Silicon Valley is obsessed with storytelling right now. Founders are dropping six figures on launch videos pre-product. A16z new media is hiring the best twitter posters to help their PortCos with comms. AI can write code ten times better than it can a blog post. Building things is cheap, so software engineers are getting laid off, but attention is all you need so LA and NYC creatives are being imported in droves. A filmmaker friend joked that “San Francisco is a patch of grass and I’m a lawn mower.” In this era where attention is currency, there’s no one who thrives more than Donald. He’s an engineer turned filmmaker who's worked with Cursor, Physical Intelligence and Meter. But he’s been behind the scenes for around 20 other startups over the years, influencing their creative direction, brand or launch videos in some way. There’s no point in building the future if you don’t tell anyone about it, so his goal is to decipher the weird yet incredible world of Silicon Valley and spread its stories to the masses. I spent a week with him to tell the storyteller's story. Somehow, he got me to talk most of the time even though I was the one writing about him, and saw him do the same to everyone else. He pulled dialogue out of a camera-shy roboticist with ease and prompted an AI researcher to excitedly rant about why now is the best time to move to San Francisco. He’s really damn good at getting people to talk, but somewhat quiet himself. I couldn’t help but think he was subtly influencing my narrative as I was trying to form it.