A walkthrough of attending RISE, Hong Kong's 16,000-person tech conference, plus a live pitch from Kangaroo, an app connecting travelers with shoppers for cheaper international shipping. Roy breaks down three investor-pitch mistakes: speaking too softly, burying the problem, and not knowing your numbers.
If you're trying to pitch your idea for investors, here's the biggest mistake that I saw happening last night. This is the place to come to see the best new startups across Asia. This is the hottest emerging area in the world right now. This is the hottest emerging area. Hottest emerging area. Hottest emerging area in the world right now. This is the best place to come to see To have a conference of this size that brings talent of this quality from all over the world matters a lot. Welcome to Hong Kong. We're here for one of the biggest tech conferences called RISE. I have Shadi with me here. He's the founder of Kangaroo, and we, we got selected to pitch for investors the idea of connecting travelers and shoppers. It's a whole new way of traveling and getting things from all over the world, and we're excited for it. If you don't know what to do in Rise, I don't either. We're going to discover it all and tell you all about it. Next time you're trying to come to one of those tech conferences, at least you have some sort of guideline. First step is you have to register ahead of the conference. So the conference starts tomorrow, you go in today to just register and get your ticket. The second thing I recommend before even coming to the conference, doing what? Getting in touch with those investors and those companies you want to try to partner with ahead of time, because there's over, you know, 16,000 participants in this conference and you would have no idea where to start. My recommendation: do your homework before you get to this conference, so this way you know who you're gonna talk to, how you're gonna spend your time. And that's called strategizing, by the way. My flight from San Francisco was about 16 hours. You know what's crazy? It's 12 hours difference. So if If it's 8 o'clock in the morning in Washington, it's 8 o'clock at night here. And the crazy part is once you get to the Hong Kong airport and you get out, you have no idea how to exit. We end up taking a train to the city. And once we got to the city, then we exit trying to get an Uber. And most people don't speak a lot of English, so it was a little hard getting to the hotel. Hong Kong streets have something similar between Manhattan and its own flavor. Uh, humidity is just outrageous though. Wow, here's one of the destinations you see. It's called Victoria Peak. As I told you, it's about 600 meters above the sea level. And you can see this beautiful view around you that shows you a lot of the city. One thing I keep thinking about, everything around us was built by other people. And Steve Jobs said that everything around you was built by people that are no better than you. So you could literally take anything around you and make it better and then simplify people's lives so they will use it, and then you become like a whole mass success, right? So the idea, instead of like obsessing over making money, you gotta obsess over solving problems. Please welcome Roy to the stage. Good morning, everyone. So we have an international audience here. Have you ever been asked to bring an item with you when you're traveling? Raise your hand. On the other side, have you ever been asked to bring something with you when you're coming? Raise your hand. Oh, come on, people. On the maps, right? So you've been doing this, I've been doing this for so many years, and there's 3 reasons we identified for that. Because it costs too much for international shipping. The second reason, it takes too long to get the items you want from wherever you're trying to get them. And the third one, you can't take advantage of the price differences between the 2 countries. So we decided to take a stab on this by creating Kangaroo, which is an app that's going to be connecting travelers and shoppers. I saw yesterday over 100 fishes here, and here's a common mistake that I saw happening. First one, their voice is too low. Like, if you come up on the stage in front of investors and you're talking like no one's gonna hear you, they don't understand you. You cannot communicate clearly. Communicating clearly and being articulate in your message is a key thing when you're presenting for someone because you have to be able to influence them with your ideas. And your ideas have to be clear with a good loud voice. The second common mistake is you don't identify the problem the first three seconds Because investors are there to know that you recognize a problem, and that problem you're able to solve it with your technology, with your product, with your service, whatever the thing is, right? So within 3 seconds, within the first, you know, like a couple minutes even of the pitch, I have to know what the problem is. And the third common mistake that I saw is know your numbers. They're investors because they're hoping to give you a dollar to get that dollar back twice, 3 times, 10 times the value, or 100 times the value. So if you're not telling them how you're going to give them back that money multiplied, you just lost them. For your marketing and advertising to win, you have to have a clear message and a good product. An example of that is JetBrains. They have a very clear message and they're out there to win because their sentence, professional tools for developers and teams, position you— position them in your head and you know exactly if you're in developer space, that you could use them to build things. So if you're not winning in business, if you're having a hard time expressing yourself, that's the first problem for you not growing. Companies who grow have articulated a message and they have a great product that serves that message. I was literally walking by this booth and if you look at their display, you would have no idea what they do. And I wanted to grab the water bottle and I just wanted to have a conversation with the guy. It turns out they build software solutions. What's going on here is what's happening on the internet and that's why your messaging and your ad advertising is not working for you because your message is not clear how you're helping someone. I don't care if you have the best product, I don't care if you have the best service. If you're not able to communicate it in a simple, clear way how you're helping me, you just lost, my friend.
