposite bet that people would not be aware of the reality, and instead, he set off a chain of events that has led Elon Musk to where we are today.

And I think it’s really important to understand 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 can take many, many years. One can be dominant for decades until a wave builds and then the landscape inverts.

But in politics, we have fixed election dates. And so, every four years, in a presidential cycle, a narrative gets spun. And if your reality doesn’t catch up at the end of four years or doesn’t favor you, you’re out. If reality kind of does, you could keep that narrative going another four years, and you’ve had your eight-year cycle.

Now, there’s a second dynamic in the application of narrative command theory to politics, which is that there is a narrative beyond any president: that is the narrative of the United States as a nation.

In the 19th century, we were a new nation, and that was one narrative. In the 20th, there were other imperial powers, and many great nations had great nation status, but in the 20th century, it was the American century, and any American, left or right, would tell you that was true. There was no question 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 inside the United States whether that narrative remains true. This introduces a dynamic that will change the course of world events, as it did last night, which is whichever candidate’s narrative aligns with the narrative of America maintaining its command is going to live at the nexus of half the populace, and whomever else in the other half wants to believe that’s true. And there’s no question that Elon Musk understood this. Some elements inside 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 20th century being carried into the 21st. And the Democrats did not have a narrative either as powerful or countervailing.

I could tell you off the top of my head exactly what the Republican party has said they’re going to do. I could kind mostly tell you what the Democrats are going to say they’re going to do, but in terms of power, everyone on both sides of the spectrum and everyone outside the United States lives inside the semantic landscape defined by Donald Trump since 2016.

And so, when you live inside the narrative and discourse and language of someone else, you will undoubtedly lose to that person. And so the good news, no matter what your political point of view is, is that we have elections every four years. And so the reality in American history is that we’ve always had oscillations of mood and narrative and reality. And this will reset once again in four years — or at least there’ll be the opportunity to reset it, if the Democrats can define a narrative aligned with the reality the people want that is better than the reality than the Republicans can deliver over the next four years.

Franzen: Thank you. That’s a super helpful lens. And to your point, I’m not suggesting that your narrative command thesis — the temptation is maybe you apply it in all possible contexts, and in some, it may not be as applicable as accurately as it is in the new vertical space. But to your point, I absolutely see in my head a connection with the formation of a new nation that is in a way a new vertical, right? We’re all experiencing and anybody that is around for the formation of a 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 think the new space in which the United States has been living for several months at least is a space in which there is a debate over what the American narrative will be in the 21st century.

Because up until 2016, there was just 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 is a resemblance to how I wrote about narrative command in the context of mature technology markets.

So when you have a market in which there are two that is mature with two dominant players, let’s say Boeing and Airbus, and they’ve been dominant and it’s been a bipolar market for decades, it is very hard for a company to seize command because their narrative is the same. We build planes. They’re all very safe. There might be some details about price and features but for the end user, they do exactly the same thing — no matter which one you buy.

And there have it would although every election cycle the vote each party says the other one is going to change everything fundamentally the world will ever be the same again, for a long time that wasn’t quite true. Each party ascending to the presidency was like a trim tab on a ship. They can make minor course corrections, but the grand motion of the reality of the United States and its global domination has generally trended the same direction.

In this case, in this election, for the first time in a long time, you had one party espousing a narrative of change and the other failing to articulate why the current narrative should continue or there should be an alternate. And that lack of focus was, in this case, suicidal to the Democratic party.

A great example of that would be Boeing has had issues now — structural issues probably for decades and severe safety issues for several years now. Statistically, they’re not that significant, but in terms of their narrative, Boeing’s in decline. Airbus has not stepped up to assert 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 in 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 look at the election without taking a close look at Elon Musk himself, because he became a proxy for Donald Trump and brought with him all the narrative command in the verticals in which his companies operate, and then 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 companies, but was not a player in any of the discourse. And so the Democrats basically brought a lot of knives to a gunfight. They fought the last war and won, then brought a lot of knives to basically a rocket launch. There were none of the tools of narrative command or supremacy or even equilibrium were brought to the table by the Democrats. There needs to be radical reset here.

And if you could distill it down to two moments on one bookend you would have the lack of an invitation for Musk to the Biden EV summit of 2021 and the other bookend would be Harris’s people chose to put her on SNL — an audience that was precaptured to vote for her. So, no there that would not move the needle. And she was on the show — what, a few minutes? I don’t know what the SNL audience It’s not that big. I mean, whatever size it is, it is dwarfed by Joe Rogan.

And so, there were people 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 of course her ability to carry a conversation with Rogan and make and state her case, tell her narrative would the value of that would 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 become that of the Republicans.

Franzen: Yeah, and I think that’s very well put and I think it aligns with, other things that I’ve seen other reflections of Democrats, left-leaning folks, leftists, those in the media who do tend 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 understand where we go from here as a country and in particular a technology industry…

It’s super interesting because in advance of this particular election I recall voting during the Obama years, I recall Obama having a very 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 a lot has changed since then, but it is striking to me and I’m hoping that you might have some thoughts about this, is back then I took that Obama being a strong narrative performer also his ability to articulate and do so through new media — at the time Facebook was very popular. Right now we’re seeing complaints that the Democrats have kind of lost their edge that they once had in online communications in get out the vote online and in online messaging rather 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 somebody that links to a post by Kate Starbird on social network Bluseky and she says: “The Right built a powerful, partisan, & participatory media environment to support its messaging, which offers a compelling “deep story” for its participants. The Left relied upon rigid, self-preserving institutional media and its “story” is little more than a defense of imperfect institutions.”

I think that kind of aligns pretty well with what you’ve just talked about here. I’m just curious as to how we got from a party that understood the internet, could use it, and was actually aligned in a lot of ways with science and technology — I remember Obama investing in Solyndra, It was actually a big scandal, a solar company, and investing in starting green energy grants — and now all of a sudden it seems like all that has evaporated both on the policy side and in the communication side that the Democrats are no longer aligned with either the means of communication, technological communication, nor the ends of what we can build. And do you see that what do you see when you look at what happened?

Roy: No, I absolutely agree. I mean, look, if you’re not using the latest most successful technology to amplify your efforts, you will lose to someone who does, which is the same analogy used for AI and every other new technology.

Fundamentally, people admire consistency and you don’t have to agree with what you’re hearing, but if it is consistent and there is a cadence to it and it becomes ubiquitous, those are the structural elements of narrative command.

There are too many internal tensions among people who would claim to be Democrats for the Democrats to do this 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 point of view is — like people, a party must be united or you will lose.

All of this is elemental in the absence of a narrative and for many decades since the end of World War II the American narrative was that 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 both parties agreed on and among implicit in that American native command.

Implicit was that we would openly or covertly encourage other nations to follow us down that road and protect nations that believed in that system. NATO is the ultimate expression of this and so the notion of protecting that system and other nations what is essential for that narrative to survive.

So when there is debate over whether or not we should protect Taiwan or debate whether or not we should support Ukraine that narrative begins to come apart. And so if the policy of the Biden Administration was to support those nations then one has to come 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 kind of support those countries but you never elaborate why, you leave the semantic and discourse environment open for an opponent like Trump to come in and take it. And I don’t know if any Democrat effort in new media would have been successful if they had not entered the landscape with that “here’s why America attained narrative command. Here’s how it attain reality command. The two met and continue to meet in our policy decisions. You don’t have to agree with them. This is what they are.”

No one ever came out and said that. And so here you have Donald Trump, he comes in and I believe it was actually JD Vance who elucidated the platform for the future. It’s space, re-industrialization. friendly tech environment, open markets, free speech.

Now, Joe Biden has had some great policies like the CHIPS act is the heart of reindustralization of essential industries in the United States. I live in Arizona where the TSMC plant is here now and they’re operating, at high capacity. We need that. It’s a national security issue. And yet at no point did the Left come out and explain why that is an essential convergence of narrative and reality command. And so people admire consistency, clarity, and strength — real or perceived — and they voted for it.

Franzen: This idea — I think you articulated really well — is that the Democrats and their supporters need to have that internal that messaging consistency no matter what methods they choose to express it. But, to your point earlier about the Rogan podcast and Harris’s communication and then ultimately unwillingness to go on Rogan her willingness to go on Fox yet at the same time and older media. Is the Democrats is it necessary, do you think, for a person who’s seeking narrative command in any kind of vertical, politics or business to be leveraging new media tools like these Rogan podcasts, streamers, Aidan Ross — I think somebody shouted him ou, I know Trump appeared on his show — is that going to be a necessary precondition for either a political figure or a business leader if they’re seeking to establish narrative command to go to these new media sources?

Roy: Absolutely. Yes. If you’re not appearing at the cutting edge, the leading edge of new media, you’re DOA. It’s done. I mean, imagine going on, you’re running for president 1965 and you go on the opposing party’s most popular radio show, but you don’t go on television because you want the TV crew to come to you. It’s exactly the 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 strategy? No, those are tools. Those are tools. if the goal is to win then you execute in every dimension on the path to winning — and the Democrats didn’t.

But, there are so many errors baked into the party and their strategy that I don’t know how they could have won. I’ve seen on Twitter [X] and [Meta’s] Threads today people debating small things, “oh, if Kamala had selected Shapiro instead of Waltz [as her vice presidential candidate], could he have delivered Pennsylvania?” Maybe. But such a decision 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 must have a total approach. And so anything less is table stakes and table stakes doesn’t win.

Franzen: And is that what you’re saying when you say in your post, you mentioned this on Twitter today, “Open the iris or you will never see.” What should we be seeing when 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 use something close to home: look at the history of autonomous vehicles. There have been multiple companies attempting to build them — there’s Tesla who owns the narrative and there’s everybody else and everyone else says has the same narrative: “We’re going to make the road safer, traffic will be reduced and pollution will be reduced.”

And then behind that, you need everything else. None of those companies own the landscape of the language. One of them, Waymo, has the seminal product experience and pretty much nothing else. Waymo is the best product in the market without question.

My old employer, Argo AI, great company, great technology, the leadership was shy about speaking in public. If you are shy about speaking in public, you will be defeated by someone who isn’t shy. And that’s it. That is all it is.

So the Democrats could have had everything. They could have had total reality command, I think they still would have lost because the messenger wasn’t doing the messaging. Biden and Kamala weren’t out there doing the work. aA an investor, I have 50 plus at angel investments and most of them the technology is good and interesting and some 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, as long as there isn’t too much of a gap between their narrative and reality, those companies will crush — crush!

And so I would be very hesitant to invest in any company, no matter willing and excellent the execution, whose leader is unable to make the case in the room unscripted. Because in the modern media environment, there are many 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 is divergence between reality and narrative for Elon, but there is a lot 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 the most important person, probably in the West today and maybe in the world today after Xi and whoever is elected after Trump

Franzen: Xi being the premier of China. Knowing what we all know now and coming at it with the approach that you have, 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 about the firm, if you want to learn about it, I recommend going to our website: NIVC.US.

Franzen: Can you share at all about what you’re looking at in this new paradigm that we’ve entered into, either as an investor or just as the person that coined this term narrative command, what are you looking for next?

Roy: So my partner on the fund is Patrick Hunt who was previously Rivian employee number 15, he ran manufacturing strategy and a lot of foundational elements of the company and is a fantastic person. So he is an expert in the other half of our thesis which we call operational mastery. That’s basically reality command. You got to build stuff. Do you know how to build?

And so we are looking at American and American-allied and adjacent companies 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 looking for operational mastery, which is: can you actually build it no matter how good your prototype is? And then of course, are you capable of achieving narrative command, which is my half of the thesis. These are some pretty tough filters, but without both, companies don’t scale. They don’t win.

And I think the evidence is if you look at companies that have succeeded in new verticals, they have possessed both these things. Anduril is a great example. Uber, Airbnb, there’s Fervo Energy, Redwood Materials, and obviously Tesla.

So, I could not be more optimistic about the future, But the companies that will win in that future are the ones 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 in which founders, either the ones that you invest in or the ones that will be successful applying narrative command and operational mastery, can they do so 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 understand just the forces of history and the passage of time. This is what I meant by “opening the iris.” I have friends who are Left and Right, but my best friends are united in ideas of health, quality of life, work, and abundance are best if they’re shared among all people. They disagree on the path to get there. But if we can agree on end goals, then we can debate how to get there while working on getting there. And so the best founders understand this.

If your startup, the success of your technology depends on an election, for 99.9% of founders, you are in the wrong business.

In the case of Musk, I actually don’t believe that the election was existential for him. A Democratic win might have slowed him down, but what he’s doing is so successful and so powerful, his narrative so strong that I mean his companies will weather any election. But fundamentally — we need some level of regulation, safety matters when you’re building autonomous vehicles — but we need founders coming to the table with companies and technologies that transcend politics and when they enter the market truly do benefit all.

Almost every technology we use today — the computers that we’re talking on right now, cell phones, none of these were built as political products. They were used by people to make political statements but they’re not political, and fundamentally the United States is the best example in history of what happens when you unleash freedom, ingenuity, creativity, innovation in an open environment. So people can disagree, debate, and build. And so as long as people think put that the top of mind as they build their companies, this country will remain the greatest nation on Earth because of those freedoms, that openness.

I would encourage everyone to think very carefully about what is most important: is it the end goal or is it expressing your political point of view today? It’s the end goal: the betterment of all humankind.