Have you ever spent 45 minutes writing a LinkedIn post, hit publish, watched it get 9 likes from your team… and wondered why no one else cared?
Meanwhile, the investors, hires, and partners you’re trying to reach scrolled right past it.
I’ve ghostwritten for 20+ climate tech founders. And the #1 problem I fix in every single draft isn’t bad ideas or wrong topics.
It’s posts that make a smart investor think “I’ll come back to this later,” and they never do.
“Our proprietary bio-based polymer formulation provides a functionally equivalent alternative to petroleum-based packaging substrates.”
Vs.
“We make packaging from farm waste instead of oil. It’s just as strong.”
Same founder. Same breakthrough. But only one version gets shared by the VC who could lead your next round.
Why Hemingway
The fix is based on Ernest Hemingway’s approach to writing. He built an entire legacy on one principle: say more with less. Short sentences. Active verbs. No hiding behind jargon. His prose was so clear a teenager could read it, and so sharp that literature professors still study it a century later.
That same principle is the single biggest unlock for climate tech founders on LinkedIn.
The 5 Hemingway rules for LinkedIn
Kill adverbs. Use active voice. Shorten sentences. Replace jargon. One idea per sentence.
Apply those five rules to any draft and you turn a sentence a VC saves for later into one they actually read and forward. Take the packaging example above: the second version follows every rule, and it’s the one that travels.
The point isn’t to dumb your work down. It’s to make the breakthrough impossible to misread. Across solar, water tech, sustainable packaging, energy efficiency, and alt proteins, the before-and-after is always the same. The clear version is the one that gets shared.
The free Hemingway App highlights what’s wrong: the adverbs, the passive voice, the sentences that run too long. That alone is worth a pass on every draft before you hit publish.