How do you build lore? First, you win.

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“Does every company have deep lore?” she asked.

She was a venture capitalist with a well-regarded early stage fund, a premium IYKYK brand, and it was a fair question. The companies she invested in were what you might think of as pre-lore. It was her job to identify those that might, eventually, at some distant point down the line, be able to cultivate the status of myth — to deduce what might, many years from now, simmer down into legend from an assortment of raw ingredients like “talent” and “market,” usually before there was any product to speak of. It’s a skill that’s more art than science.

“No,” I answered, truthfully. It was something I’d been thinking about a lot, then. Something I still think about a lot, now. For communications consultants like myself, there is a lot of work to be had helping early stage tech startups emerge from stealth, announcing themselves to the world. You could build an entire business on these launches and fundraising announcements, helping companies build their v1 messaging, homing in on their mission and vision; indeed that’s exactly what many consultants do, and the whole ecosystem is better for it.

In the process of building First Principles, a number of these early stage companies reached out. This was lucky, and I got even luckier after I published a piece on this here Substack called Build Your Own Lore. The piece did not go viral in any meaningful online sense — it still has a single-digit number of likes (I like to think of my corner of the internet chic and understated) — but it unleashed a deluge of inbound interest from former coworkers and former coworkers of former coworkers and even, delightfully, total randoms.¹

At first, I directed those early stage inquiries elsewhere. My business targeted “growth-stage companies at moments of inflection”; my core product was creating bespoke Lore Bibles, or operating systems, for companies who already had a messaging framework that they wanted, as one client put it, to melt and repour. But earlier this year, around the time I talked to the early stage VC, I found myself craving more scalable impact. (That phrase, scalable impact, is also how you know I was spending more time in SF, land of the lifehack-y buzzword, though that is neither here nor there.)

Pursuit of scale was the impetus for speaking to a venture firm, where I could theoretically have more impact across an entire portfolio than via direct company engagements. It was also the impetus for starting to reimagine the 1P Lore Sprints for earlier-stage companies. Maybe I shouldn’t be turning down all these out-of-stealth launches, I thought. Maybe this could be productized, lower costs made up for in increased volume and a more paint-by-numbers approach.

Briefly, I even considered creating some kind of course (that’s how you know I’d been reading The 4-Hour Workweek). “Lore in Four (Weeks/Days/whatever),” maybe hosted on Maven, sign up now for a 10% discount!, that kind of thing. But something about it felt icky, felt schlocky. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I spoke to that early stage VC. Then it came to me as we spoke, struck-by-lightening epiphany style: No, NOT every company has deep lore. Indeed, many companies have no lore at all — at least not yet, and maybe they won’t ever. It would be a lie to sell them a course on how to build it.

Which brings me to the title of this piece. Lore is not something that you can build, exactly. Or it’s not something you can aim at building directly. It is built, certainly, but building it requires time and a large number of contributors, each making the company work a little better every day — many more people, surely, than could sit in a room and pontificate in a half-day workshop about what the company is or isn’t. That, perhaps, is the crux of my resistance to very early stage work, to pre-product or even pre-product-market-fit work: There is a difference between imagining what you want your company’s lore to be and excavating what it is.²

More to the point, lore can never exist separately from a company’s (or a person’s, if we’re talking about individual reputations) history of action, and more precisely, its history of winning. Lore as a field is intentionally grander than brand or its worcel cousin narrative, because it implies you have won, no just once or twice, but over and over again; you have won in a macro sense, the war and not the battle. Even a losing company has a brand, but only a winning one has lore.

A couple examples: Were Palantir not listed on the S&P 500, all its idiosyncrasies — Karp’s onscreen shenanigans, the robust internal lexicon of things like FDEs and Hobbits and impl and NACK/ACK, a barbell communications strategy built primarily on memes at the one end and closed-door whispers at the other — wouldn’t amount to lore. It would just be a weird group of people, a cult even.

Or: We all care about Google’s lore — its origins in a garage and so forth — because it had maybe the world’s best business for many years. But if it cedes the AI battle, if Gemini dies an unceremonious death at the hands of Claude or ChatGPT, Google will be little more than a historical footnote, its lore reduced to rubble, an also-ran.

I hadn’t intended to built a business around the concept of lore. Indeed, as recently as a year ago, I would still have called my work “brand” or “communications.” The lore of it all was a tagline on my website, an H2 instead of an H1 in my positioning. But there is a stickiness to the concept that brand and comms lacked. People kept bringing up the term by name, asking me how they could build it. I mean that literally: I was trying to sell them “comms” or “brand” and they said, “But how do we build LORE?”

At the same time, I was getting deeper into my own creative work, spending more time on my long-brewing novel, cowriting my first short film, and steeping in the entertainment industry via a rare non-tech client, from whom I learned the term “Lore Bible.” (In the biz, Lore Bibles are a guidebook of how a particular universe works, so you can, say, write the seventh season of a superhero show, or craft a sequel, or adapt it into a video game.)

The whole process has made me feel like a founder, sucked into the swirl of product-market fit. It’s been special and wild to see other folks adopt it into their own lexicons and even their businesses. Recently, someone told me they thought other purveyors of the Lore Bible weren’t creating enough usable content for clients, and my first thought was, Wait, other people are selling Lore Bibles now?

But the work of lore-building can not be relegated entirely to strategists like myself, because lore goes so much farther than words. Strategists can help you understand what you want to be, how to marry that with who you actually are. We can uncover your internal memes and put words to your funny little customs. All of that is tremendously valuable, and can help you build the culture required to get people to preferentially attach themselves to you, thus making it much more likely you will win.

But ultimately, lore is the work of actually building a company, of finding ways to win, little by little and then lots by lots. Otherwise you’re basically writing a dictionary definition for a term no one will ever think to look up.

So if you want to build lore, first: You must win.

1. A fun piece of this here Substack’s own lore is that, until September of last year, my newsletter was called Per My Last; the rebrand followed nine or so months of building out a lore practice on the back of that post.

FWIW this, in my view, is also the difference between lore and brand, and why I felt, even if only subliminally at the time, like the work I was doing needed a novel term, one that was both more precise in its existing definition and one that I could help define in this context.

2. Shoutout to Peter Winzeler for elucidating this distinction for me.