Patrick O'Shaughnessy

You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.

My guest today is my friend Wolfgang Hammer.

Wolfgang is a successful film producer and executive who helped create House of Cards and ran several major studios, including Lionsgate, CBS Films, and Miramax.

He's now building a new kind of film studio with support from Mitch Lasky and Marc Andreessen.

Wolfgang also helps founders and CEOs use storytelling to better understand what they do and why it matters.

In many ways, this conversation is a manual for how to find that story and communicate it in a way that resonates.

Wolfgang shares the questions and tools he gives leaders to help them do the same.

Our conversation explores how stories work, what great ones have in common, and why understanding your own story can be transformative.

We talk about the three layers every story must have, the external, the emotional, and the philosophical, and how they apply to building companies and leading people.

So many CEOs at both startups and massive Fortune 100 companies have Wolfgang to thank for changing how they think and talk about their business.

And I hope this episode gives you tools to do the same.

Please enjoy my conversation with the great Wolfgang Hammer.

I'd love to ask a bunch of questions about work that you've done with companies and helping the founders of those companies distill down the narrative of them, their business, their product in a way that's transformative for them.

I know you've done this with startups.

You've done this with massive companies we probably can't name.

It's a thing you've done over and over again.

Can you describe in as much detail, crazy detail as you're willing to, the method that has started to emerge from this curiosity you have about certain builders and what you do with that curiosity and how you help them?

When you talk to someone about this, like self-knowledge exploration or something, is the thing you're after the underlying reason that they themselves may not know yet why they're doing what they're doing?

Does it boil down to that?

I want to just like drill on these three layers of the story and try to turn it into a device that someone could like take away from this and try to apply to themselves.