We often tell founders to pitch their company – to investors, customers, the public or anyone – as if giving a TED Talk. And the best TED Talks have a pattern. 

It’s the same pattern we use when writing a category defining Point of View (POV).

Many TED Talks start out with the speaker telling the audience, in plain language, about a problem – usually a problem the audience didn’t know about, or an obvious problem that they’re invited to think about differently. 

Once the audience understands the problem, the speaker describes an interesting new solution. It’s not a product marketing pitch – it’s a solution pitch. The audience should feel like the solution should exist no matter who builds it. 

Only toward the end does the speaker mention a company or product, often in the context of creating credibility – as in, “We know this because we’re working on it.” No details of product features. No technical or marketing jargon. Nothing that wreaks of selling.

And then, finally, the speaker helps the audience see how the solution can fix the problem, and why the world will be better for it.

The audience cheers and claps, feels good about the speaker, and wants to know more. They don’t feel like they were sold to. They feel like they were informed.

One of our category design clients – Lauren Dunford, CEO of Guidewheel – followed that pattern in her main stage TED Talk in April. 

Since working with her in 2020, the problem Guidewheel has focused on solving has expanded. At its inception, Guidewheel offered an affordable, easy-to-use system that could help small and mid-size factories operate with more energy efficiency. 

Five years later, after building its initial product and raising $52M, the company is aiming at a bigger mission: It wants to make manufacturing feel as exciting and important to society as building the next digital product. 

In other words, Lauren is saying that a huge reason manufacturing has declined (particularly in the U.S.) is because it got a bad rap. Younger generations want to be social media influencers, not industrialists. Too few talented people go into manufacturing. 

“And that’s the problem. Manufacturing has an outdated reputation as three-D – dull, dirty and dangerous,” Lauren states less than two minutes into her talk. She soon adds: “The future isn’t just coded – it’s built. If we can’t build, we can’t lead. If we can’t build, we are handing the keys to our future to those who can.”

So, the way to revive manufacturing is to make it cool to new generations of innovators and entrepreneurs.

How? Lauren talks about her journey to discovering the solution. 

The world has far more small factories than big ones. Small ones can’t afford fancy technology to run efficiently, so many end up being wasteful and uncompetitive – bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Guidewheel may have started by making a simple product to monitor power usage and save money. But it found that monitoring power is a key to rejuvenating both small and large manufacturers. 

“It’s the first-ever universal translator for any machine, anywhere on the planet, energy to production, and the foundation for real-time intelligence. So any factory team on Earth can reach peak productivity and decarbonize,” she says in her TED Talk.

Factories will no longer be dens of dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. They will offer clean, cutting-edge, and “really dang cool careers,” Lauren states. “But unless we bring manufacturing from devalued to uplifted, millions of jobs in manufacturing are currently on track to go unfilled by 2030. That’s innovation that’s not going to happen, critical infrastructure that won’t be built.”

Guidewheel is on a mission to fix a very big problem that most of us hadn’t quite thought of: the fading allure of manufacturing. By giving factories a way to track their vital signs and generate valuable data, generations that grew up on videogames and apps will have a new playground for innovation. The more such people get drawn to manufacturing, the more robust the industrial sector becomes. 

Which in turn leads to a better economy and environment.

“Each of us, whether we care about our countries or our climate, can help make manufacturing the biggest comeback story of our time,” Lauren concludes – essentially articulating Guidewheel’s larger POV.

That’s the way to create a category, and convince an audience that you can build it.

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