Katie Trauth Taylor - Co-Founder & CEO at Narratize AI: AI-Driven Storytelling, Scaling Innovation, and Creating Serendipity

Katie Trauth Taylor 00:01
If you can create an experience that is so life-giving, that is so transformative that it just naturally sparks that kind of, like, "I have to tell someone about this," that's your goal. It's not your goal to say, "I'm going to pay you to go promote my product." The goal should be, "No, truly, I recommend this because it's changing my work."

Callan Harrington 00:23
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here.

Callan Harrington 00:41
Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Katie Trauth Taylor. Katie is the CEO and co-founder of Narratize AI, a generative AI storytelling platform for innovative enterprises. Before Narratize AI, Katie received her PhD in rhetoric and composition, and during her PhD program, she launched her first startup, Untold Content. She is also the host of the Untold Stories of Innovation podcast. And I gotta say, Katie is incredibly passionate about what she's building, and that comes through immediately. We talked about how to build a referral strategy based around impact that can not only lead to new business but can also help you capture testimonials and case studies at scale.

I thought this was really, really interesting, and I'm personally a huge believer in having as many assets around the voice of the customer, such as those testimonials and case studies, as possible. They're important for all stages of business, but man, are those critical for building early momentum with new customers, and I love the conversation we had around this. We also discussed how Katie builds an amazing network of people through curated dinners. These dinners are often called a salon dinner or Jeffersonian dinner, and I loved hearing how Katie pulls these together because I am also a really big fan of these.

I gotta say, the most impactful part of the conversation to me was discussing how only two to three percent of funding in AI is awarded to women. I personally had no idea that it was that low, and she spoke with us about her strategy on how she targets investors and how she doesn't let the fear of rejection limit her ambitions. And I just loved hearing her story around this. So with that, let's get to the show.

Callan Harrington 02:52
Katie, where I really want to start this out is, you seem like a very passionate person. What is it that sets you on fire?

Katie Trauth Taylor 02:59
Oh, I love this question. So I think the thing I tell my team every day is we need to wake up with a vision to help other people share their bold ideas. That is the way that we elevate society and give people opportunity, is to help them express their bold ideas and put it out there in the world so it can get buy-in. It can get funded.

One of my favorite stories is, actually, this sounds a little bit nerdy, but it’s from literally a rocket scientist, an aerospace engineer, who was one of the first people to use Narratize. And he got in there, he built a pitch for a new wingspan concept for an airplane, and in the process of building this pitch—it probably took him 10 minutes—and in 10 minutes inside the platform, he had a 1,000-word pitch that clearly articulated the problem he wanted to solve, the solution, and a technical description of the solution, the impact it was meant to have, and the business case behind it.

And he looked up, and I was actually in person with him on site, and he goes, "I just articulated it. I’ve been struggling for months to try to tell people about this idea, and now I just unlocked it." And seeing him light up like that, and knowing that that innovation could lead to the ability for us to travel safer, to travel faster, and get to where we need to go so we can make connections around the world—that, to me, just sets me on fire.

And so I try, every time we have an all-team meeting, every time we have a huddle, I’m telling the team these stories that we’re hearing from users and how they’re making the world a smarter, safer, better place because they’re able to better articulate their work using Narratize.

Callan Harrington 05:00
How fast are you capturing these? I mean, like, these testimonials, case studies, things like that. Are you getting these, like, the second somebody has that kind of "wow" moment, and you’re asking them, "Hey, can we capture this?" What does that look like? Social proof is huge. How do you capture those?

Katie Trauth Taylor 05:17
Oh my goodness, yeah. I think social proof is like the Holy Grail for any kind of organization, group, company, right? Like, if you have social proof, and people are out there generating their own stories about the conviction and the experiences that they’ve had and how it’s been life-giving or life-changing, that’s better than any kind of formalized marketing plan or thought leadership you could ever try to push out into the world. It creates pull, and so as CEO, I do a few things. One is, early in my career, I was actually taught Lean Six Sigma process improvements and all the Black Belt training and things like that. And so one of the practices inside of Lean Six Sigma, which is also, by the way, part of the inspiration for the idea of the Lean Startup—which, of course, now is like best practice—one of the principles is called a GEMBA walk, and it came out of Japanese culture. It means that as a leader, you go where the people are, and you live within the workflow.

So you’ve heard stories like this, of the founder of a giant corporation getting on a headset and taking on customer service calls. You’ve heard the example of the healthcare leader who goes to the basement and sees how people are washing linens, so he understands the way that rooms get turned over and the challenges of timing and room change. It’s a way of living and breathing in the workflows that are actually mattering to the organization that you’re responsible for.

And so one of the things I do as CEO is I do those GEMBA walks, but I call them listening sessions, so I love to ask users as often as I can. I try to get in a couple each week, at least 15 minutes. I say, "Hey, will you just chat with me for 15 minutes? I want to ask you a million questions within that period of time to understand what value you are getting from this, what was your experience like, did you have any troubles, and what do you wish that Narratize could do?" Having that kind of continuous feedback fuels me, and I carry those stories back to our huddles and our all-hands inside of our organization.

This is so inspiring to our team, this idea of capturing insights at scale, that we actually built this capability into Narratize, too. So in Narratize, we built a never-before-seen AI feature called the Story Infuser. And because Narratize is different from any other generative AI platform, you don’t prompt it as an assistant the way that you do with every other chatbot. Instead, Narratize prompts you; it asks you smart questions, and it pulls your insights and ideas. From there, it generates different types of artifacts. It can help you create presentations that are fully designed. It can help you create pitches and proposals, product requirements documents, and all types of thought leadership, like white papers and more. But it’s prompting you, and you’re answering.

And so we said, "How might we have the AI actually prompt other people and capture their insights at scale?" How do you capture other people’s stories, their testimonials, their experiences, their technical acumen at scale? And so the Story Infuser feature literally lets you send those prompts out to a contributor. It could be one contributor, it could be a million contributors. And what we’ve seen our customers doing is essentially creating, like, a URL or a QR code. And so now at events, you’ll see these QR codes up, and when you scan them, people can be prompted to share their testimonial. "Hey, how is this event feeling to you? How are you doing? What’s your biggest takeaway so far?" And now the organizers of that event are capturing all those insights at scale.

We’re seeing founding teams, startups, use this technology to capture customer testimonials and to be able to go put those back into marketing campaigns that they’re running. We’re seeing innovation leaders within huge Fortune 500 companies using this feature to capture ideas from their thousands of employees by essentially having the AI prompt them and say, "What challenges are you facing, what types of solutions are you looking for?" And then those stories show up to the Narratize user within their feed, inside the dashboard.

To me, capturing and sharing our stories is one of the hardest things to do at scale. Surveys suck, but ethnographic research takes forever, and so the Story Infuser is a way to make that kind of collaboration happen a whole lot faster.

Callan Harrington 10:00
So I want to go back to—you got your PhD, you’re in a number of research positions, and I know you had a communications position as well before starting your own business, but one of the things I’ve seen—we’ve had a number of PhDs on the podcast—what I’m curious about is, what is it about going through that PhD process that generates entrepreneurs?

Katie Trauth Taylor 10:17
It's a great question. I’m in a bit of a minority when it comes to founder profiles. One of my favorite people—he's a technical advisor, and he’s been for a long time, the former head of innovation at Verizon—he said to me, “You’re like the only person I know with a PhD in rhetoric that’s killing it in the startup ecosystem.” So I’m a non-technical founder, and I think it’s very unusual, the path that led me to where I am.

I did start my first company when I was a PhD student, but in my degree or my domain, like in my discipline, that was almost unheard of. Nobody was talking about the startups that they were creating. This wasn’t an MBA program. This was narrative science. I was studying narrative algorithms, how they train foundational models. I was studying scientific and technical communications and public rhetorics—how words make meaning, and how we train AI to understand the meaning of those language patterns, and especially how that all impacts scientific and technical innovation. That's what's always driven me, and that was sort of my early start.

But in those programs, especially in more humanities-related PhD programs, you are really encouraged to go into academia and to be a professor. So that was really where I was going. I got that dream professor job right out of my PhD, but I had also created this startup. I’ll never forget my very first mentor back at Purdue, as I was finishing my PhD, she said, “You can do this. This is exactly how you’re going to start a business.” She walked me through the steps, like, “You’re going to drive to this bank, and you’re going to open this bank account, go to this form online, and here’s how you’re going to do it.”

Her name is Kathy Scott. She heads up the Center for Medication Safety Advancement at Purdue. She got me my first gig. She helped me understand how to do it. And she even started to give me hints and visibility into different business models and how I could have contractors and subcontractors, how I could subcontract into the government through primes and all of that. It was just so eye-opening. I’m forever indebted to her. I don’t know that I could have done it without her.

But I think, to your point, the PhD, it's pretty intensive study. It helps you learn a discipline deeply. And so having that expertise coming out of school—and some people kind of go into industry and then come back and finish a PhD—I really went straight from college to my MA to my PhD, and then founded my startup, had a professor job, and then kind of agonized about whether to stay as a professor or go focus on my startup. And you know how the ending kind of turned out for me. I decided to take the less-beaten path, and I know it was the right decision for me.

But I think I strongly encourage people to put forth the sacrifice and the time to become a domain expert, because it opens up so many paths to you professionally and just in terms of your self-worth and understanding and how you see the world.

Callan Harrington 12:22
So let’s talk about that a little bit. You mentioned that you had this awesome mentor that almost kind of pushed you to start your first business. What was that transition like? How different was that from what you had been doing? And I’m curious where some of your training that you’ve had—what really helped you when you were first starting that business?

Katie Trauth Taylor 12:40
Yeah, she was incredibly helpful in helping me get through the practical stuff, which sometimes is a barrier to us as humans. We look at something like starting our own business, and it’s not the idea that’s the hard part. It’s not the problem we want to solve that’s the hard part. It’s the practical stuff. How the heck am I going to fund this life for myself? How am I going to pull people into it and inspire them to be part of it and devote their time and their energy and their resources towards its success so that we can solve it at scale? It’s all of those things that are quite a bit harder than, in my opinion, just getting the idea and the problem to solve right—which, of course, they're all critical.

And so I’m forever indebted to her for helping me see that path and her not being embarrassed to make me feel like, “Hey, this simple stuff is important.”

I think what was really unique across my career was the way that certain people carried me from one space to the next. Callan, I know if this is part of your story too, but my very first client for my first company, she was really high up within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and she pulled me in as a lead content strategist. They were deploying systems engineers across all 140 medical centers in the VA, and they were doing it because there was an access crisis. Veterans were dying on the waitlist, and they weren’t able to get veterans in to see doctors fast enough. And so they did something very unusual for healthcare at the time—they deployed systems engineers. And they had them go do Lean Six Sigma and process improvements to help everyone from the top senior leaders in the organizations all the way to literally the people folding linens in the basement, to the nursing staff, to the clinicians, to have everybody aligned towards better ways of getting veterans the care that they deserve.

And I was charged with telling that story and helping to evaluate the outcomes of that effort and show whether or not they should scale it. Once the leader who first brought me into that role—once she left the VA, she went into digital health within Silicon Valley, and she carried me and my company to those customers. And I’ve really spent the last decade of my career getting business through customer referrals. Again, we weren’t really standing up these massive marketing campaigns. I don’t think we ever ran a paid ad for my first company because everything was—you proved value, and then you were carried to the next role and the next role.

And what was really cool about where I sort of ended up across the last ten years is the thread that ran through it was innovation. I was always within organizations that were deeply innovative. They were disruptive. They were looking to enter a new market with a new kind of solution. Health tech is a great example. Ten years ago, there weren’t huge digital health or telehealth solutions that were at scale, IPOing and creating the kind of traction that we see today as health consumers, and we want to have access at our phones to a doctor, to care solutions that help us get well or be well. And being able to see a window into those different startups at all their various phases—so many of them, we would come in when they had 50 people, and now they have thousands and thousands of people, and they’re public companies, and I’ve been able to see a window and build relationships across startups all the way through their scale.

That then was a natural introduction to innovation and product leadership teams within large, large companies. And so I guess overall, allow and find the champions in your professional life to carry you to the next stage with you. And don’t forget that every connection—it’s going to circle back to you at some point in your professional life. And so bringing your best to work and being ridiculously supportive and helpful to other people and shining in every opportunity that you can may sound trite, but to me, that’s what led to the opportunities that I saw.

Katie Trauth Taylor 17:00
I think too, we as professionals—tell me what you think—but I think a lot of us want so badly for our story to always make perfect sense, like linear sense. And I think it's like an impossible feat. It's okay. It's okay that your journey is going to take twists and turns. The more that you can find the through-line, the thing that you learned and what that meant to you and how it shaped and changed you to be who you are, that I think is the most important piece. It's that story that we tell ourselves and that we can help articulate to others, so that we can express our value and express our mindset and our capability to other people. I think a lot of professionals today, we're shifting our role over time, and it's so important that we can align on what's the through-line. What did you learn? What does that mean about the way you think and your unique capabilities? The better you can articulate that, I think the more opportunity you'll find. What do you think?

Callan Harrington 18:23
Yeah, I think with my career, mine was largely kind of going in the executive route. And for me, I would say it was very opportunistic, being fully transparent on that. The next good opportunity came, and I often jumped at those next good opportunities. What I would say, though, is at every position, I learned more on like, what did I want to do and what did I not want to do any longer? I don't think it was until I actually founded a company, though, that I took more of that non-linear approach, meaning in that world, it was okay. You've got to go from an individual contributor to a manager, from a manager to a director, a director to...

Katie Trauth Taylor 18:49
...linear path.

Callan Harrington 18:51
Yeah, that's exactly right. That doesn't really exist in startups, right? It's who's doing what, yeah, outcome. And then, once founding a company, I looked at it differently. You know, the business has pivoted multiple times, and I'm more comfortable with that because I understand that I'm looking at it from a much more long-term approach than a short-term approach. So non-linear doesn't bother me as much as it did in my career. It's like I'm not taking a step back. Like I'm not going to go from the VP to a director, even if that director’s a better role that could set me up long-term. I just wasn’t thinking like that. So that's kind of what it was for me.

Callan Harrington 19:47
One of the things I'd love to circle back to was this untold story that you're talking about specifically with the referrals—that you were driving the majority of your business through referrals, is that right?

Katie Trauth Taylor 19:56
Yeah, but it's true for Narratize as well. I think in my company leadership, that's another through-line. If you're growing based on referral or based on the voice of the customer, that is going to create—and actually, this is statistically true—the startups that grow faster through share of voice and through referral and the voice of the customer, those are the ones that are better positioned to outpace competitors in the long term. And so, yeah, I think it's a principle that I've kept as a North Star and as a litmus test for how we're doing in the market, for sure.

Callan Harrington 20:24
Because referrals can oftentimes be out of your control. Do you have a process for how you continue to drive incremental referrals?

Katie Trauth Taylor 20:30
Yeah. So number one, we do use the Narratize Story Infuser. At Narratize, we send out the URL within our different kind of digital touchpoints with customers or with champions through social media as well. That gives us a way to capture testimonials and case studies at scale, which then go get infused into any of the thought leadership or content marketing that we're doing.

We keep in tight conversation with the people who we call champions, and we have like a specific subset of people who we see as champions, who have influence towards the markets that we care about, towards the domain areas that we want to grow in, industries we want to serve. And we make intentional relationships with those champions in a couple of ways. We do it through—we have brand ambassadors. They help share the good news about what we're building, how it's impacting their particular industry or their functional area. And we have affiliate relationships to partner and help associations and different groups get the word out.

And so those are some of the ways that we build into referrals. I think the biggest thing is really effectively communicating and remembering that that's a core audience for you. And so within our marketing system, we don't just send them the standard monthly newsletter. Our champions and brand ambassadors get special content that's meant to help them put out the good news.

And so in Narratize, you can also create things like white papers and thought leadership style articles to build upon your thought leadership. You can create social media or transform articles into social media. And so when it’s a brand ambassador or a champion, somebody who's given us a customer referral, we give them free access to Narratize. We give them activation sequences to get them pumped about it, make sure they know how to use it effectively, and then we send out specialized messaging to them to help them essentially spread the good news, whether it’s, “Hey, here's a new case study that just got published in Forbes talking about Narratize’s impact on the United Nations and all the amazing research teams across the world there. Would you share this good news with your audience?” Or, “Here’s a new customer that we just onboarded. This is the outcome that they're seeing. Would you consider looping this into a keynote that you're going to give at a conference coming up?”

So those are some of the ways. I think that's an underutilized form of marketing, and it's very social in nature, and it's how we as humans operate, right? It's in systems of trust, and if we've built trust with those champions and others within their influence trust them, then everyone is better served by the solutions that we collectively agreed to. It's kind of the same principle in academia as a peer-reviewed publication—a group of domain experts get together and validate whether a type of research is truly authoritative or not, or whether there were real weird gaps in how they did the study, whether the findings are scientifically accurate or not. The more we can create social proof, the better.

Callan Harrington 23:34
So I'd love to get in the weeds here a little bit. When I was posting a good amount of content on LinkedIn and things like that, I had a lot of companies that were reaching out to do similar things that you're referring to—help promote it. I signed some affiliate agreements with a number of them, but it got to the point where I got so many of these that, like, I couldn’t sift through the noise or really know who to partner with, who not to partner with. I mean, I knew some of these tools I had used firsthand when I was a VP of sales, but a number of them I hadn’t used either in a long time, or there were new things coming out. Maybe we’d helped implement this on clients, but I wasn’t personally a user of them. So like getting into the weeds—are they incentivized through a percentage of the sale, or are they just doing this kind of out of the goodness of their heart, right? I'd love to talk about how you maximize those because I think a lot of people want to do this but don’t know how to do it, yeah?

Katie Trauth Taylor 24:30
Yeah, or it just kind of sits in an inbox, right? And it creates clutter for us because there's too much responsibility. I mean, I think it’s a fair “New Yorker style” question: “What’s in it for me? How do you create good incentives for people?” The number one, right? Is like, you look at the way something like ChatGPT took the world by storm, and I don't think we talked about this part of my story, but three years ago, our team was tapped by OpenAI, and we became one of their first seven developer ambassadors. This was about a year before ChatGPT was launched, so we were working with GPT large language models for quite a long time before they were out in the marketplace and so known by everyone.

It grew the way it grew because people were so excited about what it could offer them that they couldn’t not talk about it. That's the number one goal. If you can create an experience that is so life-giving, that is so transformative, that it just naturally sparks that kind of, “I have to tell someone about this.” That's your goal. It's not your goal to say, “I’m going to pay you to go promote my product.” The goal should be, “No, truly, I recommend this because it's changing my work dramatically.”

So I think that's always the North Star. And we do have several brand ambassadors with Narratize who are naturally incentivized to spread the good news because they've had those kinds of experiences in the platform.

Now, is it super smart to look into affiliate marketing structures and to give influencers a percent of sales, or associations a percent of sales to use their unique affiliate link, so that the traditional approach is, “Check out the link in my description box below, and you'll get a discount, plus I get some referral fee for you buying it”? Like, that's how influencer marketing works. It's proven to work, and so I think structures like that are super helpful with reaching new markets and using relationships with influential individuals or organizations or associations to help push that forward.

But I still think the Holy Grail, and what every team should really strive for, is the first—it’s just that natural sense of like, this experience created such an impact on me that I want to be able to share it and refer. And then put monetary incentives there where that makes business sense on both sides.

Callan Harrington 25:56
Do you do anything else, like create communities, whether that's exclusive dinners at a conference, things like that?

Katie Trauth Taylor 26:00
Those strategies are wildly smart. So one thing that we do that's similar to that is we have kind of a—I won’t call it a secret society, but it kind of operates as such. It’s essentially think tanks. We handpick certain very high-level innovation leaders across the Fortune 500 and across very mature startups, and we invite them together into sort of intimate listening sessions or roundtable conversations about their use of generative AI, their implementation practices, where they’re finding limitations, challenges, and where they want to see it grow. And those conversations fuel our product roadmap. They inform our go-to-market team on what the market is currently experiencing. And the people who choose to join, they elevate their professional network and their reach by nature of being part of those conversations.

Plus, those conversations are intimate—they enable you to be vulnerable and to open up within respect for privacy, and that’s always the kind of way you start that type of dialogue. But yeah, pulling people together from incredible brands that maybe are in different industries and not directly competing and inviting them to share best practices, I think, will always drive innovation forward, and it will always create smart professional incentives for people to build those relationships, to really grow their professional impact.

Callan Harrington 27:07
Yeah, I mean, I think those small group events are probably one of the most effective things going on in enterprise go-to-market right now, and they've been catching on like crazy for a while. But I think people are craving that, whether it’s virtual or in person, just kind of that little bit deeper human connection.

Katie Trauth Taylor 27:22
I just thought of a really nerdy one too, that you will love if you love this. I’ve been a part of something called the Serendipity Salon. Have you heard of this?

Callan Harrington 27:30
I host a Jeffersonian dinner, so I am familiar with the salon dinners, but I’d love to hear kind of the setup for it.

Katie Trauth Taylor 27:36
I first did this in Dubai, so it felt very, very exciting.

Callan Harrington 27:41
Yeah, I’ve never done one in Dubai.

Katie Trauth Taylor 27:42
I’ve done this now in Dubai, Boston, Montreal, and Cincinnati, and the idea is you create moments of intentional serendipity. Basically, what it means is you invite folks together who have powerful influence over innovation or who are just, like, brilliant leaders—or really, anybody off the street, doesn’t always have to be an exclusive type deal—but you invite folks into a shared space and a shared time. And the goal is to do futuring work together, to share, like, big picture, “Where is society going? Where is innovation going? Where are certain technical domains going?” and to have good food and to not make it really super structured.

So the one that I did in Dubai, it was truly like six people from all around the world who had different types of influence. Like, it was a crazy mix of people. But the point was, we just discussed the future together and had a delicious, nice meal together. And you just see where those sparks might fly later, and now there’s all kinds of interesting through-lines in our professional journeys and lives where there's collaboration happening or partnership happening just because we kind of took that chance and said yes to that dinner.

So fast forward, I was in Montreal for the AI World Summit there, and there were very, very few women at that event. But in a huge networking hall, we all started gravitating toward one another, and I just randomly said to this group of like 20 women, “Hey, you guys want to do a Serendipity Salon? Let’s go to dinner.” And like, 60% of them said yes. And so we ended up with this, like, 16-person dinner, everybody sharing their stories. And I don’t know who’s doing what from a business perspective that came out of that, but what I know was we made that time for the intent to be able to support or spark collaboration in the future. So, cool concept—Serendipity Salon.

Callan Harrington 29:23
I think that’s excellent. And yeah, I’ve been hosting the Jeffersonian dinner for a few months.

Katie Trauth Taylor 29:29
What is this? I don’t know what that is.

Callan Harrington 29:31
I think they're fairly interchangeable. The Jeffersonian dinner concept is essentially, you do have a theme. And so this one is with a group of CEOs in Columbus, and some of the themes have been strategic planning and strategic goal accountability, things like that. Some have been hiring in a tough market, and everyone's kind of going around. And first, everyone shares, like, a personal story. I create the icebreaker question—it’s something that’s around the theme. Everyone goes around, shares that story, and then you bring it back to that theme specifically. And you're talking about that theme, that way somebody could see, like, “Am I actually interested in this theme? Am I not? Am I going to go to this?”

Small groups, eight to twelve people is ideal, and it's one conversation. The only rule is you can't speak to the person next to you. If you're going to say something, it has to be to the whole table. You could do it at a rectangle table, but having it at a round table is the best.

Katie Trauth Taylor 30:30
Very cool. Yeah, I think, you know, you've got to build deep relationships with the people that you're in business with, or that you want to be in business with. And then also, sometimes taking off any pressure to have to know today what the outcome is, and instead making it more about serendipity is pretty fun too.

Callan Harrington 30:45
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to touch on something that you mentioned. You’re at this AI conference. There’s only a handful of other women that were at this conference, and you all kind of gravitated to each other. And you talk about this a lot, about the challenges of being a female founder in AI specifically. Can you walk us through that? And why do you think that this is so much more pronounced in AI? I know the numbers are low across the board for venture-backed female founders, but why do you think this is the way it is in AI specifically?

Katie Trauth Taylor 31:15
Yeah, so Narratize is fully female-founded. Our three co-founders are all women, and that makes us part of a 0.3%—so 0.3% of venture capital in AI goes to female founders. Looking at venture more broadly, it’s 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. So, yeah, it’s abysmally worse in AI. I still, most times, am the only woman in the room. To your point, I don’t know why there are fewer women who get PhDs in computer science and AI and data science, and so obviously girls going into STEM disciplines is something that we all should be passionate about. I have two daughters. I passionately instill this in them, that they are just as primed to do it as their brothers, and I encourage my sons to know that as well.

It’s a tough statistic. So fewer women go into STEM—that’s part of it. So it’s a systemic problem, really. But for me personally, it was in the early days much harder to raise venture capital—much more vetting that I had to go through as I watched other male counterparts raise faster on less customer base, less revenue, less product, whatever. And it is what it is. I think there’s not a lot of value that comes from dwelling in a disadvantage, but I do think that diversity fuels the right use cases and the right outcomes for technology.

So I feel passionately that diverse founders should be funded just as appropriately and just as equally as any other type of founder, specifically because that type of diverse thinking actually will enable you to move faster in the market—not just because it’s going to make the world a better place and a more equitable place, but because it’s literally going to make the investors more money. And that’s just proven. Female founders return more money to investors than male founders.

And so it’s been important to my journey to sort of understand the statistic that I’m working in and be able to work through it. And it’s not something that I can tell you, Callan, that I’ve figured out and that I can live easily with. I still leave some rooms—whether it’s a customer opportunity or an investor room—wondering in the back of my mind, “Is it my gender that’s playing a role in this?” But I try not to dwell in that type of thinking. It’s not very productive. Instead, it just needs to be... I’ll put it this way, I had another female founder friend say to me along the journey—felt like she grabbed me by the shoulders, and she just said, “Katie, if we don’t do this, who the fuck will?” So suck it up. Like, it’s gonna be hard. You’re gonna be alone. But if we don’t do it, who will set that standard for our daughters and for the future generations?

So in those really weird, tough moments where I feel like there’s no other interpretation besides some kind of weird gender bias, I say that to myself, and then I move on, and I try to find the next logical solution or opportunity to persevere through it.

Callan Harrington 35:00
When you started raising capital—and obviously you’ve had a good amount of success, you look at your website, I mean, you've got very large clients: Nvidia, Comcast, Boeing, you’ve got very large enterprise clients, and you’re early to Narratize for all intents and purposes—I’m curious, when you first started raising capital to where you are now, and I heard you just say like, even to this day, you still walk out of a room and have some of these thoughts. How has it changed or not changed, from when you were first raising capital to this business, to how you approach raising capital now?

Katie Trauth Taylor 35:30
I think any first-time founder is going to struggle to raise capital. It’s just—VC is a system based on trust. And so if you’re a proven founder, if you’ve exited a startup before, it's your second time around, you’re going to raise 20 times faster than anybody else. It's just kind of how the system is designed to work, and I respect and understand that.

I think the biggest difference, right—I was a first-time founder, so I already had to learn the rhetoric of VC. What matters to them today. There’s so much more awareness than even just three years ago. One of the statistics and the commitment to making those statistics better for diverse founders. So I think there’s growing awareness there. I would say half of our investors actually have something in their thesis related to being intentionally designed to fund women to help change that statistic for the better—probably about half of ours. So I found the people who care about that, who want to make that change. The other half of our investors are AI-focused, and so that’s a fantastic fit as well.

There’s a book that just came out about a year ago called Founder vs. Investor. It’s fantastic. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in raising capital, has already raised capital, will continue to raise capital—anyone who wants to become an investor. I'm one of them. I want to be a VC one day. And I love the book because it plays on a dynamic between the two and kind of helps you see, as a founder, what an investor is thinking, and as an investor, what a founder has to be thinking about. And so I think there’s more awareness today, and it’s growing and changing, and I definitely recommend that book.

Callan Harrington 37:00
Yeah, it sounds super interesting. And it is. It’s funny when you talk to investors, and a lot of times, it’s like they're pushing on us extremely hard. The reality is their LPs are pushing on them very hard. Like, they have to show a return, and that’s what shuts their businesses down when that doesn’t happen. So yeah, no, that sounds excellent. I have not read that, but it sounds so good.

Katie Trauth Taylor 37:30
That’s the exact dynamic. It’s really about empathetically understanding both perspectives.

Callan Harrington 37:33
Yeah, absolutely. So, Narratize has been a big success. As I mentioned, you’ve got great clients, you’ve got great case studies. What comes next?

Katie Trauth Taylor 37:42
Yeah, first of all, I’ll say we launched Narratize for founders, Narratize for innovators. You can just go to Narratize.com/teams and check it out for free. That is new as of the start of Q3 of this year, and honestly, it's been awesome to see how many founding teams are using it to build pitch decks, to build content marketing for their startups. We see a lot of founders in the scientific, technical, or medical spaces adopting Narratize because it's uniquely designed for complex types of storytelling. And so that's been cool, right?

Like, to your point, we've been fully enterprise-focused since our founding. We came out of stealth after our first proof of concepts were with Boeing and NASA—that was this time last year. And so I spent the first nine months in market over the last year, only being able to say to people at conferences, "If you're a huge enterprise, come talk to us." And starting Q3, we finally decided to open up the PLG (product-led growth) motion and let folks in the door at the individual or the team level, and that's been a blessing. It's been awesome just to see how that's creating more funding, creating more traction for innovation teams, no matter how big or small they are. So it's been awesome to be able to get to that stage in our growth, where we can kind of go hybrid in our go-to-market and not only focus on enterprise or only focus on product-led growth, but achieve that mix.

And so the thing that's next is—one, that exciting announcement, right? Being able to serve teams is so great. I think it continues the threads that we've been talking about through this whole conversation, right? Being able to spark virality and spark adoption and excitement for the product across a much broader scale. I think also in the enterprise level, what's next for AI is going to move far beyond the ability to just return a productivity gain for documentation.

So today, again, Narratize is designed to prompt a user to share their insights, and then the AI generates things like very complex technical documentation, reporting, presentations. It's well-loved by product teams, so things like product innovation, product development, product management teams who need to be able to streamline workflows, like a requirements document or the ability to articulate a proposed path for a new project. So it's used in a lot of project and product management, and today we’re seeing a 20x value on the productivity that those professionals get by using Narratize because of the unique way that we designed this AI to prompt you. Though it's actually capturing richer insights than any other AI platform.

So the bigger picture, next step for Narratize and for our customers is to be able to enable them to learn from and grow from the tacit knowledge that their people are sharing safely and securely within their unique instance of the platform. Essentially, for the AI to learn and grow from your people's best insights—imagine how much faster you'll be able to outpace competitors when your AI is not just absorbing people’s requests for simple tasks, like "Hey, summarize this email," or "Hey, make this list more organized." Instead, the AI is prompting you to share insights, and that creates a rich source of tacit knowledge that can really spark a deeper level of innovation.

And so I think that's the North Star, the next big horizon, and the next big technical challenge that we're going to take on at Narratize—being able to securely and privately enable an enterprise to not just work with and retrieve the right piece of knowledge within an output from the AI, but actually enable the AI to learn and grow from the insights that it's inspiring their people to share.

Callan Harrington 40:45
That sounds super, super interesting. Katie, last question I have for you is, if you could have a conversation with your younger self—age totally up to you—what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Katie Trauth Taylor 40:56
Oh gosh. So, when I was in the fifth grade, my fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky was, like, super innovative, and she signed us up for the Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneur Invention Society competition. We had to create an invention and make, like, one of those, like, three-fold posters that you have at every science fair.

Callan Harrington 41:15
Absolutely.

Katie Trauth Taylor 41:16
Of course, like, make one of those. I had to write a business plan, and I took it super seriously, and I ended up, like, winning for my school, and then, like, winning the state of Kentucky. And then they, like, flew me on an airplane to Kansas City. I felt like it was so cool. And I think there was, like, this momentum for me at a really young age to be an entrepreneur, and to know that I could lead in that way.

And then I think I spent a good decade after that kind of going other paths and kind of getting distracted by other paths, to be honest. And I think if I could go back to my fifth-grade self, I’d be like, “That's your thing,” like it really is, and lean into it and stick to it. I think I would have told my younger self, like, “Hey, actually, that fire you felt? That's for real, and that's gonna be your thing as you get older. It’s okay to just lean into it.”

So, I don’t know if anyone can relate to that kind of moment looking back in your childhood to be able to just, like, encourage yourself to focus.

Callan Harrington 42:16
Oh, 100%. I grew up in Toledo Public Schools, and so there wasn’t a lot of those entrepreneurs that were just kind of going out and starting businesses. So I do know exactly what you're saying. I thought it was—you get into a company, and you just work your way up, and that's how you become successful. So yeah, I hear that to the T.

Also, I'll tell you what I thought you were almost going to say there was, “When I built that trifold in fifth grade, that was actually Narratize.”

Katie Trauth Taylor 42:42
No, do you know what it was? Though it exists today. I called it the "electronic push-button menu," and it was meant for, like, fast-food restaurants, so that people who were hearing-impaired or who didn't want to talk to a person could push a button to order their food. And now you can do it in every McDonald's.

Callan Harrington 43:02
Yeah, okay, I'm not surprised you have a PhD because there's no way in hell I would have thought of that idea in fifth grade.

Katie Trauth Taylor 43:10
I think my mom helped me. I’m gonna give her full credit for this idea. I think my mom is like a closet innovator—like, ultrasound tech her whole life, worked so hard for us, but she’s that person who’s like, “Man, wouldn’t it be great to pay at the pump?” And then, like, five years later, we’re all swiping our credit cards at the gas station pump. That’s just her, and I'd give her credit for probably that actual idea that I did write that business plan on.

Callan Harrington 43:34
I love it. I love it. There’s a very cheesy commercial I had to do, like, with my dad holding a shaky camera.

Katie Trauth Taylor 43:43
I love it.

Callan Harrington 43:44
Katie, this has been a ton of fun. Thank you for coming.

Katie Trauth Taylor 43:48
Thank you, super fun. Thanks for all of the amazing conversation.

Callan Harrington 43:53
I hope you enjoyed Katie and I’s conversation. I loved hearing about Katie’s salon dinners, and I think that they are a great way to build an excellent network. If you want to learn more about Katie, you can find her on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you like this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.