'Getting to Wow!' on Your Pitch, with Bill Reichert of Pegasus Tech Ventures
In this live session, Bill Reichert—author of Getting to Wow and partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures—explains why pitching is fundamentally different from presenting and introduces a practical framework for creating compelling, memorable pitches. He argues that effective communication must engage three parts of the listener’s anatomy: the head (logic), the heart (emotion), and the gut (instinct). Reichert stresses that entrepreneurs have only about 20 seconds to capture attention and outlines a three‑sentence "wow" structure: a clear description of what the company does, a compelling benefit for the target customer, and a concise validation that differentiates the startup from prior solutions. He critiques common pitch mistakes (overly technical language, story‑first approaches, inflated TAM numbers, and template‑driven decks) and offers alternative hooks such as an "imagine‑if" sentence, analogies, or big‑name drops. The talk also covers practical advice on metrics of merit, credibility checks, and tailoring pitch formats for different contexts (handshake, elevator, demo‑day, partner). In the Q&A, Reichert discusses the evolution of the venture ecosystem, university IP licensing, the role of crowdfunding and non‑dilutive capital, open‑source business models, and his view on over‑hyped versus under‑hyped startup sectors. Throughout, he emphasizes clarity, emotional impact, and credibility as universal principles for all founder communications.
Chapters
Bill is the author of Getting to Wow. It's a practical guide to help founders master the art of the pitch, and that's what we'll be talking about here is, you know, how you can really hone your pitch down. He's a partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures and previously co-founded Garage Ventures with Guy Kawasaki, which was acquired by Pegasus. Pegasus Tech Ventures is a global venture capital firm with headquarters in Silicon Valley and over $1.5 billion of capital in management. They invested in over 200 startups worldwide in AI, robotics, big data, health tech, and other deep technologies. And they're actively involved in supporting portfolio companies by connecting them through the network of global strategic partners. And they also run the Startup World Cup, which is actually what Bill runs himself, and it's one of the biggest international startup competitions in the world. So we're really excited to have Bill here with us, and I will stop presenting now and let Bill say a few words and then kick things off once he's ready.
Outstanding. Well, thank you, Carol, and thank you, Pete. And I got to say, I am so impressed with what you guys have done and what ADEO has started. I was— I got way, way, way back. I can't remember. I mean, it was like 15 years ago. It was like one of the very, very earliest you know, events when— and I did a workshop for Founders Institute Entrepreneurs, you know, way, way, way back. And when was— when, when, when, when did Adeo start this thing? I can't remember.
I mean, I want to say at least 8 or 9 years ago, maybe more.
Come on, it was more than that. It must be more than that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. It feels like— it feels like it was a long time ago. But yes, and I've I've known Adeo for a long, long time, and we actually got him a couple of times on panels, judging panels for the Startup World Cup. So it's, you know, been give and take between Founders Institute and Pegasus Tech Ventures. But thank you, thank you so much for that, for the introduction. Yes, the context today, the idea today is to talk about not just your pitch, but the way you communicate with the entire world about your company. So, you know, people talk a lot about pitching and pitch coaches and the right pitch and the slide deck and all that stuff. But what I want to talk about is more than just your pitch. I actually want to talk about your communications and the way that you explain what it is you're doing to the rest of the world. And so I've, I've, I've— this comes from This comes from a background of having been a serial entrepreneur. Before I became a VC, I started 4 different software companies and I was very lucky. I got, you know, Kleiner Perkins and Accel Ventures and Microsoft and Intel invested in my companies, 2 of which, you know, we took public. So I thought I was pretty good at understanding what pitching was all about. And then I became a VC. I crossed over and, you know, when you're a VC, when you're an entrepreneur, you're pitching, you know, 2 or 3 times a day, maybe. When you're a VC, you're listening to thousands of pitches, right? And so I crossed over, became a VC, and I realized, oh my God, all of that pitch coaching that I got when I was an entrepreneur was was just not right. It was presentation coaching. I got presentation coaching. I didn't get pitch coaching. And it turns out, what I didn't appreciate as an entrepreneur, it turns out a pitch is not a presentation. A pitch is a very different type of communication. So let me launch my slides and let's get into it. And I'll tell you, explain a little bit more what I mean by that. So here we go. And everybody see that? Is that working? We're good. Looks good. Looks good. Great. Um, so, so the whole big point of what I want to talk about, uh, this evening, uh, is, is what I refer to as getting to wow. And the point of it is that explaining your company ain't good enough. You've got to take it up a notch from that. And the reality that you have as an entrepreneur is in this crazy attention deficit disorder, you know, crowded, noisy world, you have 20 seconds to be compelling, or you might as well go home. That's your reality. And when you think about it, if you think about it, 95+ percent over 95% of the pitches you give are likely to be less than 30 seconds. Now, most entrepreneurs don't realize that because they assume that when anybody says pitch, they're talking about, you know, at a minimum, an elevator pitch, if not a demo day pitch, if not a real pitch, right? But every time you open your mouth and talk about your company, you're pitching. And every time you open your mouth to talk about your company, you want to be compelling. You want to get the person you're talking to, whether it's an investor or a customer or a potential employee, you want them to get to say, you want them to say, wow, that's amazing, tell me more. So that's your reality in this, you know, crazy noisy world. You've got 20 seconds to be compelling. Or you might as well go home. So now, how do you do that? So it turns out this all comes back to Human Anatomy 101. What do I mean by that? Well, what we know is that an effective communicator engages 3 body parts. What are the 3 body parts? Well, obviously, the first one is the head, the brain, right? So whenever you're talking to someone else, they have to understand what you're saying. It's gotta make sense to them. They've gotta, at a minimum, understand the words. Ideally, they understand the meaning as well. That's a little bit different, but you gotta connect with the head. And so when I was an entrepreneur, I thought that this was like 98% of pitching, right? Was I was taught in order to make a good pitch, you create this logical argument, you back it up with evidence and data and graphs and slides, and you, 56 slides later, you come to the conclusion, QED, you should invest in my company because you'll make a boatload of money. That's the way most pitch coaching gets done, focusing on the brain, focusing on the words and on the meaning. But then when I crossed over and I became a VC, I discovered, and this is the sort of most important dirty little secret I'm gonna share with you about VCs, that VCs won't tell you, VCs won't admit to you. But I'm telling you, VCs do not invest with their brains. Believe it or not, VCs do not invest with their brains. The reality you've got is that VCs are flooded with this data, with this information. But the secret to getting the attention of the VC is to get their heart beating faster, to get their pulse racing. So you've got to connect with the heart. Now, again, you probably heard some pitch coach somewhere talk about, you know, yes, you've got to connect with the heart. You know, I don't mean that you've got to show pictures of babies or, you know, cure cancer or eliminate climate change. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is just, getting the other person excited about what you're doing. And so there's a whole bunch of things, if you're talking about investors, there are a whole bunch of things that get investors excited. So it turns out, yes, we get excited by this incredible team with amazing domain experience and knowledge, and they're articulate and they work rather well together. We get excited by amazing technology breakthrough, deep tech. You can make bits do something bits have never done before. We get excited about vision. You're going to change you're gonna make a dent in the universe. So, you know, investors get excited about a number of different things, but you've gotta figure out what is exciting about your business. So the secret, the core secret, this whole presentation, I'm telling you, you've gotta figure out how to get an investor to fall in love. What is it about your company, your team, your value proposition, your mission, your technology, what is it that will get them to fall in love? What is it about your company that is lovable? So that is the core to getting to wow, right? Because wow is not an intellectual response, right? Wow is an emotional response. And so that's what you got to figure out. What's going to get them to say wow? Now, so that's the second body part. What's the third body part? Third body part is the gut. So as you know, human beings have an instinctive reaction to everything they come across. Every person we meet, every idea we hear, every sentence we absorb, we have an immediate reaction. This is bioevolution. That's the way we are wired. Literally, that's how we are wired, to make these instant judgments. Do I trust this person? Or do I back away? Is this person telling the truth? Or is he a lying piece of whatever, right? So we know, we know that humans have this instinctive reaction. So, you know, I'm sure everybody out there, you're all great people, you're all wonderful, nice people, I'm sure you do not kick cats downstairs, right? But nevertheless, sometimes, sometimes entrepreneurs have a tendency to exaggerate. You know, maybe stretch the truth a little bit, maybe get a little bit out ahead of themselves in terms of their forecasts. And so the challenge you have as an entrepreneur is it's great to be highly confident. But when you cross the line from highly confident to hyperbole and misrepresentation, then you blow the gut check, right? And people start to back away. So 3 body parts: the head, the heart, the gut. Which is the most important? I wish I had you all in the room together and, you know, we would have a show of hands. What do you think is the most important? This is to check to see if you're listening. I won't go through the chat room, but it's the heart. So, you know, frequently I get people say, oh yeah, the gut, no, the brain, it's all 3. It is the heart. The point is that you got to get them to fall in love. You got to get their heart beating faster. You got to get them to say wow. So that's what we're gonna talk about now. How do you get them to say wow? Well, you don't do what most entrepreneurs do with their elevator pitch. So typically, this is kind of what we get from entrepreneurs. We get the hyper enthusiastic entrepreneur who comes into our office and says, CoolCo is a dynamic startup company that has developed a revolutionary technology that is going to disrupt our $56 billion industry. Our team has over 45 years of combined experience, and we have 3 patents pending. We project that our curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting technology will blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we get that, we see it in our office, we see it on stage, whatever. But What was here? What did they say? I don't know. But so we get this all the time. Now we get the other extreme as well. Here's the other extreme. The other extreme, a company, they really came into our office and they really said this. They really said, we use a 2048 Diffie-Hellman key exchange and 256-bit triple DES to provide impenetrable security for your IoT devices. Whoa. So now I get it. Most of us are here in Silicon Valley. I'm guessing a big chunk of you know exactly what this is and you know exactly what this means. I get that. But understand, a lot of VCs don't really understand what that is. And so this is where you wind up with the VC going here, and this is where you are. You do not want to be here. You may not even know you're there, but that's where you are at this point. So we're busy now, we're checking our email, we're looking for our next appointment. This is not where you want to be. You want to figure out how to get to wow. So let's talk a little bit about how you do that. So first of all, I'm going to be a little controversial here, but, you know, bear with me here. The first thing you got to do is flush some of the things that you've heard from pitch coaches. So Some of the things that pitch coaches say, start with the problem. Because if you're doing a TED Talk, what you do is, you know, you frame out the context, you talk about the problem, and then you deliver your solution, and it has this logical arc. But I will tell you, the reality is we probably already know what the problem is, and we just want you to get to your solution. And in fact, I will tell you, 19 out of 20 times, if not 99 out of 100 times, if you just tell us what your solution is, we know the problem you're solving. And indeed, if you tell us the solution, and the value proposition, and the compelling benefits, guess what? Your value proposition and your compelling benefits are indeed the problem you are solving. So What we do not want as investors, trust me, guys, we do not want you to kick off your pitch with a slide that says 850,000 Americans die of cancer every year. And the leading cause of cancer death is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We do not want you to launch into a minute or 2 minutes or 5 minutes of the problem of cancer. Or "the problem of abandoned shopping carts," or "the problem of climate change." We do not need a dissertation on those topics. We need to know what the frick you do. So make it clear what you do, and if there's some confusion about the problem you're solving, then maybe you can clarify that, but I I guarantee you, for almost all of you, if you just tell us what you do, we'll know the problem you're solving. So don't distract us with stuff we already know. Get to the point. Second, the other thing presentation coaches will tell you is the best way to hook them is you tell a story, right? You tell a story. So we get, you know, these entrepreneurs, they come into our office, they've been coached by a presentation coach, and they come in and they say, You know, they put up their title slide with the name of the company, which is some indecipherable collection of letters that they used as the name of the company because they were able to get the URL, right? Okay. So that's where we are now. We have no idea what this company does. They put up the title slide and the entrepreneur goes into this launch, launches into this story and says, you know, before I tell you about my company, Zizzy G, let me tell you, you know, where this all started. You know, when I was a child, my grandfather had a farm, and on the farm he had a pond. And in the afternoons, I would go down to the pond and look across the water at the woods beyond. And in the woods, what a blah blah blah blah blah, right? So we would get this foundation story that maybe someday, if we invest, maybe someday we can have this story over, you know, dinner. But again, do not launch into a story before you tell us exactly what you're doing and what's compelling about it. Now, I will give you permission to tell a story if you can tell a story in one sentence, and I'll show you that a little bit later. But the next thing is that, you know, all these pitch coaches, you know, tell you you got to show a big market because these These VCs, they're greedy bastards and they'll only invest if you have a unicorn. And so the only way to get to a unicorn is to have a big market. And so crank up that TAM as high as you can crank that TAM, $256 billion, $1.5 trillion, better, the bigger the better, which is bullpucky, right? It's bullpucky. Your likelihood of success is not a function of the size of your market. There's probably no market that is not big enough to build a successful company. And I tell you, I have never seen a company fail because the market was too small. And I defy any VC who's actually funded a company to identify a company that failed because the market was too small. No, companies fail because they don't know how to get customers. That's why companies fail. And there are plenty of customers out there. So it's not the size of the market, it's your ability to penetrate the market. That's what makes the difference. And then last, you'll get a lot of people say, well, here's the perfect template, just fill this out and you'll have a perfect pitch deck. So everybody's got a perfect template. I assure you that no template was designed for your particular company. So, you know, you can use templates as guides, you know, and, you know, I've been guilty of, you know, and you can find, you'll find in, you'll find in the book, you'll find the book, you'll find the perfect template. No, you'll find an outline or guideline. But if you, if you, if you, if you stick to these old rules, they will not get you to wow. The secret to getting to wow is you've got to be clear about what you do. You've got to be compelling You've got to be able to communicate how much better you are than anyone else and why you're unique in that. And you've got to be credible. We got to be able to believe you. We can't think that you're lying or misrepresenting. So be clear, that connects with the head, right? Be compelling, get my heart beating faster. Be credible, that passes the gut check, right? I believe you. So If you figure this out, my point is this is not just for your pitch. This is for all of your communications. When you're pitching to investors, you're talking to customers, you're schmoozing at events, you're posting updates, recruiting employees, you know, this lesson, be clear, be compelling, be credible, applies to all of your communications. Now it'll be different, right? So the way you frame it, it's gonna be a little bit different for investors than for customers, than for recruiting, But the principles are the same. You got to be clear what you do in order for me to understand, you know, why this, why this could be interesting. You've got to be compelling to get my heart beating faster. And you got to be credible. So in other words, you can use this for all of your communications. So now how do you do this? So what I'm going to suggest is that in the first 20 seconds, in the first 20 seconds, you can knock down all of those. You start with a clear description of what you do better than anyone else. Now, it is stunning to me how many entrepreneurs, when I turn to them and I say, what do you do? It's amazing to me how many entrepreneurs do not have a clear, simple sentence right at the tip of their tongue that they can easily enunciate. Frequently, I mean, I don't think I'm that intimidating a guy, but frequently I'll get the entrepreneur, I say, what do you do? They go, Well, we have a product and it's a technology and it's a full stack and it's a platform and it's end-to-end and it's really easy to use. And, you know, so please, please, please come up with a sentence that a good journalist would use if they were writing an article in TechCrunch about your company. So you can't say we have a curve-shifting paradigm-destroying, whatever kind of company. You've got to have a simple sentence that a good journalist would use to describe your company in that next article about you in TechCrunch, right? So everybody needs that sentence. So that's— so you're now 8 seconds into your pitch, right? So, you know, a lot of pitch coaches say it's got to be 8 words, or it's got to be 12 words, or a 6th grader has to understand it, or your grandmother has to understand it. No, don't, no, just a simple sentence that anybody can understand in sort of, you know, medium business, you know, TechCrunch kind of language that I can remember when I go back to the office and talk to my partners. Okay, that's your first sentence. Second sentence, what is your compelling benefit? So there's got to be a big idea behind your company. Don't start talking about your product. Don't start talking about your technology. Don't start talking about your stack. You know, tell me, what is your compelling benefit? And who gets that benefit? Those are your target customers, right? They're the ones that realize your benefit. So, you know, maybe that sentence starts with the big idea, the big idea behind our company. And that, you know, what is the big idea? Not every little piece of your product technology, the 15 benefits that you offer, the big idea that's going to get my heart beating faster. And then third, I need a sentence that validates that what you're telling me is true and it's different from all those other pitches I've heard. Now, what most entrepreneurs don't appreciate, I didn't appreciate when I was an entrepreneur, is that investors, after they've been in the business for a year, it's very rare that they're going to hear something they haven't heard before. And so when I was an entrepreneur, I thought every time I was pitching that my idea was so unique, so elegant, so extraordinary that it would just blow their heads, right? But, you know, the reality is as soon as you open your mouth, every VC is thinking in the back of their brain, they're thinking, oh yeah, I heard this before. What was the name of that company? Yeah, they came in our office. And when was that? I wonder what that was. And they're distracted. So you've got to shut that down upfront. And so what you need to do is say, you might've heard of other companies or seen other companies that sound sort of like this, but unlike those other companies, what we are doing is dot, dot, dot. So you've got to shut down the sense that every VC is going to have for, again, 19 out of 20 of you that I think I've heard this before. So you got to shut that down upfront. So those are sort of the first 3 steps, the first 20 seconds to crafting your wow. Clear description, compelling benefit, and then evidence of validation. But now, you know what, if I, if I was in the room with you, somebody would be sitting there thinking, wait a second, wait a second, he said, you know, don't follow the template, and that kind of looks like a template to me. So that's fair. And so there are a bunch of other ways you can do this. There are alternative models for getting to wow at the beginning, you know, for getting this point across. But I'll tell you, you're going to need these 3 sentences no matter what. You got to have these 3 sentences. So you may not want to use them for your wow, but you got to have these 3 sentences. What do you do? What is your compelling value proposition? Why should I believe you, right? So, but you can do it in other ways. So I told you, if you can tell a story or paint a picture in, you know, one sentence, then that could be, that could work pretty well. So frequently, frequently that, you know, that story will start with this, start with the words, imagine if.
Right?
So imagine if you had an app that pulled together all of your messages from all your different messaging apps into one simple application and would respond natively to everyone who contacted you. It would save you 5 hours a week at a minimum. So, you know, paint a picture. That's, by the way, that's an app I'm desperate for one of you to develop. So, um, if you can paint a picture with an imagine-if sentence, you can make it clear what you're doing and why it's a benefit. And, you know, ideally, you know, what the psychologists say is true. If you can paint a picture in the head of the listener, they'll remember it better than if you just dump a bunch of facts on them. So imagine if is a great way to get your point across if it works for your particular situation. The other way to do it is to use an analogy, you know, we're going to be the PLAD of South America, or we're going to be the Robin Hood of Southeast Asia, or whatever. If you can use an analogy, an analogy that immediately sets me in terms of understanding the basic idea of what you're doing. Because after all, the name of your company is unpronounceable, and, you know, because you got the URL, right. So if you can use an analogy to immediately set me to kind of what it is you're doing, and then, you know, you then you sort of flesh it out from there, you can— that can be much faster and more effective. At being clear what you're doing. You can't use an analogy to be compelling. You know, to say that you're the Robin Hood of Southeast Asia, you know, just because Robin Hood is a unicorn doesn't mean you're going to be a unicorn. But at least I know what you're doing, right? Or, you know, another way to get to wow, it's a totally different angle on what I've been saying. But another way to get to wow is if you've got a really big name you can drop, then drop that big name. So my favorite story of this is I was in New Zealand and I was a judge at a pitch competition and an entrepreneur gets up and says, hi, my name is Marsha. We develop a suite of software for the special for special effects for the entertainment industry. Last year we won the Academy Award. So boom, you know, she went on for another 4 minutes, but I said, wow, you know, you had me at Academy Award. You know, if you've got a really big name, you know, you— probably most of you have not yet won your Academy Award. You know, we've also had people show up in our office, you know, with Nobel— Nobel laureates, that's good, you know, tell us that upfront. So those are some ideas on how to get to wow. Some other key points I want to offer you, and then we're going to get to the Q&A, are, you know, make sure you keep it simple. Now, one of the problems that a lot of entrepreneurs have, a lot of, you know, anybody who does any sort of public speaking, has the problem that in order to prepare for talking, they have a tendency to write out their script. Um, and there are two problems with that. One is when you write out sentences, we write differently than we speak. And so you can tell if somebody's memorized a written sentence, and usually written sentences are much more complicated complicated than spoken sentences. And so you have the danger if you try to write out your wow, that it will be convoluted with subordinated clauses and adjectives and whatever. So try to keep it simple. The test, the test is that it's gotta be memorable. So if you write a, you know, if you deliver your wow and to some fresh brains, and, and they can repeat back to you what you said. It doesn't have to be word for word, but if they can give the clear gist back to you, then it was simple enough and memorable enough. But if they got lost in all of your verbosity, then it doesn't work. It doesn't work. And so keep it simple. Then the other thing, just to emphasize this point again, is investors really, really want you to be customer-focused. We care about your technology. We care about your solution, your product. We care about your go-to-market strategy, but we really want to know, we really want to know that you're focused on delivering a compelling benefit to customers. So I just warn you, when you're talking about your company, try to stay away from describing your product, your platform, your technology. And focus on talking about the compelling benefit you deliver to customers. So if I'm clear what you do, then I'll appreciate the compelling benefit that you offer. And then I encourage you to try to identify one or two numbers that are your key metrics of merit. So a lot of entrepreneurs— and this is another classic pitch coach template problem— you've probably all seen these slides now. It's now, it's now very de rigueur to have a slide in your deck that has, you know, 6 or 8 big numbers, right, on the slide, you know, which are our key metrics, right. And so you've got 6 or 8 big numbers on the slide, and they think because the numbers are big, they're compelling, whatever. The— but I don't know which one to look at. I don't know which one's the most important or the most relevant. And so I got a whole bunch of numbers and I'm not going to remember any of them. So decide what are your key metrics of merit and make sure that that metric gets across. You know, we are 10 times faster than any other metal 3D printer on the planet. You know, we last 5 times longer. Our battery is 1/3 the size for the same power density. Are for the same amount of power, whatever. So, so what is the metric of merit that is really the big thing about your product technology value proposition? Okay. And then of course, you know, please don't lie, right? And so again, I know you don't intend to lie, but the reality is, you know, it's, it's so endemic that entrepreneurs tend to exaggerate that we actually created a blog called The Top 10 Entrepreneur Lies, which you can look up on the internet sometime. Um, so gonna end with, with just a couple of other comments about the rest of your pitch, crafting the perfect pitch. Um, so my main point here is that there is no perfect pitch. There's no recipe. So each company has some core that is what makes it compelling, which makes it lovable, which makes it stand out. So you need to figure out what's that core. Is it the team? Is it the technology? Is it what you've accomplished so far? Is it your Nobel laureate founder? What is it, right? So you've gotta figure out what makes for a compelling pitch. The other thing that unfortunately, I'm sorry to tell you guys this, but The reality is you need a different pitch for all the different situations in which you are pitching. And unfortunately, most entrepreneurs, they've got their pitch deck and it's designed, you know, as my partner Guy Kawasaki told you, 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font, right? So it's designed for a 20-minute pitch. And so every entrepreneur, when they are told you've got 5 minutes, what they do is they cut out half the slides, and they talk twice as fast. And that's a 5-minute pitch, right? No, that won't work. So you have to have a different pitch for every different setting. So we talk about the handshake pitch, which is the introduction. Hi, my name is Bill. We talk about the wow pitch, which is, you know, all 3 sentences. So the handshake pitch is the first sentence. What is it you, you know, a clear sentence that explains what you do. The wow pitch is the first 3 sentences, clear, compelling, and credible. The elevator pitch is, you know, generally 60 seconds to 2 minutes long. So it addresses the sort of the elephants in the room. For each of you, sort of the key challenge, the key question is gonna be different. As soon as you get through your wow, then you knock down sort of the key questions, you know, in the time you have remaining. A demo day pitch is a little longer. The partner pitch, that's the 20-minute pitch. And then unfortunately, there's this different pitch, which is the pitch deck you send in advance or the pitch deck you leave behind. And that pitch deck has more words. You can't use that pitch deck to stand and deliver. Because there are too many words on it. But you can't send the pitch deck with just the graphics and the images because there are not enough words on it. So you've gotta have a version that you present and a version you leave behind. Sorry about that, but that's just your harsh reality. The good news is, the good news is nobody reads executive summaries anymore. So you probably never have to do an executive summary again in your career. You just need a short deck. So in, you know, this is in, in the book, we go through sort of the core topics to make sure you cover. This is just a checklist, it's not a template. And then some other, some other, you know, sort of material that might be helpful. So if you go on the internet, you type in top 10 terrible, horrible, very bad slides, you should find a couple of videos. And this is my way of sort of saying, you know, don't make this mistake because, you know, literally what we did is we found a bunch of slides that, that some of which came off of templates and some of which came out of decks, some of which came out of, off of very famous decks, which just don't work. And so, you know, which I'm encouraging you to improve upon. And then of course you can always go to amazon.com. And check out Getting to Wow, available in ebook or paperback for the low, low price of $9.95. So there's the advertising portion of the program. And this is how you can reach me if you want to track me down. I'm bill@pegasusventures.com, or Twitter, you know, Twitter, etc. I'm @billreichert. So with that, um, You know, I'm happy to spend some time doing Q&A. Sorry, I went a little bit long. But tell me, are there any questions, or can I expand upon any of the topics?
Yeah, we got a lot of questions. They've been coming in here.
All right.
I'll go ahead and start to get to some of them now. The first one I'll start with is one that I'm personally really curious about. You know, Bill, you've been an entrepreneur before you've been in venture capital. You know, you mentioned a number of companies there, and you know, you've been in VC for so many years as well. And I'd really love to know, you know, what has changed? What's changed since you were an entrepreneur? What's changed since you were a VC? Tell us about, you know, the new and the greatest.
Yeah, no, I mean, interestingly, so I think, you know, what's changed You know, everything, but it all still stays the same, right? So as an entrepreneur, you know, the opportunities now available to entrepreneurs wherever you are on the planet are just so much better, so much richer, so much, you know, more resource available to entrepreneurs than there were, you know, way back in the day. I mean, and so, you know, Founder Institute is sort of case in point. You know, Startup World Cup is another case in point. You know, we give out a million-dollar grand prize to the winner of the Startup World Cup. So there's just, you know, all of this support available to entrepreneurs from the earliest, earliest days, and then all the way up, you know, in terms of at the universities, these contests, these accelerator incubator, And then the venture ecosystem also has changed dramatically. So again, when we started Garage, basically the whole big idea behind Garage was there was the Band of Angels, which was relatively new. There were angel investors and there was Sand Hill Road, and there was nothing in between. And so when we started Garage, we were the venture fund that was in between. We were venture capital. That was one of our taglines, because there was not a lot available in between the angels and the Sand Hill Road guys. So now, sort of every nook and cranny of the venture ecosystem has been jammed full of all sorts of different investors across stages. When we started Garage, we thought we were being bold when we said, "We're a seed stage investor," because nobody on Sand Hill Road said seed stage. They said early stage. They were early stage. Seed? No, that's for the angels. So we were one of the few and first seed stage venture capital funds. Now, now we have, you know, 4, 5, 6, 7 levels of seed funding. Believe it or not, I was— I mean, I almost fell off my chair when I asked an entrepreneur, you know, which round of funding is this? And she said, well, we're calling it late seed. It's our 7th round. Are you freaking kidding me? Wow. So yeah, and so the venture ecosystem has changed dramatically. The entrepreneur ecosystem and resources available have changed dramatically, but the core principles are exactly the same, right? I mean, the core principles are exactly the same. So when you're starting up, When you're starting up, you gotta figure out what your product market fit is. Now, you know, we didn't coin the term product market fit until I don't know when, but you know, when I was a lad, that was the whole point. I mean, you try to figure out, you know, where is the opportunity that matches with a product technology that can generate a compelling value proposition that can scale to a big company. Same issue. You know, it's just now we use different language to describe it, and we have lean startups, and we have MVPs, and whatever we've got. But the principles haven't changed, and there isn't a lot of— there's not a lot of profound insight that really has come across. I mean, we tried to do a startup genomics project, you know, to see if we can quantify what works and what doesn't work. And, you know, I'd love to hear if anybody thinks that that nut has been cracked, but I don't think anybody has figured out an algorithmic method, you know, other than maybe following Vinod Khosla around. I don't know if that's—
Yeah, not so sure about that. And, you know, a lot of things that you're talking about falls really well in line with what we do at Founder Institute. I even threw in the chat, we have a startup Mad Libs, like a kind of guide to pitching. There's templates that we have and there's a lot of basics that are covered in the program that you mentioned in the book there. The market validation, go-to-market strategy, all these pieces are so critical. And one thing I'd love to hear about, and this is coming from one of our participants here, this is from Kiwan. Could you share an example of a description benefit validation sequence that made you wow?
Yeah, so I got a million of them, but then my favorite one, my favorite one, I gotta admit, is I was actually, I was actually at an event and standing around chatting with a bunch of people. And this entrepreneur walks up to me. And says, Bill, what would you say if I told you that we can accelerate big data analytics by a factor of 100x without changing your hardware? And I, you know, whoa, right? And so, and I looked at her, and I, you know, and I, my wife criticizes me for this. Sometimes I just say things that pop into my head. And so my reaction, I looked at her and I say, I'd say you're lying to me. And I said that out loud. And because I assumed there was a trick in there that she just wasn't telling me, there was some trick in there, right? I was sure. She did not blink. She did not blink. She followed it with, what if I told you we proved it last summer with Major League Baseball? And I went, whoa, okay. That was probably the fastest invite to our conference room ever, was probably that pitch. But, you know, I mean, 100x Major League Baseball, are you kidding me? I grabbed a friend of mine from Intel Capital, PhD, you know, big data analytics friend, you know, dragged him into our conference room with the team. Like that, we put down a term sheet. So that was one of my favorite examples of— and again, I mean, she spoke a total of— I mean, count the words. I've never counted the words, but she spoke a total of 25 words. Bill, what would you say if I told you, right? So that was 25 words and she got an invite into our conference room.
Amazing.
I mean, now, and not everybody can pull that one off because, you know, but you got, I mean, if you got something that's 100x or 1:100, whatever, right? So there's, that's one of my favorite examples.
Love it. Thank you so much for sharing that. A question that I had, and I think this is related to one of our attendees as well, you know, there's a lot of things that might be a red flag for VCs, especially around, you know, cap tables or IP. And in particular, there's a question from Naveed.
Okay.
Or sorry, from— no, let's see. Yeah, it is from Naveed. So he wanted to know, coming from university, if there's IP that's owned by the school, is that a bad sign for VCs? And what are some of these other red flags around IPs or cap tables?
No, no, no. I mean, we see this all the time, right? Google had IP owned by Stanford, right? So that's how they got started, right? So it's, it's, you know, we love university IP. And because what it almost always means is that somebody has spent millions of dollars in grants or something developing this IP, and at some level validating it. And so that's, you know, that's all stuff that's already been done. What the red flag is, is if you haven't figured out a way to move that IP, you know, sort of from the university over to the startup company. And there are, you know, there are two ways to do that. One is if you can actually acquire the IP, if the university will actually you know, basically transfer the IP in exchange for some combination of consideration. Usually, however, usually they don't transfer the IP. Usually, and almost always, it's a license agreement. And so you got to do that the right way. And the right way to do that is, you know, exclusive worldwide for a tiny bit of equity and a tiny royalty. So sometimes we see that screwed up, but, um, but there are plenty, plenty of good models for licensing university IP that VCs, you know, are delighted with.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you for that answer. Um, what about, you know, crowdfunding or grants or other non-dilutive capital? I mean, is that something that is, is a turnoff or is that becoming more accepted?
Well, okay, so there's, you know, right, there are two types of crowdfunding, right? There's Kickstarter, Indiegogo, product crowdfunding, and then there's, you know, there's equity crowdfunding. And so, you know, we love it, we love it when, you know, Kickstarter, Indiegogo has done not only the product validation, but also generating revenues kind of right out of the chute, that's great. As long as the company hasn't screwed it up somehow and defaulted on their obligations or whatever. So we see plenty of companies that mess these things up. The challenge is there's a very, very narrow set of companies that can do Kickstarter. I mean, tend— they have to be pretty much have to be consumer products. You know, you're not going to do enterprise software on Kickstarter, right? So, or Indiegogo or whatever. So, so it's, um, you know, it— that, that's fine. That's great for those category of companies. On the equity crowdfunding side, you, you know, it's a little dicier. It's a little dicier there because, um, VCs get pretty nervous when they see 40, 50, 60 names on the cap table. And so if there's just a lot of names on the cap table, sometimes you can hide that with an SPV type thing, but if it's a look-through SPV, then the lawyers are going to look through and you're going to have these investor questionnaires and blah, right? So it's, we just, Sometimes companies can mess up their cap tables with equity crowdfunding, but sometimes it works brilliantly. And so if you can design a company that you can equity crowdfund and you don't need traditional institutional venture capital, God bless, because you can probably get a better deal. Than maybe with the venture capital approach. So that's kind of the way we think about crowdfunding broadly defined.
Gotcha. We'll do a couple more questions and then we'll break into our AirMeets. So this is a real quick question from Keith. In terms of open source, is there any red flag around companies that have open source technology?
Well, again, it's, you know, some of the best companies on the planet have had an open-source software model, right? You just gotta make sure that you do it the right way. You can't sell open-source software. So, you know, and the other side of that, the other, you know, sort of the deeper dive into that is, and I've seen, you know, we've seen this, if you ever expect your company to be acquired, These days, these days, any acquiring company, they're going to do a code review, you know, line-by-line code review, and they're going to check to make sure that none of that code is open source. Or, and if it is, or if it is, that you are just rigidly and carefully following, you know, the open source licensing guidelines. So, so it can get very, very hairy. If you incorporate open-source software into your software. But there's a perfectly good business model that says, here's an open-source version of this application, and we've got a community of thousands of developers that are continuously improving on it. And by the way, here's a proprietary version with support, and with tools, and with blah, blah, right? That, you know, you can pay for. And so if you want to fiddle around as a developer, you can use the open source. If you're an enterprise and you want to bet on the code, you want to bet on the code for an enterprise application, you probably want, you know, you probably want the, the, the, uh, the professional version, right? So the model, you know, the model works. A lot of great companies have done it. You just, you know, got to be crystal clear about how you're using open source software.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And you know, what I've seen a lot of companies do is, you know, sure, they have open all this open source software and it's great, but then they also have that enterprise tier, right? And that's the part where it's like, well, pay us and we'll do custom development for you. Or there are some pieces that, you know, we are keeping behind a curtain so that we can monetize. But get them in with the open source, you know, prove your value that way. I think that's a good point.
Yep.
And so the last question before we break into our air meet for networking, just want to get a hot take from you. What do you think is the most like overhyped area of the startup world? And what is the most interesting area of new technologies for you?
Well, clearly, you know, clearly the most overhyped area of of the startup world right now is, God, I hate to say this, but excuse me. Okay, I guess, I mean, I'm on record here, right? Is that what's about to happen? And my light is failing on me. So maybe that's a clue. Clearly, I, you know, so clearly the most overhyped segment of the startup world is flying cars. Or whatever. I mean, all these flying taxis and EV tolls and blah, blah, blah, blah. If only because we've seen this raft of SPACs around these vehicles that aren't going to get deployed in any serious number for a decade. But I love it. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love, love, love it, but you got all these guys going out saying, "Well, yeah, we expect we're going to have to spend about $1 billion, maybe $1.5 billion to get to market." And it's like, "Oh my God." My second company, which we took public, we took public on a cumulative total investment of $4.5 million. And yeah, it'll take us a billion, maybe a billion and a half to build this. Okay. So that's a little bit insane. And then you want underhyped? You want underhyped? I mean, I think there are a bazillion underhyped opportunities out there. I think what is so amazing about the world we live in right now is that almost every corner of every aspect of our life, of business, of commerce, of entertainment, of leisure, of travel, almost every corner of our world is subject to innovation. And again, you know, when I, when I was a lad, right, way back when, you know, Silicon Valley was, you know, ITC and life science, and that was kind of about it, right? So, but now we've got AgTech and FoodTech and EdTech and RegTech and FemTech and PetTech. And we got every tech, right? Everything now is susceptible to innovation and entrepreneurship and potentially venture capital investment. There are almost no markets you can possibly even imagine that are too small to build a highly successful company. And so, you know, that's, that's the big opportunity we've got right now. It's unbelievable how many things you could go do, innovate, and build a unicorn.
Love it. Thank you for that answer. That leaves us on a nice and inspiring note. Um, I know we weren't able to get to all of our questions, um, but go ahead and jump in that Airmeet. Um, you know, either myself or Pete or Bill, if you can stick around for a little bit, we'll be in there. We can answer these questions. And I'll just do a quick reminder that we do have our upcoming deadline for early admission for the program. So if you're interested in, you know, talking to amazing experts like Bill and working on your startup through this program, make sure to apply using the apply link down there in the chat by this Sunday. The application is free to fill out. It includes an entrepreneur assessment, and if you can get all that done by Sunday, that'll lock you in for that early deadline price. Um, after that it is going to go up, and you know, we always see a big flurry right towards the end. So apply early, you'll have the best chance of getting in, and you'll be able to qualify for that early price. Um, now with all that said and done, uh, any other Can I, can I, can I make one final shameless plug? Oh yeah, go ahead.
No, just, you know, um, you know, one final shameless plug. Please, you know, go to amazon.com and check out Getting to Wow: Silicon Valley Pitch Secrets for Entrepreneurs. I, you know, I, I would love it if, um, if you, you know, you, you look at it. I would love feedback on it. We are planning on keeping it up to date. And so I'm looking for feedback. Of course, publicly, feedback, only 5-star reviews on Amazon, please. Okay. But privately, you know, tell me that, you know, whatever you want, right? And so you know where to find me. I've told— I've given you my contact information. But thank you. Thank you, everyone. And, and please, please If you ever pitch me, please make sure you get my heart beating faster, okay? Thank you.
And Bill, I threw the link down in the chat there for everyone to be able to click on that. And funny enough, I don't even know, but you wrote it with Angelica, who was also a mentor at Singularity.
Yes, yes.
I know, I saw that.
I was like, I remember her. Yes, shame on me, shame on me. Yes, my co-author is Angelica Blenstrip. And for any of you guys out there who— any of you people out there who aspire to be authors, let me tell you the secret to getting a book written is to have a co-author, you know, who will, you know, prod you and poke you and whack you and keep you going. But having a co-author is incredibly valuable. And in my case, having Angelica Blenstrup as a co-author was a gift from heaven. So thank you, thank you, Angelica.
