narrative-shift

Mode skill. Default-enabled on the Stage specialist.

When to use

Use as the first step before any deck drafting. Use also when a deck is not landing — the diagnosis is almost always that the shift is weak, generic, or absent. Covers seed and Series A narrative work, investor-update openings, demo-day openers, and founder-bio "why now" statements.

A pitch without a named shift is a feature list. This skill produces the one-paragraph spine the rest of the deck hangs from.

The shift sentence

Andy Raskin's macro pattern, condensed to one fillable frame:

"There's been a fundamental change in the world. [Old world] is ending. [New world] is here. The winners will be the companies that [strategic move]. The losers will be the companies that [opposite move]."

The frame is fillable in any domain. The work is making it true and specific enough that a sceptical investor cannot dismiss it in one line.

The three-question test

Every candidate shift sentence has to pass all three:

1. Recent. Is there accelerating evidence in the last 24 months? Older than 24 months and the room asks "where have you been?" Newer than 6 months and the room asks "is this a blip?"

2. Irreversible. Is there a structural reason this cannot revert? Regulation, technology cost curves, generational behaviour change, supply-chain reconfiguration. A trend that could reverse next quarter is a marketing observation, not a shift.

3. Creates new winner criteria. Does the shift change what it takes to win in the buyer's world? If the same companies win after the shift as before, the shift is real but irrelevant to the pitch.

A shift that fails any one of the three is rejected. Ask the founder for the next candidate. Iterate until one passes.

Procedure

1. List five candidate shifts. Ask the founder for five things that have changed in their buyer's world in the last two years — not five things they care about.
2. Score each against the three-question test. Recent / irreversible / new winner criteria. Most will fail at least one.
3. Pick the shift the company is uniquely positioned to ride. Of candidates that pass, pick the one where the founders' earned advantage maps to the new winner criterion.
4. Write the shift sentence in the Raskin frame. Specific enough that a competitor cannot copy-paste it.
5. Stress-test against three competitors. Name three companies in the adjacent space. Does this sentence describe what they do? If yes, rewrite until it picks out this company's move, not theirs.
6. Locate the proof point. One dataset, news event, or regulatory move that makes the shift undeniable in one citation. This becomes the slide-one proof.
7. Lock the sentence to TEAM_MEMORY.md. Stamp under ## Pitch. Coin's market build and Mira's deck cover both depend on it.

Decision rules

• No shift, no deck. If no candidate passes, the company is not pitch-ready. Send the founder back to validate before drafting slides.
• Shifts beat trends. "AI is rising" is a trend. "In 2025, the average B2B buyer evaluated three AI vendors before requesting a demo from any of them" is a shift with operational consequences.
• The shift belongs to the deck, not the company forever. A new round or new evidence often warrants a new shift. Do not freeze a sentence past its usefulness.
• Old world / new world phrasing must be parallel. "Old world: ten-person sales teams. New world: AI." is not parallel. "Old world: ten-person sales teams. New world: two-person teams with AI tooling." is parallel and concrete.

Anti-patterns

• The eternal shift. Anything that has been true for a decade is not a shift, it is wallpaper.
• The personal shift. "I got frustrated with X." Decks fund world shifts, not founder origin stories. Save origins for the team slide.
• The vendor shift. "Companies are adopting more SaaS." This is the vendor's narrative, not the buyer's. The shift must be true from the buyer's seat.
• Two shifts stacked. Pick one. Two shifts split the room's attention.

Before / after

Brief: "Help us frame the opening for a seed deck. We sell a tool that helps small ecommerce stores reply to customer-service emails faster."

Before (generic, eternal, vendor-side):

"Customer service is hard for small businesses. They lose customers when replies are slow."

After (specific, recent, irreversible, new winner criterion):

"Old world: a small ecommerce store competed on price and reviews. New world: review platforms weight response time inside scoring, and Google's shopping rank pulls from those scores. Winners reply in under one hour. Losers triage the inbox once a day."

The "after" creates new winner criteria. The "before" describes the company.