Pitch to win—how this method will help you raise capital and sell more—Nir Zavaro on F*the Slides

I do a little bit of investing. I've been to Demo Days and so on. And I'm also a founder. And the feeling as an investor that you often get from pitches, whether it's a 3-minute one or a 30-minute one, is they just point a fire hose at your face and just try to cram as much information at you as possible. And I'm like, oh, first of all, it's hard to absorb all of it. Secondly, there's no structure, there's no scaffolding. Thirdly, it's probably all bullshit, especially if you're at the pre-seed or seed stage. Nearly everything is bullshit, except to your point, Nir, is the story and the credibility of the person telling it. If you're at a startup, you know how essential it is to preserve cash. The last thing you want to do is blow a bunch of your precious capital on expensive laptops, phones, and tablets for you and your team. You have better things to do with that cash, like making a dent in the universe. That's why I'm so, so excited to share Circular's new Circular for Business offering. Get your hardware on affordable, flexible, hassle-free monthly payments and spend your cash on what really matters. For listeners of the Startup Podcast, I have a special offer. Once you've signed up and been approved, use the code TSP10 to get 10% off all subscriptions on our 12-month flexi plan. We're currently live in Australia and Singapore. Go to nowcircular.com.au/business or nowcircular.sg/business to learn more and to sign up. And don't forget that code TSP10. That's TSP for the Startup Podcast and the number 10. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it was a fantastic deal for startups. So check it out, use the code, and make me look like a hero to my co-founders. Once again, nowcircular.com.au/business or nowcircular.sg/business and use the code TSP10 for 10% off any device on a 12-month Flexi plan.

You're listening to The Startup Podcast, a show focused on helping you build, run, and invest in Silicon Valley-style startups. Whether you're an investor, founder, or operator in a startup, you'll gain insights on the principles that power high-growth disruption, the way Facebook, Google, and Uber do it? The conversation starts now.

I'm Yaniv.

I'm Nir.

That's right. Chris is out this week at a big wedding, so we have storytelling expert, novelist, and passionate salesperson Nir Zavaro joining us as a guest host. For regular listeners, this is a different Nir from Nir Eyal, who we had on the show a few weeks ago. We actually had Nir join us at the very last moment, so we're so glad that you're able to join us. Nir, welcome to The Startup Podcast. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Thank you very much for having me. By the way, I'm on a 6-month trip around the world to promote my new book and doing workshops. I'm so happy that we get to do this while I'm visiting Tel Aviv in Israel. My name is Nir Zavaro. I'm a salesman at heart. I've written 2 novels. I've been doing marketing for 20 years, and I'm now finally traveling the world and doing workshops in the hopes of teaching a million people how to become better storytellers.

So exciting. Storytelling is something that's very close to my heart too, obviously coming from a completely different background to you as a software engineer and I realized over time that even in technical areas, storytelling is so important. And more and more as I've gone into leading teams and being a founder, the importance of storytelling is just absolutely core. So really excited to have you and dive into this topic. Now, I know you have a book, like you mentioned, coming out in September. It's got a great name. It's called Fuck the Slides, which I love.

Thank you very much. You use the word storytelling, right? Everybody knows the buzzword storytelling. We're all storytellers. It's the way we communicate. There isn't an option where you're not a storyteller. Now we can define how good or bad you might be, but you are in fact a storyteller. Now what's interesting is storytelling is the skill we do the most yet practice the least. If you could be a better storyteller, most probably you would get more done. Features would be explained better. So many things would become easier. In fact, the slides came to be because I was working with startups. I couldn't understand what they do. And then I went to the demo days and they were not interesting. They were not inspiring. And I said, whoa. They're disrupting the world. They're gonna change everything. But they sound at the level of a freshman year college student where I teach, and they're asking for $10 million. That's weird. And when I started to see and understand how they do it, I noticed that everybody does the same thing. We all put all the emphasis on how it looks. We don't like to write it down because it's a commitment. We're afraid of it. There's so many different things. So what we do, we design slides and the slides are amazing. So working with startups on marketing and starting to work on their messaging and understanding, there's a bit more clarifying problems. I don't understand what they do and how they do it. And I said, wait, so of course the stories are not interesting. And of course they're avoiding them because they cannot define what they do. And I said, you know what, let's forget the slides for a moment and let's define, let's write. And they said, yeah, no problem. They went back and came back with slides. And then I said, you know what, fuck the slides, no slides. I understand you need them. Let's write a good story. And that led me to a 2-year journey of defining what is a good story for startups and then learning that it works for almost everyone pitching.

A few things that you said there really resonated with me. So the first is the beautiful slides. They're sort of beautiful and empty, right? And it can be very easy. You see like every startup pitch deck, every presentation at a big corporate, it has beautiful visual design of the slides. And yet so little thought going into what you're actually trying to tell. And I nearly now see it as a bit of a power play when I see ugly slides, cuz I'm like, you are confident enough in the actual content of your slides that you don't need to make it look pretty because you know that the actual story you're telling is compelling. And I believe a couple of years ago, the original pitch deck that Uber used was doing the rounds, and I think it was using the Google Slides default template. It was so ugly. But it didn't matter because the story was good.

Uber and Airbnb are the ones I mentioned in the book because we all know Uber and Airbnb. They work. You get it. The problem is you don't know what they said in the meeting. That's the key thing.

So the other thing I was reminded of as you spoke is, of course, the famous Amazon culture, right? If you read the book Working Backwards and you know about the famous 6 pages and the PR FAQ, and the PR FAQ is a lot like what you're talking about, Nir, is start with the story, figure out what you're going to be building based on the story that you can tell about it. And Amazon bans slides. So they really, they're like fuck the slides on steroids because they're saying slides are a crutch. They are a way of presenting bad ideas as good ideas. And so we're not going to have them.

You go into a meeting, someone has the slides, they look at them, they talk, then they go to the next slide, they talk about them. Most of the time they'll read pieces of the slides and there's a discussion. Now take away those slides and ask you, is your presentation ready? You'll say, uh, not exactly. And then what happens, they need to wing it. They need to improvise what they're going to say. So for example, have you heard of a concept called Fuck Up Nights?

Yes.

Great. So I was invited to do Fuck Up Nights in September. I did Fuck Up Nights in Bulgaria. I was a guest there. There's 250 people and 5 minutes before we start, and I'm the last speaker because they do it in Bulgarian, I do it in English. And 5 minutes before they call us and they say, hey, listen, we're having a problem with the screens. We're like, okay. So the option is we fix the projector and hope it works. It'll take 30 minutes. Or you guys want to do it without slides? Now, most people would panic, right? What am I supposed to say? And we're like, yeah, sure, we'll do it. And it was amazing. Now, if I take your slides away, and again, I understand startups need, they must show slides. That's okay. But we need to work on the story first. So what happens? The slides, as you said, they're not just the crutches, they're the basis for everything we work on. And that's where we're making a mistake, in my opinion. Because if the spine is the slides, we don't know, we don't control. How many people have you seen present? They come off stage and you ask them, hey, how was it? They said, yeah, I think it was okay. I think it went well. Yeah, I think it was good. But they don't know. And I said, I wanna take that unknown out of the equation. You don't wanna work with a TED coach. People wanna be able to do it by themselves. So basically what we're turning into is a new way of measuring or thinking because we're using what we say, the story, as the spine. And you probably noticed the mathematics of spoken and unspoken, the verbal and nonverbal communication, about 7%. By the way, there's a lot of discussions how accurate this concept is, but 7% would be what I'm actually saying, and the other 93% will be the nonverbal, my intonation, how I behave, my hand gestures and everything, the voice, everything else. So if I do not have those 7%, I cannot control the other 93%. And that's the basis. From there, we take it onwards.

So we talked about storytelling and the fact that it's a very compelling concept, but maybe let's take a step back and talk about what is storytelling and why is it so core to communication? We had Jenny Rudd on the podcast a little while ago. I know you listened to that. episode on communication, and storytelling is obviously a very important type of communication. So what is it? And ultimately, what constitutes good storytelling in your view?

I think the ability to convey a message or pass information, right? We still tell the same stories for thousands of years. Greek mythology, you know, I'm Jewish, we still tell the same stories at the holidays for thousands of years. This is how we're structured. We want to pass on the information, but more than that, we want to pass it in an interesting way that people will remember. It will resonate with them. Now, if I present 10 pieces of information and data, it's not interesting. It doesn't convey the feelings or the emotions, and you don't remember. And you say, I don't care. Like, it's great. I don't care.

You don't remember and you don't care. So there's sort of 2 problems with bad presentation, that bad storytelling.

So my question is, if you are a storyteller, because you need to pass the information and you want to share things, right? You go home and you say, Wow, what a day I've had. It could be interesting. It could be boring. Now you're gonna do it anyway. And we all know these friends we have when we go to the pub, the bar, a coffee place, we sit at home and they'll be those amazing storytellers. It's not just about the story because you and I can tell the same story. There's a difference in how we tell it because what we pass on the information and the emotions in a way you say, I enjoyed it. It's an entertainment. And that entertainment is a vessel to teach me something, to educate me. Once we understand that concept, we can say, okay, how do I do it? How do I become a better storyteller?

This is the Startup Podcast. So, you know, we wanted to talk about storytelling in general, and then a couple of really key types of storytelling that are important in a startup context. And what is more important than pitching to investors? Actually, there are some things that are more important, which is providing a great experience for your customers and for your users. But from a presentation point of view, from a storytelling point of view, being able to raise capital is So important. And investors are, in my view, I'm sure you agree, they are far less rational calculating creatures than they think they are. It's very much an emotional aspect. And then you mentioned demo days, right? Demo days are a particular type of investor pitching that is highly compressed, which I imagine is where that art of storytelling has to be at its purest and at its most pared back where you say you have 3 minutes. My startup was in Y Combinator. We got 1 minute. It's incredibly condensed. How do you get people to feel a certain feeling? How do you get people to walk away with a certain message, to remember you and to care about you in just 1 minute or just 3 minutes? It's really tough. So tell me how you've approached this.

So if we look at the spine, as I mentioned, and then we build on top of that, we understand what does the pieces of information wanna convey. Now we need to wrap it up in an interesting way. So let's take emotions, for example. It's a universal thing. Every person on the planet knows DNA-wise, we know how we behave. If I'm smiling, You smile. So I know what I wanna convey to you even now when I'm smiling. So we feel that, we know. The question is, do you know when to make the audience, the people in front of you smile? So in the 3 minutes, let's say if I look at 8, 9, or 10 paragraphs, these are the chances I get to convey a message and leave you with an emotion or a feeling. So once we understand that concept, 3 minutes is a lot of time. And by the way, when we look at the audience today, let's take investors as an example. They will measure things in 4 boxes. One of them will be how I make them feel. For example, we were working with a startup that was fixing a big problem of lost luggage in airports. And we all know, you travel, I travel. When you do a presentation at a demo day with 60 people and all of them are investors or VPs or marketing people, whatever, they all know the feeling of standing at that belt and seeing the same suitcases going round and round and your suitcase is not coming out. You'll know that feeling.

Oh, I know it well.

Especially post-COVID. So this means that I can give you that. Now we're standing together, you're with me at the belt hoping that your suitcase comes out. And it's a very simple example to show you how we pass that information. Secondly, if we are able to pass the information, we have an experience. Every single one of us will have those experiences. What happened to us at that time? What happens to us in that moment? So we measure feelings, we measure experiences, then we are able also to complete in our mind. I don't need to tell you every single piece of detail during the storytelling process. And an example for that would be I write books. Okay. I write novels. Look at the novel. What's a novel? At the end of the day, you're holding a white paper with black ink. You, the reader, are completing how the dragons look, how my city is, the ships, the boats, 20,000 Miles Under the Like you are able to imagine. So I need to leave enough gap for you to imagine. Then only then after those 3 steps, will you take everything into consideration, take the information, and now you will try to convince yourself that everything you heard matches and the data is okay. As you said, most investors make sometimes irrational decisions because their gut feeling says, if I go with them, they'll take us to a unicorn.

Yeah, it's funny, something that you reminded me of. Is the way compression algorithms like MP3 work. They're called psychoacoustic, right? And basically the way they compress the music is they know what hints to leave in the music so that your brain reconstructs the entire tune. And so it's not in any sense a compression algorithm like the type that you use for zip files. It's based on the human brain and how it works and how it processes audio. And I think what you're saying is it's the same thing when you're telling a story. That by doing something small, you can create this whole image. You can create this whole feeling in someone's brain. And that's a very powerful skill if you know how to use it and you consciously make use of that skill.

So first of all, I love what you just said. That was an amazing example. And here's the difference. You were just telling me an example. You said something about an engineering and I was like, oh, I'm scared about what he's gonna say. I'm not gonna understand it. And then you simplified it in a way that I like. And I said, oh, MP3, I love MP3s. And then you mentioned something and then you're talking. And what I'm thinking is, wow, that should have been a great example in the book. So what we say and how the other side reads it are completely different. Then we need to be able to control that.

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So when we discuss this concept now of doing a 3-minute, most of us go back to the same presentations. And a Demo Day is interesting because usually you have about 10 startups, 3 minutes each. And we measure according to the second, the third, the fourth, and we say, I like them more. So it's already a subjective matter of how I see the other groups, but they all have the same structure, which is kind of based, if you know the concept of the hero's journey, this happened, I had a problem, I solved it. I'm going to conquer the world. If you give me $10 million, I'm going to change everything, which is great. The problem is who's the hero of this journey? What's going to happen? I get it. But then I always hear the same structure and the same narrative, and it's not compelling enough for me. And then you will show me a pie that you're going to do a market. The market potential is $7 billion. The person after you will come in, they say, I have a $10 billion market. And you're like, oh, that's bigger. Is it good? Is it bad? It doesn't work. When we go to the movies, and I love going to the movies, and we sit at the theater and before there's the trailers. And the trailers is a concise 2.5 to 3 minute pitch to make you want to go to see that movie when it comes out in the summer. At the end you say, I want to go. You haven't committed. You haven't given them money. You haven't promised anything. All you said is, I'm interested. I want to know more. I'm interested to see that. And that's why I called our pitch the trailer pitch. By the way, one of the biggest problems we have today is actually in storytelling, the language. We call the same pitch, pitch deck, elevator pitch. We do all the same. We can't. These have to be different things. So I called it the trailer pitch. In the 3 minutes, instead of going in saying, hey, I found the problem. Here's an amazing solution. Here's how I'm going to solve it in a buildup. What I'm saying is why we don't have a lot of time and I have 30 seconds within the trailer pitch of the 3 minutes. The hook needs to be about 30 seconds. It's about 70 words and you need to hear an example, a case study, whatever you need to understand what we do. Then I have 2 and a half minutes to prove my point. Why is that different? Because today in the buildup, the hero's journey, at any moment I might drop off. When you see a movie, I don't like it. I don't like the character. I'm not interested. I'll leave. So basically what we're trying to do now is instead of building the hero's journey and you're sitting like this with your arms and you're waiting, convince me, sell me. I'm saying, no, why? Let's make you as the audience say, wait, what? How, how do you do that? And then you lean forward psychologically in sales. Now you are interested. Now you are open to hearing the arguments of the why that works. So 30 seconds is a hook, 2.5 minutes to prove your point, and at the end, You say, you know what? It makes sense. Why? Because we use the 4 structures. I'm making sure that you think what I want you to think. And even now, when I'm speaking, you're running everything I'm saying through your experience and your feelings and everything. You say, hmm, I like him. I'm interested. Ah, it makes sense. That's how we work.

That's so good. I love the trailer analogy because quite often I've been on both sides of the table. Like I do a little bit of investing. I've been demo days and so on. And I'm also a founder and The feeling as an investor that you often get from pitches, whether it's a 3-minute one or a 30-minute one, is they just point a fire hose at your face and just try to cram as much information at you as possible. And I'm like, oh, first of all, it's hard to absorb all of it. Secondly, there's no structure, there's no scaffolding. Thirdly, it's probably all bullshit, especially if you're at the pre-seed or seed stage. Nearly everything is bullshit, except to your point, Nir, is the story and the credibility of the person telling it. And so it's so frustrating. And whenever I advise founders, it's nearly always the same thing. Like I could nearly have an autoresponder where they like send me a deck and like my feedback is it's too long and there's too much information in there because I've never seen one that isn't like that. What they're not trying to do is create a feeling. They're not trying to create an impression. They're just trying to put the entire smorgasbord in a blender and then they're trying to shove it down your throat.

Why? Because they don't wanna miss anything. They want, as you say, they throw the spaghetti on the wall and they hope something sticks and you will give them money. But if I say, you know what, can you explain to me in 140 words? By the way, you know the word, I assume, blurb. We use it a lot here. Send me a blurb, give me a blurb, send me a short blurb. It became like the modern elevator pitch, if you want. And when I teach today and I ask them, what do you do in one sentence? That became the biggest spiel I had for the last 5 years with startups. In one sentence, can you tell me what you do? And they start arguing, the founders. And you say, wait, wait, you guys raised money. You've been working together for 3 years and you can't tell me what you do. And in the workshops, I teach them how to do it in one sentence. And people, their minds go crazy. They're like, wow, so this is what we do. And why is that important? Because then it drops everything around. It's not relevant. It helps us focus. It helps us focus the audience. It helps us focus the product. If it doesn't fall under that category, it's out. Now, what we do and how we do is where most founders get confused, right? We do a marketplace algorithm based on a blockchain to do machine learning AI. No, no, no. This is how you do it. This is the under the hood.

Yeah.

So the basic for a good concise storytelling is that everybody needs to understand what you do. And then we use the concept of dumb it down. You're an engineer. You can have a completely different conversation with someone, with another engineer, a fellow colleague, than you can have with me. I don't understand. And I meet startups in so many complex things and so many different industries. I don't know their industries. I will never know what they know. I need to understand what they're saying, comprehend in my marketing brain to teach that to my team here. So we teach how to dumb it down into 3 levels. If not, I'm out. I'm not interested. Now the problem is many times founders go into the meeting, 30 minutes, it doesn't matter. Maybe they're not throwing all the details, but the way they speak makes me feel stupid or dumb. And the problem is with that, I don't like you for making me feel like that. So I'm out. Even if your product is good.

Yeah.

Subconsciously, I don't feel good. And that's what we call gut feeling. I don't know, it doesn't feel right. I'm out.

Just as you're speaking, I'm reflecting on times where a pitch has left me cold because I feel dumb or I feel that they're not explaining it to me in the way I would like to have it explained to me. So much of this comes to knowing your audience. Going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, right? Where if what you're doing, and I remember on the previous podcast with Jenny, I talked about this as well, the magic of communication. Is you get to change what is in other people's brains and in return have what's in your brain changed as well. But I think what you're saying, that extra layer of nuance that's really valuable here, is the way to change what is in people's brains has to take consideration of what's already in there. What do they want? How will they react to what you say? Because in the end, what you say is less important than how that is received and incorporated into that person's mental and cognitive state. And I think when you talk about knowing your audience, That's really what it's about. Understand them so you can understand what you need to tell them to get them to think and feel what you want them to think and feel.

Exactly. So they're all the same, and that's the interesting thing. And I'm now traveling. I've done 15 cities, major cities from South Africa, Europe. I spent 2 weeks now writing in Istanbul, and I just came back from Rio, and I'm flying to Melbourne on Wednesday. And people are the same, and we're wired the same way. And once we understand that, We need to create a better playing field when we go to the meeting. I can't know how everybody's doing. By the way, sometimes you just had a bad day and I now have to go and pitch and you had the worst day and you are not interested. So the storytelling allows us to take you into my story, into my journey. And then you're like, hmm, I get it. That's interesting. How do you do that? Once you are interested, you immerse into my story. When you say, I go home, I had a bad day, I just want to watch TV and relax. What do you want? You want to immerse in someone else's story. So, and that's how people are. A demo day is always a good example because there are going to be from 10 to 15 to 20 to 100 people and I don't know them. I can't know every single person in the audience. Sure, if I go to pitch specifically to you, Yaniv, and I know a bit about your history and what you've done and so on, it's a great advantage, but that will go into a different place which I can't always control. When I mentioned the blurb earlier, I teach how to use the blurb in every place. So it could be in your email, but it also could be when you meet someone at the pub and they ask, what do you do? Okay. Or you go to a cocktail party to meet other investors and other founders. That happens a lot. And you mingle and you want to have 140 words where people understand a bit about you and a bit about what your company does. They get it. Then if they want to elaborate, that will go into the next step. So once we understand that, what is left is how can I measure if I'm passing what I want? To the audience. So going from the hook, what we started to do is what I like to call in the workshops is creating a love story. And I teach at the workshops on how to unfold the scene after scene. Now today, what you do is problem, solution, market, da da da. They're just divided pieces of slides. They're not even connected paragraphs, but the story is connected. It makes sense. The flow makes sense. So I might use a piece of data that's relevant to competition in a different place. I might use a different place to talk about something about the features. It doesn't need to be in one slide, dump 10 pieces of information and lose the audience along the way. And then once we understand that, we then put the pieces of information. So in a 500-word story, about 3 minutes, you will get 8 to 10 paragraphs, which is not a lot, but it's just enough to get a story. And if you put 2 pieces of information into each paragraph, before you've started to write, you already have 200 to 300 words. And you have a layout of how your story will look.

It's so fascinating. So like I said, I really love that phrase trailer pitch because it really captures the fact that you're not trying to tell the whole story. You're trying to draw people in so they want more. And then you're like, okay, if all I'm trying to do is get them to want more, I can be much more selective in the information I share and in the story I tell them. So that's one type of pitch. You said, you know, the language is unhelpful because there are different types of pitches. Another one, and I love this name even more, is the toilet pitch. So tell me about the toilet pitch.

Yeah. So it's called the toilet deck because what happens is when you go into the trailer pitch, in fact, with slides or without slides, you are the presentation. By the way, we were working with a startup fund. They were creating the 5th fund, presenting in the US. They went to Miami. The only thing I was certain of is that most meetings will happen on the golf course or at lunch, and no one will let them open a computer and present. And that's what happened. So the trailer pitch became, you, my friend, are the presentation. You need to be able to present. If you have slides, they're a bonus. And slides represent 2 different things. We can talk about it later. But what happens is most founders will create one deck and they will use it when they present and they will use it when they need to send it before or after the meeting. But that is the wrong thing. Why? Because when I present, I'm the presentation. We have the trailer pitch. The slides only need to play a supporting role or scenery. But the toilet deck is when I send it to you and I'm not there. Now, what I've learned while researching for the book is most founders read them in the morning or in the evening, and sometimes in the toilet. And secondly, the most important is no matter what happens, most probably I would not sit next to you in the toilet while you're reading my deck. So that means it needs to be—

That's why I got a phone with such a big screen, by the way, so I can fit a deck while I'm on the toilet.

And now what happens is You are now sitting on the toilet. I'm not there. You need to understand by yourself what I'm talking about, which means you need to have a bit more text, might have a few more slides. It might have a different structure. And that is important. And that's why I'm saying we need to separate the things. Trailer pitch is when I'm presenting. The toilet deck is when I'm not there and you need— by the way, in the book, even I mentioned that sometimes you want to have a different one for before the meeting and after the meeting, because Before you need to get it, but maybe during the meeting we discussed things like, I don't know, lifetime value of a client, right? The potential of the platform doing 1, 2, 3. Maybe the roadmap needs to be more in-depth. Could be a lot of things. So you might want to have a different toilet deck for the after that has a bit more information. Now you asked me, I think last time we spoke about what happens if you want to do the 3-minute in the longer structure of a meeting. So what happens today is I'll go to present as a startup. I'll go and present and I want to have as much time as I can. with you, right? I want to have 30 minutes, which is great. Then what happens is I will speak for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, bore you to death. You will ask some questions and we finish the meeting. But what would happen if I did the trailer pitch and then we can discuss everything else, right? Now you're interested.

And by the way, that's been my exact experience raising capital. Yes, if you have a demo day or something, you have your trailer pitch. That's important to draw people in. Once people are interested, you send them the toilet deck. Always send it to them ahead of time. They read it. And then when you get to the actual meeting, it's not really a presentation anymore. Every single one that I've been to is like, okay, yes, like you said, maybe you do the trailer pitch, if that, but then you go straight into questions and it becomes a conversation. If you've done your toilet deck right, you're not giving a presentation again. The slides barely even come out. If you have them, they are there as an appendix, right? Like if you need to pull some extra data and you show it, but Love it. But otherwise it's a conversation.

Love it. So in the old days, there was a major city called Babylon. Babylon was the city, they say in old times, they had 350,000, 400,000 people there and they had all the information, the biggest libraries, the biggest language appendices, everything was there. And I named the last deck that we have the Babylon. The Babylon deck is the one you go into a meeting with. So I go into the meeting, I do the trailer pitch. Now we're having this Q&A. They're interested. I'm interested. We have a discussion. When they ask me specific questions, I'll have all the slides if I need them with me on the Babylon Deck. By the way, it might have as an appendix 50, 60. We now have a client with 67 slides. But when you ask me about the lifetime value and I can say, oh yeah, let's discuss about the lifetime value and I can show you that slides, it means that I'm ready. I'm prepared. I did my homework. It makes you Feel good, right? You say they're serious, they know what they're talking about. And again, it's about the feeling I wanna convey.

I'm loving these names, but I have to admit this is a bit obscure for me. Why is it called the Babylon Deck?

So Babylon was the place you have everything is there. The city that had all the information. Yes, I say in old times, this city that had all the information with the biggest libraries, all the languages, people would come from all over the world to learn things there. And that's why it's called Babylon. And the idea is that everything that doesn't go into your trailer pitch and you might need to explain, you might have to talk about. So I went to a meeting, an investor asked a question. I'm like, hmm, it's a good question. We might design a slide with the information that will allow us to show that we've researched, we know what we're talking about, we're serious, we're putting in the work. It's about showing you that I'm ready.

But just to be clear, this is a random access deck, right? This is not something you should be going through from start to finish. It's more like people ask you a question, you're like, Here's one I prepared earlier. Pull up the slide.

Exactly.

So it's, it's only a deck in the sense that it's all in one file, but really it's a bunch of individual slides that you call up on demand.

Exactly. And the idea of that, they might ask you some stuff. By the way, they might ask some stuff that you don't find it necessary to upload one of those slides, but in cases where you want to prove a point, you want to show the graphs because you have the information, you've done the research. You probably know this, one of the worst slides you can see as an investor is the competition, right? And these people, they don't even have a proof of concept. They'll show you the competition. They'll have quadrants where their idea is above IBM that's been around for 200 years. And you as an investor, like, yeah, whatever. But if I have enough time during the meeting and you will ask me specific questions about the competition, and I have a slide to support that shows that I've done the research, it makes you feel more comfortable.

For me, questions about the competition are always like, do they have that peripheral vision? To your point, have they done the research? Do they understand the strengths of their competitors and why they do things the way they do?

So you're asking the question because you have a different reason from why they're presenting the competition. And a good story will align those.

So something that was fascinating when we were doing the prep, Nir, you talked about having KPIs for your presentation. And I'm like, that's great, but I've never heard about this before. So what do you mean by having KPIs for your presentation? And how do you set them and measure them? Yeah.

So we discussed about how we behave as storytellers and our ability to improve. And then we discussed about the audience. Now, Now, once I'm writing the story, 500-word story based on the paragraphs and the structure, now we go into the position of let's measure if what we've done is good. Interestingly enough, most startups I meet will talk about the slides that have more visual the longest, which means most of them will talk about features and competition more. Now, how weird is that, that you go for 3 minutes to talk and 15% of your time will be wasted on talking about your competition? So we measured the length. So how many words do you use and how long each paragraph will be? And the next things will be, what is the one key message my audience needs to take from that paragraph? And then we only measure according to that. By the way, that's how you write in a book. You measure that paragraph. Does it serve that purpose? What was the purpose? Does it serve it? And lastly, what are the key feelings that I want to convey to that audience? What do they need to understand? And how do I want them to feel? Are they happy, concerned? Do they understand that asking that money is a risky move or not? Once we add those feelings, we can measure if that paragraph is good. Now, when I show that during workshops, people are blown away. Why? Because you understand feelings, you know what you wanted to say, so you understand the key message and word count. It's the easiest thing you can do. Once people understand those 3 things, we are able to say, is that paragraph good? Or not. Now, if you remember, I was explaining the spine. So the 7% will be what we've written. The 93% will be about the key message. Now, if I want to, for example, tell you, let's say the product we've built will fundamentally change how everything in the world works. Or if I say the same thing, I'll say it will fundamentally change everything. Not the same. But once I say excitement, safe, happy, this, all these emotions and feelings that you can convey, I know how I need to behave. Now, the biggest problem of most people, and you know that, is all the engineers are usually people who don't like to present. They don't like storytelling. And they say, I'm not an actor.

The best ones do though.

Exactly. So you know how you need to behave and you know how you need to pass that feeling to me. And then they understand if I tell them to be happy because they defined, they need to show that they're happy. In some cases, startups will go in and they start with a joke. To break the ice. The problem is you make a joke to break the ice, that's for you. And then you ask the audience to become serious for them. It doesn't work. So once we define the key messages and the feelings, we can control how you will behave. And that starts a structure of how the other 93% will appear. And what we're seeing is when we show that to the founders, they know how to fill the blanks and then their story starts improving. Because they start crafting the words in each paragraph to make sure they're aligned with what they wanted to pass on.

Yeah, it's really good. So, I mean, you talk about KPIs, to me, it's working backwards again, to use that Amazon terminology, right? You need to think, what do I want my audience to walk away with? And then I've got this toolset, the communication as a toolkit. I've got language, I've got presentation. How do I make that happen? And then you can measure. I think that's where the KPIs come in. Am I making that happen? Is this content serving its purpose? But the bit that's really missing, Nir, I think most of the time isn't the measurement. It's the fact that people haven't even stopped to think, what am I trying to achieve with this presentation? They don't ask that very simple question.

Yeah. So they can't measure.

Okay. So folks, I hope that's really helping you think about how you craft your pitch decks. I've been looking at a few lately and I think this is so valuable because I think All the things, Nir, that you've been talking about are things that people really struggle with. And I've seen such epic products, fantastic founders struggle to get their message across in a crisp, concise way. And the solution that they come up with is always the same, right? It is, let's add more and more content and make it look more and more beautiful. That never solves the problem because, you know, it's like you're marching to the north and the enemy's to the south. So you're never gonna get there.

The concept in the book is the best sale is a no sale. Don't sell me, open the door that will lead to the relationship that will lead to the sale.

Soft sell is the best sell, right? So there's another topic that I thought we could cover a little bit more briefly, but I think again, so important to, well, really every organization, but even more so in startups where time is your most precious resource, which is meetings. I've never met anyone who's like, I'm satisfied with the number of meetings that I have. They're always too many, too long. And Nir, you've got some thoughts on how people can run their meetings so that they are shorter and more efficient. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah.

So what I've learned in the last couple of years is if we took the same concept of the trailer pitch, you go into a meeting and you have 3 minutes. The first 30 seconds, you explain to me the feature, the need, the everything. I understand what you're talking about. 2 and a half minutes to prove your point. And at the end, like in a startup, what is the one ask? If not, usually we go into meetings, you'll present for 15 minutes. We'll start elaborating about this and this is good and not, it doesn't work. But if you worked at home and prepared everything before— by the way, we ask people today to approve the text that they're going to say with their boss. So not only are they exercising and improving, they're communicating with their bosses about what could be the solution for that problem. And then after those 3 minutes, we do in a very structured manner 2 minutes of each person explaining what they think. And then in the end, we wrap it up and we close. Basically, 4, 5, 6 people are going to have a whole meeting with a decision because we know what we need to discuss. In about 10, 12, 15 minutes. There's a clear ask. That's very important in a meeting. And then everybody gets a timer. 2 minutes, tell me what you think. And we're done.

So this is specifically for decision-making type meetings, I assume, is where you're talking about, where you need to get to a consensus. And I do agree that those are the meetings that are the most likely to go way over time, to feel fundamentally unsatisfying.

You want to take a sales meeting? Let's take a sales meeting. Okay. You go in, I don't know how it is in Australia. Usually in Israel, people come in about 10 minutes late. They will talk about the heat, the humidity, parking, and then we jump into the meeting. In a good sales meeting, I'm less interested about talking. I'm listening. I'm asking the question and then I'll go into a 10, 15-minute rant about my business, why you should hire us, what's important and so on. Turn that into the trailer pitch. Make them say, hmm, this is exactly what we need. And we've been doing this for years. And then go back to what you mentioned, the Q&A. I have the answers to everything. And then the ask is timeline, pricing, and so on. But this is how you're gonna feel if you work with me. And we turned it into 45 minutes.

So Nir Zavaro, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. If people want to connect with you or learn more about what you do, or maybe even work with you, where should they go?

So I think nirzavaro.com is the best. Secondly, @nzavaro on Instagram is where you can follow my journey traveling around the world and teaching. And I would love to connect with people, which is always great. And lastly, we're about to launch a new platform called stuk.app, which is basically a story and a hook. We're going to teach people how to do the whole methodology of Fuck the Slides on a platform and the structure, the measuring, and then they can share their slides, their pitch decks, their trailer decks, and everything else. I think you will like this because we started the episode by you mentioning Nireyal, and seeing that we both have the same first name, I never liked my first name, Nir. As a kid, people called me by my surname, Zavaro, since I was about 6. I never liked my first name, but when I was trying to find a name for the platform, I stumbled on Stuk and I said, oh, that's cool. And I look it up and what does it mean? And apparently after you harvest the fields, right? And you take everything and you tie it together, that's called the Stuk before they pick it up. And Nir in ancient Hebrew means harvested field. And that was the first time I realized why that's my name. So that's what I want to do in life.

Okay. That's, that's deep. What a fantastic way to end. And of course, you have your book coming out in September. So one last time, what is the title of the book going to be?

Fuck the Slides.

And available, no doubt, where all good books are sold. Is there going to be an audiobook?

There's going to be an audiobook. I'm going to record it even with my accent because we thought it would come across as nicer. Feel free on the website to sign up for the newsletter because we're going to update about early sales and where I'm traveling next. So hopefully I'll meet you all.

Okay, fantastic. Folks, thanks so much for listening to The Startup Podcast. If you found it valuable, you've listened to more than a couple of episodes, don't forget The Startup Podcast Pact. Please follow, rate, and review us in your listening app. Follow our channel on YouTube and give us a shout out on LinkedIn or wherever you have an audience. It helps other people find us and that's really why we do what we do. So thanks so much. And Nir, thanks again for coming on.

Thank you very much.