How to tell the story of your startup with Camille Ricketts and Carmel DeAmicis

In today’s episode, we talk to two expert storytellers in startupland — who also happen to be Ryan’s good friends.

Carmel DeAmicis is an editor (aka word wiz) at Figma, a company that’s reinventing how people design software and which recently announced a $40M round led by Sequoia. Prior to joining Figma, Ryan met Carmel when she was a reporter at Pando. She was the first journalist to write about Product Hunt and later went on to join GigaOM and Recode.

Camille Ricketts is another friend and veteran storyteller. She recently joined Notion, a hot startup building an all-in-one workspace for your notes, docs, and to-dos. Prior to joining Notion she spent nearly five years at First Round, starting and leading their content and marketing efforts. You’ve likely read one or many of her First Round Review articles. Earlier in her career she was a reporter at Wall Street Journal and VentureBeat and also worked at Tesla, Kiva, and the White House.

In this episode we talk about:

• How to tell the story of your startup. Both Camille and Carmel are former reporters and they share some of the secrets they’ve honed over the years on what to do and what not to do when it comes to crafting the narrative around your company.
• How Carmel and Camille ended up in their respective jobs at Figma and Notion, why it’s important to take time between jobs to find the right role, and how to leverage your network to find out what a company is really like on the inside.
• The wild, weird, wonderful world of TikTok, and why the constraints it imposes generate such creativity. Carmel talks about opening up the app to check it out for the first time and ending up staying up until three in the morning watching TikToks.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to FreshBooks, Bubble, and Dipsea for their support. 😸

Quotes from This Episode

“It’s easy to tell a story about a company that just comes out as a collection of features but the better way to tell the story is to emphasize the outcomes that your audience actually wants.” — Camille

“At Notion, they have pictures of Engelbart. At Figma, they threw a party on a Sunday on the exact 50th anniversary of the famous ‘Mother of All Demos.’” — Carmel

[In thinking about which company to join next] “You go through this conversion funnel where you maximize activity at the top of the funnel by emailing anyone who might have an idea for you, and then you winnow it down.” — Camille

Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode

Figma — Styles, prototyping and design at scale.

Notion — Increase your team intelligence.

Superhuman — The best email experience ever made.

TikTok — A creative music video clip maker.