Business Storytelling: From Steve Jobs to the Bro-mantic Style of Altman and Ive

How narrative precedes product in the age of AI

A filmed conversation in a San Francisco café between Apple’s most famous ex-designer and OpenAI’s CEO is worth as much as a product demo today. Sam Altman and Jony Ive haven’t presented anything tangible yet, but their project already has an aura, a trajectory, a positioning. This is the power of narrative.

Apple has always done this: product and storytelling are born simultaneously. In fact, in the creative process, narrative precedes the product. Especially in a secretive company like Apple, narrative is the first product-market fit test.

Altman-Ive: The Story Before the Device

The project is clear: build an AI-native device that transcends the logic of apps, screens, and traditional interfaces. But instead of showing chips or 3D renders, Altman and Ive chose to start with a story. The video featuring them, shot in Francis Ford Coppola’s historic café, is a statement of tone and vision.

They talk about ambient interaction, invisible design, augmented everyday life. They’re not selling a gadget. They’re selling a horizon. A direction of meaning.

The technology will come later. Or rather, what will come later is the physical device that will dress the technology they believe they already have.

And here lies a fundamental tension: OpenAI has an existential stake. If it truly arrives first at AGI (artificial general intelligence), it will dominate. If it doesn’t make it, it risks collapsing under the weight of the venture capital it has attracted. Because let’s be clear: there’s no way to return money to investors with $20 subscriptions.

The deal with Jony Ive isn’t just an innovative project: it’s also a Plan B. A safety net. A narrative that provides them with an alternative reason for existence.

Jony Ive thus becomes both trophy and antidote. As a trophy, he’s the ultimate Silicon Valley status symbol — the man who designed the iPhone now validates Altman’s vision. It’s like recruiting Michelangelo for your Renaissance startup. Ive’s name alone transforms OpenAI from “another AI company” into “the company that convinced Apple’s design genius to bet his legacy on their future.”

For investors watching OpenAI burn through billions, Ive represents proof of concept before there’s even a concept to prove. But he’s also a parachute — if the race to superhuman intelligence should derail, OpenAI can pivot to being “the hardware company founded by the world’s most famous designer.”

Steve Jobs’ Ghost

In Silicon Valley, Jobs’ ghost continues to linger because no one, after him, has managed to fuse technology and desirability with the same narrative force.

“Business Storytelling: The Silicon Valley way — Leandro Agro | PASC3”

Despite Tim Cook having built 90% of Apple’s market value, every time a new product is announced, the implicit question remains: “Is this up to Jobs’ standards?”

Jobs didn’t just present products: he built narratives that made them obvious, inevitable, almost natural. This ability to make the new inevitable is today the emotional and strategic benchmark for anyone who wants to innovate. It’s what Altman seeks, and it’s what Ive — consciously or not — seems to want to recreate.

It’s impossible not to notice Ive’s posture in the video: leaning toward Altman, often with his gaze directed at him even when he’s not speaking. His body language betrays a form of intense and perhaps even misplacedadmiration. A fascination that resembles more of a delegation than a partnership between equals.

Altman seems to embody something familiar and desirable for Ive: a young leader capable of manipulating the future, of polarizing attention, of embodying a narrative. In other words: he’s a candidate for the new Steve Jobs.

But where Jobs was driven by an obsession with user experience, Altman is driven by an ontological urgency: to build definitive intelligence before others. It’s a radical shift. And precisely because of this, the way Jony Ive positions himself in the video appears almost like a medium between the past and what’s about to arrive.

Direction, Localism, and Myth

Not by chance, the video between Altman and Ive was directed by an Oscar winner: Errol Morris. An iconic director and author of some of the most influential documentaries of the last thirty years.

Choosing Morris isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. It’s a declaration of intent: this isn’t an informal chat. It’s a narrative construction with high symbolic density. Forget keynotes — this is myth-making.

Everything in that video is studied. Even the “localism” that makes the frame in which the protagonists perform legendary.

The video doesn’t just show two people talking: it tells the epic of San Francisco and makes the protagonists mythical.

Jony Ive “walks down” to the restaurant from his house. And the meeting place isn’t casual. We’re at Café Zoetrope, in the heart of Jackson Square: the most sophisticated and least touristy neighborhood of the city. Right where North Beach, with its Italian soul, intersects with Chinatown, symbol of the city’s cultural and commercial contamination.

It’s an area where investors have now appeared (to the point where you can’t find a table at Cotogna anymore), new galleries open, AI-first startups are born. Ive is easily encountered on the street. INNOVIT is there. This video isn’t just set in San Francisco: it IS San Francisco.

Showing San Francisco in its epic form allows the protagonists who fit into it to become part of its legend.

It reminded me of the operation with which U2 celebrated themselves by fitting into the myth of America with the album Rattle and Hum.

Jobs, the Narrative Engineer

Steve Jobs wasn’t a coder or a great electronic engineer. He didn’t need to rest his myth on the epic frame of a city or leverage someone else’s ghost. He built the epic himself.

Certainly together with agency talents, he designed narratives with the same precision with which Wozniak designed logic boards. He did it with a simple and powerful grammar:

• “The computer is the bicycle for the mind” (1980, Apple II)

• “A computer for the rest of us” (Mac 1984)

• “We’re going to focus on four great products and we’re going to turn them into gems.” (1997, return to Apple)

• Jobs presents the 2x2 grid — consumer/professional x desktop/portable — radically simplifying the portfolio. An example of visual and strategic business storytelling that Apple still uses today.

• “1000 songs in your pocket” (iPod 2001)

• “Not just a phone, but a paradigm shift” (iPhone 2007)

Never a technical specification. Never an acronym. Every product was an answer to a vision, not just a need.

One of the keys to his impact was language. A lexical analysis of his keynotes shows that Jobs used just over 1,100 unique words, about half of those used by Barack Obama in his presidential speeches. But it wasn’t a limitation — it was a strategy.

Among all words, the most recurring in his speeches wasn’t “Apple,” nor “computer” or “technology.” It was “people.”

Jobs spoke to people, about people, for people. Every product was presented as a way to simplify, empower, improve the human experience.

This was his true innovation: he didn’t explain what the product did, but what it would do for you. This is the heart of business storytelling, in its purest and most powerful form.

Why Does This Matter Now?

Jobs and Ive, even in the AI era — and despite Apple not (yet) positioning itself at the apex of the race — still define the cultural and emotional grammar of innovation.

The question isn’t whether we should absorb this culture through products, but whether we understand what generated them. Business storytelling is the hidden engine behind every breakthrough innovation.

Working with hundreds of startups and established companies over recent years, one pattern emerges consistently: the companies that scale sustainably are those that master narrative before they master technology.

They understand that in a world drowning in features and specifications, story is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

The lesson is clear: narrative isn’t decoration that comes after the product. It’s the foundation that makes the product inevitable.

In an age where technology moves faster than human understanding, the companies that will win aren’t necessarily those with the best algorithms — but those with the best stories.

Over the last decade, we’ve learned to build MVPs.
Maybe now it’s time to build MVS: minimum viable stories.
Because in narrative, as in product, iteration wins.

Because in the end: “We are all and only the stories we are able to tell.”