NYU professor Aswath Damodaran recently spoke at Google on the value of stories in business. This theme is at the core of his latest book, Narrative and Numbers. In his talk, he discussed how the world of business and investing seems to be increasingly divided into two camps: number crunchers, who believe only in data and models, and story tellers, who believe in the power of narrative.

According to Damodaran, valuation is ultimately a bridge between stories and numbers – ideally, “every story becomes a number in the valuation and every number in a valuation has a story behind it.” He discusses how to go from stories to valuation and uses the examples of both Uber and Ferrari to illustrate this process.

The video of his talk is embedded below and you can also read his blog post on the same topic here.