Yaron Flint: How to Get a Meeting With Any Investor

Hi, today we meet an extraordinary person, Jaron Flint. Just imagine that you do business in different countries or you do business in different industries and you have to build new connections. You have to convert some flash connection and confidence into long-term relationships. You should innovate across the cultures. It's very difficult to do because you don't know what you don't know. And here, Yaron can help you. He wrote two bestseller books. One is about networking called Beyond Networking, and another book is Innovation Business Development. These two books can help you to master your innovation and relationship skills. So please meet your own Flint. Jaron, hello! So happy to have you on my podcast.

Thank you, and thank you for having me.

Jaron, tell our audience about yourself.

Okay, I'll try to do the short version. No promises there. Yeah, but, um, I kind of pivoted between, uh, various sectors. I started from financial background worked in family offices, one point, one of the richest guys in the world at Deloitte, did a lot of on, on, on that side of the investment side. Somewhere in the middle of my career, I decided to become operational. So I joined the automotive market and started working with a large distributor and reseller and started working on the innovation front. And that was back in 2009 where everything just started with Google X naturally and, and things like that. So you can definitely say I'm one of the veterans in that domain. Worked, uh, in Optive, uh, leading scouting and onboarding, uh, in a, in a few regions. And then I moved to Continental, uh, scouting, onboarding operations and investments. And I was sent to Singapore to establish innovation from there and key account for ContiTech and Thales, which meant whenever these divisions did something with a startup, I led that. So Industry 4.0, smart materials, ESG topics. And in my last position in large corporation, I was in Stanley Black Decker, basically, uh, working on open innovation platforms and frameworks. So every partnerships that is not a supplier or customer.

That's amazing. You know, I spend all my life like a startupist. So I build 4 startups and I can tell you that I don't understand how large corporation works despite the fact I sold to more than 100 corporations in the United States, my first product, even 15 years ago. But still, when I do any meeting or start to build relationships, I didn't have any plan how to do it. I just did it by my gut feeling. And now, just looking at you and what you have done, I understand that there is something I can learn. And just combine my gut feeling with the real strategy how to do it and plan, right?

Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I kind of like don't like the, the, the term gut feeling for someone who has a lot of experience because it's like a physician, right? Your set of experience of so many years have showed you so many things that you can kind of like, you call it a gut feeling, but it's a summary of all your experience gathered together. You've seen so many things, you understand so many things, so you know exactly very, very fast how to evaluate things. Yeah, that's, that's kind of what you're referring to. And, um, I, I do agree to that. And I think a lot of the people who have been successful have done what you would call a gut feeling, but it's not a replacement to do things structured and more processed. And when I say structured and more processed, it's kind of like thinking before you jump, right? It's like, am I doing things right? Can I do things better? Can I become better in what I'm doing? Can I become better in parts of the things that I do? And this is why I wrote my two books, basically from a perspective of this is a book I wish I had when I just started my, uh, you know, journey, where someone would mentor me and give me all his life experience so I will, you know, hit the ground running.

Exactly, that was problem, for example, for me. I started my company, first company, 18 years ago. I didn't have any advisor. We didn't have a lot of people having exit. We didn't have a lot of people with experience. I had to learn it from my mistakes.

So you learned it in the hard way.

Yeah, exactly. And that's today, today I just want to help startups and founders to, to focus on their business and not to think about how to, how to make it, uh, specifically. So how to cut the corner and how to, how to build it. So tell me more about your, your, your, what is your first book? Innovation Business Development.

Yeah. So my first book is Innovative Business Development. The idea there is how do you take best practices from business development and apply them for innovation, basically showing that they run through the same process because innovation, if you think about it, is all about implementation. If you don't integrate it as part of the product roadmap, it's just nice thinking, right? So the idea of integration and implementation is kind of like business development, and then you take the best practices and try to apply it. So I'm trying to give a structure in a field that there's really no structure behind it. If you know a lot, a little bit about open innovation, there are many books that are written on the subject, but most of them are very high level. You kind of read them and say, okay, you got me convinced. What am I doing? Where am I starting? What are the actions I need to do? What do I need to avoid? And these books are totally missing with large corporations. So a lot of corporations have this from their kind of like experience. So trial and error, which they did. So they learned what works well and what doesn't. But in some cases they fail or not succeed very well. And then they ask themselves why, and they don't know how to answer that. So this is exactly kind of like why I wrote the book, you know, from the experience of moving between companies and countries and of course sectors. And it gave me a very good perspective on what works well across cultures and across sectors. And I did a lot of best practices and lessons learned from a lot of companies there that I incorporated into the book. That's the first book.

Yeah. So what do you think? How founder, uh, should build relationships with corporations, with sale, corporation sales team? This is the most important for founders today.

Definitely. And I think this is one of the biggest problems in, in, in modern education in, uh, university. I'm about to start a course in, in Reifmann University, which is a leading university for entrepreneurship. And I'm— the course is exactly on that, a course that will teach, you know, the entrepreneurs what is business development. And, you know, from theory to practice. Look at all the MBA programs out there. They're not teaching you MBA. They're not teaching you how to form relationships.

I agree with you. When I did it, Exactly. Business school. Yeah.

They teach you how to evaluate a financial, deal or, you know, read a, financial report. Who cares? You know, you have ChatGPT today. You need to go out there, create relationships, and obtain customers and investors. That's what you need to do, and no one teaches you this as a skill. So this is exactly where I'm aiming for. And I think, first of all, the, the bottom line is This is something that could be educated. It's not, uh, reserved only to extroverts. Introverts can do that as well, um, and they can educate themselves on how to do that by utilizing their capabilities and their strong suits and downsides. So, uh, if you are, uh, aware of what you're strong at, you can educate yourself how to become better. And that's exactly the point. I think this is something you can definitely learn from, from a lot of people, uh, like yourself, like many people who've been there around, um, and become better in what you're doing and how you're approaching this. And it seems very, I would say, when you're an, uh, uh, investor, when you're an entrepreneur, um, even an investor, by the way, companies are like a big, not, not, I mean,, right? Anomaly. You don't really know how to approach them, where to start from, who to engage. If you engage with them, do you do it right? Do you hit the right person? How do you do follow-ups? All of these are really tough questions to handle, and all of these are kind of like eventually come to networking. How do you build and maintain relationships? Because eventually you're not doing a deal with the company, you're doing a deal with people who sit on the other side.

You know, I, I, I can share with you, when I was writing my book Invisible Game, I learned more than 100 books about SPYRs because Invisible Game is all about emotions and all about psychology of investor and how to build connections. And I'm talking there about 3 brains, how to get out of the croc brain into social brain and then into their logical brain that usually doesn't decide, just finalize decision of croc brain and social brain. How you, what you suggest founders how to get into this? For example, just simple example, let's get to the earth. I'm in a conference and I'm raising, I don't know, $5 million and I don't have a lot of connections among investors. I have two ways. I can go to hire advisor for fundraising for warm introductions. Okay, maybe it's good, maybe I don't want this. I want to learn it by myself because I have to continue to raise. How do I get into investor in a conference and how do I build relationship, long-term relationship? Not only investor, maybe it could be some vice president or president of General Electric or something like this. I have to get there out of the blue in the conference and start to build relationships. How to do it?

Definitely. So I think conferences are one of the most sought-after and misconceptions that people have because they see conferences as social gathering. That couldn't be further than the truth. Conferences are working processes. You need to treat it as part of your working routine. If you are raising money and you're going to a conference, Your job is to sit down with investors, find them, and pitch your company. So it's all about the preparation in advance. You cannot come to a conference when you didn't do any preparation. You know, anyone who's been to CES understands this. If you go to CES without a preparation, without meetings, you won't meet anyone. So you need to understand who's going to the conference, who are the interesting people that you want to meet, build a profile around them. It sounds like a lot of work and it is a lot of work. What are their interests? What are they looking for? What kind of things they invested in, in order to tailor your story to their needs or what they're looking for. And then when you designate them, the whole idea is how do you generate the appearance with them? It's kind of like easy. Okay. It sounds really complex, but you can start from people you know who can reference you. And between me and you, the more— it's not a problem to get to anyone if you do it in the proper way. It's a long story, it's a long process, but you can get to people. Even if you didn't get to people, you have LinkedIn, you have other ways and means to get it, and you can learn a lot about the person so you can tailor, uh, uh, a, you know, a message that is tailored to him. I don't think I reached out to anyone, you know, that I wanted the connection to that didn't reply eventually because I built it directly to him and tailor-made to his needs and what he's looking for. And if you, even if that's not possible, you just need to find where are they in the event and find the right timing and right perspective, build your elevator pitch. You know, that's an elevator pitch because you don't have more than 1 minute to explain it. Come to him, explain what you did, and say, I'd love to sit down with you and explain more. If you build it right, there's no way in hell he will say no.

Yeah, that's— thank you very much. That's amazing advice. And let's move to another subject about innovation integration. I know you are a professional in innovation, how to integrate it. And you help a lot of companies to do it. You are advisor actually, right? Very famous advisor. And how today in AI time, where there is a native AI, native AI just like infrastructure, how this connects to innovation? Because for example, innovation is not AI. AI is a tool. I have some innovation. I have to integrate this innovation in AI tools or an opposite, integrate AI tools into this innovation. What's the best approach to this?

So I love this question and I would tell you the more AI that is out there and the more digital frameworks that are out there, you can shine better. It seems like the opposite where you say, wow, there's so much noise around it. So who will listen to me? But that's exactly your point. If you give someone on the other side the human touch, the human feeling above the AI and not do cold outreach, don't do generic messages, but really tailor it to his needs and show him that you care, that would give you the edge because people are looking for that. Eventually, like I said, you're doing a business with a human on the other side. The more digital frameworks that are out there, the more these people crave and want this human touch. So you need to exploit that and understand this in order to do it in a better way. So give your personal touch, invest time, invest in effort, try to give it your personal touch to every meeting that you meet. And like you said, an AI eventually is a tool. It can help you get more information, more data, more access, but you need to do the work, the human touch in order to get, not to get into the room, but to stay there.

Yeah, that's amazing. And it's like famous quote, you know, so you don't sell to, to the corporation, you sell, uh, to the people inside the corporation.

Exactly, exactly. And eventually you need to understand that still in the business world, uh, uh, up until this point, you're still doing relationship or, you know, business with humans on the other side, no matter how it seems that it's become very generic, but they're still human on the other side. So, you know, this is kind of like the thing that I like a lot about the digital world because, you know, it seems that it's not— it's never been so easy to connect to people. Yes, people feel so disconnected. And this is exactly the point in what you can exploit.

Yeah, it's very interesting approach. So I see you was involved in M&A, in investment deals. What's your approach to operations? Because everywhere, if I invest somewhere or I do M&A, I'm working with operators. And the best operators do the best business. So how you help people, founders, I don't know, corporate guys to become operators? Do you have any strategy for these specifically designed for corporation or small teams?

Yeah, I, I think that, and this is what I do a lot with investors when they pitch to me why this idea would eventually be sold to someone. I stop them. I say, I don't care about who you're selling to. Show me how you're growing the business, how you're making it self-sustaining. Let's say no one buys you. What's your game plan in order to be really successful and be self-sustained? Because if an investor, if an entrepreneur doesn't know that, how in hell can he build a company? Yeah, he's only lucky that someone will buy in along the way. He can get lucky, but he needs to come from a perspective of I'm building this to last. And if someone comes and buys me along the way, if it makes sense, I will sell it to him. But I'm building this to last. I'm not building the company to sell it. Right. So I think that's kind of a shift that has happened with all the market situation where entrepreneurs used to get easy money when two guys and an idea, right, got a lot of money. And now they really need to work for it. They need to show exactly where this idea will land, who will buy it, who will pay for it, how are the competition looking like. So people are starting to ask the tough questions that they should have asked before.

Yeah.

But they didn't. So they were a bit lazy the way I see it.

Right. And I can tell you, I can share, I, I'm talking to founders every day. And almost, I don't know, most of the founders start their elevator pitch with, we developed XYZ. I don't care what you developed. Exactly. Unless I know who's gonna buy it. Yeah. What's the market? What's the problem? Many people develop something. Who cares?

Yeah. You, you can't really, eventually you need to understand that you're not, you're not in a university. Right? You can't develop ideas. Eventually you need to sell it, and in order to sell them, you need to address and answer a need from the other side. You need to solve something for him. So you can't just develop an idea. You need to show how this idea solves something for someone, and he's going to be willing to pay for it. Otherwise, it makes no sense. It's just an idea.

Yeah, so here is another subject, um, You position yourself like you, you can offer the roadmap to create opportunity, right? How it looks like exactly. For example, you're going to the company, you're, you're meeting with them, the corporation or some, and you are talking about your, uh, your services. You can have where you can help them. I don't like word service. I, I mean how you can help them improve their results and sell the company, raise capital, something like this. So how to create for, for these guys, uh, roadmap to opportunity, to create opportunity?

It's a great question, and I think I'm, I'm kind of like, how should I say, lucky in that perspective, because the companies who approach me are companies who already do did something wrong and they don't know why. And they come to me to, in order to solve, right? So in, in, in a point—

Sometimes too late, by the way, sometimes too late.

Could be, but I don't need to convince them what I can do already. You know, it's already there and they understand the value that this change can do because they asked someone and they saw how it's done. I think that the most important thing when you talk to a company, and I hate this term consultant, I came, I started doing a lot.

Yeah.

I think consultant is the wrong approach. I always tell them I'm not a consultant, I'm a mentor. I have a lot of experience and I'm gonna sit with your teams and make them better. I will see what they're doing wrong. I will improve what they're doing and give them a structure and framework to be repetitive and do it less from a gut feeling perspective. That by itself will increase your chances and reduce the risks. Because if you're doing things from gut feelings, you're gonna do a lot more mistakes. If you're doing something from a repetitive structured approach, it's by default reduces the risk. And I just show them how it's done specifically in innovation, but also in strategical framework and business develop. And a lot of things, and I'll give you a very good example. I worked with a company and the first time I, I came to them, I said, show me your strategical analysis. And they showed me how they compared themselves to the product of the competitors. This is the strategical roadmap. We do X, they do Y. I said, guys, what are you doing? You're basically building yourself to be a follower. If you're just comparing yourself to the competition, you're always waiting for the competition to do something first and then trying to adjust.

Mm-hmm.

Think about what are they trying to do. Where are they heading? And try to get there before them. And understand your customers. Stop thinking about your product. Start thinking about your customers. Am I building something that someone will eventually appreciate? I don't care if it's the best thing out there. If someone doesn't appreciate it, it means nothing.

Exactly. So going further, how it will become monopoly.

Exactly.

This is what Peter Thiel is talking about everywhere.

Exactly.

Forget about competition. You should have monopoly.

Exactly. So you need to get back to your origins and connection to your customers eventually and understand their need, what they're looking for, even better than them.

Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. So What your— what is your, uh, suggestion, or what is your recommendation to, to young entrepreneurs?

Find someone. The best mentor in, in my career that I learned with one of my mentors in Deloitte, and it kind of stick with me. So, you know, we're talking about 25 years already. He told me something that really stick. When you're trying to learn something, don't ask someone who thinks he knows, ask someone who's done it 5 minutes before you.

Wow.

That's what you should need.

That's amazing.

So find someone who's done it 5 minutes before you, learn from him what he did right, what he did wrong, and evolve beyond that. If you think about it, make better. Yeah, exactly. This is kind of what's missing in the business world. Let's take this to physics or mathematics. What happened there is every mathematician or physician who came into the world learned from the people before him, tried to improve and try to do things better according based on their work. This is something that the business world needs to align and, you know, take into hands. And people don't do that. They don't learn from others. They're trying to reinvent the wheel instead of understanding how to reutilize it.

Yeah, so we use everything off the shelf. By the way, what I teach founders, if you want to build a great business, take something that already works, for example, United States, and take it to Africa, take it to Australia, take it to UK. Just copy, start from this. Maybe finally you will find your own way. This is how the best, uh, uh, musical groups working. They, they copy somebody, then they find their way.

100%. This is one of my strongest beliefs. And this, if you see all the investments that I did, all the investments that I did in, in a corporate world, okay, not as a financial, uh, advisor, but in a corporate world, all the investments that I did were in startups that came from another sector.

Mhm.

Okay. Why? Because when you are focusing on what you're trying to solve, what you're trying to achieve, and what is the technology that can enable you that to get there, you expanding the scope. You're not looking for the coin under the lantern, and you can go and find new and exciting technologies in other sectors that will enable you to get there. And then it's just an adjustment to your, to your sector. So imagine you're getting a startup who already have experience in another sector. You're just aligning them to your needs. So you're getting mature, uh, people with a technology that no one's have seen before in your sector that is already proven. So yeah, how can you get wrong in there? You know, you just need to do that. So I hate the, the scouters, I would say, that kind of look for the coin under the lantern. You know, if you're in automotive, just look for the automotive startups. That's not a way to go. There's a lot of ripple effects. There's a lot of learning from other sectors like you learn from other people, right? And therefore you can adjust and align, bring a lot of technologies, interesting technologies from other sectors to your sector.

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what happens. So don't devise your own ideas. Take something, I would say steal something from other industry or other location and implement it in a new industry, in a new location, maybe with some changes, cultural changes. By the way, this is your job. To innovate in different cultures. And this is how people come to you and ask for the help to do exactly what we are talking about. Well, thank you very much. It was an amazing conversation. And just remind our audience that we are sitting with Jeroen Flint after, after two bestselling books, Innovative Innovative Business Development and Beyond Networking. He's a strategy and partnership advisor, M&A advisor, and he's professional in networking and building the business. I would say very simple, he's a great operator. Thank you very much. Subscribe, like this episode, and we will meet next week. Thank you, Aron Flynn. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.