David Reimer on Storytelling, Human Insight, and Building Narratives That Move People

David Reimer’s work sits at the intersection of storytelling, entrepreneurship, and human psychology. Asked what emerging questions excite him most, his answer is immediate: artificial intelligence. “The question that I get nowadays is how can AI help with storytelling?” he says. While AI can accelerate structure and craft, Reimer is clear about its limits. “It’s certainly not going to replace their role in telling the story, the human’s role in telling the story.” For him, the promise of AI lies in assistance, not authorship.

Reimer emphasizes that tools like chatbots can generate narratives, but only humans can uncover the insight that matters most. “Any chatbot can help you put together…a potential narrative,” he explains, “but you need to have the smart strategic inputs and you need to understand the great customer insights…that are at the core of the story.” Authenticity, he insists, comes from lived experience. “It can help us with all sorts of structural things…but it can’t make an authentic story.”

That belief underpins his approach to teaching founders how to think about narrative as a strategic tool rather than a cosmetic layer. At the center of every effective story, Reimer argues, is motivation. “At the core of every great story is some human motivation,” he says, and discovering it “takes some work.” This is why he encourages founders to collaborate with AI, not outsource judgment to it. “There’s a place for both the human still in the equation…and the tool.”

Reimer structures startup storytelling around growth phases that mirror a classic narrative arc. Early on, story is inseparable from product–market fit. “The narrative structure…is a strategic tool that teaches you as the creator how to figure out that first product market fit,” he says. Questions about who the customer is, what problem matters most, and why a solution is better than existing alternatives are not just marketing concerns—they are foundational design decisions. As founders test assumptions, the story evolves with them.

Where many teams stumble, Reimer notes, is attachment to their first idea. “People get stuck in their own biases,” he says. “They fall in love with their original story and their original story isn’t always the right story.” He points to founders who learned to listen closely to customers and pivot when a different, more urgent narrative emerged. The discipline of storytelling, in this sense, becomes a way of vetting one’s worldview against reality.

A recurring theme in Reimer’s thinking is that the customer—not the product—must be the protagonist. When founders lead with features, he stops them. “I just stop them in the middle of their sentence and I say why should I care about that?” Stories only work when they center a real person with a real struggle. “If they think about their customer as a human and not an entity…it’s so much easier to get at that human motivator.”

To uncover that motivator, Reimer urges founders to act like journalists or therapists, repeatedly asking why. He illustrates this with a simple heuristic: keep asking “what do you really want?” until something memorable emerges. “Every time she asks him…she’s getting closer to the truth,” he says. You know you’ve reached the core when you hear something and think, “That’s something I’d remember.”

Emotion, for Reimer, is not the enemy of rigor—it is its ally. He explains this through neuroscience. “Our brains have literally evolved to respond to story,” he says, noting that emotion and memory are tightly linked. When something moves us, “we get a dopamine hit…effectively putting a post-it note in your brain that says remember this.” Ignoring emotion, he argues, is an irrational choice for anyone trying to persuade.

This doesn’t mean abandoning data. Instead, Reimer advocates weaving metrics into narrative. The goal is not volume but resonance. “Pick the right data points…the few data points that illustrate the problem or the solution,” he says, and embed them in a story people can visualize. Done well, the number sticks because the narrative carries it.

Across startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, Reimer sees enduring continuity. Tools change, but the fundamentals remain. “There’s still magic in going out and talking to human beings,” he says. Watching reactions, listening carefully, and probing for meaning are as necessary now as they were decades ago. AI may accelerate the process, but it cannot replace the human work of understanding.

Ultimately, Reimer frames storytelling not as embellishment but as strategy. A compelling narrative helps people grasp a problem “almost feel it in their bones,” and only then does the business case matter. “If I don’t believe there’s a customer with a problem and that it’s a really big problem…none of the rest of the stuff matters.”

The 6Degrees team extends its sincere thanks to David Reimer for sharing his insight, clarity, and deep conviction that great companies begin with great human stories. His work is a reminder that in a world of powerful tools and endless data, progress still depends on our ability to listen, to empathize, and to tell stories that are unmistakably human.