The New Currency is Narrative Liquidity

In an era where attention moves faster than capital, the real question is this: do you have a story liquid enough to compound, or one sitting idle in your head?

We are living in a market where things shift faster than most people can track. Pricing that used to change every 12 months is now getting reevaluated every 90 days. Entire categories get disrupted not over decades but in quarters.

In this environment, you can have the best technology, the sharpest strategy, and the strongest backers, but if you cannot tell your story in a way that cuts through the noise, you will get left behind.

Narrative has always mattered in business. What is new is the velocity. Stories no longer just explain a company. They move markets. They attract talent. They drive customer adoption. They shape fundraising outcomes. In this environment, narrative liquidity is as real a currency as capital.

What is narrative liquidity?

When I talk about narrative liquidity, I mean the ability of a firm, a founder, or even a fund manager to put their story into the market and have it circulate with impact.

Just as financial liquidity measures how easily you can turn an asset into cash, narrative liquidity is about how easily you can turn a story into momentum.

This is not hype. Hype burns fast. Narrative liquidity is different. It is about having a story that is authentic enough, clear enough, and resonant enough that it gets repeated, shared, and reinforced in rooms where you are not present.

A dollar that sits idle in the bank does not compound. Neither does a story that only lives in your head. Narrative liquidity is what happens when your story is circulating, when it is earning interest in the conversations of customers, investors, employees, strategic partners, and competitors.

Why it matters now

Markets have always been noisy, but right now the noise is deafening. Everyone has a microphone. Everyone is posting, recording, publishing, and broadcasting. The volume is up, but the shelf life of attention is down.

That is why narrative has become an asset class of its own. The people who understand that are building a durable advantage.

Take a look at The Founder Box, launched by Katie Tarbox. The whole premise is pairing founders directly with journalists to sharpen and distribute their stories. That used to be the job of a PR agency after you raised capital. Now it is part of the startup tool stack, because founders know the right story at the right time can change their trajectory more than another feature release.

Or look at the post from Matt Shoss of Dragonfruit Ventures. He is 22 years old, running a fund with an average GP age of 24. In his words, “momentum is king.” He calls out that founders today are building in public, going viral on TikTok, and raising capital from their audiences. Meanwhile, most of the venture is still relying on pitch decks and handshakes, as if it were 2005.

Here is the kicker: one of the comments on his post came from a fund-of-funds manager offering to make an allocation. Why? Because the edge of narrative liquidity resonated. LPs are rewarding narrative-first strategies, not just founders.

Authenticity as the differentiator

Everyone can tell a story. Everyone is telling stories. The only ones that travel, the only ones that build liquidity, are the ones that are authentic.

Authenticity is not about being casual. It is about being aligned. Your narrative must align with your purpose, product, and operational approach. When those things are aligned, the story compounds. When they are not, it collapses.

I wrestle with this myself. It is tempting to look at Sequoia’s blog or a16z content library and say, “I need to sound like that.” But if I try to be a weak copy of Sequoia, no one will buy it. Founders will not. LPs will not. They will just go to Sequoia or a16z.

What makes Stresswood resonate is different. It is rooted in resilient operators who carry the weight inside companies. It is rooted in the networks I have spent years building across worlds that rarely overlap. It is rooted in my own story, the son of a pastor and a teacher, raised in the South, educated at some of the best universities, still driven to connect dots others do not see. That is my narrative. That is what makes it liquid.

Story as strategy

At Stresswood, one of our pillars is “Storytelling as Strategy.” I believe the best investors in this next era will not just be capital allocators. They will be narrative allocators. They will know how to identify a story before it becomes obvious. They will know how to amplify it at the right time through intentional connections. They will know how to help founders and portfolio companies translate their authenticity into narrative liquidity.

The same is true for fund managers. In a fundraising market where LPs are taking longer to make decisions and have more choices than ever, you cannot rely on a deck. You have to build a narrative that moves through the LP ecosystem. You have to cultivate it like an asset.

And the same is true for founders. You can hire engineers and cut burn, but if you cannot inspire talent, customers, and investors with your story, you will not make it through the turbulence.

This is why you are seeing so many edited video announcements around fundraising announcements. Founders and firms want to own the narrative.

The challenge and the opportunity

The challenge is that this is not easy. Narrative liquidity cannot be faked. People can smell a copycat from across the room.

The opportunity is that when you get it right, it compounds. A strong narrative earns you the benefit of the doubt. It gives you a seat at tables you might not otherwise reach. It keeps your company or your fund in the conversation even when markets are brutal.

That is why I tell founders, LPs, and GPs the same thing: stop treating story as an afterthought. Treat it like a line item. Build it into your strategy. Rehearse it. Test it. Refine it. And above all, make sure it is aligned with who you really are.

Because in a market moving this fast, capital alone will not save you. Technology alone will not save you. Strategy alone will not save you.

The firms, founders, and allocators who win will be the ones who master narrative liquidity.

We have automated the mundane. We have optimized the process. But the scarce currency now is an authentic story.

So here is the real question: Is your story liquid enough to compound, or is it sitting idle in your head?

Earnest