In 2020, Nikola was worth about $30 billion.

It had a hydrogen truck that badly lagged the promise. The trucks weren’t ready, and the refueling network to actually run them never showed up. One of the trucks got towed to the top of a hill and rolled down for a promo video, because it couldn’t drive itself yet.

Didn’t matter. The founder was the loudest voice in the category, and for a while the loudest voice was the category.

Meanwhile the purpose-built battery-electric challengers, quieter companies like Windrose, sat mostly in the dark. Better engineering, smaller rounds, and nobody outside the industry saying their name.

You know how it ended. Nikola filed for bankruptcy in February 2025. The story finally met the hardware, and the hardware won.

The easy lesson to take from that: narrative is a con. Keep your head down, let the tech speak, stay clean.

Wrong.

How do investors actually find the startups they fund?

Mostly through their networks and the names they carry in their heads. The louder story wins because the investor already knows it before you walk in. Picture two companies in the same market, pitching the same fund.

One has genuinely better technology. Its founder is heads-down, building, silent online.

The other has weaker tech and a founder who’s spent a year telling the category’s story. On podcasts. In posts. In every room that would have him.

You’d assume the better tech just wins here.

It’s a serious fund. They do their homework. Right?

And they do. That investor runs proper diligence, digs into the tech, calls references, pulls the numbers. I’m not saying the meeting is theater.

But diligence starts from a shortlist, and the shortlist starts from the founders he already knows exist. The loud one is on it. The quiet one with the better tech often isn’t. The contest gets decided before anyone opens a data room, back at the point where the investor is just deciding who’s worth a call.

In the largest study of how VCs make decisions (885 investors across 681 firms), only about 10% of the deals a fund even considers come in cold from a founder. For every 100 deals a firm looks at, it closes roughly one.

The authors put it in a single line: "Few VC investments come from entrepreneurs who beat a path to the VC’s door without any connection."

And on the rare day the quiet founder does make the room, the loud one still got there first in a different way. He spent a year writing the version of the category that’s now sitting in the investor’s head. So the better-tech founder walks in arguing against a story he didn’t write, if he walks in at all.

What happens when a better-tech founder stays invisible?

You lose the comparison by never entering it. This is where a lot of better-tech founders live.

You’re not in the conversation. The louder one is. Your name might not even surface, and if it does, there’s nothing of yours out there to set against him.

The investor is working from a list, and you’re not on it. He never weighs your tech against his, because yours isn’t in front of him to weigh.

That’s the Nikola move, minus the fraud. You don’t have to fake a truck to win an empty room. You only have to be the one talking in it.

What changes when a better-tech founder gets visible?

The comparison finally happens. Now change one thing. You start explaining your work in public.

The investor can finally hold the two of you side by side.

And that drags the decision off charisma and onto the merits. Off "whose story do I already know" and onto "whose technology is better." That’s the ground you want to fight on.

Investors are moving this way on their own. In DocSend’s 2024 fundraising data, VCs spent 40% more time on the team slides of seed-stage decks than the year before.

You’ve got the stronger tech. You just have to make it visible enough to get into the comparison.

What if your competitor is genuinely more charismatic than you?

"But the charismatic guy is still more charismatic than me. He’ll out-talk me anyway."

Maybe. So picture the hardest case: you’re both loud. Both posting, both on podcasts, both telling the story.

Now the investor with actual expertise in your space has the two of you side by side. One of you has superior technology and is explaining it clearly. The other is riding vague charisma over a weaker product.

Any investor who knows the sector skews to you. You didn’t out-charm anyone. Your edge is the technology, and now it’s finally legible enough to see.

Visibility doesn’t beat charisma. It forces the comparison that lets your tech beat it.

What should you do when a competitor with a worse product out-raises you?

Start telling your own story, with the hardware behind it. The wrong founders figured out narrative first.

Right now, the only people telling the category’s story are often the ones whose tech can’t back it up. That’s the whole problem.

You don’t have to become Trevor Milton to fix it. You’re not faking a truck. You’ve got a better one. All you’re doing is refusing to let the weaker product be the only one with a voice.

Two 5-minute checks.

First, search your company and your closest competitor right now. Whose story does the internet already tell? If an investor did his homework before the meeting, whose version of the category would he walk in already believing?

Second, when did you last explain your actual technical edge in public, in plain language a non-expert could find? If the answer’s never, that edge can’t win a comparison that isn’t happening.

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I write one of these every Thursday: a short strategic essay on going from invisible to investable as a climate tech founder. The next one lands a week before it shows up anywhere else. Read it first, free: Climate Visibility Lab on Substack.