How to iterate on your pitch while fundraising

All right, and we're live. It's not loading anymore, Manta, you can take that off. Awesome. Hey, Ben, welcome to the funding live session here, the webinar, and hello everyone that's logging in right now. So, you know, as usual, feel free to add questions or anything like that in the chat room. And, um, you know, if you can't stay for the whole thing because you got something else going on, uh, you know, uh, we're recording this for your convenience as well. So just, uh, I wanted to put that up there. Um, so, uh, many of you are about to start going out, have already started going out and talking to at least friendly investors and things like that as part of the program. And, you know, now we're starting to ramp things up. Um, and so this week, next week, and so on, you're going to gradually start meeting more and more people. And so I thought it would be appropriate to bring in Ben here to basically talk about like, you know, how to iterate on your deck and how these engagements are gonna go, right? So we're working on getting you to a baseline right now, what your actual presentation should be, but every single meeting from here on out, you're gonna iterate on that. And I couldn't think of a better person to kind of help with that. So Ben, welcome to the webinar. Maybe you can briefly introduce yourself and we can get going.

Thanks, Mike, and hello everyone. I don't know, maybe I've talked to some of you before. I've been involved in the Founder Institute for, well, nearly a decade now. Formerly global operations, directed a bunch of programs here in the Bay Area. Before that, I did struggle through a few startups of my own and have since got onto the other side of the table, did a bit of investing in the cannabis industry. And I'm now back on the operating side of the table, raising money, building a business, and doing all that. So I've seen all the perspectives that you need to know, and I will tell you all my secrets. But this is less about me and more about you. And so, Mike, if you have anything else to say, now's the time. Otherwise, I'm just going to press forward and cram as much into this hour as possible.

Yeah, go ahead and press forward. As questions come in, I'll just— I'll interrupt you if that's okay, or would you like us to do it at the end of the presentation?

Yeah, I'll feel them whenever. Okay, yeah, sounds good.

We'll do that. So guys, everybody here, if you have questions, as usual, just feel free to add them in the chat room. I'll relay them over to Ben.

Okay, so I wanted you guys to see my beautiful face throughout this. I didn't do your, uh, you know, typical pitch deck style here. But I did make slides, so put down the deck and let's talk about you for a bit, okay? You've probably heard this numerous times throughout your journey, but I'm just going to reiterate it before I get to focus on the deck. It is all about you. If you are not confident enough to get out there and raise money without a deck, you're not ready. You know, I made it halfway through my last seed round before I even sat down to make a deck. Like, you need to be so confident, you need to be the right person. People are betting on you. So if that's not embedded in your head yet, hopefully it is now. Okay. You know, what are people looking for when they're looking at you, evaluating you? Like, you're the opportunity. You're their extension. They want to place money in your hands because either you have unique insight that is going to, you know, solve a problem that has needed to be solved or that many people are trying to solve and you are the one person that knows how to do it best. That's why they're betting on you. If you have a unique perspective on an industry that they want access to, like the cannabis industry, like, people are gonna come to you if you seem to be the most knowledgeable, have the greatest access, be able to pass information back to them. If you can't confidently get out there and say, "I am the best person to do this. I am the one with the most knowledge. I'm gonna be your friend and educate you on what I'm doing." the industry that I'm working in, then you're not ready. Put down the deck, do whatever it takes to get you there. That said, I think the deck itself and the what— the reason I take this very iterative approach when building my deck is that it's a tool to help you refine your thoughts. The deck is as much a tool for you that it is for them. Um, So yeah, let's talk about me for a little bit more. I've gone through the process of building many decks. I am constantly iterating on a deck. I'm constantly fundraising. People are always asking me for a deck whether I'm fundraising or not, which we'll kind of dig into that whole thing. You know, it's like if you, if you have a company, you've probably been told that you're always pitching, that you're always putting your best foot forward, that you're always representing your company. You should also kind of constantly be focusing on, on that story that you're telling and making sure that it's consistent and being updated and relevant. And so that's where the deck really comes in. So just kind of have that mindset. And then as we move forward through this, you know, let me know if you have any questions. If you want to get in touch with me, hit me up on Twitter or Instagram. It's Pitch to Ben. It used to be more relevant when I was running a fund, um, of which I'm not anymore, um, but you can still find me there. Okay, so let's talk about now. You guys are building a pitch deck. You guys are building many pitch decks, right? Not just one, many. So we have The base pitch deck. Hopefully it's a good snapshot into where your company is today, what you've achieved, what you're going to achieve, right? This is kind of like the moving target. This is why it's always changing because every month that passes, there should be more relevant information to be adding to that deck. If it's not, you're failing, you're stagnating, it's uninteresting, right? You wanna be moving so fast that you can't keep your deck up to date. I love telling my future potential past investors that, oh, this is dated back in December, lots has changed, because it's true. It's not bullshit. It's just like things are moving so fast, we're accomplishing so much. Here, let me get, let me get you one that I sent out to someone, you know, a month ago. This was good enough for them, you know. Like, you got to keep the excitement, the confidence, like the confidence that you are getting so much done, that you're focusing so much on the business, that you're going to succeed, that you can barely take the time to go back and revise that deck for them, right? It's like, oh, I'll get you better numbers in a month, you know, when I'm really actually fundraising. So there's this kind of dichotomy. I often talk about the dichotomy of being a founder. There's a dichotomy that you must kind of embody when you're fundraising. And it's the idea that you're fundraising now, you need the money now, I wanna get this done, timeline, deadline, boom. You're also never fundraising. It's like, ah, yeah, we could use the money, but, you know, we have money coming in, we have interested investors, you know, we're just building our business. And then there's the fact that you're always fundraising. Like, I'm taking, I've been taking Series A meetings for my company since I closed my seed round. People are trying to give me money now. I don't have a— I'm guilty of not having an up-to-date deck, but I want to bring the money in. I want to get the Series A started if people are willing to do so. So like, how do I do that? You're just always fundraising. You're always being creative and thinking about ideas. These are kind of— there's some like wizardry that you can like work into the process later on where it's like, I'm going to give you an uncapped uncapped note, a little bit of a discount, you know, you can put money in now if you really want to get in now. Um, that's where I'll come in with one of my book recommendations. I'll write it down later, later in the presentation. But, uh, if you haven't read Venture Deals by Brad Feld, just do so. It'll kind of like really get your knowledge level up to where it needs to be to really have effective communications with investors, because you just really need to be able to think like them. You know, it's helped that I've been one, and so I can actually coach my investors on how they should give me money, which is a nice situation to be in. So you're always and never fundraising, right? Go you. Okay, so let's talk about the deck a little bit. I don't know how many technical people are on the phone. There's about half. Okay, half. Well, half of you will get this and the other half will pretend that they know what I'm talking about. Your deck is like an API between you, your company, and your investors. It is speaking a common language. Whatever is in your head doesn't necessarily communicate well directly to an investor. And so your deck becomes like this kind of communication platform, right? You're gonna put stuff in it, you're gonna hand it over to them, and then there's gonna be feedback, questions, data that you can collect that will help you better refine your deck. There are tools to help you do this. Use them. Don't just send out your deck. Don't, don't have just— sorry, I had a lot of coffee this morning. Don't have just one deck. I've already said that. But when you're sending your deck out, like, you need to not just be sending out, be like, oh, here's our deck. Like, here is an information source for you to interact with us, and we are going to track you as you look at it, and we're going to collect information. We're going to use that information to better refine our deck, and then we're going to start asking you questions to see if you understood the information that we put in the deck. And if you have questions, we're going to write them down, and we're going to go back to the office, and we're going to see if we can better address those questions. Or— and, and again, like, there's a whole other rabbit hole I can go down with this— It's like, did I want you to ask those questions? 'Cause that is the case sometimes. It's like you can tee them up so they can ask questions so you can answer them so you can look smarter. You don't want everything in the deck. But let's focus on the tools first. Very basic, very actionable, okay? If you are creating a deck in PowerPoint or Keynote, Fuck slides, don't even go there. Like if someone sends me a slides link, I'm done, I'm not gonna look at it. Just, I don't know, it's a personal preference. You know, you don't have to follow it perfectly, but use Keynote or PowerPoint, keep it on like a hard disk, PDF it when it's done, and then get it to DocSend, docsend.com. Put it in DocSend and create links for every individual that you want to send that deck to. It's great because it kind of gives you, um, like just a bunch of like housekeeping procedures. You send them a deck via link, you can allow them to download it, which I do recommend if it's a deck that doesn't have a ton of information in it. A lot of investors like to be able to download it and be able to review it when they're on the plane or going to bed at night. They're old school, they print, you know, whatever. But use it because if they're going through your deck, then you can go back and see which slides that they spent the most time on or what slides that they just jammed through and what slides that they stopped looking at your deck completely. Like, this is critical information. So every time you send it out, see if you can get that report and see, like, you know, what people are actually interested in in your deck. So DocuSign is great. It's also good because it helps you do version control. So every time you load a new version on there, it's like you can see what you sent and you can see how your information has evolved over time. And if you spool up a conversation that you had 8 months ago, you'll know exactly what they know, right? You won't get confused about what version they've had. You won't have to ask them stupid questions. Like, you will be in control of your knowledge. So use tools like DocSend and then Pipedrive. Pipedrive is super helpful and I think Founder Institute has some discount codes for that. Pipedrive is basically a CRM system. I use it for my investor pipeline. I'd be like initial or lead, initial contact, you know, all this kind of stuff. And so as you're communicating with your investors via email and DocSend, and it's all, you know, intertangled, right? So sync it up with your Gmail. If you don't have Gmail set up for your company, I don't know what area you're living in. You know, just get it. It just makes it really easy to do all these like startup integrations. So DocSend, Gmail, and Pipedrive, link them all together and just really kind of start becoming a data junkie when it comes to your fundraise. Like you wanna be tracking all the conversations, all the questions, be open-minded. I was a stupid founder once too and thought I had the greatest idea. But I was a nobody, and I wasn't listening. I was just trying to get people to give me their money because I had this great vision. What I've learned over the years is that you really need— you're really trying to build a relationship with the investor to give them an opportunity to do something exciting. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to understand what their perspective is and to be able to understand what they want to hear. And the only way to do that is to listen, take copious notes, and go back and be truly like open with what you designed. Not only the concept of your company, but the, the deck. The deck. It comes down to the deck. Like, is the deck communicating what you want it to, to investors? Um, and I know this has been said a ton of times again to you, But I'm gonna reiterate it again. Like, you need to kind of continually refine the deck to refine your talking points. If there's a ton of words on your deck, you're being fucking lazy. Like, get the words out of there. Like, what are the points that you wanna get across in your deck? Like, how do you get to the point where you can sit in front of a bunch of investors and just talk to them about what it is that you do? Okay, so I talked about tracking, right? Talked about analytics. Talked about listening. These things are all very important. They're things that I just don't see a lot of founders doing. You know, I give people feedback all the time. They come back with a deck. It might look different, but they didn't fucking listen. They were just like pontificating off in a corner in their office. Make sure that anytime you're making changes to your deck, that it's justified, that it's driven by feedback that you've received. I can't believe I have to say this sometimes. It's like, there needs to be reasons for change. You don't just go and like rehash a deck because like you felt like it. Like iterate, have it be an iterative process and refine. One kind of pro tip for meetings in general, if you're the CEO, CTO, executive, whatever, carry around a Moleskine or some notebook and a pen everywhere, carry it everywhere, start taking copious amounts of notes. If you're not having shit tons of meetings already, start working harder and get your calendar full, but like, it will come to the point where you can't remember every conversation that you have. And it's also kind of, it's still, it's not rude, but it is distracting when people are sitting there taking notes on their phones or their computers. So put all that shit away, have a real in-person experience when you can, and just take notes. It's a very natural way to do things and it helps you actually remember what you're talking about. And then you can review them back when you're in your office saying, what can I communicate better in my deck? So I've made it through kind of my— I'm gonna take a break real quick because I made it through my list of tools. Look at this fancy slide. Get a pen. A Moleskine, Pipedrive, Gmail, DocSend, and Venture Deals by Brad Feld. Okay, those are the tools that you need. That's all you need. And confidence, right? Like you need to know your company, your industry in and out better than anyone else. If you are not confident that you are the right person, then investor sure as hell is not gonna be confident that you are, right? Like this really, I mean, building a deck is really the process of helping you refine your vision, how you communicate it, how people understand it, where the true opportunity is. And this is constantly evolving. You know, I don't have a definitive seed deck and a definitive Series A deck. It's been an evolution all the way through. People constantly want more information. I'm constantly building relationships. I haven't even officially started my Series A process, but I have a Pipedrive that I know have like 39 investors interested. Like, how do you kind of keep that process going? It's constantly, it's constantly an evolving process. Let me just take a quick perusal through my notes here.

We have a couple of questions here.

Yeah, let's bring them.

So one is, they're kind of related, the one Glenn asked about, you know, can you— should we send the deck out before meetings? And what's kind of like your view on that?

Print?

No, just sending the deck out in general.

Okay, so, so yeah, tactically I like to have I like to start with like the full-blown informational deck, like in-house, right? Like I get all the information I can into a deck, right? And then I start paring it back and I start taking information from the deck and putting it into a technical appendix or appendix. And I try to get that deck down to 10 slides. I don't like 10. I don't like, I don't like decks that are more than 10 slides. Really, because you can always send people more information. So what you want to do is get that deck down to 10 slides. That does 2 things. It gives you a chance to then make a presentation deck, right? If you've had all your information put in the deck, then you think, okay, I'm gonna go in person to a meeting. And, and again, going back to my very first point, what is the point of that meeting? It's a point for you to to sell yourself. And so that deck is gonna be as simple as my deck here to you. Well, maybe not that simple, but like it is gonna be pared down, largely graphics and big words or singular points, and the whole meeting should be focused on you. So that's that. What to send out before you get there is a teaser deck. I do these decks of like 4 to 5 slides. It has the high-level points, something exciting. Hopefully the team is exciting, something about the team, you know, but just really it's like, how do I get to that in-person meeting? How do I get them excited? How do we make sure it looks like we have our shit together? You know, if you're not a great designer, pay a friend to come and help you like make it look nice. Please don't send clip art. You know, this is just table stakes nowadays. There's so many people out there founding companies, a lot of them with marketing and sales backgrounds. Like, do the work to at least like win the beauty contest. So send that teaser deck, come in person ready to have a presentation. You might not give it. You might just have a cup of coffee with them and just chat it up for an hour or 10 minutes. You know, I don't know. After that, they will say, send us more information. Then at that point, you can send a little bit more of an extensive deck that has a little bit more words, maybe a technical appendix. I mean, you don't want to give away the entire farm, but like, you know, that's kind of generally how the flow works. You know, you want to What you want to avoid really is cramming everything into the deck. And what I said earlier is about did they ask you a question that you hadn't anticipated? You know, one of the fine arts of preparing a deck is making it look like you have your shit together, making it look like there is interesting information, but leaving some questions that you're really good at answering. Because if you have an hour, you're gonna spend half of it going through the deck, telling your story, all this kind of stuff. If you had anticipated leaving some questions unanswered, you know they will answer them, and then you get to look really smart answering their questions and make them feel good. It's like, oh, they actually— it's like, I thought it was a gap and then it wasn't. You don't wanna leave like glaring holes in your business plan, for God's sake, but you know, You know, this is kind of, I see a lot of founders try to put everything into a deck and like really build out their vision. And it's like, you wanna keep it simple, easy to understand, and it should be exciting in that fact alone. And then you can blow their minds like about everything else, all the other potentials, like how deeply you know the tech, reasons you're not doing certain things because you've already kind of explored them and quickly marked them off and said no to them. These are all important, important kind of aspects to kind of building that deck. Again, you know, we're focusing a lot on refining, but I'm hoping you got some of this advice previously. If not, take it to the bank.

Cool. That's why we're basically building this foundation right now for you guys, right, with this deck and all of these various assignments, is so that you have a foundation to basically iterate on, whether it's to ask for more information, in-person stuff. But if, unless you get your foundation right, it's really difficult to do what basically Ben just said, right? So you, you know, that's where you're getting all this detailed feedback from HQ that's, that sounds like, oh, I can't believe I had so much more work to do, but you do because if you don't have this all set up, it's gonna be very difficult for you to iterate moving forward.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, as, as I built my team, I'm asking the team every day, like, what kind of questions are you getting? And we're creating a doc, like every question that someone asks us, we're creating a doc and making sure that we have great answers. That document is not only great internally for us to ensure that we're spreading knowledge, but then we get to just turn it around and be like, all right, let's create an FAQ on the website. Like, what questions should we be up there? And like, what, what answers do we need to put? And so as we kind of grow, You know, we are making sure that we, we have no blind spots.

That's super good advice, guys. Everybody here should start creating a doc with all the questions that you're starting to get, even from the friendlies, right? You already went on friendly meetings for most of you last week. Uh, this week you're going to start kind of ramping that up. This is a good opportunity to write down those questions. If you don't know the answer, right, just, just, you know, say I'll get back to you. Don't try to work your way through it.

That's advice right there. I I've coached many people on being confident in not knowing. Because look, if you've built yourself up enough and you've done the homework to know that you are great, it's okay not to know. It's okay to be uncertain. But what you have to do is be definitive in the fact that you do not know or uncertain. Don't try to bullshit your way through an answer. Don't hem and haw about it to say, "That's a great question," or, "That's a really tough aspect of the business that we're really drilling into." You know, like, just, you have to have confidence in every aspect of everything, even if it's being wrong. Cool.

If you wanna keep going or if you have a question.

Yeah, so I'm, please keep asking questions. What I will, What I will say is that doing, you know, I didn't really understand the value of going out to friends and family in the early days of being a startup founder. It's like, ah, do I, you know, it's uncomfortable. You know, I'm just gonna go to investors, they do this professionally. But really going out to your inner circles friends and family really helps you do is kind of knock off those, those early questions because they're your biggest supporters, or I hope they are. Like, they want to see you succeed, they want to be nice to you. And so if they have questions, those are like glaring, like, holes in your business or in the way you're, the way you're explaining it, right? So those questions are the most important to address because if If they still have questions, you know sure as hell that like someone that does this professionally is gonna have 10 times more, 100 times more. So get out there, listen to what people are telling you from the early stage. If someone's like, oh, this seems really a lot like this, your answer is no, it's not like that because of this. It's why do you think that? What did I say that makes you feel that? Obvious if that truly is a differentiator. Is this a differentiator to you? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's not a different— a big enough differentiator. If you can't clearly come up with an explanation as to how it's different or why it's gonna solve the problem better or how you're gonna succeed faster, then you're kind of like screwed. But luckily you're still in your inner circle, so there's time to repair that opportunity. So use that as a stepping stone and then, you know, create a list of like tier 2 investors or 3 even to go out and like kind of test on. You don't want to shoot straight for like Sequoia and Andreessen. Now you're going to get eaten alive. Like get out there and, you know, test on me, you know, test on investors like me, the ones that don't know their head from their ass.

Which is exactly what is your next assignment, right? That's exactly what we're doing. That's how the curriculum is designed. Fantastic.

I knew that.

Awesome. Yeah.

So any other questions?

Not right now in the chat room.

Okay. No, I don't— I, this particular topic, there's not a whole lot to get besides the importance of implementing these processes. Like your deck is never done. That's why I had my loading bar, right? I don't know where it went, I threw it somewhere. There you go. It's like, this is the status of my deck. Technically, this is why I don't have a deck today, because I owe some investors an updated deck, and I still don't have time to do that because I'm too busy. You should constantly be going back and looking at it. It helps you to also understand, am I on track? Am I hitting the milestones that I'm hitting? Is this being like— are all the achievements that we're excited about falling in line with our story? You know, and if you actually have to change things, again, like, you better be able to rationalize and have good explanations as to why it's changing. You know, I hear a lot of feedback from other investors that are evaluating different deals. And they'll talk, it's just like, oh, well, I saw so-and-so the other day, and he was quoting a $20 million valuation, and all of a sudden it was $12. And then the very next day, I heard it was $10. It's like, that makes you look like a super amateur and that'll just kill all investment, right? So, you know, having a succinct story, understanding the information that you're putting out there, why you're changing things, how the industry is changing, like you just need to be in control of everything. And if you're not there, like you need to find a system that really does help you figure that out. And for me, that's been just doing those simple tools, thinking of investors as colleagues, right? Like, to have them as friends, to not fear them, to actually think, oh, they bring money and expertise. Oh, I'm really excited to have you a part of our team because of, you know, your access to this network or your experience in dealing with these types of companies. These are the things that can really help you succeed. You know, when I'm building out my investor list, I'm thinking about how can I leverage these people beyond their money, because they want to. They want to get more. Most of the time they want to get involved. Um, so just kind of always thinking about, you know, not being intimidated by them as people. Like, they have a job, especially if they're VCs, right? They have a certain number of companies, a certain number of investments, a certain amount of money that they need to spend, and you might be one of those people that can help them achieve that. So help them achieve it. Like, they have to give people money, might as well be you. And if you're not ready to receive it, then that's on you. And again, I, I know I talk a lot about things that don't have anything to do with the deck, but that's because the deck is merely just this thing sitting in the middle, the API, so to speak, to help you communicate your vision, right? And so, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier, just to wrap it up, you know, the concept is to constantly be sharing that your deck is communicating the vision that you need it to, because whatever's in your head isn't always easily communicable. To people on the outside.

Do you include the financial ask in your slides?

I do, yeah. I mean, well, to an extent, I, yeah, I identify how much I'm raising and what it's gonna be used for. At a certain point, I, we'll even throw in like a meter, like I have achieved, you know, 80% has closed, because then you can like use that for FOMO. It's like, all right, we're moving fast, we raised this much in this amount of time. Oh, look at that, we're oversubscribed. I guess I'll still maybe take money from you if you can, you know, fit these needs. Yeah, I mean, the ask is pretty much always in there. I don't necessarily You know, if I haven't brought in any money in yet, I won't set the terms. I'll let that be left for discussion. Um, you know, if it's a, if it's a big mainstream investor and you're far enough along, a lot of times the investors will be setting the valuation anyways. Um, unless you're super confident in what your valuation should be and you have good reason to, to back it up.

Uh, yeah, don't add the terms on your slides for everyone here. Everyone, they're not, they're not at that point yet.

Yeah, it's, that's a typical consulting answer, right? It depends, but people like to know why you're out there talking to them. And at the end of the day, you know, a lot of times people aren't gonna just offer you money, you have to ask at some point. So it's just whether it's in a deck or, you know, in person. What I would say is, and we didn't mention this earlier, just assume that your deck is gonna get out there and passed around regardless of if you use DocSend and you don't allow downloading and all this kind of stuff. Like people will just pass it to their friend and be like, oh yeah, just use my email address. Information gets out, people pass shit around even if it's confidential, even if they sign NDAs, like information will get out so Just keep that in your mind, control it. Don't be overly protective. Like, I'm sure you've been told this in the program a bunch of times, like, you gotta get out there, you gotta share your information, people need to know about you. But if you have like some really big secrets that you don't want out in the world, don't put it in the deck because that information will get out. I see decks all the time, even still, even now that I'm like, you know, not doing deploying capital through a fund, people keep passing decks to me like, hey, would you take a look at this? Would you like tell me what your thoughts are? And I'm like, I don't think I'm supposed to be seeing this. In fact, it actually helps me with my new company.

All the time that happens. Wayne asked the question is, you know, as we iterate, uh, uh, we will be changing information, for example, like the market and stuff like that. You know, how do you deal with like investor comments on earlier data, on earlier data, and iterate on that? I think that's, that's what you're asking, Wayne. If not, feel free to add another question in the chat.

Yeah, I mean, when it comes to— you mean market data? Well, let's just say, let's just keep this a little bit more general.

Any, any data on the deck, right? Uh, investor has comments on it. Maybe it's your market, maybe some things like that, maybe it's like your revenue model. I don't know, like, how do you iterate on some of those things?

And that's great. I mean, it's, you know, anytime— let's put it this way— anytime an investor is asking questions That's great. Like, questions are conversation, and that's what you want to do. You want to progress the conversation as far and long as possible, and hopefully somewhere in there, there's a transaction, right? But as long as they're asking questions, they're interested. And if they're asking detailed questions, that means they're even more interested. And if you put information in the deck, like I said before, you should have so much confidence in the information that you put in the deck that you're able to explain it clearly. And if you've changed it, it's because you found new information. Or if the investor has contrary information, ask them. Just be like, oh, that, you know, that's interesting that you think that. Here's what my information is based on. Where did you get your information? Because if it's more relevant, we would love to update our deck. It's showing a willingness like, look, this is, this is the best information that we have today, um, but If that's new information, it's new information, right? And some investors, you know, some of them are really quite brilliant in certain areas, and a lot of that is like market analysis or finances, of which many of you are not. So, you know, stroke their ego a little bit. Be like, oh wow, that's really great, really interesting. Like, let me incorporate that into my deck.

How, if I don't know if you do this, but if you do, how do you leverage video in investor reach out to get like the first meeting? For example, product videos or team?

I mean, I just never know. It's almost, almost all my investor meetings have come through introductions. Or my network, or I've never used a video. I do not use videos in your decks, for God's sake. It's, you could send like, I could see sending like a promotional video or something in an email, just be like, hey, it's something like we just created, it's something interesting. But if you're having to use it to sell your company, it's— you're not doing enough legwork to kind of actually build a relationship.

So if you're getting the introduction right, uh, from a strong introduction, you technically shouldn't need a lot of this kind of stuff, Glenn. It should just be like a 2-sentence email. I actually put it in the guide of what this— of, you know, of exactly kind of what it should look like. Yeah, the whole point is to do all this selling while you're in the meeting, not before, you know, get the meeting, get the next date.

Like, getting invest— fundraising is like, is like dating, right? You're always trying to get to that next date, to that next level. Well, I don't want to make any assumptions, but generally that's the goal, right? You want to get married or, or life partner, whatever is PC these days. Um, we— you should be designing your Pipedrive so that you're constantly trying to extend that personal interaction, right? Like put it in there, be like, all right, initial contact, coffee. Initial contact, coffee. Oh, lunch, all right, I get to jump to lunch. I didn't have to go coffee lunch, I went straight from initial contact to lunch, that's fantastic, all right, one step out. After lunch, like how do I get partner meeting or meeting at their office? Because like if you're in their office talking about business, you're like so close. And all the paper pushing in between, that's just to progress the conversation, progress the relationship. I have investors that just want to hang out, you know. They're like, hey, well, it helps that I have a product that they can consume, um, you know, it's a little unique, I guess. But it's just like, hey, what are you doing next Wednesday night? I don't know, let's go test some product and talk about the industry. If you can become that person for them, like, you are winning. And they're gonna introduce you to their friends and those connections are gonna move super fast because if they know one person's in and they bringing in their friends, like, that's when the ball really starts rolling. And I don't know, I don't know how many people on here are first-time founders versus second-time founders, raised money before or not. But if it's your first time really going out there and getting money, like really, like try to look at that person across the table from you and be like, we are colleagues. We need each other as much, I need you as much as you need me, right? And start from there. Like, I'm out here doing the hard work, exploiting this huge opportunity. I'm gonna win. I'm gonna be ridiculously successful, and you need me. You need to be a part of this to achieve your goals, which is make more money for everyone that they represent, right? Get them excited. Be their friend. Be the expert, like there's no reason why you can't get the money out of their pocket. But it all goes back to that thing at the very beginning. If you're not confident enough in yourself, if you don't know that you are the right person or that you will succeed, then you need to keep grinding. You need to keep working on that deck. Refining the deck really helps you kind of really understand it. That's the beauty of, designing a deck is it really helps you understand your business and your information and what's important. Because a good deck is very simple often, it's very clear, it gets the information across succinctly, and getting to that point is the difficult part.

Uh, do you recommend doing demos during, uh, in-person meetings?

Hell yeah, yeah. If you got it, show it. Don't wait. Don't forget to show it. Like, I've had people where I've gotten to the end of a meeting and I was like, so do you have a product? Like, oh yeah, it's live. And I'm like, what the fuck were you waiting for? Like, you know, get it out. Like, as long as it's, you know, it's gotta be functional or not embarrassing. It's okay if it's a little embarrassing, but like, you know, when I had my first startup, I didn't have a product, but I spent long enough on the live demo using InVision app where people would turn to me and be like, so how do I upload my file? I'm like, no, no, this is a clickable demo. I'm like, you can't upload files yet. But it's like, that was my demo, right? Like if I have a product, if you have a physical product, have it in your pocket for God's sake. Like I've seen hardware founders show up to meetings without product and I'm like, what the hell are you doing? I don't care if it's wires and a circuit board, you know, like bring it. Show like tangible, people like stuff. People like touching things, feeling things, seeing things. Make it real, 'cause that's what you're doing. You're constantly trying to make it real, right? Like, think about, everyone asks about traction, and traction can mean many things. If you don't have sales, then like, go to like, all right, we have this number of beta users. If you don't have beta users, say, I've hired this many people without paying them, which is really exciting traction. If you haven't done that, like, at least built something, design something, like, People want to see that this is actually going to come to fruition. Again, it's building the confidence, like, you are the one, this is going to happen whether you have money or not, you're moving, you're not fundraising, but you are, remember?

Yeah, I mean, depending on the investor, a lot of them just like playing with this stuff, you know. So what I used to do is I would literally just like send them a test flight to my app when I was, when I was out raising, and they would put it in there, uh, and it would literally like play around with the product. And we would have these conversations while they're playing around with the product, you know. So it can work really well for certain kind of products, you know. And I like what you said about hardware. We do have a lot of hardware companies in this as well. It works to bring the hardware sometimes, you know.

Oh yeah.

I geek out about it.

I'm not even a hardware guy, like, but, you know, someone brings in a big black case, pop pop, flip it open, and it's just like start pulling out all this equipment. And it's just like, All right, this is exciting, even though it looks like shit. Like, you know, you have a lot of cool stuff that you're doing, and you're clearly smart because you know how to put this together, even if you don't.

Um, and if you can't bring the hardware, uh, try to bring them to your office or wherever you have the hardware, maybe as a first or second meeting. Uh, people like that too. So I know there's some, some bigger hardware here, like Riley's got like a big 3D printer and stuff like that. Yeah, just bring them to your to your shop and show them the—

how it works. There's a— the, the kind of like pro approach to this is be able to clearly, constantly, clearly communicating the vision, but also showing kind of where it is right now, right? Uh, there, there's a, there's a great quote that I always like to use in, in a lot of my presentations And that's, you gotta keep your eyes on the stars, put your feet on the ground, right? And that's your job as the founder, is to constantly be selling the vision, keeping people looking at where you're heading, but also being able to show them where you are right now, where you need to go in the very next step and the next step. And it's always doing that. It's doing it in the deck, it's doing it in your conversations, it's doing it in person when you're demoing or showing people a space, We have a manufacturing space, it's not impressive, but I designed a nice conference room, we set up some lab equipment, and I bring people through and I'm like, look, this is what we can do right now. You know, right now we're producing X number of units an hour. In 3 weeks we could, by ordering a machine, you know, 6x that, that production level. And so being able to constantly be like, look, it's real, this is what we're doing, we really exist, and this is what we're doing right now, this is what we're capable of. This is, you know, just a month ago we didn't even have this space, but one month from now, you know, we're gonna see exponential growth. And hopefully it's true.

Um, a question in the chat room is, is it okay to be confident in asking what the next steps are and to get an appointment down with the goal for the next step? Like after your first meeting, I assume that's what you mean.

Yeah, confidence is great. Do get what you need, right? Move the process along. And there's a way to do it to where it's not offensive, right? It's just like, I have a lot of conversations going on. I would just like to know, you know, what's a great next step? What, what more information can I give you? You know, what do you need to see to make this investment happen? If you've gotten to that point where you're actually talking in investment. One thing I love doing with the decks in these conversations is like, hey look, I've been putting this deck together, I would love to get your feedback, right? Bring them in as like, try to get them to advise you. If you've managed to build like a, you know, a good rapport with them where you feel comfortable in doing this, be like, I've, you know, I'm getting ready to fundraise, I've been putting together my deck, would you be willing to, you know, give me some feedback on it, apply your lens. You hand it over to them, they give you some feedback like, interesting, okay, well, you operate a fund or you've made angel investments before, you know, what would I have to include in here to make it an interesting investment to you? You make those changes, you give it back to them like, so is it interesting to you? You know, I mean, you— Yeah, get them to say it. Get them to say like, this is, this is an interesting investment. And like, you know, again, if you haven't engaged for long enough and if you're persistent enough, it'll keep happening. And that's the other thing. I mean, you know, again, not related to iterating on the deck, but just like persistence, friendly persistence. Don't be annoying. But like, there's been many times where I just missed emails didn't get around to responding, or, you know, just evaluating enough deals to where if people didn't have enough persistence to kind of keep getting in front of me, then they fell off. And frankly, there's been times where I'm like, yeah, it was a pretty interesting idea, but, you know, the founder never followed up with me. So, you know, probably not an interesting idea. It's a fine balance. I've also, I, you know, I would say that if you've emailed someone 5 times that you might as well just give up, you know, with no response. But if you emailed them twice and no response, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It means they're a busy person. So wait for them to tell you, no, I'm not interested. Make them tell you, no, I'm not interested. There's a lot of investors out there that are afraid to say no. They're afraid to miss out. They don't want to close the door for a future opportunity. There's good investors out there that are confident enough to be like, "No, this isn't my wheelhouse," or, "No, I'm not interested." Get them to say no. A no's— well, I don't actually— people say this all the time. They say no's as good as a yes. That's not true. We all know that the yes is better, but, you know, no is a good second place.

How do you— in switching over to a couple questions that Stuart has here in the chat, or I guess one's a comment, but like, you know, like, let's kind of talk a little bit about the dynamics and how the meetings kind of work. You know, one of his comments is, I've been so focused on the deck, I forgot to do the demo. So maybe we can talk about that. And he also has some questions in here about like how to talk about the use of funds and stuff like that, potentially. Yeah, so I don't know, generally, how do you, how do you, how do you run these investment meetings, you know, um, to start? Because some people may not even want to see the deck, right? Like you mentioned earlier, they may just want to have a conversation.

Yeah, uh, you know, it again, it's just honesty and, and, and openness, right? Like you, you sit down like, hey, what's the best way to get started? Like, we've already chatted a little bit, or this, you know, you know, so-and-so introduced us, would it help if I just did a quick overview? And jump in questions. Would you like to see a deck? You know, I actually, I very rarely offer the deck. If someone asks, it's like, oh yeah, I could throw it up on the screen, you know. But frankly, I just get really good at like my 60-second pitch, 3-minute pitch, whatever you want to call it. And I just tell my story and then let it turn into Q&A. Because if you, the faster you get to questions and answers, the more you're getting to focus on talking about what they want to talk about. And if you're listening, if you're not just reciting like a script, then you get to actually have a conversation with someone, and that's when you start progressing the relationship, right? Sorry.

That's where the demo part comes in too, Stuart, right? Like, let's say you have a question about how this works or how— well, okay, let me just show you, and you pull you pull out your iPad and you kind of show kind of the entire process of, of the supply chain or whatever it is that you're doing. Um, and so, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's one way to kind of bring the product in, uh, into these meetings.

There, there are— there should be so many aspects to the business where you could really dive down the rabbit hole. And, and look, if, if, especially if you're a hardware founder, you know, people might really zero in on supply chain If you've really figured out your supply chain, if you've built a relationship with a US manufacturer that gets you to 3,000 units a month, but then you have a Chinese manufacturer that's already under LLI to get you up to 50,000 units a month, for you to be able to explain that and draw it out for someone and spend 15 minutes doing so in a meeting, that's really valuable if that's what interests that person. It's completely useless if no one gives a shit about the supply chain and all they really want to hear is the vision, which you should be able to spend 30 minutes just talking about the big vision and how you're going to change the world and move mountains. It's getting to that two-sided conversation as quickly as possible. That's what I always drive to. The other part of the question was use of funds. You know, psychologically, as you're doing your fundraising, you need to understand why you are raising the amount that you are raising. And have a very specific amount. Do the financial modeling. Know how much it's gonna cost you to get to where you need to go. And the question is, where do you need to go? And you need to have the answer for that, right? Like, where are you going with this money? Is that, is this money gonna help you get to break even and profitability? How many units a month do you need to be shipping? How many people do you need to be hiring? Like, what goes into that modeling and how are you gonna get there? How much are you gonna spend on each part of your business to allow you to achieve break even in 12 to 18 months, right? That's what people wanna know. They don't wanna know, they don't wanna know what you're gonna spend your money on. They kinda do, they think they do, But what they wanna know is like, are you gonna be successful? Are you gonna survive? Are you gonna get to profitability? Are you gonna get to the next round of funding? And that's actually, I mean, half of you at least, if not 90% of you, that's the answer. How do I get to the next round of funding? What makes me an interesting Series A? A lot of times it's $1 million in revenue, right? Like, how do I get to $1 million in revenue? Is the money I'm collecting right now going to get me there? If the money you are raising is going to barely get you past your first manufacturing run, you're gonna run out of fucking money. And that's gonna be shitty for the investors that you took money from. And so, especially if you're hardware, raise 4 times whatever you think you're gonna need, right? I'm just gonna set that aside. Hardware is a whole different beast. But people want to know where you're going and how you're gonna get there. And if you're gonna get there, and they need confidence to do so. So what I like to do with my financial modeling is, all right, where do I need to go? Series A? Okay, how much revenue do I want? What trajectory do I want? How many customers do I need? Like, what is the true benchmarks? What are the metrics that I need to be tracking to know that I'm interesting to a Series A investor? And if you don't know what that is, go find some Series A GPs to talk to and just ask them. Like when you are making Series A investments, what do you evaluate for? I'm sure you could just, if you're more introverted, just jump online. I'm sure there's plenty of information out there where you could just like look at all the deals that are done and what the companies were raising on, what their decks said. That is what you need.

And we share that information, by the way, with you guys in week 1 and week 2, so you have an idea.

That's great. That's great.

One of the things that, you know, you said, and this is why I've been like kind of like harping on you and everyone here, about making sure that your go-to-market strategy matches your financial or business model, as well as the business objectives that you're trying to reach in your ask. That's why everything has to kind of come together, right? Because of everything that basically Ben just said, right? So yeah, this is just kind of hitting it on the head again.

And when you, when you really win is when you can, when you can have lofty goals, like we are going to achieve great things. Here's how much money I need to get it done. And if you can do that based on making no revenue, it's like, all right, if I raise this much money, I will have 18 months runway, it'll get me here. And then if you can magically, if you have the type of business where you can start making revenue, fantastic. Like do that, have revenue start coming in so that when you do get to that point later in time, you're merely raising money to move faster, to grow faster, so you can elate people, so you can say, hey, we've exceeded expectations, right? Like, it's a, you know, you might call it conservative to be like, oh, we're going to do projections and not consider revenue, but like, it's just, I mean, this is part of, again, the dichotomy of being a startup founder, right? Like, you want to be, optimistic and sell a big vision. And then you want to exceed that because falling short is— it just makes it more difficult later on down the road. Most people expect that you will fall short because all startups like have, you know, stars in their eyes. But when you can change the narrative a little bit in your favor, it works that much better.

Awesome. That was a great, great way for us to kind of wind this down and end. Ben, I really appreciate you taking the time and giving us kind of like your candid views on this. I think everyone here in the chat room appreciates it as well. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this for us. It's really helpful.

Yeah, yeah, much appreciated. And thanks for bearing with me while I jump around a little bit here and there. But, you know, if you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram or Twitter and, you know, maybe I'll even get a meeting. Uh, but yeah, I'll let Mike manage that.

Yeah. All right, guys, thank you so much. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Talk soon.

Bye.