A new podcast by Four Pillars cofounder Matt Jones explores the power of story
Entrepreneur and Startup Daily contributor Matt Jones has launched StoryWork, a 10-episode podcast with one unifying lens – story, featuring founders, VCs, politicians and other leaders.
Jones, who’s career spanning military intelligence, political speechwriting in the UK, brand strategy in New York, and co-founding Four Pillars, the Victorian gin business that sold for around $90 million, knows that for startups with little more than an idea, story is what makes it compelling.
“Story is the most undervalued asset in business. Not marketing. Not brand. Story. The organising force that makes a strategy followable, a business fundable, and a leader worth believing in,” he said.
“It’s the reason people line up and sell out your product.”
Jones has been watching AI flood the world with content that all sounds the same – polished, plausible, and hollow – and argues it has created both a crisis and an opportunity for business leaders.
“AI is doing two things simultaneously. It is making audiences more sceptical of synthetic, faceless brand content, and making the job of leadership exponentially harder as data overwhelms and choices multiply,” he said.
“It is going to make the act of brand storytelling feel increasingly irrelevant unless leaders step up to fill the gap with something it can’t manufacture – a true story.”
What’s the story?
Jones is deliberate about what he means by story and what it isn’t.
“Story isn’t storytelling, that’s the craft layer. Story is something deeper and more structural; it’s the sum of every part of a business. Why it exists. What it believes. How it behaves when no one is watching,” he said.
“The only way to win in this environment is through the organising clarity of a great story. The leaders who succeed will be the ones who can author a story for themselves and then infect their whole business with that same conviction.”
Having led global agencies, co-founded businesses, written a book, and given hundreds of keynote addresses, he describes those formats as ways of bringing his own knowledge and experience to a room.
“The podcast however is an opportunity to unlock the knowledge and experience of others. People who’ve built something completely different, in a completely different industry,” he explains. “And to do it in real time, out loud.
“In a world where information is instantly available, there’s still something irreplaceable about watching someone think.”
StoryWork is not another podcast that interviews successful people. Every conversation is interrogated through a specific and deliberate lens of uncovering what role story played in making growth possible and what it cost when story wasn’t clear.
The result, Jones says, is a masterclass that proves the hypothesis rather than just asserting it.
Nine guests
The show’s nine guests are: fintech guru and investor Dom Pym; Main Sequence’s Phil Morle; The Daily Aus cofounder Zara Seidler; federal MP Allegra Spender, cofounder of Australia’s newest political party, Community Strong Australia; maths nerd and science communicator Adam Spencer; Scape CEO Anouk Darling; FunLab CEO Blaise Witnish; and Volvo Australia MD Stephen Connor.
The series kicks off with Jones being interviewed by 60 Minutes journalist Amelia Adams.
“My whole career has been one long lesson in the power of story. Every election won, every brand built, every business grown has come down to the same thing in that someone had a story clear enough that other people wanted to be part of it,” Jones said.
“StoryWork is my attempt to prove that at scale, in public, with the best proof I could find.”
The StoryWork podcast with Matt Jones, exploring the role of story in building brands, businesses, movements, and ideas, launches today and is available on Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Substack.
