A Chilean baker looks directly at the camera and explains that he was turned down for a loan. He wanted to buy a delivery van for his bakery, but the loan officer told him he had no way to prove he was creditworthy.
Then frustration sets in. He pays for water, electricity, gas, and his phone bill on time. He has never defaulted on anything. Yet they still do not trust him.
The video is from Destácame, a Chilean financial inclusion fintech, and it runs for roughly 90 seconds. It does not show a single chart. By the time it ends, you know exactly what problem the company solves, who they solve it for, and why it matters.
That is storytelling for founders. Taking what your company already knows, turning it into a person, a moment, and a consequence, and letting the audience draw their own conclusion.
Data Without a Story Is an Actor Without a Director
Numbers matter. They can be impressive on their own and still leave zero impression if nobody organizes them.
Today’s investors were trained by Netflix and HBO. They are used to shows that hook them within seconds. When faced with a linear presentation packed with bullet points, their attention instantly drifts to their phones.
Zak studied why this happens. In his experiments, character-driven stories with narrative tension spiked oxytocin levels in listeners. Those people were subsequently far more willing to take action—in his study, by donating money. The exact same information delivered without conflict provoked no response at all. The findings were published in Cerebrum in 2015.
Why Stories Carry More Weight in Latin America
The baker in the video pays every bill, but the formal system never logs it. That scene reveals something fundamental about the region. A massive share of economic life in Latin America happens off the books—through cash payments and handshake agreements.
When paper trails fall short, trust is built differently: through relationships, reputation, and stories. That is why business meetings across the region usually start with personal conversation before the first slide ever appears.
A Latin American founder who tells a compelling story is leveraging a tool their culture already masters. Warmth, relationship-building, and a community mindset are narrative advantages. Too many founders in the region copy Silicon Valley content instead of its underlying techniques, resulting in a pitch that sounds like an art-house film shot with a Hollywood manual.
Two Ways to Put Someone at the Center
The Founder as the Protagonist
Adolfo Munizaga, CEO of Wovi—an AI transcription platform—used to open his pitch decks with the speech-to-text market size and open-source models. By the time he reached the solution, the room had already tuned out.
His story was already embedded in his own background. A decade ago, working at a retail enterprise, his boss asked him to analyze customer sentiment. He went looking for call transcripts and discovered nobody had a process in place. A one-day task was suddenly going to take two weeks.
Once he started sharing that story, his problem stopped being "transcription market inefficiencies" and became Munizaga standing in front of his boss with an impossible report.
The Customer as the Protagonist
Destácame took the opposite approach: they put the customer front and center. The baker has a face, a van he urgently needs, and a loan officer turning him down. At the end of the video, he says they will meet again. That line foreshadows the moment he returns with his credit report—and this time, gets approved.
Both approaches achieve the same outcome: the problem is felt before it is explained, and experienced before it is argued.
If you have the data but lack the story, Pitch de Película guides you through finding it using the exact questions tested with founders in coaching sessions.
The Pixar Formula Applied to a Startup
In 2011, Pixar storyboard artist Coats shared a set of narrative rules from the studio. One of them is a six-sentence framework that works for virtually any story. Applied to Wovi, it looks like this:
- Once upon a time, there was an analyst named Adolfo working at a retail company.
- Every day, he did his job without any friction.
- One day, his boss asked him to find out what customers were saying.
- Because of that, he went looking for call transcripts and discovered no one had a process.
- Because of that, what should have taken a single day was going to take two weeks.
- Until finally, he decided to build the best transcription platform in Latin America.
Six sentences, and you already have a protagonist, conflict, consequences, and a resolution. Market data and model precision come later, once the audience is already invested in knowing how it ends.
Five Principles Common to High-Performing Stories
The book closes with five principles found across every analyzed success case:
- Simplicity over sophistication. The best stories are understood immediately and remembered for weeks.
- Authenticity over perfection. Acknowledging a vulnerability builds more trust than manufactured invincibility.
- Purpose over product. Products evolve; purpose endures.
- Transformation over transaction. A transaction ends when a contract is signed. A transformation continues generating value.
- Stories over statistics. Numbers convince the analytical brain; stories win over the whole person.
Exercise: Your Story in Six Sentences
Take 20 minutes to draft the Pixar formula for your company.
- Choose a protagonist. It can be you, if you lived the problem, or a real customer with an actual name.
- Write the six sentences without using any acronyms or technical jargon.
- Read the draft out loud. Flag any sentence that sounds like a corporate report.
- Tell it to a family member. If they ask, "So what happened next?", you have a story.
That story becomes the foundation for your elevator pitch. To condense it into 20 seconds, read elevator pitch examples. To integrate it into a full pitch deck, see how to pitch to investors.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is storytelling for founders?
It means framing your company’s problem, solution, and vision around people, moments, and consequences, rather than technical specs or detached figures. It is used across investor pitches, sales meetings, social media, and internal communications.
Does storytelling work in B2B?
Yes. Even in B2B, purchasing decisions are made by human beings. Fracttal, the maintenance platform, illustrates its solution with a hospital refrigerator protecting two thousand vaccine doses at 3 a.m.
Can I make up a character for my story?
To illustrate a workflow, yes, provided you state it transparently. The book does this: María Fernanda is the protagonist of the Pitch de Película story and is presented as such. In an investor pitch, however, customer accounts and figures must always be real.
How much of a pitch should be story?
The story opens and closes the pitch. The emotional arcs at the beginning and the end frame the hard data in the middle. In a three-minute pitch, roughly one minute combined for both is a solid starting point.
What Remains When the Screen Turns Off
Storytelling for founders means choosing a person, placing them in a difficult moment, and letting your data serve as validation afterward. Destácame's baker resonates far more than any financial inclusion chart ever could, because everyone knows someone like him.
Write your six sentences today. Tomorrow, test them on someone completely unfamiliar with your business.
Pitch de Película uses cinema as a universal language to make your story unforgettable. It features Destácame, Wovi, and seven other Latin American startups analyzed from the inside out.