The reality behind Hollywood pitches: Silicon Valley, Shark Tank and more

Not hot dog.

Wait, what the. Eh. We're going to try something new. It's a new segment that I want to experiment with, and I'm going to hear pitches from either movies or famous companies that are out there and then give my reactions to them.

This first clip is from my favorite scene from the show, Silicon Valley. This is my favorite scene to the point that one of the meetings at my company until recently were called the no hot dog meeting.

What would you say if I told you there is an app on the Mac?

We're past that part. Just demo it. Let's pause there. So this idea of just demo it. I can't double click on that enough. Like, the more you talk and the more you explain something, when you can show it, the worst off you are. So when you can show, show, don't tell.

Okay, let's start with a hot dog.

Holy. I wanted to talk about something that just happens to all of us. You get really excited when you see a demo and you obviously know what's going to come next. I'm sure you've seen this scene and I'm really excited to talk about what comes next. But at the end of the day, everyone gets excited about a good demo. You'll never feel exposed again.

I'm going to be rich.

You Guilfoyle.

Do pizza.

Yes.

Do pizza. Pizza.

Hey, Zach.

Not hot dog.

Wait, what the.

Huh?

I mean, this is just classic and it's. I know it's a parody and it's meant to kind of entertain us, but at the end of the day, this happens a lot. Like someone will demo something and it'll work with very specific circumstances. And then you kind of try to dig in and try to do something else. And guess what? It doesn't work. And so can you go pitch it? No. So you got to go back to the drawing board. Okay. For the next video, it's going to be Doordash's application video. This is the one that they sent to Y Combinator when they were applying to get in.

And the four of us came together about six months ago to work on software for small business owners. But we didn't have a need at first. So we just went out and talked to all the small business owners we could find. After over 100 interviews, we came across a really interesting problem with small business restaurants in an area like this popular.

Right away, they didn't jump and try to tell me all these great things and features and product stuff or even capabilities or anything like that about their service or product. It's not their opinions that I'm listening to. It's the evidence that they have found something that people actually care about and they have found those problems. Okay, so the next video we're going to hit play on is the second video from DoorDash. And this is their actual demo day video when they were graduating from Y Combinator. Let's go.

We're Door Dash and we enable every restaurant to deliver. For customers, we offer restaurant food delivery in under 45 minutes. And for restaurant owners, we provide our own drivers and we manage the logistics of delivery.

He was clearly not reading the slides. But one of the most valuable things about that first slide that you have when you're talking and kind of setting the audience up is how crisp and clear the sentences that you put there. So the sentence that they had here is straight up, we enable every restaurant to deliver. I don't know how you can get more clearer than that of what DoorDash does. And this was like in the very early days, they had the crisp message of what they do and even more importantly, who they do it for.

Outside of pizza joints, just about no restaurant in this area delivers.

In fact, that means the market is underserved because over 70% of the United States live in areas where restaurants don't deliver.

What he says after in fact, and tells us a fact that we all can agree to be true based on what he just said and then provides a stat for it. It kind of like bookends and gives you closure on the problem statement and the problem part of the pitch. So I'll bet what he goes next into is more about the solution. I'm just guessing, though we're the only.

Company in this space that manages both our own logistics and partners with the merchants, we figured out the model to make consumer deliveries work.

That is such a strong statement because he's saying that the model was broken previously and his integrated approach at DoorDash is the model that they figured out that will work, which means it'll probably scale. So there's a lot of implications to that statement. It's not just some random statement. It means a lot because it explains so many things. The differentiation and the discoveries and likely the traction that comes as a result.

If you were building the FedEx of today to manage local deliveries, deliveries wouldn't happen overnight or even same day. They would happen on demand. And that's what we're building at DoorDash. If you're interested in hearing more, please come find us afterwards. Thank you.

I don't really have anything else to add on this pitch. It's a brilliant pitch. It's. It's staged, so to speak, in the right way in terms of the sequence of it, starting with a very solid idea of what the problem is, who the competitors are, why this company is different, what exactly the product is, the traction, and then the future. And here's the thing, if it wasn't so crisp and clear, I wouldn't be able to describe it with to you like this. Which means it's memorable, which means someone's gonna walk away and tell someone else about this pitch, guaranteed. And that's someone that's gonna walk away. If it's a demo day pitch, is an investor. And then what are you gonna get? You gonna get meetings, then what are you gonna get? You gonna get money? So this is like the perfect way to tell the story in the right segments of the pitch if you. In a way that compels someone to not only talk about it or tell someone else about it, but more importantly, understand it fundamentally. For this next video, it's actually gonna be a Shark Tank video. And I bet you can't guess what company. Are you ready? Okay, let's hit play.

Who's there? It's Jamie, here to pitch. Who? It's Jamie.

Come in.

Sharks.

Wouldn't it be nice to know who was behind the door before you let me in? Think of it as caller ID for your front door. Think of it as caller ID for your front door. When you can come up with a brilliant analogy of a category of product or a experience that everyone has had that they're familiar with and you're kind of introducing it in a new paradigm, it's a really powerful way to think about it. These are the kind of lines that people are going to remember. I'm sure the Sharks are going to remember those lines. And that's kind of like a very powerful way to frame your product. Now because it's a Shark tank, of course this is all staged and they have the like front door and all this stuff set up. When you're pitching investors, you're probably not going to have that. But if you think about this product, there is probably a way that he could demonstrate it right in front of people even when going to a pitch. And when you have a product like this that's physical hardware or something that you can demo, even if it's not physical hardware and software, and it's something that even people can kind of get immersed in like that, it's a really powerful tactic. So I actually like how Shark Tank kind of stages these things because we can get inspired by it and think of, oh, can we actually demonstrate our product? Can we show it off in some kind of way like you would see it on Shark Tank? That was my reaction segment on reacting to pitches. If you liked it, if you hated it, if you have feedback, reply to me on Twitter, tweet at me, but more importantly, comment down below.

The show is produced by Supermix. Thanks for joining.