A biotech or SaaS company wants to be seen as an AI company. A health company wants to be seen as a tech company. Some have earned the label. Many are chasing a valuation multiple, knowing capital flows to whoever carries the tag. We’ve seen this script before. During the dot-com boom, adding “.com” to a corporate name could trigger a speculative surge. A decade later, companies rushed to rebrand around blockchain.

I run a communications firm. Narrative can change how people see a business, but it can’t fix the fundamentals.

Investors, employees, and reporters invest in stories, especially concerning frontier technology. When a company is building something that won’t exist for years, it can’t point to a finished product. It has to give people reasons to believe. Jensen Huang positioned NVIDIA not as a graphics card maker for gamers, but as an AI computing company years before ChatGPT made AI a household word. NVIDIA’s story ran years ahead of the market, and the company built fast enough to catch it.

Your story can run ahead of your business. That is what vision is for. But it can’t run ahead forever. A good story sets expectations. If the business doesn’t hit the expectation, however, the market responds in many ways: a fall-from-grace headline, a disengaged investor, or a stalled deal.

” Opportunity and disaster both live there. How long you can stay in the gap depends on how many people are watching.

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