Lance Cottrell: Pitching Principles for Idea Stage Founders

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan Isaacs. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thanks so much for joining us this evening, this afternoon, this morning, wherever you're calling in from or dialing in. We have a pretty exciting webinar session for you all today. We're gonna be talking about the principles of pitching, and we have an amazing instructor, a fund mentor called Lance Buchrow. He's been there, he's been helping and supporting early-stage founders for quite some time now. You know, what I'm gonna do is let me just go over some housekeeping, but before we do that, like, let me know in the chat where you're dialing in from. I think I saw earlier we have some based people from Pakistan, we have some people from California, Arizona, Israel, Germany, Berlin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, so pretty international, London, Tunisia as well, really awesome international crowd. We had about 300 people sign up, so I'm expecting 150. We're already at the 136 mark, so that should be a good session. Akshay, do you want to bring up Lance? And while you actually bring up Lance, let me go over what the programming is. Lance will do a presentation for about 20-25 minutes, then we'll jump into Q&A. Please use the Q&A button on the right-hand side to submit your questions because everybody then can submit their questions and then they can upvote it. We can bring up the questions on stage. It's very interactive that way. So that's going to be super important. After that's done, we'll leave the last 10 minutes, everyone, we can jump into online networking. There's these virtual tables. Lance will have a table. You can go jump on that. I'll try to jump on a couple as well. The idea of this is to go and network with other people, talk to your peers or what you learned and then really go from there. Apart from that, like, you know, we have international audience, please leverage that. We have co-founders, we have founders from the Founder Institute, we have grads, we have mentors, we have a bunch of people here today. So let's take advantage of everyone giving us their time. This is awesome. All right, Lance, are you with us?

I'm here.

Awesome. Great. Okay folks, I'm gonna actually, you know, while Lance, while you're here, let me run the poll and bring it up on stage. So folks, before we kind of start off, where do you feel like you're struggling with your pitch deck? Do you feel like you need more structure, you need help with keeping it on time, you need help making it more compelling, need help with answering objections from the audience? So you should see the poll on the screen, okay? All right, Lance, so you have quite a bit of people. Oh, okay, wait, this is changing fast. Can you see the poll as well, Lance?

No, no, I don't have the results.

Oh wow, interesting. So I'll read, so we have 60 people or so voted so far. 22, 35% say they need more structure, 8% need, they need help with keeping on time, 46% says they need help with making it more compelling, and then 18% says they need help with objection handling. So that was a good, Last minute add-in. I'm glad you asked me that. Hopefully that's relevant to and helpful for you. I'm gonna hide the poll from stage. All right, Lance, you know, feel free to introduce yourself, share your screen, and then, you know, you have 20-25 minutes and then we'll go from there. Lance, you— yeah, there we are. Perfect, you're back on.

Get that sharing going.

And then, yeah, and then folks, as you're doing the— as Lance is doing the presentation, as you can see, there's an emoji button If you press 1, it's a clap, 2, it's a heart, 3 is a thumbs up, 4 is super cool, 5 is laughter, 6 is party, and 7 is wow if he blows your mind. So please, yeah, yes, throw those emojis in there. That's the only way we'll get some good feedback on whether or not you like the content and you're resonating with it. All right, Lance, stage is yours. I'm gonna hop off now and I'll jump on for the Q&A portion.

All right, uh, so I'm excited to have so many of you here, uh, for this presentation talking about pitching principles for early-stage founders. I think the, the original description of this said for idea stage, but really I think everything I'm going to be talking about today applies more broadly, really through seed stage. By the time you get into the A stage, some of these rules are going to change a little bit, but kind of those, those pre-seed and seed stage rounds. This is really targeted at that. So my background, I've been in the entrepreneurial space for a long time. I dropped out of my PhD in astrophysics to found Anonymizer back in 1995. That was the world's first internet privacy company. We pivoted to providing platforms for conducting online undercover operations for the national security community and ended up exiting from that in 2008, very successfully stayed on as their chief scientist and then got active in angel investing. So, uh, moved to the North Bay area up in wine country and joined the North Bay Angels fairly quickly. I ended up on the board of directors there, and now I run their selection committee process. So anyone who's applying to present or get investment from the North Bay Angels, I end up seeing their pitch decks. Side effect of this, I see a huge number of pitch decks, and I have really firsthand insight into exactly why they get thrown out. You know, just for some round numbers, if we get, say, 50 to, you know, 75 applicants every other month, we have a 2-month cycle, half of them get thrown out sort of instantaneously. The committee votes that down to about 5 or 6 that actually present to the committee. The committee then weeds that down to 2 or 3 to present to the group. And of companies that present to the group, about 25% actually get funding. So super important to nail that presentation. The competition is insane. I'm also a global entrepreneur, a global entrepreneur in residence with the Founder Institute, which means that I work with their cohorts all over the world. So I get a lot of exposure again to companies in all sorts of places. I always have office hours available. And then because I was doing a lot of advising and I realized I didn't scale as well as I wanted to, I created Feel the Boot several years ago as a platform for startup advice, and it's free. We've got coming up close to 90 episodes of content, blogs, YouTube videos, YouTube channel, whatnot. So again, a good source of resources as you're going through your founder journey. So real quick for the structure, I'm going to start off talking about how angels think, what angels want, and then a 5-step pitch building framework. So that's gather, focus, organize, build, and polish. And then some QA. So first off, it's important to realize that this is not a friends and family round. People are not investing in you because they like you. They're investing in you because they want return on investment. This is typically people taking money out of their retirement accounts to invest in high-risk early-stage businesses. And in addition to sort of other benefits, they're looking to beat the stock market with that, right? Otherwise, they could just leave it all in mutual funds or something like that and just sit on their laurels and play golf. But they're investing in you. They're looking for that return as part of it. They're also looking for involvement, especially angels. Venture capital is a different fish. They're investing someone else's money. And so they are far more mercenary about this. But with angel investors, at least, They like being involved in startups. It keeps a hand in the game. They get to feel like they're part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem without, you know, the 100-hour work weeks and existential dread all the time. But they like being able to contribute, hopefully be able to improve their chances of success. And it's great cocktail conversation, right? If someone says, what's going on? I love being able to talk about some startup that I'm advising or recently invested in. Right? That's very cool stuff to share with friends. We also often like to see improvement in the world. So given two companies of similar quality and similar likely outcome, if one of them has a net social benefit and one of them is sort of a net social negative, we are more likely to be investing in the positive one. So to the extent that you can put sort of a green wrapper around what you're doing, that can be beneficial in attracting angels. But don't go too far with that because at the end of the day, we are primarily interested in making money from the deal. So it's critical to understand how this looks to the angel as an investor because I often see people kind of disturbed by the multiples that angels and VCs want to see. Right. And we want to see these very high returns. Problem is, it is fundamentally a statistical game, right? So 80% of the investments will return effectively nothing. We expect most of our investments to go to zero or close enough. Maybe 10% return our investment, maybe a little bit more. And then the last 10% returns, say, 20x to 50x our investment, or maybe it's a unicorn, returns a couple hundred x. That's the one that really is carrying the whole deal because it's a long timeline, right? If I'm doing an investment now, I'm really not expecting to see any possible returns until something like 2030. And so, right, positive returns are going to take 7 to 10 years. To the extent that things happen faster, it's usually not good news, right? If a company fails, that will frequently happen within the first couple of years. But for long-term returns, to understand where I'm coming, it takes a long time. So when you look at that return on investment, you'll then need to divide it by that number of years to understand what that really looks like to me compared to being in the stock market. And so to, to beat those portfolio returns, every investment I'm making has to have a plausible case for returning at least 20 times my investment. And that's after dilution, right? So if you're going to be bringing in a bunch more money, I could be diluted by 50% or 75%. And so that, you know, 20% now becomes 80% if it looks like you're going to need a lot more money because my ownership shrinks down. So when people are looking at you, and this is important to understand when you're putting your pitch together, you need to be making that case for that kind of high-level return. And just as a reality check, most companies aren't a good fit for angel or VC investment. You know, you have to be a company that's shooting for the moon, that's going to have this extremely high growth rate, and that in a reasonable short amount of time will exit so that we will see that money back, right? You'll either get acquired or you'll go public, one or the other. If you are just going to have a lifestyle business, which most businesses are— restaurants, plumbing, electrical, whatever— Those are amazing businesses, but they're not venture investible because there isn't a drive towards an exit that we can benefit from. So what do we look for in your pitch? Typically, what I'm thinking about when you're talking is I want to see what's the problem or need, what's your solution, what is the unique insight that you're bringing to this, right? What is it that you understand about this space that everyone else is missing? The competitive landscape, what are the alternatives your customers have, your defensibility, you know, moat or strategic power, your team, super important, particularly because you're likely to change what you're doing. You know, most companies pivot. And so the details of what you're presenting in many cases are not at all what you're going to end up doing. But if you're the right team, and I believe that you can sort of knock down all those barriers and innovate and twist and turn and dodge and weave, then you'll still succeed even though it's not what you originally pitched. I want to understand how you're going to market. How do you get customers? What kind of traction validation have you done? It's all about de-risking, right? We know that most of these deals are going to fail. The more I can try to put my thumb on the scale to reduce the number of losers and improve the number of winners, the better off I'm going to do. And finally, the deal. What are you asking for? So remember, when you're pitching, you're not selling a solution. I see a lot of pitch decks that look like they're sales decks for customers. Very different, right? They're often way too focused on the product and not enough on the business. It's not a product demo. And this meeting isn't gonna close the investment. The purpose of the deck is to get the next meeting. So you just need to provide enough information and enough excitement to get them to say, "Yeah, I wanna have another conversation and let's dig deeper." You're right, you're going to convince us you can be big, that you can pull it off, and that we should talk to you again. So let's look at a 5-step process for building this pitch. The first step is to gather information. See, a lot of people I talk to, their first move is to want to jump into Keynote or PowerPoint or, you know, Google Presentations, whatever that may be, and start work on it. But really, you want to make sure that you've got the information in hand before you get going. So the first thing, what is your problem? You know, what is the thing you're trying to solve, the pain point, the need that's out there? And for each one of these, you want to write down basically a sentence. What's your solution from a non-technical and benefit-focused perspective, right? I want to understand why this matters to your customers, not what kind of tech is under the COVID unless you're a deep tech play. What's your secret sauce, unique insight, right? Write that down. What is the thing that allows you to beat all the other companies that are probably thinking about the same space? And what's the current status of your solution, right? Is it built? Is it prototype? Is it MVP? How far along? How well tested? What are the sort of technical question marks around that? I want to know who are you going after? And the more specific you can be about your customer, the better. So jot that down, but it's not everyone or everyone with a computer. You know, it's going to be women between this age bracket with this kind of income with 2 or more kids and whatnot, right? The more you can niche down, the better, especially if you are a marketplace type play where density really matters and you need to have a high enough density of users so that when someone goes to the marketplace, they find the vendor and vice versa. No one likes an empty shopping mall. What's your go-to-market plan? How do you go out there and get these people? Who is your competition? And by competition, don't be thinking other companies that are doing exactly the same thing as you. Really, your competition is any other way your customer can solve this problem. So if they're, you know, and they probably are, right? They probably are already doing something to do the thing that you're going to provide. And in many cases I've seen, it's Microsoft Excel, right? They're just going to use a spreadsheet. And yeah, that's kludgy and it's pretty ugly, but it's cheap. They have it. Everyone knows how to use it. So that really is one of your key competitors. But think broad. It's any alternative way of solving the same problem. And then what's your defensibility or moat, right? Are there strategic advantages you have? Is this a winner-take-all and you're a first mover? Do you have patents or intellectual property? Huge amounts of data that you've built up, like Tesla has a big advantage in self-driving cars because they're collecting data from so many of their self-driving cars that are on the road already. And that is a self-reinforcing cycle. You want to have something because as an investor, it scares the bejesus out of me when I see a company that comes in and says, you know, here's what we're going to do. And it's obvious that any other company with a reasonable amount of money could do the same thing. And there's really no reason why they couldn't just come in and own the market and undercut them. So think carefully about what that defensibility is. Jot down your business model, right? Who is paying for this? And this really comes into what I'm talking— I want to back up to that problem solution as well and your customer. A lot of people will talk about who the end user is as their customer, and that it is important to talk about who the end user is, but often that's not the customer. So we'll see, for example, in a medical scenario, where they spend a lot of time in the deck talking about the benefit to the patients and how this improves outcomes. But the customer is actually the insurance company. They're the ones who pay for this. They're the ones who select this solution. So what really matters is what does the insurance company care about, right? Does this save money? Does it reduce total payouts? It allows, you know, treatment and much less secondary infection. So they're spending less money per patient, whatever that is. Make sure you are speaking to who the customer is and your business model is. How do you— how do they pay you? Right? What's the structure? Is it subscription? Is it pay-per-use? What have you. And then financial projections. This is not expected to be accurate. My most popular video is about doing pre-revenue financial projections. We know you don't have data. So that's kind of where it's at. You know, if you're pre-revenue, you have no data at all. But we still need to understand how the business works, right? Can it function? Is it theoretically possible for you to make money? You know, do you have the costs of your inputs and, you know, all of those things, the cost of advertising, you've kind of got a guess as to what your CAC is going to be. Put that together and show me that this plausibly works. The financial projections also show me how you think about the business. That's really valuable. The one thing I don't pay attention to is what the actual numbers end up being, because if you're within a factor of 5 of being right, in 3 years, I would be shocked. And then finally, why now? Is there a reason why someone else hasn't already done this? Is there some trend or overarching situation or disruption that you're able to take care of, take advantage of? Sometimes it's just the area is so unsexy, no one else is looking at it for disruption. And then why this team? What is it about you that makes you the right people to do this as opposed to some other random group of competent people I grab off the street? Write that down because that in your team slide, you really want to be selling me on the skill set, capabilities, and experience that applies to this, not just giving me a resume or a list of logos of companies they work. That really conveys very little. Tell me why these people have what it takes to do this thing. Traction is huge. I need to know that people want this. If you are pre-MVP, that means surveys and customer interviews and You know, maybe comparable companies that you're looking at. If you've got real customers already or a waiting list or letters of intent, fantastic. Paying customers, obviously the best traction, but always make sure you've got some note on that customer traction and interest. And then finally, end with the ask. Typically that's going to be money and investment, but in some cases you may be, say, if you're at a pitch fest and you're not quite ready to do that, you're asking for advisors or introductions or connections to some partners or something like that. But always have an ask. There's got to be some reason you're giving this pitch. Next, focus down. People only remember about 3 things from any presentation. Make sure you are intentional about what those things will be. So from that list you were looking at, think, what are your superpowers? What makes your startup particularly awesome? And what are the top highlights of your journey so far? And what are your superpowers? The things that other companies just wouldn't have access to. Just put a star by those on that list of things that you did in the gather stage, because these are the things that you really want to focus on as you start to build out the deck. So at this point, you just have a bunch of information that you pulled together, a bunch of sentences and some stars next to things. The next step is to start organizing this and putting this together into a deck. You are going to need to end up with several decks. So you'll want to have a 5-minute deck for pitch competitions or demo days or things like that. Typically, you're not going to put in particularly sensitive information. This is going out to a public audience. And normally you won't be doing a financial ask at the end because there will be non-accredited investors in the room. In the room unless you're doing a crowdfunding or something where this can be broadcast, but be very careful about that. You don't wanna step across legal lines. Probably wanna have something like a 15-minute version for investor presentations. You know, they'll tell you exactly what you have, but something like 15 minutes allows you to stretch a little or compact a little depending on the space they've got. And then create a read-alone version so that when someone says email your deck, or if when you're submitting to a group like mine, you're uploading the deck into our portal, It needs to make sense without you talking. And that's one of the important things about sort of decks is when you are delivering it, you want as little text as you can manage so that they're focused on you and you're delivering the information. But of course, those decks make no sense at all when you're not speaking alongside them. So the email deck actually does have to fill in those gaps, but still avoid walls of text as much as you can. In fact, it's kind of funny. If you look at the presentations I give, you can tell how much time I have I had to work on them by how few words there are. The more time I have, the more distilled it gets, the less bullet points. There are a couple of common structures that you'll see around decks. The first is the problem-solution deck. So there's something causing a lot of pain, time, expense, and there's no good solutions for it. And then your solution makes things 10 times better, faster, cheaper, more fun, whatever's the relevant metric here. It always needs to be a lot better because people already have a solution that they're happy working with. Getting them to take the switching costs and adopt a solution from an early-stage startup that probably won't survive for 5 years is asking a lot. And so you need to be not slightly better. 10% better doesn't cut it. Way better is what's critical. There's the vision, opportunity, desire, DEX. So people would love it if this thing existed. It's not really a problem. There's no problem slide here. And then you lay out how you create that, why you're the person able to create that. Really common in game or entertainment kinds of scenarios where, you know, the new version of Skyrim is not solving a problem, but there's a whole lot of people who would love to play more of that kind of game and you can fulfill that. Or sometimes it's greenfield opportunities where there's just no one in the space yet. So there isn't necessarily a problem, but you're opening up a whole new vista of capabilities. Traction slides. So the traction deck is built around the success that you're having. Fundamentally, you're saying, we know people want it. Like, I can— we will talk about what all those details are that we do, but fundamentally, we know people want it because they're already buying it, and all we need is money to scale it, right? And so this is where you're already being successful And success breeds success, right? Everyone loves to hear about those kind of stories because people don't want to do science experiments as investors. Ideally, we want to have everything lined up, all the ducks are in a row, and all you need is money to market it or to accelerate growth or to do something pretty straightforward that isn't a big question mark. The team deck. So this is where your team is the outstanding aspect of the company. You're all rock stars. You've done this several times. You've got a bunch of successful exits behind you. And it's sort of a, we're getting the band back together again story. If you've got a company and let's say you're a deep tech company and you've got a couple of Nobel Prize physicists on there who actually developed the entire technology that you're working with and you've got a boatload of patents around that, right? This is a team deck. You're going to be talking about the people, and that's why you're going to win. When you're thinking about organizing this, you want to be opening strong, right? People remember the first and last things they hear in a presentation. So start off with a bold statement, a clear articulation of what you're doing, something about your business, and avoid those word salad situations, right? I hear people making really strained analogies where they're Uber meets Google or something like that. I'm like, I don't even know what that means when they say that. Or they're using acronyms or trying to be buzzword compliant. Make it strong, make it simple, make it in English, but do have a crisp opening to your deck. Hook people in the first few seconds so that they feel like they want to hear the rest of the deck. It's a good place to put your superpower or whatever special thing it is that you think is the most important to make you stand out. Leverage narrative if you can. People don't remember facts very well, right? That's part of the reason why they're only gonna remember 3 things. If you can tell a story, they're far more likely to internalize and remember it. Steve Jobs was great at this. He used it at large levels. He used it at micro levels. When they released the MacBook Air, he could have said, this is this many inches by this many inches by this many millimeters, and it weighs this many ounces. And eventually that was in the press releases, but what they talked about was the fact that it fit in a mailing envelope. It was small enough to fit in an envelope. The picture on the screen was an envelope. He turned around and pulled one out of a mailing envelope. And the next day, all of the newspaper articles talked about this thing coming out of an envelope, right? That was a memorable little bit of theater that he put on. Showing your problem and solution through a story about a real or hypothetical customer can be extremely effective because they get this sense of that journey and they can empathize with them. And that's the other thing about narrative is it allows you to sort of hijack the emotional circuits. And we are emotional monkeys, even when we like to think we're not. If you can get people feeling emotion and passion about your customers and the problem and what you're doing, that can go a long way. And it's It hacks the way the brain works and makes things stick much better. And then close big. End with a big vision or climax point. You know, say, we're just getting started. From this business model that we've been talking about, we can leverage into these 5 sort of adjacent verticals, or we can expand in this other way. And, you know, here's the big vision that takes us even beyond the big story I've already been telling you to another order of magnitude or two in potential growth. And this then is going to be the penultimate slide because you always want to end with your ask. Now, I'm going to ask you to go super old school when you build this organization out, because when you're starting to build this deck, you're probably not going to get the structure right the first time. And so the most important thing is to make it low friction to change. So I like 3x5 cards because you can't see an entire deck in PowerPoint on your screen and read it, whereas you can read a whole deck, pot, table full of 3x5 cards. One concept per card. Effectively, it's going to be one card per slide. Just a couple of words. Write it in big Sharpie if you can so that you're not tempted to put a lot of text on there. But then there's no friction to making changes, right? It's not like you spent 5 minutes on some slide and then have to delete it or split it in two. It takes 1 second to tear up a card if you don't like it, or jot down 3 more cards. And so as you're then starting to practice, practice it at this stage. Lay it out on a table, stand there, and as though you were delivering it to someone, go through the cards. You can even like tap them with your finger or with a pencil, you know, as though you were clicking through, and get a feel for it. And you'll often hit the spot where like, ah, nope, nope, I'm putting the cart before the horse. I either need to put some idea earlier, move some cards around, jot down a new card and slap it in, You'll discover that really fast. Well, there's no friction to this at this point, right? It's super easy to start tweaking things out. Iterate it until it feels good. You feel like you know the pattern, you know where your transitions are, it flows logically, right? You've got sort of a comfortable sense of movement through the entire deck. And then, you know, master those transitions because transition points are really critical. And from there comes the easy part. Build the deck. So just make one slide per card, pile up your cards, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and just type what was on the card into a blank slide. Don't worry about format at this point. And if you've got graphics that exist, you can drop them in, but don't format them. Don't try to put in backgrounds, just go. And then start practicing with that. Practice, practice, practice. This is a repeating theme here, right? You can never go too far, but start taking this deck out to show other people. Friends who don't know your business, and then have them explain it back to you. Do they get it? Do they understand what you're talking about? And again, don't spend time on aesthetics, 'cause you're gonna be throwing out a lot of these. They're gonna change, they're gonna evolve as you get feedback. And so you wanna make that still as easy as you can. Once that gets comfortable and it's feeling really solid, now you can spend time making it pretty. If you're good at that, you can do it yourself. If you're not, like I am generally not, go hire someone to make your decks attractive because aesthetics do matter, right? People will judge you based on how these things look. I gotta say, be careful about templates though. You'll see a lot of online templates for slide decks. The problem that I always have with them is they make assumptions about the amount of content you have, the kind of information, right? There'll be a business model slide and it'll have 3 boxes on it, which kind of means you need to put 3 things in there, but your business only needs 1. Well, if you only do 1, now it looks like crap because it's not really laid out correctly or they've got too much text. So if it works perfectly, it's great, but really worry about trying to bang a square peg into a round hole. Form should follow function and it really needs to be led by the content you want to share. And then you want to polish it, more practice. Now that you've got it finished, get out there, get it back and forth. Don't memorize it, right? Because I want to make sure that you can be pulled off track by a question and get back on track again. So don't have it fixed. Don't read it as well, right? Don't, don't read the script. It sounds wooden. And again, someone asks you a question, now you're off track and you're trying to get caught back up and it's, it's this big mess as you're shuffling through papers. And that's where you see people sort of freeze like a deer in the headlights because, "Ah, where was I? What word was I on? What was the next word?" Whereas if this is all relaxed, it's more like jazz, right? You want to be improvising and speaking extemporaneously about this. You know the point you're going to make, right? Each slide has a very specific point, so you're not going to wander a lot, but you still can say it in your own words. It'll be a little different each time. And say it with energy, right? When you're reading it, you sound dead. And you want to be feeling dynamic. You need to do this until you get through the uncanny valley. There's going to be a point when you're starting to practice it where it feels like you are on rails and it will feel kind of wooden. It's very common. And the only way out is through. You just need to do it and do it and do it and do it until it feels comfortable. People who are natural public speakers, this comes much faster. It is a learnable skill. but there's no substitute for doing it a lot, especially in front of people. Record yourself doing it. It sucks. Everyone hates being recorded and watching themselves on video. Do it anyway. How do you talk? How do you present? Are you easy to understand? Do you emphasize things, right? Are you leaving pauses to allow key information to land? How's your posture? How's your clothing, right? Do you look professional? Is your background good-looking? All of those things matter. Studies show that how you look matters the most, how you sound matters the next most, and how the actual words coming out of your mouth matter the least. So good time to put that in. Pay attention to filler words. Learn to avoid um and ah. Silence is golden. When you're not sure what to say, just shut up. People generally assume that you're being profound rather than freaking out. So let them, let silence linger for a moment. Get your head together and talk. Don't feel the need to fill the air with something. And um, uh, er are the worst. Start pitching as much as you can. Pitch fast, low priority investors, right? Because your pitch still probably sucks. Anyone you can get, that you can get in front of, because you want to iterate this like crazy. Take notes, have someone else take notes so that they can keep track of where you made mistakes, where you went off track, where people got confused, what questions they asked, where you were getting pushback, because that'll allow you to then fix the deck. You know, oh, at this point they were thinking about this thing that I don't normally show for 3 slides. Well, if you see that a couple of times, you'd better move that up because as soon as someone's brain is off on their own tangent. They've stopped listening to you and you've lost them. Then update your pitch and wash and repeat. The deck's always evolving, always going to be fixing things. Your business is going to be changing. Your business model is going to be changing. And so this becomes a moving target, which leads to the final thing, Frankenstein decks, that as it starts to evolve, as you pivot, as the business ideas change, often you have slides from 3 versions ago that sort of fit. You know, that arm kind of goes with that torso, but not quite anymore. At some point, watch for this closely, you just need to tear the entire deck down and start from scratch to make sure all the things align. Otherwise, the point that slide 3 is making doesn't quite match with the point that slide 5 is making, and this can confuse your audience, and confusion almost always equals no. And don't forget to follow up. As soon as you've given a pitch to someone that you want, results from. Make sure you stay engaged. We're distractible people and we've got a lot of things coming across our transom. So don't let a lot of time go by. Even if you get a no, ask if you can put them on your mailing list and stay in touch and maintain that warm contact. 'Cause a lot of nos are not nos. And in any case, they may be able to help you in some non-financial way with advice or introductions or something else down the road. And I think that's it. So we can go to Q&A now. And thanks very much. Again, you can find me on pretty much all the socials @lancecottrill. And you can also get lots of free advice at feeltheboot.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Lance. I've sat through a lot of these presentations, and I can be biased here, but I really enjoyed yours, like the others. But if I had to give you a bit more extra points, I would. I love all my presenters, but I think Yours was extremely informative and very helpful. A lot of individuals showing you the love. All right folks, let's kind of jump into Q&A. I think this will be good. So again, please, there's a lot already here, Lance. I don't know how many of these we'll do. I want to probably do like 5 or 6 and then we'll break out into the networking tables. But folks, please submit your questions. Like read the existing ones, upload it. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna be reading and presenting at the same time, but let's kick this off. So Samson's asking, hey, you know, being a solo founder and you don't have a team, what's the chance of being successful?

So it really depends on the kind of business that you're doing. I think if, if this is— if it is going to take a team to even sort of get an MVP or get initial traction, then it's going to be really challenging. They don't necessarily need to be co-founders, you know, it could be employees, it could be outsourced resources depending on where your initial starting point is. But it is hard to get funding unless we believe that you have the elements in place to be successful. So if you are a non-technical founder and you know you need a technical co-founder, probably it's going to be very difficult to raise money until you have that person. Now, they may not be able to join until you can pay them. So it's okay to have someone who is in the wings, who has already sort of contractually agreed to join the team as soon as the money arrives. So you can sort of say this person's ready and we can go pending, you know, when we get the first half million dollars in investment, we pull the trigger and away we go. That can be an option, but it is challenging. I was a sole founder. I started on my own, fairly quickly hired my first couple of people. I did a very bootstrappy thing. So I had some revenue coming in pretty early. And then was able to, to go out and get some, some angel investment from there. So it's certainly possible.

Awesome, thanks so much for this. All right, let's keep going. Uh, Shinjin is asking for the why this team, what would be some examples for a good response? Uh, what are investors looking like in the results? So I guess this is probably a continuation of the previous one, is like How do you justify your team is probably another.

Exactly. As best you can, right? I mean, you have the team that you have, you know, and you might wish that you had a couple of Nobel Prize winners on there, but most of us don't. And frankly, if you've got 5 Nobel Prize winners, you're probably not having to work that hard to get fundraising anyway. But what are your backgrounds? So, you know, if you've got someone in the CTO role and you're a highly technical company, right? So the technology is really at the core of what you're doing. You know, you want to make the case that this guy has built 5 other products like this for other people and he knows how to do it. And, you know, we can build fast and reliable and easy to maintain, you know, code for our core thing. Or this is all about going to market and Sally has been the lead marketer for some other companies in this sort of general kind of area and generated $80 million in revenue for them. Numbers are great, right? If you can say something quantitative about the people, you know, I've been managing teams like this for a while. That's why I'm CEO, or I've got, you know, the specific insight into the market and our customers to be this because I, you know, I know the problem because I've been there sort of argument. But if you can say things that are concrete about each of the key team members and why their skill set is key to the success of the business and how they can leverage that, that's way better than just 4 different company logos because I don't know what you did there.

I love that. It's a great response. All right, let's go on. Mohammed from Lahore, Pakistan is asking, is traction mandatory or can we just show the MVP? Can I do a light demo? And but there's no user base to an angel investor.

To me, yeah, traction is mandatory, but not all traction is existing sales or customers, right? So fundamentally what I want from, from traction is a demonstration that the customer wants the thing that you're building in fact, not in theory. But they always say, uh, In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. So if you don't have customers, right, you're at the MVP and you're about to launch in and there's no existing users, then I want to see proxies for traction. Do you have customer interviews? You know, maybe, maybe a dozen if you're B2B, maybe 100 or more if you're B2C. Can you do surveys? Can you do, you know, B2B, do you have letters of letters of intent from customers that say, as soon as you finish building this thing, we will buy? Or do you have a waiting list of people for your software if you were B2C? Any of those can be proxies for traction, right? They're not currently paying you, but there's really good evidence that they will. And the farther you can get down there, the better. The NFX guys did something called the Ladder of Proof. It was a great blog, but it sort of lays out kind of all the different kinds of indications of traction that you you can have roughly in order of how good they are, right? I mean, you know, the gold standard is obviously you have a ton of paying customers and you're growing fast, and the lowest is, you know, my mom says it's cool. And you know, you want to be as high on that ladder as you can be.

I didn't know your mom thinks it's cool is even on the ladder. That's an interesting one. All right, let's do a couple more of these.

I don't think they included that one.

Yeah. Let's do a couple more questions and we'll talk maybe a little bit about the bootcamp and then we'll kind of jump into Q&A. All right. So Stuart from Czech Republic is asking, hey, what about the backstory and like determining passion as a reviewer? Like, yeah.

So backstory is an interesting one. I think it really depends on how good your backstory is. There are cases in which that is really key. You know, it is the why me, why now is your backstory and how you got into this. Other times that's much less important, less interesting. You don't need to have that as much. I do need to sort of see and feel your passion around it though, because the startup world is brutal and you know, you're gonna have these periods that just really suck and you're asking yourself why you're doing this and it's a slog. And as an investor, I need to believe that you're not just going to jump when it gets difficult, that you're going to stay in the game and keep working, right? That's one of the reasons why passion is so important. In my startup, during the dot-com collapse in 2000, we spent 18 months with less than 3 weeks of working capital in the bank. Right, that was whole loads of no fun, but we were extremely passionate about what we were doing and we worked out how to make that, that function and we're able to eventually, you know, climb out of that and build the revenues. But yeah, so the backstory is great if it's a great backstory. If not, you still do need to clearly have passion for it. If this is something where you're doing it just cynically because it looks like a good business to be going into, I question your willingness to stick with it when it sucks.

I love that. Um, all right, let's do one more. I think this was good because, um, it was implied but you didn't really talk about it. It's like, how long should your pitch deck be? So there are some people who are asking like, hey, my pitch deck is 84 slides. And this, and Amir from Portland saying that his deck is 11 slides. So what is that Is there a number? What do you think?

You know, you're going to get a lot of contradictory advice around this. Frankly, as you talk to advisors, you're going to get a lot of contradictory advice about everything. We all have strong opinions, sometimes lots of them, sometimes not even internally consistent. Personally, I don't care about the number of slides. I do care about time. Right? So I'm expecting you to land in the amount of time I've given you and not waste my time. But personally, I like decks with a lot of slides and you go through them pretty fast, right? I am perfectly happy to have a slide that has a couple of words on it and I, and, or one word or one number, and I spend 10 seconds on it or 5 seconds. I remember I did one, I used to be in security and I had a slide talking about how there was sort of an all or nothing situation. The slide was just a picture of a pregnant woman's belly and I went, Click. But you can't be kind of pregnant. Click. Right? But 2 seconds on this slide. So numbers don't matter too much to me if it flows well, delivers the information, and stays in time. But, you know, if it's 20 slides and they're packed with text, that's devastating. Frankly, I don't like super short decks if they're texty. I would rather have one idea per slide. I think it's cleaner, it's easier to explain, your audience's eyes know where to go, right? If you've got kind of 4 different things on the slide and you're talking about them in one order, my eyes may go to them in a different order, and now I'm having a hard time keeping up with you. In the same amount of time, I tend to think you're better off having 4 slides and you go boom, boom, boom, boom, you just hit them all really quickly. Unless, you know, those things are relating to each other, it's a graph and a figure or something like that. But that's me. You will hear other people give other advice.

I, I know. I, I think a lot of people with people's attention span, like, they want to see, like, just they want to see and get, like, movement, for lack of a better word. Like, so you need to be constantly presenting new information. And I love that, that one or two words per slide. Like, that's where it is. You don't need to have a busy slide. Like, you know, a picture's a thousand words and just quickly burn through that as much as possible. So I like, I like how you think, say like rethink about it. Don't think about the number, think about the amount of time it'll take you to go through this and actually, I guess, communicate your value. Folks, there's a lot of—

Another point is that before we break here, don't talk fast, right? There's this real tendency, especially when you've got a short timeline, to pack in as many words as you can into the time available. And this is terrible because it turns into this just freight train of words going by, and I don't have time to understand it or think about it or internalize it. And what matters is how much your audience takes away. So ironically, you can usually communicate more by saying less and making sure that what you do say lands.

Yeah, that's great. Another great piece of advice. Folks, we're going to wrap up here shortly. I think what I wanted to give Lance is an opportunity thing to chat about is Lance is gonna be hosting a bootcamp in a couple weeks, uh, do talking more about this around pitch decks and like what makes a good pitch deck for fundraising purposes. I'm going to throw that in the chat already, um, if you guys wanna check out the landing page. Uh, Lance, do you just wanna quickly talk about your upcoming bootcamp?

It's like 2 sessions long, but like, yeah, so it's, it's effectively gonna be a much deeper dive from this. Uh, you know, we had very little time, so I was smoking through each one of these points. I, it will be talking about the same framework, But expanding on that greatly, really digging into how to think about these, I'll be talking about all of the common slides that you may choose to put in your deck and exactly how to structure them, what should go in them, why you should build them in certain ways, the kind of information you want to get out of them. And then we'll be having everyone for homework actually build their slide deck from that structure. And then it's a 2-day webinar. Then the second session will actually be going over them and doing reviews and deep dives on the decks we've got, giving live critiques. And I think that'll also really help everyone understand how this works in practice and see, you know, 'cause you'll often think you've done the thing, but it turns out that it hasn't quite captured it yet. And so that's a really effective structure.

Perfect. Yeah, thanks. If you all wanna learn more about the bootcamp, the link is in the chat. You go there, there's a Typeform, go through that and then you should be good to go. It's pinned to the chat as well. All right folks, you know, Lance, thank you so much. This has been very informative. I saw some questions about the recording. We'll shoot out the recording shortly. You will usually get it within 24, maximum 48 hours. If you don't see it in 48 hours, go to fi.co/ youtube. All our webinar content lives there, but we will also send it out to you so you have access to it. Uh, we're big proponents of making sure that everyone has access to great content and we have access to great mentors like Lance. Um, Lance, any final words for the audience before we break into networking?

Uh, yeah, I mean, I think, um, I'm really looking forward to, uh, to talking to you all if you've got specific questions or, or, you know, need to want to bounce things off me, I'll be hanging around here for quite a while to, you know, go one-on-one with all of you.

All right, perfect. All right, thanks everyone. We're going to end the session now and then we'll see you in the networking tables. Thanks everyone.