Donna Griffit is a Corporate Storyteller who has worked globally for over 18 years with Fortune 500 companies and startups. She has consulted and trained clients in over 30 countries. Through her guidance, clients have raised over a billion dollars. In addition, Donna can magically spin raw data into compelling stories that captivate audiences and drive results.
Donna has recently released her much-anticipated book, Sticking To My Story – The Alchemy Of Storytelling For Startups. Launched in January 2023, this book has quickly become a must-read for startup founders, and here is a quote from Tim Draper about her book in his introduction to it: “Well finally, there are no more excuses. Sticking to My Story is the new bible for startup founders. It’s the A-Z recipe for how to create a powerful pitch deck, with all the right ingredients. It’s filled with helpful tips, fascinating stories of what worked and what failed abysmally, peppered with insightful quotes from my colleagues in Silicon Valley.”
Donna was featured on Forbes where she explained how she has helped female founders raise millions from investors. Most recent articles were published on Entrepreneur.
What you will learn
- How storytelling can transform raw data into compelling narratives that captivate audiences.
- The importance of structuring pitch decks effectively and how to polish them for maximum impact.
- How AI tools like ChatGPT can assist with research and streamline the storytelling process.
- The critical role of visuals in presentations, ensuring they enhance rather than distract from the message.
- Insights into scaling personal expertise through books, courses, and new opportunities like academia.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:05 – 00:00:27
Hi, everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show today I have with me, Donna Griffit. Now, Donna is a corporate storyteller. She has worked globally for over 18 years with Fortune 500 companies and Startups. She has consulted and trained clients in over 30 countries. Through her guidance, clients have raised over a billion dollars. In addition, Donna can magically spin raw data into compelling stories that captivate audiences and drive results.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:32 – 00:01:16
Donna has recently released her much-anticipated book, Sticking To My Story – The Alchemy Of Storytelling For Startups. Launched in January 2023, this book has quickly become a must-read for startup founders, and here is a quote from Tim Draper about her book in his introduction to it: “Well finally, there are no more excuses. “Sticking to My Story” is the new bible for startup founders. It’s the A-Z recipe for how to create a powerful pitch deck, with all the right ingredients. It’s filled with helpful tips, fascinating stories of what worked and what failed abysmally, peppered with insightful quotes from my colleagues in Silicon Valley.”
Donna was featured on Forbes where she explained how she has helped female founders raise millions from investors. Most recent articles were published on Entrepreneur.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:16 – 00:01:53
So, welcome to the show, Donna. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you here and I’m looking forward to a good story.
Donna Griffit
00:01:54 – 00:02:02
Pleasure to be here. Stories are the spice of life. So I love hearing them. I love telling them. I love helping other people tell them as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:03 – 00:02:28
So let me ask you the story of how you got into storytelling and then into how you evolved into doing that and helping start-ups tell their story to attract funding. So where did this all start? What was the call from the ordinary to the extraordinary of what you’re doing today? When did it all start? And was there an inspiration was an aha moment.
Donna Griffit
00:02:28 – 00:02:50
Well, the aha moments I call them, you know, serendipity moments or you know, those moments where you hear the, the, the choirs going. Oh, it’s like, wait, this is a pivotal moment. So it’s funny how the road kind of takes you on these different twists and turns. And we were just chatting before we started recording. Um I’m one of those weird
Donna Griffit
00:02:51 – 00:03:18
16 year olds that discovered what she wanted, what she thought she wanted to do with her life at 16 and, and work towards it. I had discovered that there was a program at NYU for Drama Therapy, a master’s degree. And I was just like, oh my gosh, that combines my two great passions, which was acting and working with people um into one and everything I did from that point on was geared into getting into that program. What I studied in my undergrad,
Donna Griffit
00:03:18 – 00:04:06
what you know, all of the extracurriculars. And then I got accepted to NYU. And I went and I realized that the salary of a drama therapist was basically that of a starving artist. And I’m like, you know what, I didn’t give up being an actress to wait tables when I’m 30 to supplement my income. I’m like, there’s got to be something else I can do with my skill set and with my talents, a serendipitous moment again, came, I said one was at 16 when I discovered drama therapy. Another one came when I was doing a postmaster’s uh course. And one of my lecturers said that she had a friend that traveled the globe and gave workshops and inspired people. And I’m like sign me up for that started investigating, turned out that at NYU
Donna Griffit
00:04:06 – 00:04:55
There was another program in training and organizational development for post uh masters. Signing up for that sent my resume to the first place that’s hiring for trainers in um uh presentation skills, business skills, business writing skills. And I got hired by the wonderful Brad Boyer Boyer Communications group. And for years I traveled the globe, getting to see different places, get to know people intimately through their presentations and their struggles and their strife and their, their uncertainty and their stage fright and their over informing and really get to, to help them break through those barriers. And then came 2008, which was kind of a not so great serendipity moment because everything shut down,
Donna Griffit
00:04:55 – 00:05:33
you know, it at once, the first thing that organizations will cancel is any non essential travel or non essential training, which I was, you know, a burden of both on and then it was like, ok, what now serendipity would have it that I was introduced to a cardiothoracic surgeon who also had two medical devices he had developed and he needed help with his professional speeches. But also he showed me the mock ups of his two medical devices. And he said, you know, I’m invited to speak at this angel conference in New York. I have five minutes to present each company. Can you help me with that?
Donna Griffit
00:05:34 – 00:06:15
Now, this was 2009, I had never worked with a startup before and I was like, you know what, I’ve never worked with a start up. But hey, a story is a story, right? And we went to work working on these 25 minute pitches, poured heart, soul hours, blood sweat, tears. I ended up going with him presenting on his behalf, he was in the room. Um And then the other companies got up to present and my heart just broke for them because they were so bad, so bad. The, the, the like they were getting shot down before they even got through their five minute pitch. And I was just sitting there holding my head like, oh my gosh, why would they not work with someone like me beforehand? Do you have this opportunity? 80 something angel investors sitting in a room.
Donna Griffit
00:06:15 – 00:06:56
And then I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean someone like me? Maybe there’s nobody working with startups on storytelling. Storytelling was so nice that nobody was yet really calling it except, you know, Nancy Duarte, who’s one of my idols. Uh I love her and she, she just has been like the storytelling ma um And so I started investigating, nobody owned a storytelling space in start ups. And I was like, OK, that’s what I’m gonna do. And then come the voices of dissent, like no one’s gonna pay you, you know, startups don’t, you know, have money. They, no, no, I was like, yeah, luckily I don’t really listen to those voices too much. And I said thank you for your concern. Um, I’ll get back to them
Donna Griffit
00:06:57 – 00:07:19
and lo and behold, here we are. 10 years. Oh, no, I’m sorry. It’s been more than 10 years. But God, this was 2009 years down the road. And, uh, I’ve worked with over 1000 V CS, uh, startups accelerators and Silicon Valley giants like Meta and Google in pretty much any, any industry you can imagine. And then a few that would probably blow your mind
Donna Griffit
00:07:19 – 00:07:58
because there’s always the wild and wacky ones out there. And I’ve helped, like you said, raise over $2 billion. And I get to, I get to do the most fun thing every single day I wake up and I help people show their brilliance. Someone once called me the polisher of diamonds. I take that very seriously because I do work with these diamonds and sometimes they’re very rough around the edges. So I have to help shine them and, and really polish their facets so that the world can see their brilliance and their potential. So those are some serendipitous moments that led us to a few more like the book and like my next step, which I will tell you then.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:00 – 00:08:37
Ok, so let’s just go, just cut straight to the chase or the pitch dick. So, um what’s your process? And of helping people develop a pitch deck because you’ve got to find out their story. How much do you do? How much do they do? And then the second question after that is what does a great pitch deck look like? So how do you work with people um to actually go from some ideas, a draft and we polish it and become this beautiful presentation that makes people want to throw money at them.
Donna Griffit
00:08:37 – 00:09:18
Mhm So first of all, how much do I do? How much do they do? So they get a cheat sheet and a template from me that helps them organize their data. It’s like going to Whole Foods with a grocery list and buying me premium ingredients so that I can cook for them. I can see my book as a cookbook. So anybody that wants to cook it themselves, my full array of recipes are here and people will write to me from all over the world. Thank you for writing this book. Oh my gosh, I wrote it and I got funded or I won a competition and I could not be happier. But then there are those that want to come to the chef’s table and have her
Donna Griffit
00:09:18 – 00:10:05
cook with them for them and, and that’s exactly what happens in the session. So they, they bring me their content, they arrange it in a way that’s contained that’s called down. It doesn’t like not everything and, and it helps me to review it. Now, I always suspected that I had an A I component in my brain to do what I do. But when open A I came out, I actually realized that what I have is an LL ma large language model and trained on a massive data set for the past 20 years. So my brain is capable of both ingesting real time data and spinning it into stories, but also making references to other companies that I’ve seen in other industries and like, oh there’s this stat and there’s that start and like connecting the dots, which is exactly what happened
Donna Griffit
00:10:05 – 00:10:33
in the session. So I review their material ahead of time. So this morning, I had a session and before the session, I was doing the dishes and straightening up and my brain was already doing its magic. And I was like, she started from the wrong problem. She started from the wrong pain. She I like and we completely like leap to like slide five, brought that front and center and then move things around and added some things that I went to, to G BT
Donna Griffit
00:10:33 – 00:11:00
and I said, bring me some stats on XY and Z um and bring me real sources like you have to really be very, very careful with your prompts and in real time. And then I kept saying more, please, more please until I had enough. And then we went and we vetted the sources to find the step that we needed to tell that story on the spot. And that’s where, you know, A I is really gonna come in handy for that. A I doesn’t do my writing but it does my research on the spot
Donna Griffit
00:11:00 – 00:11:42
and I ensure then that the stats you have to make sure because it does hallucinate sometimes. Um And, and yeah, so, so we’re, then it’s a co collaborative process. I came to her and I said, listen, this was my thought, there’s three different narratives that we could do. Here. One is this, it’s like choosing your own adventure. Remember those books where you would like if you wanna go to the K turn to page 27 if you want to go to the school, turn to page two, if you want to go to the river turn to page 40. And I said, OK, so there’s this narrative, this narrative or this narrative. And I kind of gut feeling wise, felt that it was the last one and she agreed. And then we set out on that journey
Donna Griffit
00:11:42 – 00:12:26
and I started writing and she saw it and then she was like, not exactly. I said, what’s missing and then we adjusted. That’s much better. OK. And she saw it all happening in real time. This happened in two hours and we emerged after two hours with a completely deconstructed and reconstructed deck that was so much more powerful that drew her a much bigger picture, bigger market, powerful technology that’s really serving what investors want to see, which are huge markets with massive potential for revenue and exit. And that’s how it works. That’s, that’s the magic, the welcoming.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:26 – 00:12:43
Yeah, I, yeah, I love the fact that you think of yourself as a large language model. In other words, you’re collecting all the data, the information and then you’re trying to make sense of it. In other words, you are taking um then you distill something that could be complicated and technical and also making it simple, aren’t you as well?
Donna Griffit
00:12:44 – 00:13:30
Absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s not just uh simplifying it, it’s um it’s, it’s bringing it to the audience in the most optimal form for them. So if we’re writing for investors, I’m thinking like an investor. If we’re writing for potential customers or potential users, I’m thinking like them, which, you know, C might be A B to B to see. So end users, it completely changes the conversation. So it’s all about who you’re actually writing towards, which will inform the message that comes out. Now, a lot of what we write, what we wrote today, she can take and plug into a sales deck, right? But the whole
Donna Griffit
00:13:30 – 00:13:46
opening is gonna be a bit different than that because you’re not teaching your clients what their pain is. You’re just empathizing with them and showing them how it is so important, how we get your pain and how important it is to do something about it by using our solution,
Jeff Bullas
00:13:47 – 00:14:16
right? So in terms of storytelling, there’s uh one school of thought is that if you’re doing a presentation, um almost to anyone is to, is to tell a story and then make a point. In other words, the power comes from the emotion because it, I do remember once people were saying to me and I looked at other people’s presentations and going, they’ve got like just data everywhere, graphs everywhere. It’s small. In other words, it’s about information. It’s not about inspiration.
Donna Griffit
00:14:17 – 00:15:01
I like that. Yeah. And you don’t wanna over inform and, and unfortunately, and that one of the gifts quote unquote of startup founders is that they are so in love with their product that they could talk about it from here to kingdom come. And it sometimes reminds me of when I had my first starter. Uh II I people would be like, oh, can I see a picture of the baby? And I’d show them 80 pictures like scrolling through my phone. And at some point you realize, oh wow, their eyes have probably glazed over about 70 pictures ago. You could have shown them five pictures and gotten just as much adulation. So you need to know how much to tell
Donna Griffit
00:15:01 – 00:15:31
just enough to get them excited, make them wanna ask questions, make them want another meaning, make them wanna dive deeper. But if you’re sending something out that you want them to read, you have to make sure that it’s, it’s, it’s not overwhelming because the minute we see a slide that’s totally crowded with data and Excel and these weird graphs and charts and everything. It’s like, dude, I, I don’t want to look at this. Why are you punishing me? I’m throwing this away and moving on to the next deck that I got in my inbox.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:32 – 00:16:14
Yeah. Challenges really, especially in the technology world full of a lot of data is trying to get the data that matters um in front of people and how much in part of your book you cover, you know, the visual part of the storytelling. In other words, what sort of images do you use? Do you use graphs? You talk about infographics, how much, how many, how much visuals you use in a presentation and how much more is about, you know, the person actually telling the story in the simplest way that makes the most sense to the context of the audience they’re presenting to. So how, how do you use visuals I’d be interested in in how you do that?
Donna Griffit
00:16:14 – 00:16:49
Right. Well, first of all visuals are not there to decorate. I don’t need all kinds of dots and squiggles, and abstract art in the background. Because anything that’s on a slide, my eyes are going to try and interpret into like what are they trying to say with this message and if it, if it doesn’t, then it’s like, why is it even there? So while you want something to look very aesthetic, you wanna keep it very clean and neat and let any visual there tell another layer of the story. So whether it’s an image that
Donna Griffit
00:16:49 – 00:17:35
connotes the bottom line, the big idea of the slide or whether it’s a graph or whether it’s a chart or whatever it might be, it has to inform us on another layer. So our brain, we, we take in information through three channels, our visual or auditory and our kinesthetic. So when we read, it’s not our visual piece of the brain that’s actually being activated, it’s our auditory because we’re not just looking at the text decoding it and you and I have English, you might have another language. I’m sure listeners have many other languages. But the minute we see a language that we don’t read, it stops at the visual level because we have no decoding. So we see something visual. But if we’re trying both to
Donna Griffit
00:17:36 – 00:18:24
let them listen to us and let them read something’s gonna give like if you have a ton of text up there, they’re not listening to you, they’re reading the text. You don’t. Now if you add on top of the reading and the listening a visual that powerfully encapsulates it either with a bit of humor, with a bit of emotion, with a bit of cleverness. Um then they’re like, whoa, get it on, on, on different levels. And then if you have something kinesthetic, if you have an actual physical thing, I would say, you know, he has food or anything that is a physical thing, bring it, let them touch it, let them try it, let them interact with it. So that’s on the kinesthetic level. Not everybody has that, especially in software, it’s more ethereal than that.
Donna Griffit
00:18:24 – 00:19:20
So, you want visuals to really truly inform. Now, you asked before, what a good pitch deck should look like. It should not look crowded, it should look neat, aesthetic, clean, but also visuals that inform not something that looks like a second grader did on powerpoint, second graders today, it can probably use powerpoint or can be a lot better than most founders can because we’re still stuck in the Microsoft 97 days while the clipping, remember clipping the clip and, and, and all the stick figures not gonna wash all these, you know, so keep it very authentic and very, you know, nothing comic and cutesy. Yeah. Not a bunch of animations. Good God. Those are horrible. I’m like, why do you think that this is neat? Like why do you think that this is impressive?
Jeff Bullas
00:19:20 – 00:19:21
Yeah,
Donna Griffit
00:19:22 – 00:19:23
flying in
Jeff Bullas
00:19:25 – 00:19:33
because it was really popular for a while back there to actually have a uh I suppose an animated presentation of what you do. Is that still useful or not?
Donna Griffit
00:19:33 – 00:20:04
Well, it depends on what you’re showing if you’re showing a demo and you’re building the demo. Absolutely. But not every slide kind of sliding in with some kind of twist and an explosion and a melting and all the effects that you can have from keynote or from, from just don’t do that. What you can use powerpoint for nowadays um is there’s a button called designer and it’s an A I designer. So you basically can just write your deck in plain text and then get visual suggestions for it and it automatically cleans up the
Donna Griffit
00:20:04 – 00:20:37
look and feel of it. And it can totally give you a theme. And that’s a good use of A I and design and the software I’m waiting for, I know that Google Slides, which is my go to for creation, is adding things slowly with A I. But in terms of having it instantly designed, it’s extremely helpful to get it there. I personally have three designers that I send my clients to who are phenomenal and they, they, they’re able to take what I write and bring it into life as if they could see inside my brain. It’s amazing.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:37 – 00:20:50
Yeah, that was, that was my next question. I was going to ask you in terms of what involvement you have in actually putting the presentation together. So you basically outsource that and they understand what you’re doing because you’ve been working with them obviously.
Donna Griffit
00:20:50 – 00:21:16
So I create the, the, the bones and the flesh of the presentation and they create the skin. I don’t have a talent and when it comes to design or aesthetics, I know what I’d like to see. So they leave the two hours with me with a fully fleshed out presentation with the script and with everything, they could literally get on the phone, not show their deck and go through it and feel like they’ve given the best price
Donna Griffit
00:21:16 – 00:21:36
presentation of their life. However, you gotta have it look good. So I mean, I don’t outsource it. I connect them to designers that I know and trust they can use their own. I’m more than happy to take a look and give some notes. I also write visual notes as to what I would like to see. So they kind of have a direction. And so, so yeah, that’s my involvement in that.
Jeff Bullas
00:21:37 – 00:22:30
Ok. So you obviously get a very good pitch deck done or presentation done. But then after that, there’s the iterations, isn’t it? Because you talk about it in your book about iterations. So, uh for me, I remember meeting Melanie Perkins for the first time, one of the founders of Canva. And uh she told me the story that uh she’d had done, I think 45 iterations of a pitch deck before she hit pay dirt. So, and today they’re a $40 billion company based out of Sydney. So, ah and they got a little secret, by the way, they got, I think a year or two in, they made an offer by Adobe to buy them and they said no. So. Right. Cool.
Donna Griffit
00:22:30 – 00:23:02
Smart, very smart. I don’t know. Uh if fig ma made the right caller who called off that deal. But um yeah, very smart because they’ve grown into an empire. Um So yeah, so oftentimes companies will come to me saying I’ve got 37 different versions. I’ve been working on this for 400 hours. I can’t even look at it anymore. And here’s the problem. They’ll, they’ll write an iteration, they’ll not be happy with it. They’ll go back to the drawing board, then they’ll be like happy they go talk to some,
Donna Griffit
00:23:03 – 00:23:23
You know, a two bit investor or advisor who says it’s all wrong. I just got off a conversation with someone who was asking if I knew someone in Google Cloud because he was looking for pro cloud credits and he’s creating AAA products and he doesn’t want to go the funding route. He wants to build a business
Donna Griffit
00:23:23 – 00:23:48
and, and he said, you know, I had a really bad experience with some funding. Someone reached out and offered to meet me claiming she’s an investor and when she heard what I was doing, she said you lack uh charisma, you lack a good business idea. Nobody’s ever gonna invest in it. You do yourself a favor and just do this, build this on your own. It’s like what I call to say something. Like, first of all, it’s not true. I know this person and he’s just a wonderful person
Donna Griffit
00:23:49 – 00:24:29
and he’s got a great idea. But why would you kill someone’s spirit from the beginning? Who the heck are you? And she’s not really an investor and she’s not really a uh entrepreneur as she claims to be. So, II I think people have a lot but you, so you, you hear from people and then they tear your deck apart and you go back, you put it back together and then you show it again and somebody says the opposite and you put it and what you end up with is a patchwork pitch, pull together all these different things and you’ve completely lost the core, you lost your center. So for me, it’s coming back to the basics, stripping away all of this patchworks and, and getting back to the core story
Donna Griffit
00:24:30 – 00:24:55
and building it and rebuilding it and, and a lot of times in a session, people say, you know what? I used to pitch that way at the beginning and then I changed it. I’m like your instincts were right. Sometimes people just steer you in the wrong way. So it’s getting back sometimes to the basics of the story and, and it’s piecing it together. Sometimes I feel like it’s a puzzle. It’s like, oh, should this piece go here? Oh, actually it fits better there. Ah And then all the other pieces kind of fall into place.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:57 – 00:25:22
Yeah. So it’s, yeah, it’s constant polishing really, isn’t it? And sometimes you go down the wrong path and you’ve got to come back and start again almost because you’ve ended up at y and you wanted to be at Zed. So, um, in terms of your business, you, and you wanted to, you mentioned that you’ve got a new level that you’ve gone to recently, tell us more about that if you can.
Donna Griffit
00:25:23 – 00:26:03
So my new, so I mean, up until now, my main business is either training in organizations and accelerators and mainly working one on one with people in pitch decks. Um but a serendipitous moment. So after I wrote the book and it came out, um I was asked, so, what’s next? And I said, I somehow feel like there’s some kind of connection to academia. I don’t quite know how to explain it. But, and, and we moved to Palo Alto a few years ago. It was closer to Stanford and I kept getting asked to give workshops for Stanford Ross and Accelerators. And it kind of felt like there was some kind of chromatic connection there.
Donna Griffit
00:26:04 – 00:26:34
And earlier this summer, someone reached out to me on linkedin and said, I saw this job for, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business um on the communication coaching team that I think it’d be perfect for someone who I don’t even know very well. She saw a speech of mine a few years ago, which was lovely of her to think of me sent in my resume. I haven’t actually applied for a job in a long time but I have a resume just because sometimes different places will ask for it. Um, got called in, went through a rigorous
Donna Griffit
00:26:34 – 00:26:57
interview and simulation process and I, I just got word a couple weeks ago that I was hired. So it’s a part time gig. So I’ll still be doing the work that I do with startups. But I will be a communications coach for the Stanford GSB MBA program and MS MS X program, which is the executive MBA that they do in like a year when they take sabbatical and they’re fully immersed in it,
Donna Griffit
00:26:57 – 00:27:27
which is really exciting because it feels to me like it’s a completely new world. Um not only of academics, but these are people that already have real world business experience and they’re now coming back to get their master’s degree or to get their MS X and, and so I’m working with people that are in there and able to influence people as their career, as they’re on their upwards trajectory, which is super exciting for me bringing the gift of storytelling to life.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:27 – 00:27:48
Mm Well, I think the other uh upside to that and you sure, you know, is that uh it’s a great networking opportunity to open doors to many other businesses. So let me ask you another question and this is maybe you, you would face this almost every day. How do you scale? Because you’re doing a one on one.
Donna Griffit
00:27:49 – 00:28:34
You have a major scale. Um uh Any content that I have online is my scale. But I can’t, I’ve tried in the past to train people to do what I do but it didn’t quite work because, um eventually, I mean, I’ve had different online courses that never were up to the speed that I wanted them to be. Um So the book was a scaling opportunity. I think that being at Stanford is going to be another scaling opportunity because I get to be one to many. And I hope to, you know, give guests workshops there and, and work more with that. And I kind of feel like all right, the next step after that, who knows? So I don’t know if I can
Donna Griffit
00:28:34 – 00:28:50
scale myself more than I possibly can, but again, it’s just working in different settings, influencing more people bringing this gift of this amazing, powerful medium to as many people as possible and letting them take it to their organizations.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:51 – 00:29:34
So no one question I’m curious about is with the rise of, you know, generative A I chat G BT, the ability for it to help you create structure. In other words, make sense of noise out of your own data. Have you experimented much with that? The, the thing of any? And also the next question after that? Can um chat G BT help you with storytelling? Is it, can it enhance it? Can it just be a guide? A copilot? Um So number one question firstly, is have you experimented with Chat G BT generative A it and tools to help you type the initial noise in quite rough drafts? For example, is that, have you used that?
Donna Griffit
00:29:34 – 00:30:12
So, have I experimented? Absolutely. Um Like I said this morning, just in, in the session, I looked for stats. I think it’s a great research tool, whether researching stats for your start up or whether you’re researching local restaurants. It’s a great search tool. I think it’s going to replace Google as our default search eventually. Um Do I use it to write? No, not yet because uh first of all, a, I feel like I’m cheating, people are getting me to, to work my GP T magic. Um But
Donna Griffit
00:30:12 – 00:30:49
I feel like when I, I can recognize when somebody has given me something that’s gone through cha and PT. So I wrote a script for a demo video that someone, one of my clients was doing and I guess the animator wanted it shorter. So instead of saying, hey, can you shorten this down to 100 and 60 words? He put it through chat EPT and completely changed it to something so generic. And so it was so annoying. I was so mad. I’m like, I know he put this through Chad GP T like let’s take the original cut it down. There’s a reason and a and a that, that I’ve made it this way.
Donna Griffit
00:30:49 – 00:31:26
So, I don’t think so, I think if you need something edited down and the thing is, it also depends on your prompts. If I was gonna edit something I wrote down, I would say, ok, please write this. Make it 160 words. Take it shorten it down to 100 and 60 words. Write it in the style of Donna Griffit corporate storyteller. There’s enough of my writing samples online that it knows the style um make so that it’s upbeat or serious or whatever, like really get deep into the prompts and then you’re gonna get much better results. And then after the first one, you could say, OK, can you now make it more level and then I’d go in and I,
Donna Griffit
00:31:27 – 00:31:51
I play with it so that it becomes more mind-that is totally fine, but it’s like having your own editor there. Now, the last chapter of my book, when you get it, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Um, I wrote with Chai petit Chat P. Right after I handed in the first draft of my book, I first wrote the chapter with Jasper, which was the, the, the, the kind of popular tool at the time.
Donna Griffit
00:31:51 – 00:32:30
And then after Judge G BT launched, I said to my uh publisher, I think I need to rewrite this with Judge G BT. I have a feeling this is gonna be a big thing. And he’s like, I’m feeling too and I asked that exact question that you asked me, you know, what’s the future of storytelling? Will I be able to tell a story? And basically the answer that I got was, you know, I am great at helping, but humans are the ones that are the actual purveyors of knowledge and of uh of creativity. And I, we don’t know your idea for you. We can just, you know, help you tell the story. So that kind of,
Donna Griffit
00:32:30 – 00:32:57
I switched any fear I have of being taken over. I think we can look and you were talking about that book. I think we could look at A I as either something to embrace, which is going to be great and really help us cut out a lot of the grunt work or we can look into something that could potentially take our jobs. But what did you say, that he said that people ‘s jobs will be replaced by people using A I? Right? Is that, is that,
Jeff Bullas
00:32:57 – 00:33:03
yeah, don’t worry about A I taking your job, you need to be concerned about the person using A I that will
Donna Griffit
00:33:03 – 00:33:41
I utilize A I, so my voice because I have an audio book on 11 labs and I’m able to, so I took the script that I wrote and gave them a narration. It sounds like me. One for one. I listen to it. I’m like, that is totally my voice. It’s crazy. It’s insane. But having to go to a studio book, studio time, do a few takes pay for the studio, send it to them, then have like that would have taken time. Instead I delivered them an amazing quality voiceover in, I think it took us about three minutes to do it.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:42 – 00:33:59
Yeah. Yeah, I know. The thing is a lot of the grunt work that’s backwards and forwards and uh technology we already are enhanced, have enhanced intelligence. You know, it’s like for example, our smartphones are basically part of our brain now in enhanced
Donna Griffit
00:34:00 – 00:34:02
soon, they’ll be embedded. Right. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:02 – 00:34:14
Well, the other, the other thing I do see, I think A I is actually misnamed. I think the reality is that it is not artificial intelligence because it is actually the capture of human intelligence just done by
Donna Griffit
00:34:15 – 00:34:24
aggregate intelligence. I never thought of that. Aggregate Intelligence A I I use that.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:24 – 00:34:24
There’s
Donna Griffit
00:34:24 – 00:34:28
two of our magic and our knowledge as humans.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:28 – 00:35:05
Yes. So there’s two acronyms I think we should use. Which one is for me is E I Enhanced Intelligence and the other one is Augmented Intelligence, but that still has the same acronym. So I don’t think we should use that. But for me, I I think A I is misnamed, it is not artificial intelligence. It is human intelligence, but curated and collected by machine. So in other words, it is, it is human intelligence. It just allows us to think faster, bigger. And that’s what I think I find exciting. KP is an assistant. It’s
Donna Griffit
00:35:05 – 00:35:43
totally a copilot and you know what it is, what you just made me realize and I’ve never thought of it this way. So sometimes I look at my girls, I have an 11 year old and an eight year old. And I’m just in awe of how the combined genetics of myself and my husband have gone into these two magnificent creatures. And it’s like the best of me and the best of him and then whatever that synergy together brought out. And I’m thinking, you know, that’s really what I am. It’s like the marriage of all these brilliant minds out there that had learned and, and it brought into this knowledge base and still, yes, it’s not perfect. It’s far from perfect. We can’t rely on it for
Donna Griffit
00:35:43 – 00:35:59
building legal cases. But what it can do is it can help lawyers get the research done faster. They just have to verify it or check documents or whatever. So use it to free up the time for your creativity for what you do that’s unique to you.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:00 – 00:36:57
Does your heavy lifting for you. And you know, so now I have one other last question to wrap up. I know we’ve got uh you’ve got to go and change the world in about 1520 minutes. Um So Yuval Harari, who’s the author of SAPIEN, I saw him interviewing him having a chat with Suleiman and Sulaiman is now the original co-founder of DeepMind. And he said, and Yuval is very worried about A I and the fact is that the core of being human is our stories and storytelling and I’d be interested in your thoughts on this and also how you use uh storytelling. Um because he’s worried that I will actually become a better storyteller and will steal our humanity by distilling the stories of humans. But that’s one side of the story.
Donna Griffit
00:36:58 – 00:37:20
He also says that storytelling is one and this and Sapiens is one of the only things that all religion and all ethnicities share across the board. It’s really what makes us human. So how can a machine steal that from us if it’s us, if it’s the core of who we are? So, I’m not too worried yet,
Jeff Bullas
00:37:21 – 00:37:24
I’m not too worried yet. I think he’s overplaying it. But that’s my opinion.
Donna Griffit
00:37:25 – 00:38:10
I, you know, I’m not going to discount what he says. He’s brilliant. And, but at the same time, I think if we are able to, first of all, maintain A I in a safe and ethical way, make sure that it’s not, excuse me, not China, that achieves A G I first that it’s either us hopefully so that we can make sure that this incredible power is in the right hands. Um But at the same time, harness the power of it to better our lives, to free up our time. Who wants to sit here doing hours of research when it can be brought to you? And then you can just verify the research, turn it into your own site, the sources
Donna Griffit
00:38:11 – 00:38:29
and, and you do the creativity of piecing it together. It’s like it’s, it’s similar because I let my clients bring me the data. I don’t go searching for the data. So in a way they’re my Chad GPT but now Chad GP two will help them find that data better and faster. So we say we Google.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:29 – 00:38:40
Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s the enhancing. In other words, it does the grunt work for us. In other words, when I saw uh Netscape Browser back in 1995 I went, I’m not gonna have to go to the library anymore,
Donna Griffit
00:38:40 – 00:39:23
but we still do certain things. I was doing my thesis. I still went to the library. I mean, that was back in 2000 and uh 53. What? But, yeah, we started to go to the library back then. But my daughters go to the library to get books out. They don’t rekindle, they adore books, they devour books, they read them and I don’t see that going anywhere. We’re trying to keep them off of screens for as long as humanly possible. There will be no phones until, like, we must, because they’re going, doing something on their own and we have to be in touch. But even when we were kids, did we have phones to keep in touch with our parents? No. Yeah, kind of trust with them, the times have shifted. So,
Jeff Bullas
00:39:24 – 00:39:39
yeah, I, well, I, I have had a love of books and reading since I was five. but I do read all my books now on a Kindle app on my ipad because I’ve got 1000 books in my library that I can take anywhere,
Donna Griffit
00:39:39 – 00:40:12
which is what Steve Jobs described. The ipod was my first time using an ipod. 1000 songs in your pocket. It’s the same thing. I used to have a wonderful CD collection and I had, I’d carry it around this cute little case which would hold like 20 C DS and I take my, my disc man and I, you know, listen and take it on trips or put it in the car. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s on my phone. I don’t even need an ipod. It’s all on my phone and I’ve unlimited access to it because I have a youtube music subscription. I know I’m gen X. Otherwise I’d have Spotify. I know I’m old but, uh
Donna Griffit
00:40:13 – 00:41:02
it, it gives us access. So, it’s not that it killed the business of entertainment and I’m thinking very sadly of Susan Nasy who just died. Um, I knew her personally, our daughters were in preschool together and she was 56 and way too young to go. But she revolutionized youtube as a place for monetizing content and becoming one of the most profitable companies. And who would have thought, you know, in, in, in the times of, or when people were downloading and stealing music and the whole Napster thing that we could change the model so that they still would be making money. And now there’s all these influencers and content creators who are making money as creators who thought about that five,
Donna Griffit
00:41:02 – 00:41:27
eight years ago. So evolution is coming. I don’t even think that what my daughters are going to do when they grow up has even been invented. Yet there might be some form of it, but I think that there’s going to be new, evolving, new, new ways of expressing yourself, new ways of making money. I do think that there’s gonna have to be a universal, um, get a salary for everyone to have like a base salary because
Jeff Bullas
00:41:28 – 00:41:31
universal basic income is a possibility.
Donna Griffit
00:41:32 – 00:42:13
But yeah, anyway, we’re kind of moved off of storytelling into the future. But yeah, so we did lots of interesting stuff. I, but I think, you know, for storytelling, it is the most human, the biggest way to connect. People are riveted by stories, stories connect between people, stories to enhance trust and influence and, and create a rapport. Yeah, exactly. And, and, and somebody said to me, you know, oh, I can’t, you know, hang out with you. I feel like I’ll be judged by what I say. I’m like, I just love hearing stories. I’m not, I don’t have my professional judgy filter on when I’m just talking to people. I love hearing their stories.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:14 – 00:42:53
Well, it’s an interesting quote and I’m gonna lead to, to finish, to win things up about how much storytelling should be involved is a great quote. I can’t remember who did it, but it said, um, I’ll forget what you told me, but I’ll never forget how you made me feel. So, the reality of that is that this is where storytelling touches human emotion and is remembered. How much storytelling should you use in a pitch deck? Can you use too much? And what I’m really intrigued by is how should you use storytelling, storytelling to start your pitch deck or should you?
Donna Griffit
00:42:54 – 00:43:28
So, first of all, there’s two elements to using storytelling in the deck. One is the structure which I talk about in the book you’ll read and also in my template and cheat sheet. I call it the four acts of your startup pitch. So I, I take it from the world of ancient Greek classics and Shakespeare when everything was written in acts that was the archetype of Hollywood writing as well. There’s about eight different types of scripts that get written again and again and again and again, and it just seems the character changes the twist. But the architect works.
Donna Griffit
00:43:28 – 00:44:21
Exactly. And it’s worked for thousands of years. Some people will say, oh, problem solution because it’s a problem solution. The business and, and the vision for the future, you know, problem solution. I learned that in business school a million years ago. That’s so old. I’m like, it’s way older than that. It’s 36,000 years old, but there’s a reason it’s sustained because it works. Our brain’s last hardware upgrade came 36,000 years ago with the prefrontal cortex which is the largest part of our brain. And it’s responsible for visual analysis, visual expression. And that’s about the same time that the first cave painting was found and it was the first time somebody recorded a story, they didn’t even have a language yet, but they told the story of these water buffaloes attacking their tribe. So storytelling ha is an age old
Donna Griffit
00:44:22 – 00:44:41
art that has sustained for years. So it’s, it’s arranging it in like those four acts. But then you can tell stories within it. It’s not telling jokes and it’s not telling icebreakers. It’s telling how many stories have I related to you during this like, oh my client said this or this morning, it’s so much better than me just saying. Here’s what you should do. Here’s what
Donna Griffit
00:44:41 – 00:45:15
you should do it. We illustrate it through a story and then we break down what’s the lesson that can be taken from there. But what you’re going to remember here are not the facts and the figures. You’re going to remember the stories if you remember any of them and you’ll remember how it made you feel. You’ll remember like, oh, that reminds me of a time I worked with a client that was saying that and that and the other because it triggers other things because our brain is always searching for reference. We have a little part of our brain called the insula and it’s always searching. Oh, that’s the index. Where did I hear that? Where did I hear that? Ah I know and that’s what creates connection between humans. Exactly.
Donna Griffit
00:45:17 – 00:45:18
There you go.
Jeff Bullas
00:45:19 – 00:45:24
Thank you very much for sharing that. I was curious about that but um can you use too many stories?
Donna Griffit
00:45:25 – 00:46:03
So you don’t want to overload it with stories for the sake of telling stories? Exactly. You want the structure to be there. You want to have just enough to illustrate it. Another use of the story will be in your user journey, your user, your use case, your user story, you know, how are your users using your technology and take them on a journey of implementing a few cool features and then the results. So, so they see. So they can imagine themselves using it if you have a real client using it phenomenal. If not, then you need to just um give them an as if experience to it.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:04 – 00:46:14
Cool. So one last question which I ask every guest is that if you had all the money in the world, what would you do every day without getting paid?
Donna Griffit
00:46:15 – 00:46:40
I probably um take equity in companies and still build their stories for them. Um I, I really do love it so much. I can’t imagine myself not doing something. Um Maybe, you know, still giving workshops um definitely taking time to travel. But, if I had to, you know, find like my day to day, I would always involve this.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:41 – 00:46:44
So it sounds like to me that you found your icky guy, which
Donna Griffit
00:46:44 – 00:47:11
is an icky guy. Absolutely. I love that word. And, and I’m really fortunate to have found it. And if your listeners don’t know the icky guy, it’s being right in the middle of what you love doing, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid for because that was what was missing for me in the drama therapy. It was not enough to sustain and I wanted something that could sustain me. So I’m right smack in the middle of that icky guy and I’m loving every moment. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:47:12 – 00:47:18
I think it’s one of the best explanations of um trying to find your purpose. And um
Jeff Bullas
00:47:20 – 00:47:39
no, for me that’s been and, you know, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is actually part of the story. But I think Iki guy sums it up, which is a Japanese philosophy by the way. So for those who don’t know and it’s spelt just for everyone who’s listening, it’s Ikigai, I believe so Iki guy, um, check it out
Donna Griffit
00:47:41 – 00:47:59
but not spelled. Um, yeah, it’s just, it’s, it’s so true and I feel truly blessed that I am in that place of the icky guy. I really wouldn’t have it any other way. And I want to wish all your listeners that you are in, whatever you do, find the icky guy in it.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:00 – 00:48:26
Well, it took me and, and the thing is, you know, some of you had the gift at 16 to actually find some at the age of four, you know, are going to be a violinist. And I knew that already, um, some of us take a bit longer. It took me to be 50 plus to actually find my icky guy. And um I love writing, I love sharing, I love writing stories and I actually just happen to get paid for it. So
Donna Griffit
00:48:26 – 00:48:27
it’s
Jeff Bullas
00:48:27 – 00:48:27
the
Donna Griffit
00:48:27 – 00:49:00
best, getting paid for something that you would secretly do for free, but make sure you get paid or get something for it. I’ll do a lot of pro bono work. But I need to know that there’s an upside there. Either exposing me to more clients or um working with a cause that I truly believe in like amplifying women or, or working with underprivileged and founders, helping them build businesses. So it’s got to have something in there that even if I’m not getting paid. I’m getting paid,
Jeff Bullas
00:49:01 – 00:49:29
Donna. Thank you very much. Yeah, I, I get, you know, basically this is, I love doing too is having fireside chats conversations with smart people that um share their gift with the world and that’s what you’re doing. And thank you very much for sharing your stories and for sharing your expertise. And uh I look forward to hearing more in the back channel about how it’s going at Stanford. So um look forward to hearing,
Donna Griffit
00:49:29 – 00:49:34
follow me on linkedin. I’ll be sure to post uh um insights.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:34 – 00:49:38
I’m sure I will. Ok. Thanks Donna. Absolute joy. Thank you.
Donna Griffit
00:49:38 – 00:49:39
My pleasure. Thanks.
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