Revolution's Tracy Van Grack Unlocks the Power of StoryTelling

Tracy Van Grack, Revolution

Tracy Van Grack, Chief Communications Officer at Revolution, knew from a young age that she wanted to tell powerful, meaningful stories.

That drive led her to what might seem like a surprising choice—law school.

But Tracy says that lawyers are natural storytellers: “Lawyers understand how to take in all the relevant facts presented and distill it into a narrative that resonates. There is no group of people better prepared to craft meaningful narratives and persuasive content. At its core, being a lawyer is about being a trusted voice for your client—the same holds true for communications professionals.”

After law school and time with a leading international firm, Tracy found purpose in telling the stories of entrepreneurs. She led a marketing and communications team at PSI, an NGO focused on branding, marketing, and selling goods and services for positive health outcomes.  In her time at Goldman Sachs, she helped found and implement 10,000 Women, a pioneer program in social responsibility designed to provide education and resources to underserved women building businesses in emerging markets. She followed that up by working with technology companies at Brunswick, a global public affairs and communications firm.

Today, in her role at Revolution, Tracy is again telling the stories of entrepreneurs, specifically companies being built outside of funding-rich Silicon Valley. Those stories, Tracy says, go beyond “founders doing unique things in new places.” She explains, “Entrepreneurship is key to bridging the growing divides in our country.” 

Revolution, the investment firm led by AOL co-founder, Steve Case, focuses on what they call “Rise of the Rest.” Since 2014, Revolution has taken the Rise of the Rest tour bus to 43 cities, logging 11,000 miles on the road, to celebrate startups. The firm has nearly $2B invested in 200 companies, across more than 100 cities. And they frequently bring together founders, startup champions, and investors to share best practices and move the needle on advocacy for startups based outside of Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston.

We spoke with Tracy recently about the power of compelling storytelling, the importance of correcting our narratives about entrepreneurial success, and why supporting entrepreneurs will be key to creating “a united future.”

How would you define your purpose?

This question used to be tough to quickly answer. However, after reading Pete’s book, Purpose First Entrepreneur, my purpose is clearer, much easier to explain, and more powerful in my day to day life.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a passion for storytelling. I loved writing and communicating something powerful from beginning to end. While I was in high school, that passion merged with a desire to pursue a career in social impact, and later still with my fascination for copyright law, and by extension how the law was handling new technologies.

I found my purpose in telling stories that pulled on all of these threads—the stories of entrepreneurs and their journeys. 

How does your work at Revolution align with your sense of purpose?

Most of my roles have pulled on one of these threads—storytelling, social justice, technology. My current role as Chief Communications Officer at Revolution connects all of them.

At Revolution, I am in the position of telling the stories of founders and CEOs building companies outside of Silicon Valley. Telling their stories gives meaning and purpose to who we are as an organization at Revolution. This is even more powerful because our portfolio companies, by virtue of their location outside Silicon Valley, are often viewed as less likely to succeed because of perceived challenges in  attracting talent and capital.

Their commitment and success, and their dedicated teams, are putting often overlooked cities on the innovation map and moving our national economy forward.

Why is telling the stories of entrepreneurs so important?

For a long time, society has created a narrative that becoming a founder is about overnight success and wealth. Popular culture has exacerbated that false image and glamorized the experience.  But any founder or startup CEO will tell you that it is a long, grueling journey.

We need to be realistic about how hard it is to get a business off the ground so we can ensure we are properly dedicating the public and private resources required to move the needle. We need to tell the stories of successful entrepreneurs in a way that honors their climb to success, not just the summit. 

How do the stories of real entrepreneurs correct that narrative? 

As an entrepreneur, you must be completely dedicated to an idea, continuously reject the skepticism of family and friends, and often work around the clock to stay afloat. It requires, especially in the early (and often leanest) days, an enormously wide range of skills—you are HR, marketing, and accounting all in one day.

When we tell the stories of entrepreneurs, we should be candid about that journey and that many entrepreneurs will work for years before achieving success, if at all. And we need to be up front about the fact that most entrepreneurs don’t become the next Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Entrepreneurs  fail.

And they often fail again.

But it goes beyond acknowledging and accepting those failures. The stories we tell about entrepreneurs can change the narrative by celebrating those failures.

Failure is a stepping stone on the way to finding success. We don’t celebrate that type of risk taking often enough, and that needs to change because normalizing failure fuels greater innovation. Telling that story fuels my purpose.

You’re working to help reshape the narrative about what successful entrepreneurship means, but it sounds like the ripple effect extends well beyond the startup ecosystem. How does understanding what’s at stake for entrepreneurs move the needle in other areas?

 Startups are key to our economic future. 

When I worked on 10,0000 Women, I had the privilege of witnessing the determination of small business owners around the world. No matter what country a woman was from, their focus was the same: to create better lives for themselves and their families.

Telling their stories, their journeys, was incredibly powerful and highlighted our main objective: to illustrate very clearly the power of empowering women. When women are economically empowered, GDP grows, local economies flourish, and innumerable societal benefits emerge.

I see it today in my work at Revolution as well. For decades our economy has been diverging and tech progress—and the financial gains that come with it—have been concentrated in a few coastal cities. We can’t find unity if a huge swath of the population feels left out and left behind.

How can telling entrepreneurs’ stories help to bridge that gap?

While we often lament what’s happening at the federal level, there are a lot of uplifting stories of cities and states working to leverage their unique strengths and build the economies of tomorrow. There are so many great examples where the local government, tech community, large corporations and entrepreneurial support organizations are working in concert to build a city’s new innovation economy. 

Often, people will ask us, “How do we replicate Silicon Valley’s success?” Telling stories of founders and cities on the rise highlights that it’s not about a Silicon Valley recipe, it’s about leveraging your unique strengths, innovating on your legacy and finding support from others on the same journey in the same city, the same region, or the broader entrepreneurial community.