Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable. What reporters want is a classic "founder story," a highly developed art form that isn't taught in English Literature classes. The archetypal founder story goes like this:

I was doing something romantically appealing to my target market. As I reached the peak of achievement, I had an inspiration: make a product people will like.

In generic form it sounds completely fatuous, but consider the following real example of the genre meant to wash right over an uncritical reader:

A former bakery owner and professional bicyclist, he was choking down PowerBars for energy in the middle of a daylong 175-mile ride. "I couldn't make the last one go down, and that's when I had an epiphany -- make a product that actually tasted good."

Gary Erickson, founder and CEO of Clif Bar.
Quoted in Fortune Small Business, October 2003

This is a very carefully crafted story. It has the simplicity, economy, and punch of a Reader's Digest anecdote. Some talented marketers probably spent hundreds of hours polishing it. Each of the 45 words it contains pulls its weight. Notice in it the three key elements of a founding story:

• A quest which is romantically appealing to the target market,
• An epiphany,
• A trivial and obvious idea claimed as original.

The quest is necessary to set the stage for an epiphany. You can't just say, "I was sitting around the house in my underwear trying to think of a business to start, and decided to make a food product that tastes good." The particular quest here is carefully chosen to appeal to the company's target market. It would be ineffective to say, "I had been slaving away on my food science dissertation for months. I had finally finished the last edit, when I had an epiphany..." It needs to be the same sort of activity that the target market dreams of doing.

After setting the stage, the story delivers the punch line. The trivial, obvious idea presented as novel, original, and ingenious. Make food that tastes good. If the idea was an epiphany for him, I'm just glad I never ate at his bakery. But the more trivial and obvious the idea is, the better the story sounds. Ideas like "make food that tastes good," or "write software that's powerful yet easy to use," or "design clothes that make people look their best," are powerful positive messages. And the implicit negative message about the competition stays in the reader's mind too.

Presumably, Erickson has done clever things to make his product successful. The true big idea is something along the lines of, "make energy bars out of rice, soy and oats with cane juice flavoring instead of refined sugar, put pictures of athletes on them and sell them in sporting goods shops instead of supermarkets." That was a winning combination and he deserves wealth for having made it work. But it sure doesn't read well.