Narrative is an
asset class

arketyp. supports founders, executives & fund
managers distill strategy into narrative

Written by John White

Reading Time: 4 mins

A deserted stock exchange floor, the screens showing red

The most valuable asset in your business isn’t on your balance sheet. It’s not your IP. It’s not your team. It’s not your product or your customer list.

It’s the story people tell when you’re not in the room.

You can have the best product, the sharpest strategy, a cap table full of tier-one investors or a mandate from the board. None of it matters if the story people tell about you doesn’t land.

That story determines whether investors and boards say yes or ask for more proof – whether talent joins or takes the safer offer, customers buy the vision or wait, acquirers pay for potential upside or current performance.

We treat equities, real estate, commodities as assets because they store value, generate returns, and compound over time. Narrative does the same. It attracts capital, talent and attention. It compounds when it travels. It decays when it’s neglected.

You can’t trade narrative on a secondary market. But that doesn’t make it any less real. It deserves the same rigour and intentionality as financial assets. It’s not soft. It’s not optional. It’s something to be carefully managed.

Why? We live in a complex world. We make sense of the complexity through narrative.

Humans don’t coordinate at scale through logic. We coordinate through shared stories.

That’s how strangers become teams, uncertainty becomes navigable, and transactions become trust.

This isn’t a modern phenomenon. Shared stories have always been the infrastructure of cooperation. They help groups align on priorities, navigate trade-offs and build confidence in each other – even when information is incomplete and outcomes are uncertain.

In stable environments, alignment happens naturally. We don’t operate in stable environments anymore.

Markets shift in quarters, not decades. Technology reshapes industries before incumbents notice. The companies and funds that succeed today will be unrecognisable in five years – either because they’ve scaled beyond expectation or because they no longer exist.

When the future is this uncertain and the range of outcomes is this wide, narrative becomes essential. Not as spin. Not as marketing. As the bridge between where you are and where you’re going.

A strong narrative attracts capital before the returns exist. It aligns teams before the strategy is proven. It builds conviction in customers, investors and partners when the only evidence is the story itself.

Narratives aren’t just stories we tell, they’re operating systems for action. Their power comes not from being provably true, but from getting people moving in the same direction.

Narrative is coordination technology.

It’s not your pitch deck. It’s not your tagline. It’s not the “near collapse” growth story you tell at conferences.

Narrative brings liquidity to strategy – it’s what allows your thinking to move through people, not just sit in documents.

Strategy is how you win in your unique market conditions. Narrative is how that strategy gets understood, believed and acted on by others.

At the centre sits your strategy and narrative – inseparable. Around them, the operational reality of your business: your product, your customers, your metrics. These are the tangible things you can point to.

But surrounding all of it is context: the market conditions you’re operating in, the forces shaping your industry, and the first principles that underpin your approach. This is the territory you must navigate.

Without narrative, your strategy stays trapped in your head or buried in a document.

The logic might be sound, but it doesn’t travel. It doesn’t align. It doesn’t compound.

With it, your strategy becomes something others can see themselves inside. Investors understand why now. Employees understand why them. Customers understand why this.

None of this is new. What’s new is how much it matters now.

Value is increasingly back-weighted. SaaS, platform models, transformation programmes, network effects – the real returns come later. Investors, partners and employees are always betting on a future that doesn’t yet exist. Narrative is how you make that future credible – how you translate cohort analysis into conviction.

Narrative compounds. Strong narratives don’t just communicate – they attract. Capital, talent, customers, attention. Each reinforces the next. A compelling story becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, pulling resources toward itself and increasing the probability of the outcome it describes.

This is true for people, but is true for AI infrastructure, too. As AI agents become part of how businesses operate, research shows that agents primed with shared narratives coordinate more effectively. Narrative coherence is becoming scaffolding for alignment.

Every metric has a narrative variable driving it. LTV is how long customers believe. CAC is the cost of creating belief. Payback period is how long investors will wait for proof. Revenue multiples are a loan from your future – perception priced against reality.

Each is an attempt to get people to act on something they cannot yet see – to close the gap between where you are and where you’re going.

Narrative wears different labels depending on the context. In a fundraise, it’s the investment case. In a transformation, it’s change management. In M&A, it’s positioning. In fund formation, it’s the thesis.

The label changes. The function doesn’t.

Founders need investors to believe in a future that doesn’t exist yet. Executives need teams to change how they work before results are visible. Fund managers are selling conviction, not track record. Sellers need buyers to pay for potential, not just performance.

The specific story changes. The structure of the problem doesn’t.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you already have a narrative.

It’s in the way your investors describe you to their partners. The way your team explains what they’re building to friends. The way a prospect recounts your pitch after you’ve left the room.

The question isn’t whether you have a narrative. It’s whether you’re in control of it.

An unmanaged narrative drifts. It fragments. Different stakeholders carry different versions. The story your board tells diverges from the story your sales team tells. Confusion compounds as fast as clarity does.

A deliberate narrative does the opposite. It aligns. It travels. It gets repeated in rooms you’re not in, by people you’ve never met.

In a world this complex, moving this fast, with outcomes this uncertain – narrative isn’t a nice-to-have.

It’s the asset that makes all the other assets work.