Storytelling is the Key: A Conversation with Serial Entrepreneur Osman Kent
“Reinventing the wheel for a wheelbarrow is never exciting for investors. You need to have a story which uses many, many wheels – different wheels; because no one takes seriously a wheelbarrow as a target market.”
Osman Kent, Serial Entrepreneur & Investor
Stories are everything – the power of a compelling story can make or break the success of any endeavor. In the world of startups and investments, it’s often not just the technology or the innovation that wins hearts and minds, but the narrative behind it. A well-crafted story can inspire investors, attract customers, and rally a team behind a shared vision.
One such mesmerizing storyteller is Osman Kent, whom we had the privilege of interviewing, ahead of him speaking at our Tech Tour Digital Frontiers and Trust 2024 event in Lausanne. Osman is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder & former CEO of 3Dlabs, which was one of the fathers of the GPU and the first $1B GPU company to go public on Nasdaq in 1996. He is currently a Partner at Atlantic Bridge Capital – one of Europe’s preeminent deep tech VCs with $1.5B in assets under management. In this interview, Osman shares with us insights into his impressive journey – and how storytelling has played a pivotal role in his path, from Silicon Valley to the global stage. Savour this inspiring conversation with a tech visionary who knows first-hand how stories drive success in the world of innovation.
TT: You are joining us as a panel speaker at the upcoming Tech Tour Digital Frontiers and Trust 2024 in Lausanne. As an esteemed member of our community over the years, what is your perspective on the value that Tech Tour events create?
OK: Tech Tour is bringing the luminaries, the entrepreneurs, the technologists, the investors all together in a forum, where we can openly discuss. We cannot see the future 100%, but even if we are 50% right, Tech Tour has an extraordinary mission and platform value- in bringing these people together, so that we take better decisions
TT: What inspired you to become an entrepreneur? What drives you on your continued journey?
OK: I’m an accidental entrepreneur. I am Turkish by birth- and in my youth, Turkey was in distress, we had terrorism on the streets.. so I left, not looking back. (…) Fast forward to two years after my graduation, I had made a small name for myself on being a computer graphics guru. So this Turkish entrepreneur approaches me, an entrepreneur who was working on one of the very first portable computers in Europe. He asked for a high-resolution version of a design, and he said, “I’ll give you 500 pounds now, and 500 pounds when you finish the design.” Four months later, when I handed over the design, he said to me, “I don’t have the second 500 pounds. Why don’t we start a company instead?” So that’s how I became an entrepreneur.
But in fact, that’s not unusual. Most entrepreneurs I see are accidental, they sort of ended up being an entrepreneur- and especially when it is like that, the journey comes in phases. So, in the beginning, he was the major partner, and I was the minor; he was the CEO, and I was the CTO. I was the guy with the white coat, hiding in the lab, inventing things, and he was the one going out and making great business deals. But importantly – and I always give this advice – doing a single-person startup is very, very difficult; the companies which are more likely to succeed, are the ones with two co-founders.
So when we sold the company, my business partner decided not to be part of the ongoing journey, and I ended up being the CEO of that organization. When you become the CEO, that gives you additional confidence – and from then on, I never looked back. I was no longer the shy geek in the back room, wearing a white coat. I was at the front saying, “Okay, let’s talk business.” So it’s a development journey.
TT: What is your perspective on embracing the highest levels of excellence as an entrepreneur and later investor – in terms of performance, ethics and empathy?
OK: There are a multiplicity of answers to that. But first of all, this is a long journey. And if you make your aspirations too simple, too mechanistic, by the time you get there, they become hollow. Very early on, I read a Steve Jobs book in the eighties, and the book said, “the journey is the reward.” The journey has lots of ups and downs – but that really is the reward. So when I look back, I don’t remember the success points. Those success points only lasted 10-20 seconds, right? Like when we went public, our ticker symbol went up on the ticker board – felt happy for 20 seconds, and then back to reality again. Whereas when I look back on my interactions with my fellow employees, those are the most precious moments and what we achieve collectively remains the biggest prize in the entrepreneur’s journey.
The other thing is that you need to set your objectives very clearly. When I was 14, I had this little secret notebook of everything I wanted to have in the world materially. So when we sold the company the first time, I went on a shopping spree, and bought all these things on my list. And they came to 86,000 pounds (and half of it was actually a grand piano). Then very quickly you realize that money is never the objective. Many years later, when I sold the public company, I was blessed to have lots of wealth as a result of that, but I was no longer part of the company. So this happens to many entrepreneur friends of mine, who sell and end up with lots of money. You seek for relevance, and money doesn’t give you that relevance. Money is great, you can do lots of things with it – but it can’t be the end point.
Here is one of my favorite stories, the thing which gave me the biggest pleasure during that exit. Unfortunately, my CTO had contracted this terrible disease, called ALS. It is a motor neuron disease where you get trapped in your own body and in the end, the only way you can communicate is with your eyelids. And he had five kids… so we formed a trust, to look after all of his daughters’ education. That giving action was much more important than anything else that money could have brought.
TT: Would you share with us an important story or lesson that every up-and-coming entrepreneur should learn?
OK: Here’s an unusual book – it’s called The Political Mind by George Lakoff. It is an analysis of how, during the last hundred years, the left and the right in the Western world have formed their narratives in the public mind. But when I read it, I was inspired to use these concepts in the business world. And I tested the teachings of this book within a company that I co-founded, called Numecent. They were in a field, which was technically very deep, but many people before them tried and failed in that field – so the field was tainted. Whatever you did, you could not change that frame of mind. In the media, the technology world, journalists.. everyone’s perception was, that should never be tried again.
What The Political Mind teaches you is that when an opinion like this is formed in people’s minds, there’s no point in trying to change that. In fact, there are physiological reasons why you cannot change it. So I took this radical decision as the CEO of this company. We’d invent a name for what it is that we were doing. And we would come out with a press release, and a media tool totally debunking what it is that we were doing previously. We didn’t change anything underneath, when it comes to what we were doing.
So, we actually came up with this new term, which is our own – “cloudpaging” – and if you google it today, you’ll see it has become an IT term. I did a press tour for a month, talked to Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, you name it – and the press reflected: this is amazing, this changes everything. The previous thing that we were doing was called “application virtualization.” I declared application virtualization as dead – it was a failed attempt by the industry, and cloudpaging was the future. And it worked. When we lifted the press embargo, we had a million hits on our website and we had people who became disciples of cloudpaging. So that is, if you like, the power of the narrative pivots.
TT: Indeed, stories are everything.
OK: Yes. But it took me a long time in my career to realize that. And the catalyst for it was reading that book. Because that book taught me to touch people’s hearts. There is a phenomenon related to the so-called “mirror neurons,” which you’ll be familiar with, if you read the book. It explains some of the physiology as well, also related to the fight-or-flight response – these very fast mechanisms exist, which build neural connections, and once they are built, they cannot be undone. This is why it becomes so hard to change people’s opinion, if it has been formed with that emotional fight-or-flight response. So that’s the fascinating thing. This is all about changing the business communications to make sure you not only touch people’s brains, but you can touch people’s hearts as well, even within a cold subject like technology.
TT: You are an accomplished musician, performer and music producer. Can you reflect on your experience and its impact on your life or career?
OK: As you said, music was always a part of me – it never left me.
But this is what it taught me. When I did my company exit, I bought a recording studio. And then I turned my back on technology and started incubating artists. I thought, I’ve been so successful in technology – surely, I can do the same with music. I had all the financial resources, and the technological resources; I thought if I could spend money and time, it would somehow deliver. My first mistake was not realizing that, unlike in tech, unfortunately, the music industry is not a meritocracy. So being the best, or better than someone else, doesn’t necessarily get you to commercial, or even artistic, success.
But here’s the other mistake that I made – because I had the studio, my artists were having a very comfortable life, and it would take us forever to finish an album. We would tweak the life out of everything. And there are two related stories here.
One of my very first artists- when she came in for an audition, I recorded it. I played the piano and she sang, and the tape was just running. When we released her first album, two years later, we put that track as the hidden track in the album. The rest of the album took two years to produce, and this was just three minutes of audition – but that hidden track ended up being the most popular track of the album!
The second story happened many years later, after I finally decided to turn my back on doing music professionally. One of my artists called me, she had a film commission, and she said “Will you work with me to put this film music together?” Her name was Mirzan, a Turkish artist. I said, “Mirzan, I haven’t got time anymore. I went back to tech. I only have one weekend.” So during that weekend, we put something together, and then I went back to the U.S., and I totally forgot about it. Four months later, that piece of music that I created with Mirzan over one weekend got the Best Film Music award in Turkey.
So the moral of these stories is that: if something you are doing is taking too long a time, and you keep banging your head against brick walls, it’s probably not going to happen. You need to pull back and analyze what is happening. The minimum viable [product] – that three-minute audition with an artist; creating film music in one weekend – without worrying, without every final detail – ended up being my two most successful moments.
TT: That's a beautiful story, Osman – would you say it is the same in business?
OK: Yes, it is. Because if you keep banging your head against the wall on a particular way of doing things, and it’s not resonating – then expecting a different outcome is stupid, right? You have to change something, like we did with the narrative pivot, right? We were doing the same thing, but we changed that to pivot, and all of a sudden it started resonating. So you have to make a change.
And the other lesson is: I thought throwing time, technology and money at the problem would solve my musical issues. It didn’t. The solution was to just let whatever the emotional output is deliver. Let it deliver, even if it is not perfect.
TT: From your perspective as an investor, what are the key qualities of a successful entrepreneur in today's fast-changing world? As an advisor and investor, what qualities do you look for in startups and entrepreneurs you choose to support?
OK: First of all, it’s about the team. People get surprised when I tell them this statistic: most startups pivot at least once. [When that happens,] the original concept, the top target markets, the technology being deployed – all of that is no longer valid. The only thing remaining are the characteristics of the people you invested in. Of course that means the intellectual capital, the brains of those people – but just as importantly, their tenacity.
As an investor, you are looking for tenacity and resilience in people, right? How they respond under pressure – when they are knocked down, whether they bounce back and come up. Those are very, very important characteristics in the first instance.
The other important thing is whether the CEO is a storyteller. What we have observed is that the storytellers are more successful in raising money than the non-storytellers. You may have the best technology, but if you are not telling the story of your future journey, it’s very difficult to connect with potential investors.
I call this “the wheelbarrow syndrome.” Do you know what a wheelbarrow is? It’s a small gardening cart with one wheel at the front. My biggest focus as an investor is on deep tech, and most deep technologists – they are reinventing the wheel in their field. But to attract investor attention, you need to be able to communicate a good use case for that new wheel. And, unfortunately, 90% of the deep technology companies, when it comes to sharing that great story – instead of describing a car, they describe their greatest use case as a wheelbarrow.
Reinventing the wheel for a wheelbarrow is never exciting for investors. You need to have a story which uses many, many wheels – different wheels; because no one takes seriously a wheelbarrow as a target market. So we look for people who can tell their story: what their promised land is, in terms of what they can do.
TT: Focusing on the themes of Digital Frontiers and Trust – in your opinion, will the exponential power of Integrated Circuits with AI make or break trust? What are some of the most pressing issues that will dominate the landscape on digital trust?
OK:There are a few shortcomings of the belief systems in the industry – and, in the age of AI, those belief systems have to be questioned. To that end, here’s a thought experiment: let’s say we are living in 2040, and we have in a certain country an AI President. What is it that we need to have in place, to be able to trust that AI President, that [it] has all of our interest at heart? Are any of the existing cybersecurity approaches, that we have to protect the digital world, at all applicable to such a scenario?
I’m not trying to scare the world- I’m just trying to explain. These are very simple thought experiments, and […] I’m going to show the real examples during my talk [at the upcoming Digital Frontiers and Trust event]. What is it that we have to do as a world, to trust [AI applications]. If we have an AI Butler, what do we need to do from a technology point of view, to be able to trust it? And that’s why this creates a set of opportunities for new companies to emerge, that can create these safeguards, so that [AI applications] are not going to misbehave.
TT: How do you hope to be remembered as an entrepreneur and a leader? What legacy do you wish to leave behind, both in the business world and in your personal life?
OK: In my personal life? I want to be able to point my grandchildren or my sons at something that I helped build up. And when I go, I want them to remember, their dad was a part of that. It is all about making a positive difference in the world. That is how I want to be remembered. And also that’s why these days a lot of my efforts are about helping change – even helping make policy changes, so that this field that I understand, technology, is applied in a better way, to make the world a better place for our grandchildren.
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We are delighted to host Osman Kent at the Digital Frontiers and Trust 2024 event in Lausanne, Switzerland. To meet with game-changing founders like Osman, stay up-to-date with our upcoming digital sector programmes.
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grandchildren.