Will Richards: Why I'm joining Encour
Will is the co-founder of Overnight Success, and was previously the HO Investments at the Regional Investment Network and CEO of Startup Speakers. He has joined Encour as our first Senior Associate.
Today I’m excited to share that I’m joining Encour - a strategic communications agency founded by Jessy Wu. As part of the team, I’m excited to be helping companies and their leaders to command their narratives.
Over the past few years, I’ve been involved in the Australian tech ecosystem in several capacities - as a founder, investor, and operator. I helped to launch Startup Speakers, a speaking bureau representing 35 of Australia's up-and-coming innovators. As Head of Investments for the Regional Angels network, I reviewed hundreds of investment opportunities. As the founder of Overnight Success, a weekly newsletter dedicated to covering Australian startup stories, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about startup successes - overnight and otherwise.
But until recently, I was an outsider to the entire world of tech and startups. At University, I was enrolled in an Engineering and Industrial Design degree. It sounded great on paper - I thought maybe I would end up working for a Formula One team and feature in cameos on Drive to Survive. But I lost my love for Engineering halfway through Engineering Maths B, and ended up spending much more time on industrial design projects. This is where I fell in love with the process of creating something from nothing.
I even submitted one of my industrial design projects to the University’s accelerator program. I thought I was a shoo-in - I had interviewed users, designed and built a prototype, and put together a shmick looking pitch deck! Besides, I figured that since I had paid $40,000 for my degree, they’d have to accept me…
They didn’t.
And that’s when my fixation with the Australian startup ecosystem began. Who got to decide which ideas got funded and which got rejected? Who were these kingmakers - who wielded millions of dollars and decided which startups survived or died? Who are the founders whose companies are chosen to change the world? How could I meet them? How could I become them?
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” — Milton Berle
I’d worked while completing my University degree. I had some experience at a private equity firm focused on investing in childcare centers, and a brief stint in enterprise sales. Combined with my industrial design degree, my CV was hardly geared towards a job in tech. Nonetheless, I was determined to break in.
The problem was, I wasn’t known from a bar of soap.
In life, the front door isn’t always open. Sometimes you don’t have a key and you don’t know the doorman.
So I decided to build a side door.
As I was coming up to speed on the machinations of the Australian startup sector, I noticed a gap in the market for a weekly round-up of startup news - capital raising, product launches, and other notable developments. I had a hunch that everyone in and around startups was too busy to stay on top of all the disparate pieces of news, published across 10 different publications. No one was aggregating the content, providing context, and adding commentary.
And so I came up with the idea for Overnight Success. For the last two years, alongside Gemma Clancy, I’ve produced a weekly newsletter aggregating and adding context to all the startup news in Australia. This weekend, we sent our latest edition to over 4000 subscribers. This year, we also launched a podcast with the Dayone network - called Startup Retro.
Overnight Success became my side door. And after a few months, it started to open…
In a way, I had written myself into the story. Building this media organization taught me that in the startup ecosystem, everything is constituted and propelled by the stories we tell. And after one year of writing Overnight Success, I could tell a credible story about myself - as someone who was knowledgeable about tech and startups, who had a strong work ethic, and could competently string together a few sentences.
My ‘side door’ opened up an opportunity to lead investments at the Regional Angel network, and then another opportunity to launch Startup Speakers and assemble a great starting lineup of industry leaders.
"Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form." - Jean Luc Godard
The stories we tell about ourselves, and that other people retell, open doors. When I was an investor, engaging narratives helped me to understand complex problems and realise what was at stake. As a leader, clear communication has helped me to attract co-founders, rally volunteers, and grow our following to thousands of subscribers.
Everyone knows storytelling is important, but for early-stage companies, it often falls to the wayside. On the important/urgent matrix, storytelling falls into the ‘important but not urgent’ square. It sits on the to-do list, but never gets done.
I’m a firm believer that commanding your narrative should be one of the first big items for founders to check off their to-do lists, because it makes every subsequent challenge easier - recruiting the right people, raising capital, or winning customers. The right story acts as a beacon for your tribe.
“We often do what we call a ‘Campfire Test,’ which is where we strip the songs back to just guitar and vocal again, and see if it still stands up.” - Marcus Mumford
One of my favourite bands is Mumford and Sons. The frontman Marcus Mumford talks about a ‘Campfire Test’ as a way to ensure that what they’ve recorded in the studio aren’t actually bad songs hiding behind layers of production (and three banjos).
They’d subject all songs to the Campfire Test - where they’d play a stripped back version of the song - fundamentals only. Lyrics, vocals, with just an acoustic guitar.
The Campfire Test can also be applied to storytelling. Although I’ve written thousands of words about hundreds of companies, I can only clearly recall the stories of a handful. These are the stories that pass the Campfire Test. The prize for passing is that others will retell your story for you - maybe even around a campfire.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood… Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
At the same time that legacy media struggles with declining readership, social media is filled with misinformation, and AI is generating slop at a dizzying speed. As a result, most content no longer cuts through. To become a ‘campfire story’ - your narrative must raise the stakes, rally a tribe, and awaken the soul of the reader.
Audiences no longer sit down to read the daily newspaper from cover to cover. They listen, scroll, forward, and share. They see through PR approved quotes and they call bullsh*t. They want to hear something interesting and they want to hear from leaders directly.
Encour is building a strategic communications agency for the current era - one that is daring, original, and deeply commercial. Our growing team of seven is unencumbered by previous experience in the communications industry. Instead, we bring experiences from venture capital, journalism, policy, writing novels, delivering groceries as a Milkrun rider, performing improv theatre, running 80 marathons in 79 days, and building media businesses.
We even have a quantum researcher onboard! Does quantum research prepare you for a job in communications? Yes and no.
As we found out at our recent team day, the team’s common denominator is that we’re collaborative, creative, and experimental. To use a Dungeons and Dragons framework, there are more Chaotic aligned team members than there are Lawful ones. I’m excited to work with this team to help companies discover and distill their campfire stories - and then amplify these stories for everyone to hear.
Moreover, Encour’s mission is also to support a functional, trustworthy, and sustainable fourth estate. So I’m excited to continue working on Overnight Success and will be launching a new publication soon.
After a month-long work trial, I’m happy to be writing my first entry into the Encour lore.
I’ll continue to be based on Melbourne, but will be in Sydney more frequently. I would love to hear from you on my new email.
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