Human Claw Machine in a VR Motherboard:

"How did you get so good at sales?"

A freshly minted founder asked me this after a conference demo last week. My answer: I didn't. I'm the last person asking “what can I do to get you into this Ferrari” or "sell me this pen". Which is a real problem when you're the founder of a founder-led brand, introverted, and allergic to sleaze.

Instead of becoming a better salesperson, I leaned into my journalism training and built a show, don't tell system, one where people never have to ask why our solution is better, because it's glaringly obvious. As you might guess, I don't like to explain something twice.

For founders, "show, don't tell" means presenting concrete evidence so your audience infers the value of the product/service for themselves, rather than being told what to think. It's more persuasive because it makes ideas feel vivid, credible, and memorable. Plus, it makes people feel smart.

For Dauntless XR, extended reality is the perfect medium for this.

Every time conference season rolls around, I'm grateful our interface is a 360°, 4K-per-eye portal to another world and not a smartwatch face. For our Dell and NVIDIA activation, we built a city-sized motherboard from inside the Dell T2. Magic School Bus-style, you spawn inside the machine and have to catch electrons (glowing Dell blue and NVIDIA green, natch) using a virtual Iron Man reticle crossed with a Thanos-style claw. Inside each particle is a coin redeemable for premium swag, delivered automatically, because trucking around a tote full of random plastic stuff is not cute.

We built it all. From experience to gift distribution. The best parts:

We never have to tell anyone the graphics are superior, you live it. We never have to explain that the AI avatars are convincing, you see them. Hand-tracking stats become beside the point when you just got to be Iron Man for 90 seconds. Obviously, the workstation and GPU we used are the go-to because you've experienced what it's capable of.

This works because we're still wired like our caveman ancestors, sitting around a fire, listening to elders tell stories, our brains aren't good at evaluating "the benefits of achieving 344 tokens per watt" yet. When people become absorbed in a show-don’t-tell story, psychological research on narrative transportation shows their counterarguing drops, emotion rises, and they adopt the story's implications (aka buy this thing) with far less resistance.

Stories don't just need to communicate information; they transport. And transported people hit add to cart.

Here are four ways you can put show, don't tell to work today:

Audiences aren't persuaded by what they understand. They're persuaded by what they can picture in their minds eye, feel, and remember. Show, don't tell works because it turns an argument into an experience, and experiences outlast every abstraction.

Want to build your own show, don't tell moment? That's exactly what we do at Dauntless: get started here, or book a call with me, Lori-Lee, here if you already know what you want to build.

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For when you stop attending conferences and become the conference

Enter the chat. Most quotable quotes from our execs this week:

📽️This is real! This is a VR activation for NVIDIA and Dell (codename: Claw Machine) by Dauntless XR and designed by the insanely talented Ginny Lee. It debuted at GTC 2026 to their 100,000 attendees. If you need your own version of a show-don't-tell, live in people's brains rent-free experience, my DMs are open (but only for you).