Stories change.
There comes a time in every company's journey when the story needs rewriting. Perhaps you’re entering a new market, or launching a new product, or realizing the new customers aren't quite like the old ones.
You can feel when it happens. Customers’ eyes glaze over. Content underperforms. You find yourself asking:
“How do we explain what we do?”
In that moment, it helps to have someone close by. Someone who doesn't have the curse of knowledge that comes with overfamiliarity. Someone who sees the business anew, as it is today. An outsider who is excitable, curious, and most of all, honest.
I am that person for founders. A narrative consigliere.
I work with founders on positioning: how to craft an image of your company in the reader's mind.
E-mail me: jon@fortyiq.com
Selected work
What I do
I run 4–6 week positioning sprints with a “no homework” approach. I need 90 minutes of the founder-CEO's time, and 60 minutes from 2 other people with different opinions on the story.
After those first discovery interviews, I deliver two things:
- The Hidden Story: the most colloquial, memorable version of the narrative. The story you can recount leaned up against the bar at the conference Hilton after a glass or two of mediocre chardonnay.
- The Brand Canon: a copy-paste-ready guide to writing about your company across every surface. What category are you winning or creating? What’s your tagline? What’s the header on your website, the first page of your pitch deck, your LinkedIn bio?
From there, teams typically choose to retain me for work on landing pages, sales decks, and manifestos. In other words, wherever words are important.
Who this is for (and who it isn’t for)
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Work with me
If this is you, e-mail me with what's working and what's not: jon@fortyiq.com.
Tweets
I enjoy posting. It's how I stay sharp on culture, virality and discourse. It’s how I know that simple concepts communicated clearly can command surprising reach:
About Jon
I’ve been a first-check venture investor, a board observer to pre-IPO enterprises, and everything in between. I live in San Francisco with my wife, Maggie, and daughter, Summer. We also spend a lot of time in New York.
Curriculum vitae:
| Yale | Bain Capital | HBS | Uniswap | Aztec Network | Asylum Ventures |
San Francisco, 2026.