Carol Barash, serial entrepreneur and founder of Story2, built a community of a quarter-million storytellers across four continents. An award-winning educator, Carol is a serial entrepreneur backed by Goldman Sachs 10KSB and Techstars and named to Top 20 Women in NYC Tech. Carol developed the patented Moments Method® and EssayBuilder®, which measurably improve users’ speaking and writing. Carol coaches CEOs — including those listed in Time’s 100 Most Influential People — to complete their books.
A graduate of Yale (BA summa cum laude) and Princeton (PhD), Carol is the author of Write Out Loud (McGraw-Hill) and English Women’s Poetry (Oxford), named a top 100 book in the Humanities. Prior to Story2, Carol worked in leadership roles at Princeton, Rutgers, CUNY, and CommonHealth-WPP, where she worked on the first online discussion groups for people with HIV.
What is Story2 all about?
In Fall 2008 I had a waking dream of students in Shanghai and NY telling stories on their phones. They were laughing and having fun, and the phones were translating between English and Chinese. Even more dazzling, it was as if there was a penumbra of storytelling that connected them across continents. My son said, “Mom you should build that software. You could help a lot of people.” I started studying the neuroscience of storytelling and built the tools to teach storytelling at scale online. Just this month, for the Lunar New Year, we launched our first-course connecting students in the US and China! And this is just the beginning.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with how different people see the same situation differently. I have a PhD in English Literature from Princeton, where I studied the first generation of English women to publish their poetry in print. I studied their manuscripts in tiny public record offices all over England and compared those manuscripts to the printed books, and I saw how their very fluid notions of gender, sexuality, and political power in the manuscripts became much more binary in the printed poems.
As the 20th century turned into the 21st, and we began to see and read online books, I realized that we were in a similar moment of transition from print to virtual publication. I wanted to teach people how to maintain the power of the human voice and spoken words in this new, virtual medium. In 2014 I won a spot in Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses to create the business plan, and then the Story2 team was selected for the Kaplan-Techstars EdTech accelerator to build the software.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Trigger warning: The summer between third and fourth grade, I was sexually assaulted by one of our neighbors. He slobbered into my ear, “If you ever tell anyone, I will kill you.” That silence nearly killed me and it nearly killed my business. When I started studying storytelling in the fall of 2008, I was helping other people tell their stories. When Trump walked off the bus and started bragging about assaulting women, I knew I had to tell my story as well. It had been hidden for a long time, and it was not easy to get out. But it gets easier. If you are reading this, and you have a story you need to tell to free yourself from the past, I urge you to tell it out loud, so you can shift how you relate to it in the present.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
The biggest problem I encountered was wanting to build too many features all at once right at the beginning. When you are building new software, especially when it’s something the world has never seen before, it’s really important to stay close to your core customers and build the product, step by step, to solve their problems. We overcame the problem by creating a simple version of the core storytelling functionality – end to end – and testing it with 5000 users. That first test proved that we could improve people’s core writing skills using storytelling-based software, and we were on our way.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
My first mistake was not paying close enough attention to cash flow in the business’s early days. I worried too much about what other people thought about me and my big idea, rather than focusing on our customers and what problems we could solve for them. But the biggest blunder of all was not trusting my instincts: looking back, there are so many times when I knew what to do, but didn’t have the courage to do it when I first saw the answer. I wasted a lot of time in self-doubt.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I spend the first hour of the day meditating, writing, and gathering my energy for the day ahead. Those early morning hours are my clearest time for prioritizing and visionary thinking.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- Book: Conscious Leadership
- Book: Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups
- Podcast: How I Built This (NPR)
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
My first business idea was an online marketing company that customized the small products that businesses give away. It was maybe five years ahead of its time and failed. I sold the assets to a larger marketing company and worked there for a year.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I’m studying how we can tap into neuroscience to improve human relationships and community. Using storytelling as a daily meditation practice for the past 13 years has shifted the way I see myself and other people. I’m now able to see multiple perspectives at once in real-time, which is a key aspect of successful leadership and community-building. I’m writing a book The Golden Repair, to teach this to other people.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I only wish I’d taken myself seriously as an entrepreneur when I was younger. I shouldn’t have waited until I was 40 to start building things!
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart; it’s a journey full of surprises and confronting situations you have never seen before. The top three skills you need to get through are swift decision-making, compassion, and storytelling. In the manager part of a CEO day, you are making decisions all the time: How much should we spend money on advertising? Should we hire this person or keep looking? Should I decide now, or sleep on it? The rest of the day is making and mentoring, and that requires a very different skillset: listening to your team, helping them figure things out for themselves, building your vision of the future with very specific words actions in the present.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
During the pandemic, we shifted from a product-based company to a community-based company. We are currently building a wide range of new community-based storytelling courses to help people achieve their most important personal and professional goals — things like pitching, personal branding, and completing a book — through storytelling. We are the only company with a proven, science-based process for using stories to master high-stakes communication; we are leveraging our proprietary Moments Method® writing process, making it simpler and faster, to help more people.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
I fiercely study my closest competitors, thinking of them as collaborators in a larger plan where we can all succeed. I ask myself, again and again, what distinguishes us from those close-in competitors? What are we doing that only we can do to create value for our customers? How can we do more of that? What can we do next to keep that edge of unique value for our customers? It’s all about them.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Our most successful marketing has been word of mouth. We have extremely happy customers. People who say, “I am addicted to Storyhood” (our storytelling circle) or “What Story2’s doing is so important; how can I help you get your product to more students?” Right now, we are using these stories from our happy users to expand our reach through story-based, very organic social media.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Before you spend a dime, talk to your customers and understand their problems. What counts as a solution for them? What will they pay for that solution? Get 100 people to sign up to be the first users.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Do not “fake it until you make it.” Instead, go deep into your own heart, the place where your genius and a bit of madness are woven together, and ask yourself, “What does the world need me to do? What work am I here to do that I alone can do? How can I do more of that today?” My goal is to help more young people to figure that out and do that work.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
I can see how all my mistakes got me to where I am now, so I’m at peace with them.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
When people learn how to tell stories out loud, they tap into the brain’s most efficient and effective communications system, one that enables them to see complex situations from multiple points of view. The world needs what we are doing. That’s what keeps me going.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Rigorously prioritize and say “no” often. Put anything that matters on your calendar. Until you give time to a task, it’s just a dream.
What is your favorite quote?
“Everyone makes mistakes. Smart people learn from their mistakes. Really smart people learn from other people’s mistakes.”
– Sy Barash, my father, very near the end of his life (I was 16)
I love MindValley. They have these 30-day “quests” where you can master a whole new skillset in 15-30 minutes a day. This fits my schedule and my “always be learning” mindset.
How is running a company different than what you thought it would be?
The hardest part of being a CEO is making enough time for self-care. You really can’t take care of anyone else unless you’re full of joy and energy yourself.
How can readers get in touch with you?
I’m @carolbarash on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I love feedback and new voices! You can also #AMA at getstarted@story2.com.
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