Framing: The Most Powerful Tool in Deep-Tech Storytelling

What Is Framing?

Framing is the context you choose to present your message. It's not what you say—it's the lens through which people understand it.

The same facts can tell completely different stories depending on the frame:

• AI as "productivity tool" → optimize workflows, automate tasks

• AI as "arms race" with China → existential competition, national survival

Same technology. Radically different implications, urgency, and decisions.

The Big Idea

People don't decide based on facts alone—they decide based on the frame those facts sit inside.

If you don't control the frame, the market will. You must establish how to think before telling people what to think about. Set up the category shift, the criteria, the mental model—so your evidence has a place to land.

When US leaders frame AI as a geopolitical arms race with China, it justifies massive infrastructure investment, reshapes export controls, and turns chips, power, and data centers into matters of national security. That single framing shift recast AI from a research topic into a matter of economic and military dominance.

Change the frame, and you change the game.

Examples: Paradigm Framing in Action

SpaceX

• ❌ Incremental: "Reusable rockets reduce launch costs by 60%"

• ✅ Paradigm: "Goodbye to expendable launch" — Reusability eliminates the insane economics of throwing away a $60M vehicle after one use. Not "cheaper rockets"—it's "aircraft economics for space." Imagine if Boeing threw away a 747 after every flight.

Cerebras

• ❌ Incremental: "Our chip has 850,000 cores vs. NVIDIA's 10,000"

• ✅ Paradigm: "Goodbye to distributed training" — Wafer-scale eliminates the entire complexity of multi-chip orchestration, networking overhead, and memory bottlenecks.

Equal1

• ❌ Incremental: "Better qubit coherence times"

• ✅ Paradigm: "Goodbye to physics labs" — Quantum System-on-Chip integrates an entire quantum computer onto silicon, eliminating cryogenic facilities and exotic infrastructure. Quantum sits in a server rack beside GPUs, not in a specialized facility.

Deep-Tech Rule: Fight on Paradigm, Not Performance

Most founders fall into the incremental trap:

"We're 10× faster," "50% cheaper," "30% more efficient."

That frames you as an optimization within the existing paradigm. But incumbents own that paradigm—and can outspend you in it.

The antidote: paradigm framing. Redefine the world so the old approach looks obsolete.

That's why framing must come before product, before technology, before traction.

Common Framing Moves

• Counter-positioning: "We win by doing what incumbents won't or can't do"

• Paradigm flip: "The bottleneck isn't X; it's Y (and we remove Y)"

• Category create/rename: "This isn't EO; it's Cognitive EO"

• Asymmetric metric: "Time-to-insight, not image resolution"

• Inevitable trend hitching: "Built for AI factories, not legacy HPC"

The 1-Minute Pitch Spine

1. Game: Name the arena you want to be judged in

2. Stakes: Why this game matters now (macro, regulation, supply chains, geopolitics)

3. Rule change: The old approach is structurally broken (not just slower/cheaper)

4. New rules: Your paradigm makes the old metrics irrelevant

5. Proof: One killer datapoint that only fits your frame

6. Implication: If the frame is true, you're the default winner

The Strategic Choice

Every deep-tech startup competes not just with incumbents, but with assumptions.

If you don't frame your paradigm shift first, investors and customers will interpret you through the old one—and you'll lose.

Frame it right, and you define what game you're playing and why the old one no longer matters.