Startups that work on the hardest, most important problems often fall into the easiest trap: abstraction. We build resilience. We power the future. We transform industrial operations. These slogans might look good in a pitch deck, but they don’t truly stick. They don’t make people feel it. And they certainly don’t rally support.
The author Tim O’Brien spotted the same failure in how people write about war. “War is hell” might be accurate, but it’s too clean, too distant for people to really grasp the essence of the statement. In O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, truth lives in the particulars — the crack of tracer rounds at night, the way they unspool through the dark like red ribbons. A real story doesn’t generalize and force you to think with your head; a real story makes you feel the truth in your gut.
That’s the standard for American Dynamism companies, where the stakes are existential and complexity won’t fit neatly inside a buzzword. Customers, engineers, and regulators don’t want puffery or sales talk. They want stories that feel real, that acknowledge the complexities they navigate every day, and that measure importance in human terms. This is hard work — and it matters.
If you’re building in a mission-driven domain, O’Brien’s question becomes yours: are you echoing a slogan, or telling a true American Dynamism story? Here are some tips from Tim to help guide you.
Tell the Truth
O’Brien states that the gut only believes stories rooted in detail. The same is true for startups. Generalizations and slogans may sound polished, but they don’t move people.
The answer isn’t more words. It’s the right words. Abstractions like “we’re rebuilding the defense industrial base” try to say everything but end up meaning nothing. A few precise words carry more weight than a paragraph of jargon. Consider the difference between “we provide resilient connectivity” and “the signal always gets through.” One is vague. The other you feel immediately.
The strongest brands don’t hide behind buzzwords. They build their story on purpose and tangible outcomes. What matters isn’t how something works, but what it makes possible. This is the real truth.
Base Power doesn’t market “better batteries.” They promise to “cut your costs, not your power.” Immediately, you know the scenario. Palantir built its brand less on “big data” features than on gripping stories — counter-IED missions, pandemic response, even hints that its platform helped track down Osama bin Laden. And the strongest truth often isn’t in words at all. SpaceX barely needs them — the roar of a launch and a booster landing say more than enough. Seeing is believing.
Details and purpose are risky — they force you to show what your product actually does and why it matters. But that is what creates belief. They show you understand the lived environment of your customers, not just the market category or the unit economics. They can make the difference between a slogan and a story.
“Truth” in this context doesn’t always mean “fact.” As O’Brien notes, a true war story might not be factually precise, but it can still reveal a deeper truth. The same is true for startups: you should never lie about capabilities, but you can share vivid, realistic scenarios that show what the future could be. When you strike that balance, the reaction is unmistakable: someone nodding and saying, “I see it. I believe it. Let’s make it happen.”
Embrace Contradiction
O’Brien writes that war is both grotesque and beautiful. That paradox is core to what makes a true war story believable — tracer fire is terrifying and mesmerizing all at once. It refuses to resolve neatly, and that’s what makes it real.
Some would rather bury complex realities or dismiss them as uncomfortable distractions. For serious companies, they’re unavoidable. Palantir acknowledges that their software both “saves and takes lives.” SpaceX inspires the world with dreams of Mars, “get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness” — while also becoming one of the Pentagon’s most indispensable defense contractors.
The best companies don’t run from apparent contradictions. They own them. This is the tension that real people live with every day.
Anduril’s “Don’t Work at Anduril” campaign nails this. The visuals are sleek, but the message is blunt: hard problems, hard mode, in the field. It works as both a recruiting filter and a brand statement, celebrating gorgeous engineering while owning the muddy-boots reality of deployment. SpaceX takes the same approach in its own way — pairing an incredible launch record with highlight reels of fiery crashes and livestreamed test explosions. At SpaceX, the “failures” are celebrated. The contradiction isn’t something to hide; it’s the hook. That tension is precisely what makes the story compelling
Don’t smooth over the edges; complexity is credibility. Show it off. Investors, customers, and future teammates don’t want fairy tales; they want proof you see the world as it really is. Because that’s the world we all have to operate in.
Bear Witness
The most unforgettable scene in O’Brien’s writing isn’t about weapons or military tactics, but a character’s grief over a fallen friend. A true war story, O’Brien argues, is never really about war, but everything else.
The same principle applies to the biggest problems of our time. What matters isn’t the spec sheet, but the people who depend on those specs — a parent keeping medicine cold during a blackout, a logistics officer moving supplies across contested terrain. People don’t experience “grid resiliency” or “latency reduction.” They experience a substation that holds through a heatwave, or comms that last long enough to call for help.
That’s why the best companies build their marketing around people and the things they carry. Flock Safety doesn’t market itself as “better automated license plate readers.” It tells stories about communities made safer. Even SpaceX, with unmatched technical credibility, doesn’t lead with thrust or payload. It celebrates astronauts coming home, and remote villages connected.
Truly great companies don’t just talk about what they make possible. They bear witness to what’s at stake. What could be lost; what could be gained; and why it matters — in human terms. That’s how American Dynamism companies earn trust, build momentum, and convince the brightest people who could probably work anywhere to take on challenging, dirty problems for (often) lower salary. Because it’s worth it.
The most important work can’t be reduced to an abstraction. American Dynamism sectors are too consequential and too complex for platitudes to carry the weight. Tim O’Brien’s lesson is that the most powerful storytelling makes the message vivid in concrete detail, in the contradictions customers actually live with, and in the people whose lives are shaped by it.
That is the challenge and opportunity for founders in these domains: to tell not a slogan, but a true story. Few have the privilege of working on missions of this scale and consequence. In American Dynamism, belief is won not in the head but in the gut — and only real truth makes it stick.
