The art of storytelling and fundraising

This article is based on a talk by Siqi Chen, an investor, storyteller, space enthusiast, and founder and CEO of Runway. (He was also a software engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory!) Chen joined Mercury at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco to talk about the founder mindset, fundraising through stories, and selling emotion to investors.

Fundraising is a feelings game

Siqi Chen has founded a few companies, and each of them has had their own unique challenges when it comes to fundraising. He’s also advised a number of founders who have shared a pitch deck they made from top-quality templates. But here’s the secret he’s learned through four CEO roles and three founder journeys: fundraising isn't only about logic or numbers — it’s also about emotion. No matter what you’re building, what you’re selling to investors is a story that evokes feeling.

Many founders approach pitch decks like a mathematical equation: problem, market, team, solution. But Chen points out that humans don’t always make decisions rationally. We tend to feel first, then rationalize. A pitch strategy should consider this.

Over the years, he’s honed a pitch strategy that’s designed to create a precise emotional journey. It starts with amusement, leads to surprise, then curiosity, builds to awe, and culminates in greed — or, in cozier terms, “big desire.”

He’s found this strategy to be so effective that when he was fundraising for his second company, and investors would ask to see a deck, he’d tell them there wasn’t one — because he wanted to have a conversation and trigger powerful emotions in a specific order. He wanted to experience that magnetism that people feel when they’re in a room together. That’s how you get somewhere.

The guidance here isn’t to forgo your pitchdeck — it’s to free yourself from the expectations that using a rigid structure that doesn’t paint a vivid picture is some requirement of the fundraising process. Instead of just defaulting to a template that doesn’t serve your story, business, or vision, you can craft one that evokes emotion and communicates the potential of your business in a powerful way.

Let’s get into how to make that happen.

The emotional architecture of a compelling pitch

When Chen crafts a pitch, he’s not just presenting facts. He’s engineering an emotional experience. The first moments must be amusing — engaging, entertaining, exciting — enough that investors want to keep listening. Even if they don’t wind up interested in investing, he doesn’t want them to be bored. He wants that opening to be compelling enough that they remember him some years later.

Once he’s drawn them in with a relevant anecdote or a story that deserves their attention, he introduces something surprising: a unique insight or perspective that gets them to a place of curiosity. Ideally, they’ve gone from passively entertained to actively curious. As that curiosity builds, he gets them excited. He wants them thinking: this could potentially become one of the largest companies in the world! They’re excited now. They don’t want to miss out. They’re in awe, they’re feeling greedy, they want to be a part of this. And that final part — the greed — is what gets people to say yes.

Beyond the slides: understanding investor psychology

Investors aren’t just buying a product or concept when they back your company. They’re buying a potential 100x return. Their job is complex — they need to identify those rare companies that will return their entire fund, and then some. Most companies that pitch them will fail at that, and they know it. So your job is to convince them you're not just another possibility, but that the size of your problem is so significant and meaningful that if you do succeed, your company could be equally significant (and big!).

This means your deck can’t just be about what you've done. It needs to paint a compelling vision of what you will do. Chen structures his own his decks in three acts:

1. Origin Story: Why this problem matters to me personally

2. Current State: What we’ve built and achieved

3. Future Trajectory: How we become a transformative global company

Most founders spend 90% of their deck on acts one and two. But act three — the vision of massive scale — is what truly sells, and the majority of decks Chen has seen barely touch on this portion. And it makes sense: as founders, we’re so focused on what’s happening now that we can sometimes forget that what we’ve built so far is not actually what we’re selling.

“If investors want to buy the present,” Chen says, “they’d just invest in the listed markets.” Investors and VCs want to buy what’s going to happen in the future — they want to buy what becomes a 10, 100, even 1000x return. That’s what you’re selling.

If you don’t know that’s what you’re selling, or if you don’t talk about it, or if you leave that for a half-page on the last slide of your deck — then he suggests that you might not be selling a very compelling investment proposition.

To that end, it’s important to remember that investors are humans, and therefore inherently emotional beings. So maybe the biggest mistake founders make is approaching investors from a position of need instead of a place of relational opportunity. They see investors as Mr. or Ms. Moneybags who must fund them. What’s in it for the investor when that’s where you’re coming from?

Chen approaches every pitch believing he’s offering investors a rare opportunity, and that telling a story that tugs at their feelings will get them to a place of understanding that, too.

Chen’s time at NASA underscored to him that not all work is about a paycheck. It’s about meaning, impact, and winning. The same applies to fundraising. You’re not begging for money — you’re offering a chance to be part of something transformative. For you and your investors, that too is about meaning, impact, and winning.

Final thoughts and practical recommendations

Fundraising isn’t inherently a technical skill. It’s a deeply human one that relies on the art of connection, storytelling, and emotional intelligence. It’s not so much about presenting a perfect deck as it is about making investors feel something powerful — the potential of your vision.

A note from Siqi Chen

For those seeking more fundraising wisdom, there are plenty of great resources out there, but I’d recommend going beyond the usual. These three books shaped my understanding of human decision-making and helped me define my fundraising approach:

• Sapiens by Yuval Harari — Language is what makes us human. Shared myths and stories let us offload intent, align people, and build entire civilizations. Read this book to understand how language and shared stories actually help humans coordinate on a massive scale, and build meaningful things.
• The Book by Alan Watts — Watts makes a profound point: the separateness we see is an illusion, and everything is connected. This book humbled me, and opened me up to new perspectives. If you haven’t questioned your basic assumptions about the world, this is the place to start.
• Demand-Side Selling by Bob Moesta — The key to building something people actually want is understanding them well. Most founders think from a product-first mindset, but this book taught me to start with the customer—or investor—understand their problems and deeper motivations, and build from there. It’s simple advice that’s deceptively hard to do well.

Remember, you're not just raising money. You're building relationships, crafting narratives, and creating boundless possibilities.