The Best Way to Sell Technology Is to Barely Mention It

David Senra, who spends his time studying founders, was trading notes with Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of the communications firm Rostra and former communications chief at defense company Anduril, about why optimistic stories about technology so often fall flat.

His answer was that "the last time there was a really effective techno-optimist message was the Jetsons." The technology was ambient and assumed, he said, while the family was the story.

He argued that in dystopian stories, the technology is in the foreground, and that is what people focus on. When utopian stories put technology in the foreground in the same way, he said, people write them off as public relations.

The stories that inspire people instead show a better world and human lives within it, with technology as the enabler in the background. He pointed to science fiction novels like The Diamond Age and Seveneves, which are about families and people trying to survive, not about the inventions themselves.

Those are the kinds of stories, he said, that have led founders he knows, including Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, to start companies.

Meservey said she sees the same pattern in the companies she advises. She pointed to Shopify, where she serves on the board. On one level, she said, Shopify is infrastructure for entrepreneurship, which she described as "the last bastion of human economic value" and a hedge if other jobs are taken.

On another level, the story is told through merchants. She offered a hypothetical: perhaps a retiree in a small town dreaming of selling homemade preserves. A real case, she said, was the team behind Skims, which did not have to first figure out payments, web design, and all the pieces in between.

In that telling, she argued, the entrepreneur is the hero and Shopify stays ambient, just as the Jetson family is the hero while the robot maid and flying car are just there.

For that pattern, they floated a name: maybe call it the Jetsons rule. Meservey said fight promoter Dana White did the same thing for mixed martial arts with a reality show that followed fighters training and striving.

Viewers got to know mixed martial arts while following the human drama. She and Senra said the Netflix series about Formula 1 auto racing works the same way, and Senra joked that it is how he "learned drug dealing from The Wire."

The lesson, in their telling, is to stop selling the machine and start showing the life it makes possible.