Workshop: Pitching and Fundraising for Pre-Seed Startups, with Ben Stacey

There we go. All right. Welcome, everyone. I think we're all good to go here.

Yeah.

Excellent. Great. Well, welcome, everyone. Great to see you all here. I see we still have a couple of people dropping in, but welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome. So today we're gonna be going through, we're going to be going through kind of a, the kind of baseline fundamentals of putting together a pitch, putting together a presentation and kind of what that looks like in the context of a fundraising process, right? There's plenty of, there's plenty of information and kind of materials out there on the web that kind of speak to the very broad general kind of what needs to be in a pitch, what has to be on this slide or that slide. What I'm gonna be covering today is kind of the, the kind of fundamental baseline of the whole process. So not just focusing individually in particular on the deck itself, but how do we arrive at a good deck? How do we get a deck looking nice and how do we actually get in the room and present properly and effectively can navigate our follow-up? So let me just bring up my slides here and we will jump right into it. So throughout today's workshop, we've got about 2 hours today. I'm gonna run through my deck for about an hour or so. Then we're gonna do a bunch of Q&A. If you do have any questions, do please drop them in the chat and we can get through as many of those as we can just at the end of the session. So let's see here. Share screen. Yes. Okay, not that one, not that one. There we go. All right, excellent. So everybody see my screen okay? Yeah, looks like it. Awesome. Okay, so let's jump right into it again. So welcome everyone. My name is Ben. So as I mentioned, we're going to be running through some pitch fundamentals today. If you do have any questions after the fact, please feel free to add me on LinkedIn. That's my work email, ben.stacey@founderinstitute.com. You're very welcome to drop me a line if you have any questions about either the content of today's workshop, but also just about the program or about kind of your journey as an entrepreneur through the global ecosystem. Very happy to to respond and provide some guidance on that. But let's jump into just a quick little intro. So I kind of arrived in tech or kind of in the tech ecosystem from after kind of a career in design and the music industry. So grew up in Denmark and then the UK, but spent most of my time in Iceland from when I was like 10 till I was 25. Studied there as a graphic designer, 2008 hit, basically every job that we thought we were going to be waltzing into suddenly just disappeared. All the organizations, all the company budgets, all the agencies that we had kind of been planning on going to work for after school all just suddenly evaporated. So me and a lot of my contemporaries and kind of people in my scene, we were all kind of forced into entrepreneurship, whether you liked it or not. You could either just stay home and sit on unemployment, or you could start building something of your own. And kind of coming from the music industry, which is already a very entrepreneurial kind of space where you always have limited resources, you never have enough time, and you're always trying to reach as many people as you possibly can, that kind of shift came very naturally. So I've always kind of sat on the periphery between kind of the heavily creative, kind of chaotic side of entrepreneurship and tech, but also very much on the kind of the grassroots pragmatic kind business side of tech as well. So in 2013, I moved to Canada where I'm based now. I'm based in Toronto and I help lead one of the local chapters here in Toronto for Founder Institute, but started working at agencies doing stuff like Coca-Cola and Nike and the NFL, Netflix, a bunch of large kind of CPG brands, lots and lots and lots of decks. At the same time, I was volunteering with Founder Institute here in Toronto kind of in the early days. And one of the big kind of lessons I took away from my time in agency world and kind of straddling this divide between agency world and the grassroots and tech ecosystem was that whenever there's a large amount of money changing hands or there's a big significant decision being made, somebody's opening PowerPoint and they probably suck at it. And it's mostly just down to not using it a ton and not putting together a ton of presentations, except when you do need to do it, they're very, very significant, very important ones. And so if you're not doing it all day, every day, it's no surprise that you may struggle with putting together presentations or figuring out what to say. So at a baseline, most of us as founders, if we don't have a design background or kind of an agency background, it's highly unlikely that you've been putting together decks a ton. And so I kind of saw this happening on the one hand in kind of large agency world, whether multimillion dollar campaigns being pitched, but also in startup and kind of grassroots of the tech ecosystem where a lot of my contemporaries, a lot of my friends, a lot of founders that I was working with would often bring me in to help with design stuff like UI or marketing or landing pages. But we would always end up working on decks because that was kind of the common denominator that everybody needed. So seeing that massive need in the ecosystem, I had ditched my agency job, started a company called PitchRoute. That I still run kind of in a minor capacity on the side now. Because my main full-time job now is working with Fanarist HQ as a regional manager, helping kind of take the experience that I've had with the previous cohorts of Fanarist U Toronto. So the current one's my 23rd cohort. So I've been doing it for about 8 going on 9 years. That all the experience kind of gathered from those, from running all of those cohorts kind of helps inform my job at HQ now where I help help local leaders and directors from all over the world operate their programs effectively. Right. So everywhere from all over Canada, East Coast, US, Central Europe, all of Europe, really, UK, Scandinavia, Australia, South Asia, so India, Pakistan, Middle East, Gulf. It's a broad region, but it's really interesting seeing kind of the trends that are going on between all of these different ecosystems because there are some things that are very different, but there are also some things that are very universal are alike, and pitching is one of those things. And so in terms of like the content we're actually gonna get through today, we're gonna break down the process into 4 pillars. Essentially, we have the structure of the deck, the content that fills out that structure, the design that, uh, the, that kind of applies some aesthetic and some layout and readability to that content. And then the actual delivery of the presentation, like how are we actually, um, How are we actually showing up on the day? How do we prepare for that day? How are we speaking? How do we get all this stuff out and delivered? Right. So it'll take us about roughly about an hour to run through all this. But if you do have any questions, please do drop them in the chat. I'll stick around for as long as I possibly can today to answer questions. And if you have any follow-ups, do please add me on LinkedIn or send me an email. I'm very happy to get back to you there. All right. So let's take a look at some basics. What is a deck? Right. I should really edit the slides. Like, what is a pitch? Because that's really the point I'm trying to make here, is that your pitch and your deck are two separate things, right? The pitch is the story. What is it that you're telling me? What is the shortest version of the story that you can tell me? What are you working on? Who are you helping? What kind of technology have you built? What kind of customers do you have on board? That's the pitch. The deck is just a supporting document to that pitch. So frequently I'll get sent decks as just like a just cold, a PDF, right, of a deck. So, hey, what do you think about this company? What do you think about the pitch? My first answer is always, well, the first response usually is like, well, I'd love to, you know, here's my evaluation of the deck itself in and of itself, but I'd love to hear the pitch as well. Because in combination, both the pitch and the deck together, that's really what we're trying to create, right? The vast majority of your information is going to be delivered verbally. So now that we're all pretty used to Zoom calls and recording ourselves and sending recordings, whenever you're sending a deck out, this is kind of a side note before we get into it, but whenever you're sending your deck out for, or your pitch out for evaluation or for some feedback, do try and include a recording of you actually pitching it because that tells us so much more about the company. It's not just the fundamentals of what's in the deck, the stats and the figures and the stats and the figures and the story and the plans and whatnot. It's also like, who are you as a founder? We'll get a little bit more into that later on today in terms of just that evaluation of you as an operator and as a visionary and as a leader as well. But just as a quick side note, if you are going to get feedback, try and include a recording. But anyway, down to brass tacks. What is a deck? Right? Well, there's a couple of things we can say that it isn't, right? It's not a multimedia experience. It doesn't matter how many bells or whistles or aesthetics or live demos or videos or animations or flashy transitions or star swipes or, you know, whatever the case is that you add to a deck, it's ultimately not really a multimedia experience. We can leverage certain components of that, but we, but we're never going to be able to compensate for the lack of good content with just flashy transitions and animations and media and demos and jumping out to another website. We don't really want to be breaking the format a ton. So it's not this kind of wow factor multimedia experience because a lot of those tricks and aesthetic tools and those kind of design devices or methodologies, they come out of marketing and sales where you're trying to sell somebody on a knee-jerk reaction and on kind of a knee-jerk reaction and an emotive kind of excitement building kind of channel. But that's for consumer purchasing behavior or trying to kind of in the context of consumer purchasing behavior. Decks and presentations, although we do on leverage some of that excitement. They're essentially a risk analysis or a risk assessment, right? Do I put more time or money or resources into this company? Right? So we can use bits of multimedia, but let's not go overboard. It's not a multimedia experience, right? It's also not an epic tale of adventure. There's tons and tons of talk that kind of goes around about startup storytelling and narrative and tell me a story, this, that, and the other. But But we need to be careful not to overbalance, overcorrect, and go full-blown into fairy tale mode. Right. Personal anecdotes are great, but we need to watch our timing and see how much detail we're really getting into. And where is it that we're actually getting into the meat of what the company is actually doing and helping feed that risk assessment? So again, can we use storytelling and storytelling in epic narratives? Sure. But the whole thing isn't an epic tale of adventure. On the other hand, we don't want to go too far in the other direction, right? It's also not an engineering degree where we can't take just these massive amounts of information and detail, slap it on a slide and expect people to understand it immediately. In many cases, you may have multiple years or even decades of experience in a particular industry or have context on a particular problem or a particular technology that your audience may be completely oblivious to, even though they're very well informed, maybe analysts or investors or whoever is out there. Excuse me, in the ecosystem that you're pitching to, they almost certainly don't have the same amount of context that you do on the idea. And so things that may seem intuitive to you, may seem obvious because you have a heavily, a highly technical background or kind of strong expertise, they're not necessarily going to know. They're not necessarily going to have that same level of familiarity, right? So moral of the story here for all of these points is like, Look, it's a balancing act, right? We don't wanna go full-blown technical. We don't wanna go full-blown storytelling. We don't wanna go full-blown kind of heavy aesthetics and kind of bells and whistles and multimedia. But there is a balancing act. There's a balance to be struck between these kind of 3 key areas, right? Of the things that we tend to lean towards. Now, what a deck, what a presentation is really doing is answering these 3 very, very basic questions, right? What are you doing? Why have you picked this opportunity? Why is now the time? Why is this going to become a huge opportunity? Or why is this a huge opportunity? And how are you going to make a dent in it? Right? How are you going to move the needle? How are you going to actually start doing something? Another one of the whys. But why should we believe that this plan of yours is going to work? What are you doing? Why have you picked this? How are you going to actually pull it off? right? That's primarily what we're after here. Now for the purposes of kind of today's talk, we're gonna be looking at investor decks, right? There are many investor decks, well, sorry, there are many types of decks, but not all of the same. You've got sales decks, you've got partnership decks, you've got kind of general hype decks for the public. You've got investor decks that maybe have a little bit more technical detail or a little bit more financial detail or a little bit more vision. There are internal, internal decks that you show only to your team or kind of hiring decks. You've got all kinds of different types of decks and presentations. And so many of them will share lots of attributes, but we need to be aware that they're all kind of for unique audiences and all have unique kind of unique angles to who the audience is or what we're trying to inform the, or what kind of communication style we're going for. But for the purposes today, we're gonna be talking about investor decks, right? Generally, they take about 3 to 10 minutes to pitch max. Even if you have a half hour meeting, Don't spend the whole time pitching. Get through the bulk of the content in, say, 3 to 5 minutes, engage the audience in a conversation, and then jump into maybe some appendix slides and some detail and actually figure out what they really want. Right. No matter how complex your company is, 3 to 10 minutes is plenty of time to describe any company, no matter how complex. It's not the time limit that's the problem. It's the level of detail that you're getting into, because every presentation is ultimately just a key to another presentation, or it's a chain and it's a link in a chain of relationships and meetings. And so we don't have to be fully comprehensive immediately from the first presentation, right? They're roughly about 10 to 20 slides. I don't really care that much about slide count, to be honest. I'm more concerned about the amount of content you're trying to get across. So, like, if you are going through a 5-minute presentation that's 50 slides or a 5-minute presentation that is 10 slides, that doesn't really make a huge difference to me. I'm more concerned about how much content I'm having to take in and how much I'm having to retain in those 5 to 10 minutes. Right? So we can speed through a ton of content or we can go to leisurely pace through like very precise and refined content. So it's not the slide count, it's the amount of content. Essentially, like, what is the bandwidth of your audience? Now, the kind of rules on either side of the table, kind of objectives on either side of the table here is, on the one hand, you as a founder are trying to deliver a message that persuades your audience to take action. Usually that is maybe a referral or maybe getting a referral to another partner, getting a little bit further along in a process, like if you're applying to an accelerator or seeking funding or grants, whatever the case is, you're trying to get the audience to build confidence in your idea that what you're building is something that they are willing to support and willing to put more resources into. Because on the other side of the table, what they're doing or your audience is doing, regardless of who they are, is they're looking for indicators of whether they should put more resources into this particular idea. Right? Is the idea being presented worth additional resources? Time, access, money, connections, social capital, whatever the case is. Everybody's resources are scarce, even if it's not just money. And so the amount of companies' pitches that are coming across the desks of people that receive pitches, so analysts, investors, accelerator coordinators, et cetera, is astounding. The they're generally flooded with pitches on a daily basis. And so our job as founders and as presenters is to try and make that process of them realizing whether they want to put more resources into our company or not as easy and as seamless as possible. And usually that decision is not made after one look at a single deck. It's usually take a look at a deck, have a talk with the founder, maybe have them pitch again to a couple of partners or some other stakeholders, and then make a decision. So the initial hit that we get out to our audience does not have to be fully comprehensive. It's no one and done knockout punches. It's a series of presentations, right? So let's get into how we actually put these presentations together, right? So what's the structure? One of the kind of luxuries of startup ecosystem, well, presenting in a startup ecosystem and presenting startups is that there is a very formulaic and very well established structure. Like this one is mine. There are many like it, but this one happens to be the one that I The difference between most of these structures, because you can find like Guy Kawasaki's got his 10 slides and there's all kinds of different structures. And most accelerators will have a resource section where they have a particular structure. Sometimes if you're, say, presenting at an event that has a particular focus on, say, impact or sustainability, maybe they'll ask you to specifically address ESG or some sustainability targets or impact. then add that in here. So, you know, take this structure with, take this structure as a guideline. It's certainly not scripture. And you can edit it always a little bit kind of depending on what your company's doing. For instance, let's say you are working in a very cynical space or a very crowded space, say like blockchain or crypto or fintech or rewards platforms or insurance. So these kind of some of the low-hanging fruit that people tend to jump towards. AI, natural language processing that sound very kind of heavily technologically advanced, but require often deep industry knowledge or deep industry connections and experience to be able to actually make a really serious dent in the market. And so while an audience member is watching a pitch or watching a presentation, there's all kinds of thought loops that are going on, right? They're either think— they're either, you know, their imagination is going wild thinking what the potential of this thing could be, but more often than not, it's kind of a cynical loop. Right? It's like, okay, don't know, don't know, not convinced, not convinced, not convinced. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. And especially if it is a very— if it is a space that has a lot of cynicism in it, like AI, blockchain, crypto, because those buzzwords have been used so much and so incorrectly that the default state is always going to be skepticism, then we can kind of neutralize that skepticism up front by, say for instance, in between the problem and solution, We put, here's the problem. We put a mention of the team and credentials, right? Here's the problem that we faced out in the world. We have seen this firsthand as a team that has been working in the industry for multiple years. That's why we brought, that's why we came up with this solution, right? So those kind of slight contextual changes in the deck you can certainly make. But one thing that I would really stress is not to break these sections up into multiple buckets, right? So if we are talking about the problem, comprehensively talk about the problem up in one section and then move on from it into the solution. Because if you look at the cadence of like, and again, this doesn't have to be 13 slides, right? There are 13 points here, 13, 14 points roughly that you might want to put in. They don't have to be individual slides for each one of them. Like solution and revenue can live on the same slide. Traction and market could live on the same slide. Traction, market, and competition in a pinch even could live on the same slide. Advantage and roadmap could be on the same slide. Advisors and team could be on the same slide. Go-to-market and roadmap could be on the same slide. So there's all kinds of kind of configurations of this that, that can help you make it a short deck versus a, a kind of comprehensive deck. But, but just remember that these aren't necessarily individual slides, right? These are points that we need to hit because really what we're looking at here is a strategic overview of the business. What is, what are all these different aspects of the business that you have figured out or are working on that make me as an audience member or as a capital allocator, think that this is something that is worth putting some money into, right? So if we look at what the storyline is here, here's the COVID Here's who we are. Generally speaking, I like putting an overview at the beginning because it's kind of like an extended cover page. It's like, hey, here's us. We have a deal with Nike. We've already got 10,000 users on the platform. Here's the problem we're solving, right? Just that little poke of spice just in the beginning to get people interested because attention is going to be at its apex in the beginning of the presentation and then LinkedIn and Twitter and Gmail and, you know, some work on the side is gonna start competing for your audience's attention. So right in the beginning, if you can shoot in a little bit of traction, if you have it, that's particularly compelling or a little point about the business that should make you kind of perk up and listen, then it's good to throw that in the beginning. But generally speaking, we start off with problem, right? What's the problem? Here's the problem we've seen out in the world. We as a team have come up with a solution that helps address this problem. Our solution is long-term sustainable and can grow because we are able to charge for it, and here's how we do that. So far, our traction is that we've been— or in our traction section, so far we've been able to get X number of users on board. There is a broader pool of users out in the market that are the— that we could go after as well. There are competitors that are also going after those users, but we have certain advantages over them that we're going to expand on according to— that we're going to expand on and to scale the company, um, on this timeline, on this roadmap. The team that's going to execute that roadmap and the advisors that back it up, kind of provide a little bit of detail on that. The resource that we need from you as kind of a counterparty or as a stakeholder to achieve a certain set of goals. And then a wrap-up thank you slide, slash, thank you slide, slash kind of summary of what some of the most compelling points are about the business. Because one thing to remember as well, especially if you're in a live setting, is that that thank you slide may stay up for longer than the rest of the whole presentation. 'cause it's the slide that stays up during Q&A unless you start jumping into your appendix and going into kind of deep technical detail slides in the appendix. You may sit on the thank you slide for quite a long time, right? So a couple of cheeky bullet points on, hey, this is our traction, here are the main things that we're doing next and just leaving that up there to sink in ideally maybe with a picture of the product just to kind of help guide the conversation. But summarizing kind of what the immediate, what some of the immediate actions are the company's— what some of the immediate interesting points about the company are on the thank you slides, often very useful. So what are we really looking at here? If we zoom out a little bit, is that this structure falls into 3 distinct categories. Essentially, you've got context. What is the arena that you're playing in? Who are the other players in that arena? What kind of— what are the rules of the game here? What are the dynamics of the market that you're in? What is the opportunity that you could exploit within this arena? That's the context, right? The product itself, notice, does not take up a huge amount of time in the deck, or at least proportionately. It's very easy to get caught up in talking about the problem and pointing out 1,000 different reasons why it's such a big issue, or it's costing these types of money over here and these types of money over here, and it's affecting these and these and these and these groups, and it can't be solved because of this and this and this. And these people have tried it and these people have tried it or tried to solve it. you can spend an infinite amount of time pointing out problems. Pointing out problems is easy. Coming up with a solution to those problems is difficult. Actually executing on those solutions and bringing something to life is extremely difficult. That's why we have accelerators. That's why there's such a heavy focus on execution, right? Because the same applies to solution or the product block, essentially. Solution revenue is essentially the same thing, really. But the product block, we don't spend a huge amount of time unpacking every single tiny minute feature of the solution. We just want to understand who is this affecting and what kind of an impact is your product having on the kind of ultimate beneficiary of the product or the ultimate user. And that's not necessarily even the person that's paying for the solution. And by what means are you doing that? Is it a software platform that you've built so far? Is it a You know, is it bootstrapped? Is it just a, you know, a janky MVP that's a mix of Notion and Squarespace and some email addresses, but it still works, right? That's a viable MVP. Absolutely. It doesn't have to be software. But just getting a sense of like where you're at with the solution and kind of what it is that you've come up with is proportionately still as important as it is, is still proportionately a relatively small amount of time in the deck. Because the main thing we're looking for here is One of my favorite terms for startups, so kind of for high-performing startups, is a demonstrated ability to execute. Can you demonstrate that you can move the needle, that you can get going, that you can turn ideas into actual products, into actual solutions, and start having impact on users out in the world? Not just in the lab, not just on the drawing board. Can you get out there in the world with something that isn't perfect, build, iterate, build, iterate, build, iterate, regardless of how messy it is, and eventually end up with a great product? That's really what we're looking for, because ideas are inherently worthless, right? If you have an idea, that's a great starting point. What you want to do though is take that idea and bring it into reality. And the lessons learned in trying to build a product are what make great products, because most products do not start out as technically excellent or fully fleshed out right from day one. It takes a process of going out into the ecosystem, going out into the world and actually displaying everything and and talking about it and with users and testing it and iterating to actually come up with something good, right? That's kind of what the whole execution section is about. What is the traction so far? How is the market reacting to it? What kind of an advantage can you— what kind of advantage do you think you have or can you display that you have over the competition? And who are the people actually behind this? Because they're the ones doing the work work? And what resources do you need from us to move forward? Right? Fairly straightforward. But remember, we're always, we're looking for who can actually do things, not who can just come up with bright ideas, because there's plenty of bright ideas that go by the wayside because they, because the founders don't put in the work. Right? Okay. So content is a classic one, right? If I only had 30 minutes to present, I could get everything across. Like I mentioned, it's not the case. It's not a matter of being fully comprehensive in your kind of one knockout punch of a presentation. It's a matter of kind of creating this chain of interactions. And if you are limited in time for a particular pitch, and especially throughout the FI program, you're limited to a minute for the first couple of weeks and then 3 minutes, and then occasionally you get to pitch for 5 minutes in some of the longer sessions. But generally the benchmark is 3 minutes to get your point across regardless of how complex the company is. So how do we do that? Well, we've got 2 things to consider right off the There's a time budget and there's an attention budget. How do we optimize our time budget? Well, levels of detail and over-reinforcing individual points is usually how people run out of time. Run out of time in presentations is that they'll linger on a point for too long. They'll spend too much time getting into deep detail and that will kind of take away time from some of the other portions of the deck, meaning that they'll have to either race through or go over time. Right. That being said, we can't just speak a mile a minute. And I'm aware that I gotta speak relatively really quick and I do try and kind of temper it a bit, but we can't just fire hose content and deep detail and high technical jargon and buzzwords and high detail content at the audience and expect them to retain it. Cause that's also cause we're after retention here. So the attention budget is something we need to keep in mind as well. If it's difficult to read the deck or it's difficult to pay attention to the deck, notice mine is very sparse, right? 15 years as a designer, I can certainly make nicer looking decks than this. But because I talk fast and it's a dense topic, I opted for as minimal design, as minimal typography, as minimal color palette and imagery as I possibly could because I need most of the attention on my voice because that's where most of the content is coming through. So any visuals that you include in a presentation, consider whether is it helping get the message across? Is it showing an image of your customer? Is it showing a scenario or a context where the product is being used? Is it an image of the product? Is it an image of a technical breakdown of the diagram of the product or workflow or process? Is it a complementary visual, right? Is it helping me understand what the product is about or the context of the product? Or is it just there for aesthetic flair? There? If it's the latter, you might want to consider dropping it in favor of something that actually helps communicate. The next point is conversational language, right? If we, again, we may have worked in a particular industry for 10, 15, 20 years, right? We know the lingo of that industry off by heart. It's our professional language. And so if we're presenting to people who are outside of that kind of enlightened circle, so to speak, that are kind of uninitiated in our particular industry or in our particular kind of circles, they're not necessarily going to have the same kind of fluency and the same kind of intuitive understanding of the language that you do. So avoiding acronyms. And if you do use acronyms, speaking out what the full meaning of the acronym is, avoiding deep industry kind of buzzwords and terms, because often certain technical terms, certain buzzwords may mean different things in different industries. So keeping it as conversational as possible helps a lot. Now, if we dig a little bit deeper into that, like, how do we actually do that? Because it's easy to say, right? Keep it simple. But how do we keep it simple? So whenever describing products and especially highly technical products, we tend to fall into one of two, take kind of one of two avenues, right? There's a utilitarian approach and there is a mechanical approach. So the mechanic of a product is how does it work? How is it built? What's under the hood? What is the underlying tech? Stack, right? Was it, is it built on Ruby on Rails or React Native or on, you know, starting to talk about, you know, the cybersecurity stack, if it's a— the mechanics of how a product functions are gonna be obvious, how all those dots connect. You're essentially telling your audience like, look at all these different dots, all these different capabilities, all these different, you know, abilities that the product has. But what we're lacking in those descriptions is the context and connecting those dots and actually showing and illustrating a use case for them. That's what the utility is, right? What does it do? Who is it for? Who is— what kind of an outcome does it provide the end user? But also like, who is the ultimate beneficiary of the product? A patient coming to a doctor's office where that doctor is using an electronic medical record system that is being paid for by a hospital, that patient doesn't interact with the product, doesn't pay for it, doesn't even use it, or doesn't use it, doesn't pay for it, and may not even be aware of it, that they're the ultimate beneficiary of the product. Somebody walking into a deli or a restaurant that uses— where their waiter or waitress is using a particular point of sale system to serve them that is being paid for by a franchise or by the restaurant owner, that consumer or that customer doesn't touch or doesn't really use the product, or maybe to some minimal degree, but they are the ultimate beneficiary. The waiter or waitress is using the product, but they're not even paying for it. The company's paying for it. My point is, if you can illustrate what is the impact on that end beneficiary, then it helps us kind of walk it back through the rest of the value chain. It's like, okay, I could see how this enables efficiencies or is a better experience. Which, and I could see why somebody would use it on a day-to-day basis because it helps them do their job. And I could see why somebody who's employed that person would pay for it because it's helping their employees be more productive, which in turn is helping the end consumer have a better experience. So that whole value chain back and forth, it all starts with who is the end beneficiary? Because if we don't identify who that end beneficiary is, then everything else is called into question, right? Have you validated this out in the market? What is the market's response to this? What kind of traction do you have? Have you gotten any feedback on the product? Is this something people really genuinely care about? These are some of the very early on initial conversations that we need to get past before we get into talking about the mechanic. Because without that stated use case or that kind of contextualized use case, then it doesn't matter what underlying technology you're using. Are you an AI company? Cool. It doesn't tell me anything about what you're doing or who you're doing it for. Are you a natural language processing company? Amazing. So what are you doing with it? Right? How are you leveraging those technologies to actually help somebody in their day-to-day or improve their lives? Right? To a degree that somebody would pay for it. And for instance, in those, because there is a heavy propensity for founders to kind of lead with, we're an AI company. Doing X, Y, and Z. This is kind of the schools of thought here. So I'll offer this as my opinion, but I do work on a lot of decks, so some experience. Whenever we've been talking about kind of blockchain companies or things where there is some kind of pioneer bleeding edge technology that's being employed, we don't lead with the headline of that technology. We talk about the use case and then we talk about about the use cases for this technology or what we are lever— like the way that we're able to achieve these economies of scale or this kind of transparency or this kind of robustness in the product is by leveraging these and these and these technologies. Because often it's a mix, right? Maybe blockchain and AI and natural language processing or GPT-3 or whatever you're using there. So lead with the use case. What is it actually doing? And back that up with the mechanic versus leading with this show of force of here are all the capabilities that we have and leaving it up then to the audience to kind of connect the dots, which they in most cases won't. They'll just kind of check out. So lead with a utility. Who's it for? What does it do? Who's the end beneficiary? Then you can back that up with the mechanics and how you achieve those, how you achieve that outcome. Right now, scripts are a bit of a yin yang, right? There's some good things, there's some bad things. It's a very common inclination to try and kind of fall back on scripts as this kind of saving grace to get you to a point where you're just presenting this razor-sharp, absolutely elegant, perfect, just spotless presentation. Not generally the case, right? But there are good uses for scripts. On the one hand, I was talking about before with over-reinforcing, it's a good way to review your level of detail, especially with AI transcription. Programmes and whatnot that are a dime a dozen at this point. Get a transcript of your pitch or what it is that you're trying to say right now and add that and add just headings to that. Where are you talking about problem? Where are you talking about solution? Where are you talking about your go-to-market, about your competition, about the competitive landscape or the market, etcetera, so that you could get an overview of just how much detail you're getting into on each of these sections or where you're leaving out detail. Like, it's never too early to start putting together a pitch deck because the spots in a pitch deck's standard structure, structure that you are missing are good leading indicators of what you may need to improve with the business. If you don't have a lot to put on your competition slide, well then what do you know about your— maybe that's leading indicator that you don't understand your competition well enough or that you don't have good enough information on your, on your competition or how they function or how the ecosystem or the market that you're in functions. If you don't have a go-to-market slide, then what is your go-to-market strategy? Maybe that's lacking. Maybe that's something we need to work on. So it's a good way to kind of review the level of detail that you're getting into for each of these sections and then balancing them out and spotting, you know, okay, am I going down a rabbit hole on this one that is leaving me no time to address some of the other sections? Or am I, or do I have kind of a decent spread here? The last point here on kind of good things for scripts is that if English is not your, if English is not your first language, English is not my first language. Danish is my first language and then English. And then I had to learn Icelandic when I was 10. And so I'm very familiar with the process of kind of thinking of something in your native tongue, trying to speak it out, translating it, speaking it, getting a response, translating that response or trying to understand that response, then coming up with another response of your own. That whole kind of back and forth process can be very taxing mentally, right? Because these are very fast, high-paced engagements. And so often we just need a little bit more time and need to just speak a little bit slower and be able to kind of get our points across a little bit more concisely or just a little bit of help with vocabulary. If that is the case, I wouldn't fault anybody for using this on track sense. Most other use cases, you do not want to use a script, a live presentation. It is very difficult to maintain the same kind of speech cadence that you do whilst reading. Apart from the fact that paragraph written out text is just not the same format as spoken verbiage or scripts, right? I don't know if you've ever read film movie scripts. They're not written like a storybook with paragraphs and punctuation in the same way. There's lots more kind of inflection, emphasis, pause for dramatic effect, and all kinds of things that play into actually presenting that don't come across in a script. And if you do lock into a script, you get into this kind of robotic monotone that becomes very taxing to listen to and people just kind of check out. So you're kind of hurting your ability, you're hurting the audience's ability to retain the information and you're also making it a very stressful, difficult thing for you to pitch as well because reading word for word during a pitch is actually incredibly difficult. What essentially you're doing is creating this very thin path that you have to sprint down, and if you step off that path at all, then you fail. If not in the audience's mind, at least in your own minds. Like, I said something wrong. I didn't get this point across properly. I'm not making sense. Or it was like, oh, I should have said this, should have said that. And you get this almost like an injury, right? You go, ah, should have said this, should have said that. And you're injecting stress and anxiety into an already stressful and anxious moment, right? Public speaking is always a little bit scary, no matter how often you do it. It's always a little bit nerve wracking. And so if you rely on a script entirely to do that, even from day one, you're not necessarily building up that mental and physical muscle memory and ability to improvise. Because what we can do, we'll talk about practicing in a second how you actually functionally achieve this. But what we want is that you have kind of a broad highway that you can kind of jog down leisurely. If you lean over to one side a little bit or kind of shift over to another side a little bit, it doesn't matter. You're still going down the general path and you have kind of maybe a couple of different ways of arriving at the same point, saying the same thing with slightly different verbiage each time. As you practice, and again, we'll get into practicing in a second. As you practice and each time is a little bit different, what you're doing is essentially creating a stronger and a stronger buffer for you to slip up during a presentation. Because you'll take a handicap during the presentation. You'll be at peak performance at home alone, well rested with no stress and infinite retakes if you want. But on the day when you have that one and done presentation, stress level is going to peak and your performance is going to dip a little bit consequently. So be prepared to ad-lib and to improvise and adapt. And so that's You know, the good and the bad of scripts. Good to, good to review level of detail and kind of decide on some general talking points. But if you lock into them too heavily and, and rely on them too much, then you're actually creating a much more difficult scenario than you otherwise would if you just practiced a lot. Right? Now, at this point, let's assume that you have a story laid out, right? And we want to actually start getting it into a physical, well, not physical, but, uh, uh, uh, it's kind of a tangible somewhat, document and start putting some layout to it and start putting some aesthetics to it. One of the luxuries of kind of startup decks and this kind of format, as I mentioned before in the structure, is that it has bred this huge ecosystem of freelancers, of third-party service providers, of templates, of all kinds of resources to help you with your aesthetics and with the design, right? But the main thing to really remember here is that we have to prioritize the message and not the aesthetic. If you buy a really cool deck template because it looks really great, and then you try and shoehorn your content into it, guaranteed going to affect the content of the pitch in favor of just having a cooler looking deck. And as we mentioned before, no amount of design is gonna fix bad content. If you don't have good content, I really don't care how many star swipes or how many animations or how much video or audio or flashy design you have, right? Again, as a designer who spent vast majority of my professional life doing design for clients and for at every level of the business world from like early stage founders and individual clients right up to kind of large agency multinational conglomerates. I'd say about 10 to 15%, maybe 20% of your time should be spent on design and a deck. Literally the And it's not that it isn't important, it's that the structure and the story are the most frequently lacking parts of a presentation. If you come to me with a presentation that's all just Times New Roman with one large header and then just bullet points, but it's a phenomenal company and it's really well written and it's a good story and it's an interesting company and you're a compelling founder that looks like they're going to get some stuff built and do some really cool stuff, stuff. I really don't care what it looks like, right? I'm just there to make a risk assessment. Maybe I found a, a, a diamond in the rough that's mega capital efficient cuz they're able to not have to leverage any of these resources to just give me a sparse, simple, elegant deck instead of going into all these aesthetic, uh, uh, jumping through all these aesthetic hoops, right? There's plenty of people that can help you with, once you have a wireframe of your deck, if you treat it just like a UI project, right? Or, or an Once you have a wireframe of your deck, then get somebody to run through it, create a deck template that you can edit yourself. Being able to edit your decks yourselves is crucial as founders as well, because you don't want to be reliant on third parties to make edits before a crucial meeting that then delays that meeting. I've been on the service provider side of that equation way too often to a point where we entirely shut down that service offering for clients because If you're reliant on third-party service providers, what's gonna happen is that you're gonna do nothing June, July, August, and then suddenly first 2 or 3 weeks of September, everybody's gonna reach out to those service providers all at the same time when they get back from vacation. And those service providers are gonna be inundated with requests if they're any good at their job and you won't be able to get time with them. So it's a major strategic liability to not be able to edit your own decks. So I would just kind of, Get somebody to work on, you know, making it look good, but make sure that you can also make kind of minor tweaks or that you at least have kind of slide templates that you can operate on a day-to-day basis. Kind of operational resiliency is what we're after here. Now show and tell, right? Show me what you're working on. Don't just tell me about it. A couple things that, that, that just showing some app mockups or a little bit of, a little bit of UI, even if the software isn't built, doesn't have to be fully fully built, but if you can show me a mockup of a product that doesn't just have like user 1, user 2, user 3, placeholder 1, 2, 3. If you can give me a sense of like what would this look like out in the real world, my intuitive knowledge of what kind of a product this is, who it's for, and my imagination kind of assumptions of where could this go and what could we do with it starts to run wild. Wild, right? Instead, because it doesn't. If you just list out it's a mobile app for millennials that travel and are into music and want to meet other travelers that are into music. Text and descriptions are very expensive attention-wise. Images and quick recognizable mockups are very cheap attention-wise, right? Because there are probably more important things that we want to bring up. We've developed this, you know, we developed this app in a couple of weeks. We got a prototype out there and we already have 1,000 users that are starting to play around with it as beta users, right? I don't have to tell you necessarily that it's a mobile app if I can show it to you, right? Aside from just, aside from helping us understand what it is that you're building, it also shows the level of commitment from the team as well. It's showcasing commitment and ability to execute. You've defined a use case, you defined a customer, you defined some actions or some user experiences. You have a user journey. To some degree probably. And you've put some resources into design time, whether you're a designer like I am, or whether you have a third party or somebody on your team that is doing the design. There's at least some commitment to where you're going with this versus just kind of a couple of bullet points on a slide. Right? There are some, you know, if you have a hardware product, some sketches, some prototypes, industrial design renderings, those are all perfectly viable as well. And I would show them because even though, you know, even if you are building a physical product It's always fun and it's always interesting to see kind of the stages of the product's development and how it's coming to life because it's not necessarily a perfect image of the product, but to that first point, again, it's showcasing commitment and execution to what you're building, right? The trickiest piece here is probably the backend solutions, right? Backend systems or technical processes. What is the scenario, the issue that has come up? What is your, um, that's come up for your primary stakeholder? What is the intervention that you've deployed to deal with that? Um, what is the outcome for the stakeholder? Right? Very simple kind of 1, 2, 3. Um, doesn't necessarily have to be like a full user experience, how it works kind of, um, a step-by-step, you know, log in, create a profile, do X, Y, Z, but just a very simple kind of flowchart of how it works. That can work great for any product, but in particular for ones that are difficult to show because there's maybe not a whole lot of sexy dashboards or UI that you can show either yet or just because it's not applicable for the product. But show me maybe a photo of where the product is being used or what kind of a scenario it's affecting, and then pair that with a couple of point process, right? Here's the problem. We intervene with the solution. Here's what the outcome is for the stakeholder, right? Okay. So delivery at this point, we're gonna assume that you have a story and a structure set up. You've created a wireframe for the deck. You've gotten a freelancer off, you know, Upwork or Fiverr or a template or somebody, you know, to, to, to give it a fresh coat of paint. Now it's delivery time, right? We're assuming that your deck is ready at this point. So this breaks down into 3 stages, right? Preparing for the presentation, the actual engagement or the presentation itself, and the after action or the response to the engagement. Now preparing. So 3 days out, you have a bit of time still, right? Most engagements or presentations that you'll be getting into, you'll have a minimum of 3 days warning, right? Sometimes something just happens right on the day, but not necessarily always. You know, we want to be generally well prepared, but always in those last couple of days before a particularly important presentation, you want to just take a second look at your materials, just at a minimum as a refresher to kind of get you up to speed, but also to kind of adjust it to the audience. So you want to adjust your deck to the crowd. Is this a crowd that you know is more interested in the financials? All right, we'll make sure you've got some financial slides in your appendix that you can jump to in Q&A. Are you trying to onboard, uh, are you pitching to a developer? Maybe, you know, in, in, in say like a, if you're trying to run, run them through a deck of what you're working on, well then maybe include a little bit more about the vision and the tech that you're working on and include a lot more technical slides in the, in the, in the appendix, right? The appendix, you can essentially expand infinitely by the way. Like you can have as much information as you want in the appendix. But that's kind of your 3+ days out right now. In the 1 to 3 day period prior to it, prior to your presentation, you wanna practice. Because practicing and presenting properly is not a skill that ages well. So if you haven't presented for a long time, it's good to get that practice in. So just like practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. But let's dig into that a little bit deeper. What is it that we're really doing here? By practicing, we're creating mental and physical muscle memory. Speaking out loud as a presentation to a complex piece of content is a physical activity. So we want to be familiar with when we're going to run out of breath, when we're talking too fast, when we're talking too slow, when we're talking decent volume. The more physical muscle memory we can work in, the easier it's going to be for us to kind of intuitively cruise through the presentation. I've given this workshop, I don't know how many times at this point, but a lot. And there are certain sections of the presentation where I'm kind of talking and making a point and speaking out loud. but I'm kind of checked out mentally. And it's not that I'm not paying attention, it's just that I'm relying on muscle memory, both mental and— it's not a literal thing, but my kind of mental and physical muscle memory can kick in so that I'm making my points and I can kind of almost sit back in my mind and go, oh, this is going well. How are we doing for time? Okay, time's doing all right. All right, what's the next session we're going to deal with? Because I'm so familiar with the content that it's very easy for me to just naturally speak out the whole right? I don't have a script. I'm just speaking from the heart, but it's because I've done it a ton of times before. And every single time I deliver this workshop, my wording is always slightly different. It's never hyper-optimized. I mean, there are some things that are the same, but it's often different. So that ability to be able to talk comfortably through it comes from not locking into a script and defining just general talking points instead of absolute precise razor-sharp wording. Writing, right? Because you also need to be prepared to ad-lib. You don't know what kind of engagement you're going into, regardless of how well researched you think, how well you've researched whoever you're going to be speaking to, or come up with all the different questions that you think that are going to be raised. You never really know. And so as you get better at putting together your presentations and your presenting skills, use that time and that training as well to get better at responding to questions, right? Because those are kind of wildcards that come at the end of every presentation, whether it's in a formal Q&A period or in a follow-up conversation. So this is more or less my general kind of standard speaking voice as well. So during Q&A, I'm going to sound exactly the same versus if I'm locked into a script, I'm going to be very formal, very kind of strict and to the point, like very, very kind of razor sharp, even if I'm doing it perfectly. And then my whole speech cadence and kind of character changes when we get into a conversation. And you'll never be able to have a script for Q&A anyway. So being able to build that kind of ad-lib and adaptive muscle is incredibly important. And here's how we do it, right? So this is our general structure that we had from before, right? So let me just get my my handy dandy pen out here. So for this, let's see, is this gonna work? How are we doing? No, it's not on. Okay, I'll just use my ass. For the purposes of this kind of example, we're looking at the same structure we were looking at before, right? Cover, overview, problem, market, solution, revenue, traction. Roughly the same structure, right? The way most people practice is they'll start from the beginning, they'll try to kind of push through, but then they'll stop, right? And they'll stop for a number of reasons. They'll forget something, they'll think, oh, I could have said that a little bit better. They'll sneeze, they'll have some kind of a hiccup, something that stops them. We'll call it a fatal moment. That fatal moment knocks you back to the beginning, right? You've got to start the level all over again. And then maybe you try again and you just flub a word. It's like, ah, that wasn't quite perfect. Got to go back to the beginning and you do it again. You go through, maybe get a little bit further, but still fail, so to speak. We're creating these kind of failure points, but maybe one time you make it all the way through, right? It's like, oh, I know I can do it perfectly. So this is now going to be my benchmark for how I have to do it every single time under pressure, under stress, in a context or in a scenario that I don't know what the kind of other extrinsic factors are like. Am I late to get the kids? So I've got to race through this thing. Is everything on fire at work? What's going on in the background? Plus having to get this done perfectly every time. So you kind of build this false sense of capability that there is some kind of optimal state where you can always deliver it razor sharp, absolutely perfectly. It's not the case. Never the case. There is no perfect pitch. There is no perfect presentation. The reality is is that these points or these kind of failure points will always come up, right? Regardless of how well prepared you are, there's always going to be something. You're either going to be dehydrated, so your throat might be a bit scratchy. Cat's going to run across the keyboard. Somebody else's mic is going to turn on because they've gone off mute in a Zoom room. All kinds of things are going to happen that will kind of knock you off this path. So can we optimize our presenting context to make sure that we never have any of these issues come Well, no. What we can do is build our resiliency to them. So the way we do that is practicing right from the beginning, right through all the way to the end. These points are still going to come up, right? These mistakes of forgetting a word or not being quite sure what you want to say or having some kind of an interruption, these will come up throughout the whole presentation. They're not going to stop just because you're not going to be able to fully get them out the process. So what do we do? Well, instead of trying to fully remove them, we just build up resiliency to push through these things. And so each time you're doing a run through like this, you don't have to fully stop the run and go back to the beginning. Just take a breath, think about what you wanna say or what it is that you should address, and then carry on and continue. It's gonna be very slow the first time you do it. The next time you do do it way faster. Next time you do it way faster. Next time you do it way faster. I've had clients go from like 12, 15 minutes down to 10, down to 7, down to 3 in that many run-throughs just because they're getting used to the point of they're getting used to the idea and the capability of not stopping every time there is a minor mistake. Because the reality is that the audience is probably not even going to notice and they certainly do not care whether you said something with this term or that term, some slightly different thing. The audience is there to try and understand your business at a very high general level. So as long as you can get through kind of a casual conversation that covers most of the strategic kind of key points of the business, great. Okay, I understand what it is. I've got a relatable use case here where I can identify some person that is being affected by this product, and I can kind of empathize with what they're going through to some degree. And see how this would be useful for a larger group of people. That's more or less all that your audience really needs at an absolute minimum to be able to understand the company, right? So just to kind of recap here, you're never going to get a perfect pitch. It's, it's, it's, it's possible because there's always going to be an element of chaos, right? So instead of trying to exclude chaos totally from the process, We just— resiliency to getting over those obstacles when they emerge. When those obstacles come up, just punch through them. Don't let them slow you down. Just disregard them. If you've got to repeat yourself, you've got to repeat yourself and get back on track, just do it. Nobody really cares. And ultimately, if you do go back and look at some presentations that are really super high polish, they can feel a little bit odd and a little bit uncanny. Think of— I swear at some point I'm going to get through a presentation without quoting Apple or Steve Jobs, but today's not the day. Apple presentations today that are highly produced, very choreographed, filmed, not on stage, not in front of a live audience. They feel a bit more stagnant and a little bit more stale. They're good. They're very high polish, very excellent production quality, but they're fundamentally different from having Steve Jobs come out on stage and just talk to you about what's coming up next, repeating himself, forgetting words, stumbling a little bit. But we don't really remember those things because the message is so compelling and the products were so interesting. So nobody's really going to remember how you present it as long as they understand the business. Now, if you're right on the day out, you want to evaluate the engagement, see who it is that you're going up against, What do you know about them? Who, like, just a tiny little bit of background research on who the other people maybe that are judging or they're on the panel, getting a little bit of context on who they're involved with so that you can ask them questions. Because you also wanna look at like, what do you wanna get out of these engagements? Not just what are they trying to get out of you, what do you wanna get out of them as well? So just knowing what kind of questions to ask, making some final tweaks to your materials. One day away is not the time to fully revamp your deck. Deck, right? Rather go with what you have, even if it's this. And usually it's aesthetics that get tweaked in these last days out because of nervousness. Spend more time practicing than you spend tweaking the materials, and your deck is gonna be significantly higher quality than if you spent that time just picking fonts or imagery, right? Software-wise, Google Slides is great for getting feedback because everybody uses it. They can throw in comments. Canva is probably your easiest, most accessible way to get some design done. PowerPoint is a crucial, crucial tool to be familiar with because it's your best offline option. Keynote is really nice. It's great. Nothing wrong with it necessarily, but just compatibility issues. If you're showing up to— if you're trying to collaborate with people, they might not have the same version of Keynote as you, even if they are on a Mac. PowerPoint generally is a universal format. That you can upload, export to pretty much any platform. Because you've got Slidebean and pitch.com and beautiful.ai. They're all essentially just online versions of PowerPoint. There is no— they have, you know, maybe some different team sharing kind of functionality, but there's very— there are very few things that PowerPoint cannot do. But also, you know, if you include the fact that it's an excellent offline tool, Also, personally, editing decks in a browser drives me absolutely nuts because of the latency, and PowerPoint's just a lot snappier and a lot faster. Anyway, you'll find also that you'll, especially in person, that you may be presenting in situations where you do not have an internet connection, right? 27th, 35th floor of a tower. You didn't get the receptionist, wasn't there because you're coming in after hours to talk to some partners. Scenarios. So you didn't get the corporate Wi-Fi login or a guest login, or the Wi-Fi is down for whatever reason. There are plenty of scenarios where you do not have an internet connection. So keep an eye on— keep an eye on— or sorry, keep an offline version of your deck handy that you can edit and always just export everything as a PDF. You don't want to be sending people PowerPoint docs or Keynotes or big video files or whatever. Just send a PDF. That's also why I do not address animations or multimedia at all, or I'm not really addressing it at all today because I would generally try and leave those things out. You don't want to stick a marketing video in the middle of a presentation. So you step back for like 90 seconds, have this marketing message play, you step back in, the cadence is all broken and you've actually not really gotten a lot of information across in that short period. Like videos, audio, animations, they don't carry over into PDFs and that's the most frequent format that you're going to be using to hand off to somebody. Also, just like slow animations, having each section animate, a, takes up way too much time in production and it's not really productive. It was not really benefiting the pitch a ton. And it also slows down your cadence during a presentation. So if each little thing has a fade in, each little point has a fade in, you're actually slowing down your ability to present because each time you're mentally ready to move on, you hit the button. And then it fades and then you're ready to talk versus just going click, click, click, click, click, click, click. High cadence, high response time, much better, especially in these hyper condensed kind of 3-minute periods. Right now, audio, so often overlooked. Check your audio before crucial presentations, right? I have a bunch of different kinds of headsets and microphones and God knows what. Gaming headsets usually have pretty good microphones on them. AirPods are good, but they have a tendency to run out of battery at the worst times. I'm a huge fan of wired solutions, even though I've got some Sony cans that are pretty good and the battery is pretty reliable on those. But audio quality-wise, in terms of being heard, is one of the biggest kind of sleeper hacks for a good presentation. This microphone is by far the cheapest solution of all of these as well, by the way. It's a $50 microphone. The arm that it sits on is more expensive than the microphone and it's about a third of the price of AirPods, but it ramps up the audio quality for anybody listening to the presentation massively. This is essentially podcast quality audio for $70, $60, right? The trick, if you do get a microphone like this, and I strongly recommend it because Zoom life is real. As much as we are going back to physical stuff, we are going to continue to operate online a lot. If I move this mic over here, I just I have it kind of sitting on my desk, immediately the capture range of the mic is off, right? These mics capture a very small bubble, about a head-sized bubble in front of it. So you don't want to be right up in it because it can get a little bit overwhelming, but just kind of a fist length, kind of a fist kind of distance away. This is kind of your sweet spot for getting the best audio quality out of these kind of mics. there's plenty of them on Amazon. There's Yeti mics, you can go up getting those kind of SM7B, like fancy Shure podcasting mics. They're effectively all kind of the same thing for your purposes as a founder that's doing calls. So any mic you get in that kind of like $50 to $100 price range is gonna perform more or less the same. And anything past that is gonna be diminishing returns. There's audio way more important than video. I happen to have a fancy video setup as well, but for the longest time I just ran a webcam and a desk lamp. And actually still, that's all my lighting is, just the desk lamp off to the side here. You can get away with bad video quality and sometimes you may be off camera if bandwidth is an issue or whatever the case may be. But as long as you can be heard properly, then it's fine, right? Then much less concerned. Most laptops will have a webcam in it. Throw a desk lamp on the side or a little bit of light so that you can be seen properly. Dedicated webcams are always going to be a little bit better. I'm not a huge fan of using DSLRs and OBS and some of these overkill solutions. I recognize the hypocrisy in that because that's literally what I have running right here. But I also live at this desk, right? And I'm constantly troubleshooting and I've got all kinds of backup equipment. If my gear is failing. So I would probably not go the DSLR route just because it can introduce a couple of more points of failure. But yeah, I would probably just stick to a basic webcam with decent lighting. Now, presenting, right? Last section here. So get your questions ready if you do want to ask some questions. We'll be getting into Q&A in about 5 minutes or so. So presenting, right? Actually on the day, first thing to remember, you will feel more nervous than you look and sound. It's always gonna be a nerve-wracking experience, especially when there's a lot on the line. But there's things we can do about that, right? Knowing your pitch, knowing what the kind of talking points are versus the script. We covered that kind of ad nauseam today, but it's because it's such an important point, right? Some of these points may seem very simple, but I bring them up again and again and again because I see founders right from an idea stage, right way up to a Series A and beyond tripping up on some of these fundamentals and basics that we've covered today. So that's why some of these things may seem a little bit obvious, but remember, you do have to do them, right? You do actually have to execute on some of these things. So knowing your pitch rather than memorizing it word for word or reading off a script, getting a little bit of rest ahead of a super important meeting. Probably the biggest hack that I could give my younger self. It's like if I could tell my younger self anything, is basically just get more sleep. You're going to make much higher quality decisions and you're going to be able to react much better to stressful situations because it's kind of a hurry up and wait situation with a lot of kind of startup engagements. And so if you're walking into an engagement well rested, well set up, razor sharp and ready to answer questions on the fly, great. And vice versa, right? If you're exhausted, if you're exhausted and you're really run down, you're going into a meeting, you're going to be emotionally more touchy, you're going to be more frustrated, you're going to forget things, more stressed out, just generally a bad experience. Right. And people can tell if you are really exhausted. I know that's a cruel kind of— in a world of move fast and break things and hustle grind 24/7 and kind of grind set culture, I get the paradox there. But really, sleep is probably one of the biggest strategic impacts to presenting properly as well. Not neglecting the physical aspect, right? Just a little bit of shoulder roll, rolling out your neck, warming up those vocal cords. Plenty of quick little vocal warmups you can find on YouTube or some basic just like desk yoga, kind of loosen the shoulders a little bit, loosen the neck a little bit, mouth, teeth, tongue, all that. Maybe do that off camera. All those pieces. And then just before a presentation as well, there's a couple of things you want to keep in mind to kind of mitigate stage fright. Deep breaths, right? Shut down your fight or flight response. Calm down a little bit. Oxygenate the blood. Get you ready for game time, right? If you do need a bit of a caffeine boost, try to opt for tea versus coffee. Because especially if you're nervous, you're going to chug coffee and ramp up that caffeine and ramp up that cortisol. So you may be very fast and effective, but it may come across a bit speedy. Shaky, right? And a little bit nervous and a bit stressed out. Last little hack here is that the speed that is expected of you to build companies at, which is a high-paced, high-velocity, venture-backable, exponentially scalable kind of company, the speed at which you're building a company like that is going to be stressful. There's no doubt about it. It's doable. Tons of people do it. And that's kind of why organizations like FI and these kind of communities exist. To kind of help us all get through that process. But if you're going too slow, there's gonna be a lot of problems. If you're going really fast and succeeding, there's also gonna be a lot of problems. Regardless of how you're building out the company, you are constantly in kind of firefighting mode, right? So being able to check out for just 2 seconds from the seriousness of life and, you know, some memes, tiny bit of standup, favorite podcast, like whatever, just a couple minutes of checking out from the seriousness of all the emergencies that are going on before a presentation. Excellent little hack. But again, as if it needs stating again, the best thing you can do is practice, right? Get familiar with the physical sensations and getting through the deck. Be able to just intuitively and easily kind of drop into a flow of going through the presentation instead of having to remember every precise word. Way less stressful of a situation than than not. My most terrifying presentations are ones that I'm not prepared for. I can kind of wing it through certain types of presentations. But there's one scenario where I had to do a very complex workshop for a very specific group of people with some very, very specific parameters. I didn't have a ton of time to prepare for it because it was very short notice. That is one of the most stressful experiences presenting. That I've had presenting, and it's just because I wasn't prepared. Everything else was fine, right? I mean, I got through it. I knew the content generally, and I was able to talk my way through it, but it was very stressful and very nerve-wracking. So just practicing, being familiar, fall back on your training when you get stressed out is always a good move, right? Last point, responding. So as you're responding to questions and as you're interacting with the audience post-engagement or kind of after after the presentation, you are, you're being judged on a couple of different levels. I don't want to, you know, you're gonna say that you're being put on the spot and being judged harshly, but there is kind of direct messaging that's going on and indirect messaging going on. If you have to rely on a script and you race through it and it's super, super heavy technical detail, my understanding of that directly is maybe it's like, oh, okay, I see that, you know, here's this white paper and it's doing all these different things. It's doing all this. Like maybe I retain some of that information. That's the direct message, what you're literally saying objectively kind of in the presentation. The indirect message is this founder hasn't come up with a simplified version of this content. Do they really know the content that well? Or is it, or are they unable to kind of talk about it in simple terms? Because if that's the case, this might be a really difficult conversation to have if we can't have a normal conversation about it, right? I mean, not to overstate this because it isn't that harsh, but these are some of the things we want to be aware of. If we're speaking very fast and we're stressed out and we're sprinting through things versus at a calm, cool, collected pace with refined wording and it's confidently presented and it's conversational language and easy to understand, you can see how those two different kind of interactions can come across a little bit kind of differently. So in terms of responding to questions that— let's see, sorry, just had to grab something here. That— so in terms of responding to questions, we can stick to a very simple 3-step process, right? Pause, respond to the question, then wrap it up. Pause to allow whoever's asked you the question to finish their full question. And buy yourself like 1 or 2 nanoseconds just to come up with a good response. You want to respond in short and be careful not to run into a detail spiral and start just rehashing the pitch or just like, you know, ranting for 2 or 3 minutes on a particular point because you've been challenged, right? And that's kind of a nervous moment. It's like, oh, now I'm going to do a show of force. So like all of the content and all the information that I know about this particular thing so that they know that I know so that they don't think that I don't know what I'm talking about. Like, there's this very nervous kind of loop that gets kicked off by having your question, having your company challenged, especially if you don't know the answer. It's okay not to know the answer. You still have to respond to the question. So great point. We haven't actually considered that yet. I'd love to get some more detail after the presentation and follow up on that. It sounds like that would be a really useful, really interesting angle for the company to to explore, right? A non-answer to a degree, but it's a response, but I'm not answering it, right? And then you want to wrap up because even if you do need to go into, even if you do need to go into kind of deeper, heavier detail, you want to respond to the question, wrap up that response. Like, uh, you wanna respond to the question, wrap up that response, and then ask if, does that answer your question? Should I elaborate? Is there anything in particular there that you want me to dig in on? Should we connect after the fact to get into more detail? Maybe you can jump to an appendix slide. But usually in those scenarios where you get, where you check in with the audience and ask them, does that answer your question? Sometimes they'll say yes, thank you, next question. And sometimes they'll give you a better idea of what they really want to know. So they'll give you a more accurate indicator. It's like, yeah, that's super interesting, but tell me a bit more about like this components. Okay. And then the loop continues, right? Pause, allow them to finish their question, respond to the question, wrap up that response, move on to the next question, right? Because ultimately what we're after here, after the Q&A, all that is the next interaction. It's the next intro, the next meeting, follow-up conversation, sending some materials, coming into the office to have a chat with the partners, whatever the case may be. We're always going for the next interaction. So the So the summary of this whole thing, kind of what we're looking at here is this whole process is geared towards facilitating a chain of, of a chain of interactions that gradually builds a relationship. There are no knockout punches, there are no perfect pitches, but the best we can do is make sure that we can navigate this process in a way where we can edit our own decks and be, and be, um, and be, uh, uh, uh, uh, kind of flexible to the kinds of engagements that we get into, so that we can have specific decks for specific audiences, that we can easily and comfortably talk through our presentation without having to memorize exact specific wording, and that, and that our audience gets a general kind of strategic overview of what the business is about and whether they should get on board or not. So with that, I thank you all for your time. If anybody has to drop, do feel free to, to run, but We'd love to hear from as many of you as possible over, over LinkedIn or email. But for the rest of the time, I think we can, we can just jump into some, some questions. All right. So I'm just gonna stop presenting that. Okay. All right, Elijah, do we have any questions you wanna start off with? Let's see. Okay.

Hey, Ben, thank you so much for this presentation today. I hope you can see me. My camera's having issues at the moment.

Yeah, I know.

But yeah, we actually—

your sound is great. See, that's fantastic. Audio's on point, so like, it's okay, no big deal, right? Like, I can hear you well. If I couldn't hear you properly, you know, that's the— that would be a big issue, right? Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

No worries. Yeah, I use a boom mic connected to like some headphones. That ends up working pretty well. Um, so yeah, we have some really good questions, uh, we've collected from chat but also in the Q&A section. Uh, our highest, uh, upvoted question we have right now is from Tyler who asked if the idea is in the early stages and we don't have any current revenue, what do we do instead? And I'm assuming that they're asking about how does that affect the way we pitch? Totally. We format our deck.

Yeah, great question. Thanks a lot, Tyler. So when we talk about traction, doesn't necessarily have to be sales. Sales is like the golden ticket though. It's like, look, we've got all these people to pay for it. They're paying for it again and again and again. That's, that's an indicator of success, right? Because what is that an indicator of sales-wise? It's that somebody has used the product, they've paid you for the product, they have paid you again for the product, and then again for the product, and then again for the product, right? So that's a, that's a, it's an indicator that whatever you're doing can both bring, it can both bring people on board into your, into your product, but can also retain them, right? right? Because I can get you 10,000 users for an app, no problem. It's gonna cost you a bunch of money in Facebook ads and they'll all churn immediately, but I can still get you that user growth, right? But it's, so it's a matter of retention. That's what sales kind of ongoing sales is a leading indicator of. Now if you don't have that, if we back up a little bit, well what if you're pre-product, pre-revenue, right? Well the traction, um, is really, you know, if, if we zoom out a little bit on what traction really is, it's the market's reaction to your idea. Right? But it's also, I mean, and not just like the general idea, like how many people are building blockchain solutions or how many people are using a particular AI text generator or whatever the case is out in the ecosystem. It's what are you doing or how are people reacting to what you have created? So in lieu of sales, we can speak to partnerships, beta users, Surveys and research, I don't feel hold a ton of weight because it's like 99% of people that we asked about this solution said that they would love to use our solution. It's like, okay, it's kind of a non-sentence, right? And it's often that research is often very small sample sets and it's often very biased. So beta users that are using the product and getting some reaction from them is probably your best bet if you don't actually have have a product out there or you don't have revenue. So who's been using it? What are they saying about it? Bring the user or the beta users voice into the conversation so that it's just like, look, this is how we built the product, what it is that we're building, but this is what the people that actually need this product have to say about it. And so that's kind of your best bet if you don't have actual sales.

Yeah, that's great. And we keep getting new questions in, so we can get to some of these other ones. So, sure. Jose asked a really interesting— or excuse me, Xavier asked a really interesting question. Said, is it true that many VCs nowadays are preferring a one-pager pitch over an actual pitch deck in their first emails from founders? We have some questions kind of in that same frame. Um, let's see, somebody else had asked— is, uh, Austin asked, will people look down upon a well-designed deck? I've heard people saying they think that it shows an inability to prioritize time. So kind of some questions about—

it's a good point.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. How, how, uh, how do they best optimize their decks, and is there such a thing as overdoing it?

Absolutely. I mean, you can definitely— you know, there's a There is a— I'm sure we've all seen houses that look like wedding cakes that just have way too much decoration. You can definitely go overboard on aesthetics. And that's kind of my point about the multimedia and aesthetics, that no amount of design is going to fix bad content. And so if you have heaps and heaps and heaps of design that has been put onto— that has been put into a deck, then my assumption reading that is going to be, okay, where's the resource allocation happening? Like, what's going on here? Because the messaging here is kind of cookie cutter and kind of box checking. It's like, oh, we're raising $500K, 30% for development, 30% for marketing, 30% for admin or outreach, whatever. Or a lot of these kind of box-checking exercises. Everybody's down in the bottom left of this is our competitive landscape. Everybody's in the bottom left and they suck. We're in the top right and we're amazing. If there's that plus really heavy design around it to try and compensate, I'm going to start asking some questions. Right? It's like, okay, well, what are we really talking about here? Not to say that good design is a handicap or something that you shouldn't be including. The trick really is to keep it minimal, right? If it's not loud, noisy, busy aesthetics, if it's minimal and easy to read, then you're fine, right? Some photos off Unsplash. Some icons off Noun Project, some basic minimalist just layouts without a lot of kind of accents or flair to them. It's both gonna be much easier to, it's gonna be much easier to edit. It's gonna be a lot easier to have other team members edit that maybe don't have a ton of production skills. It's gonna be easier to keep your branding on point and consistent, and it's gonna be easier for your audience to read and retain. Pain. So on the point of design and aesthetics, it's a balancing act, right? Do it well. Opt for minimalist design if you at all can, because that trend or that genre of design optimizes for readability and functionality. So you want to lean more towards readability and functionality than you want to lead towards kind of beauty and aesthetic, because it's a very practical, functional document, right? To answer the other question on, um, one-pager versus a full deck, um, I, I certainly don't think— so we'll start with this. Sending a full deck as your first kind of cold outreach to an investor, um, there's schools of thought on this. My opinion, so I'll offer my opinion on this. My opinion is don't do it. Don't send the whole deck, uh, up front because you don't know what their bandwidth is like. So if I'm super stressed out and I'm really underwater with a ton of projects because it's beginning of fundraising is seasonal, by the way, it's September, October into the beginning of November, and then Thanksgiving comes and it's dead. And then there's nothing basically until mid-January is when you can start booking meetings again. And then there's a frenzy around March, April. And then May, you start to get into vacations, kids are on holiday, trips start to happen. It goes dead until end of August, beginning of September, and then the cycle repeats, right? So summertime is a great time to work on product, to work on decks and kind of practice your presentations and kind of draft up your game plan for the fall. And then when fall hits, you go out, execute like crazy and go and do a million meetings, right? And same kind of over the winter holidays going into going into the new year. But bandwidth-wise and being able to look at these documents, it's highly unlikely anybody's gonna read the entire deck, right? Almost guaranteed that's not gonna happen. If you can send a one-pager that is well done and is like, I've seen one-pagers that are literally like 6-point font and just like margin to margin packed in as much as humanly possible. Those are a nightmare to read. And so it's kind of an insult to people's to their band, it's like, hey, I sent you a one-pager, can you have a look at it? It's like, cool, but it's like 50,000 words. No, I'm not going to go through this mountain of detail. Give me 2 to 3 slides worth of content on one page. And the point of a one-pager is to be And the point of a one-pager is to, is to help somebody get a general understanding of the overview. Tell me what is the problem you're addressing in very short form. Tell me who you are addressing it for so that we can clearly identify your customer group. What have you done so far about it? So a couple points of traction. We have a prototype up, we've got 500 users on board. We have a municipality that is signed on to an MOU for a pilot project in the spring. This is what we need to move forward. Could we have a conversation? And you don't have to put like deal terms or raise amounts. Just like currently we're raising, we've already got some prototypes in place. And if you are gonna talk about what your plans are that are coming up, don't give vague plans. Like we're gonna continue development, we're gonna develop our market, we're going to scale the product. Say we're gonna hit, we're aiming to hit 10,000 users by the end of the year. To achieve that, we're raising a round at the moment. You know, I would be— so one-pager for sure. Like, if you're gonna send anything, send a one-page PDF that is nice and minimal, not too noisy, not layered and layered and layered in detail, but just an easy to glance— like glanceable material. If I'm sat at a boardroom table with a bunch of other analysts, real-world scenarios has happened, and we have printouts of one-pagers. If you submit a deck to a fund, either it's not gonna get read in most cases, or in many cases, I won't speak for all funds, obviously, obviously, but in many cases it's not gonna get read. And if it is, it's gonna be read by a junior analyst and that junior analyst is going to create a one-pager for you if it is something that they actually do want to present to, to partners or somebody higher up. So take the lead and make a good one-pager that is brief, easy, and concise and, and glanceable and, and send that in because that's what's gonna end up on the table when people are shuffling around. It's like, oh, well what about these companies? What about these companies? What do we think about these guys? Guys, what do we think about this one? You know, so full decks on first contact, probably not, but have them ready to go if people request them. As you get into this kind of a later stage issue as well, if you get into a fundraising scenario, one of the biggest things that slows down the fundraising process is document acquisition. So acquiring the documents that you need to serve a request. So if your counterparty or whoever, the analyst, investor, whoever is asking you for some documents to do due diligence, or because you are kind of edging towards a term sheet, they're gonna ask you for a bunch of different things. And I won't go through all of them today cuz it's a lot, but just look up data rooms and what you should include in a data room and kind of what goes into due diligence. What kind of documents are reviewed during a due diligence process? I don't think we have a resource on this, but like Y Combinator has a good like due diligence checklist. Kuritsu Forum has like a really, has this like 300-page super comprehensive one that I saw at one point. There's a bunch of organizations that have resources on this. Getting those documents together early on is probably, is a good move as well so that you just have a well-stocked data room so that if you have an investor that's actually interested, you can keep that keep that interest hot. So while they're, while they're interested and while the deal is hot, that you can get them all the documents that they need immediately and respond to any requests to close the deal quickly. Because if you drag out that process of getting all the documentation together, the deal can go cold, right? They, you know, they've only got the, they're getting bombarded with pitches on a daily basis. So maybe they found another more compelling deal, or maybe they, you know, they just lost interest and moved on to something else. So anyway, long-winded way of saying is like one-pagers, good, but brief. Full decks, no, but have them available if they do request them, because they might.

No problem. I think people really appreciate the in-depth answer there because we've had several questions about how do we pitch to different stages, how do we pitch in certain points to different investors, cold emails, all that.

But I would say like, I know there's a lot of opinions about cold emails and cold outreach to investors. I'm not saying you shouldn't necessarily do it, but don't expect that to be a high open rate. Like the open rate is gonna be minuscule on cold emails just because of the sheer volume of, you know, especially if you just yeet a deck to a general address at Sequoia, like there's nobody, there's highly unlikely somebody's actually gonna see it. Get. If it's just a general open public address, not picking on Sequoia in particular, I don't know their process, but most funds are not going to review every single deck that comes across their table. The best way to get those intros is to have a community of people that will walk you into a warm intro, right? Investors that have a portfolio of founders are going to have conversations with those founders about other companies, guaranteed. And they need to scout out diamonds in the rough as So they're going to be looking to accelerators, they're going to be looking to people in the ecosystem, to mentors, to advisors, to community groups, to other founders and peers for recommendations on who to spot as a filtering mechanism. Accelerators are essentially a filtering mechanism for a lot of VCs and they help de-risk their deals. And so if you are a totally unknown founder out in the ecosystem with no connection to an individual, it's unlikely that you're going to break through. You could, I'm not saying that you can't, but it's unlikely. So if you are trying to kind of build up that ability to get lots of intros and get attention from investors, storming the gates isn't necessarily the way to do it. And just blasting them with tons of, with tons of decks and cold outreach could work, but probably won't. Better way is to become a known quantity in their sphere. Mentoring, volunteering, working with other founders, getting to know other founders and peers in your community, and that are kind of on the periphery of investing. Because they will look to those communities and they will look to these kind of vetted groups to find new deals. Right, right. No, absolutely.

So we have a question here. Not sure what, how to pronounce this name. I'm just gonna ask the question, how much intellectual property should I include in my pitch deck? And I think people— yeah, go ahead, go for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A common question, right? How much are you exposing, right? Are you exposing patents or trade secrets? Or, you know, is somebody gonna steal my idea if I pitch it to them? Don't try and get investors to sign NDAs. A, they're unenforceable, and B, it's kind of— I wouldn't say it's necessarily disrespectful, but it's just kind of a— it's— you're starting off the engagement by not trusting someone. But it's like, hey, I want a legal document that enshrines my trust in you because I fundamentally don't trust I trust you, right? You're not saying that directly, but you are kind of saying that indirectly, right? So at the start of a conversation, like sliding an NDA across, I mean, unless you're working on something for the government or something particularly sensitive, then probably not the best way to start an interaction or an engagement, right? What you can do is just manage your level of detail. And so this is kind of the— it comes to the where how much intellectual property do you include? If you are just talking about, back to my slide about like utility and mechanic, the mechanic is pro— the mechanic, what's under the hood, what is the actual function and the ins and outs of the technology, that may be something that is proprietary, right? The utility is probably not proprietary. I know there are like utility patents and all that, and I'm not the best, I'm not super versed in IP law, but So terminology may be getting a little bit fuzzy here, but the utility of a product, how does it work? What does it do? What kind of an outcome does it provide the ultimate beneficiary or the end user? What is the value chain? What is the value proposition? Like, that is a much better way to start off a conversation and then show that you're actually making progress on this. As you progress through that process, you can gauge how much more detail you need to get into. If you need to I mean, there are very few ideas. I don't know how many decks I see on an annual basis, but it's definitely in the high 600s to 700s per year. That I see maybe 2 or 3 unique ideas a year, right? So out of maybe like 600 600 decks, I can pick out almost every single one of them. I can go, oh, it's like this company that we've seen doing that, or we've seen this company doing that, or this company doing that. The uniqueness of ideas is way lower now than it was, say, 10 or 15 years ago. Just like a lightning fast history lesson, right? I'm sure a lot of you are aware of this already, but a lot of the big companies that we talk about today were built in 2005, 6, 7, 8, 9, The playbook and the legends and the myths that we all kind of are playing out our founder journey by, or that are guiding kind of our idea, the ideological basis of our kind of journey as founders and as startups is based on a playbook that was written 10 or 15 years ago. Things have changed radically since then. The, I mean, iPads even are only 2011. That's only 11 years ago, right? 2012. I might be off by a year or two there, but iPhones are only 2007, right? App markets pre-2007 didn't exist. So this is— we've literally just existed for a blink in history, right? And so the— but despite that, the ecosystem then versus the ecosystem now, two very, very different things. It's not so much that we see totally unique, totally unique ideas anymore, even though those do come up sometimes. It's that we see similar ideas, significant amounts of parallel thinking, but an amazing ability to execute. Right? Demonstrated. Do you have a demonstrated ability to execute with all the 100 people that have read the tea leaves in the same way that you have, of which there are probably many? What is it that is going to make you win a race to win an innovation and execution race, right? Are you going to get something to market quicker? Are you going to build it faster? Are you gonna do it in a better market? Is your timing, is your luck for timing? 'Cause that's also a factor, right? Luck is certainly a factor. Are you lucky enough to be kind of doing this at exactly the right time? There's all kinds of things that play into it. So depending like, to kind of bring it back to the conversation about how much of that IP do we really show? Well, probably not a whole lot because it's probably not pertinent in those initial conversations. And once you get to a point where you may have to start exposing significant amounts of technical detail or of patented or proprietary information at those stage, like as you kind of progress in the relationship, you both build more trust trust in who it is that you're engaging with, but also you get closer to a legal binding agreement that they can see everything. So Loyal VC, for instance, they have a very interesting process where they'll put a very small amount comparatively. I think it's like $10,000 or so. They'll put a small amount of money into a company as kind of an exploratory amount that gets them the legal standing to be able to open up the books and kind of engage with the founder on a more intimate level. And they take all their recommendations from Founder Institute local leaders in Insead, by the way. That's one of They're very interesting filtering mechanisms. So they already kind of trust that there is a certain level of scrutiny that's been on the company, but then they kind of are able to connect with that company on a little bit of a legal basis where they can take a look at some of that proprietary information. This is not the case for all funds. Obviously Loyal is very unique fund, but this strategy has been working very well for them. So I would say, you know, but talk, speak to the generalized abstracted use cases and don't be too guarded around your intellectual property. Even though you do want to try and protect it, you don't have to be aggressively defensive about it because that in and of itself is a major red flag as well. It's just a leading indicator of all kinds of attitude and communication problems that can pop up later on with managing teams or interacting with investors. One of the common ones that we see paired up with that sentiment, for instance, I'm not saying that this is the case, Right. In this case, but one of the common ones that we see kind of go along with like hyperprotectionism around IP is not wanting to talk to anybody that doesn't understand their technology. If like we only want to pitch to investors that understand our space or understand our technology, and we're not going to spend any time trying to convince anybody else. It's kind of an arrogant approach. Because what's really, and we see it unfortunately quite frequently. Because essentially what you're saying there is that like, I only want I only want to preach to the choir, right? I only want to talk to people that already know a lot of what I'm talking about. I don't have to convince them of anything. It's like, I wish that was the case that we could do that, but we can't, right? If you are trying to unlock, if we approach this from just like an engineer's perspective, if you're trying to unlock the fuel and the resources that is gonna power the engine that will build your vision, that will bring your vision to life, the currency that you need to front for at is empathy and understanding of people's lack of understanding of your solution. You need to empathize with the fact that your audience, no matter how smart or how senior they may be, probably don't have all the context, right? Everybody knows something you don't. And so you need to be able to help. So you need to be able to walk them into in a conversational way what it is that you're doing so that they can get an understanding for it and you can then help, you know, dive into whatever detail in particular. A slight tangent. The upfront kind of strategic overview that we went through today, that's kind of, that's kind of the table stakes, right? You wanna get through that as the, the primary kind of bulk of information that you wanna get through as quickly and as effectively as possible without too much difficult to retain or difficult to process information. Cuz then you wanna turn it into a conversation. And have a massively stacked appendix, right? All the technical detail in the world can live in the appendix because once you get into a conversation and say like, hey, I'm curious about how your algorithm is learning. Like, is it a, is it a self recursive, you know, self correcting algorithm? Is there monitored learning? Are you adding datasets into it? Tell me a little bit about the learning process, right? That's the point. That's a level of detail that's probably inappropriate in an overview deck, right? It's too granular, too detailed. But as soon as you know that somebody wants to know that or is interested in that, you can jump to that section, right? It's like, excellent. Yeah, here's our slide on the learning algorithm or here's our deep technical deep dive on how the algorithm is developing, right? Too much detail on the upfront, but a real goldmine to be able to jump to in the appendix and always have like a nice table of contents of the appendix. A little like cheeky hack as well. As well is that after your like thank you or summary kind of wrap-up slide to just move to the table of contents slide that just says like appendix table of contents and just this big comprehensive list of slides that you can jump to. It's like, look, we can jump into a conversation about any of these topics if you want, but happy to hear out, you know, what, what, what kind of questions, um, uh, what would you wanna dive into? Right. So anyway, bit of a rant, bit of a tangent, but, uh, let's, uh, let's jump onto a, let's jump, jump to another question.

No, that's cool. Really cool tip. About the table of contents, appendix kind of thing. And like you said, it's a lot about understanding more than just the concept you're pitching, it's the people you're pitching to.

100%.

That's great. So Pranay asked, as a startup at the very early prototype stage, what should I put in the revenue and traction slides? And they also asked if the roadmap slide was for product building or growth.

Yeah, great questions. So early stage product, if in, in the revenue section, the revenue is how you make money, not how much you made, right? Traction is how much you have made. Revenue is what is the mechanism by which you make it. I have that in like the product block. I almost, I very frequently include, especially in short decks, I'll include both of those points on the same slide, like the solution and the revenues. Like it's a product that does this. You can sign up and do X, Y, and Z. It costs $12 a month. All right, that's it. So by saying it's $12 a month, we've now established that this is a subscription SaaS product. Maybe it has a free tier, maybe it has a premium tier, maybe there's an enterprise concierge service. We can talk about that in the functionality of the app or the software or the solution, whatever it may be. We don't necessarily have to dive into deep mechanics or complex revenue models. I mean, at this point, and happy to be corrected on this one, but there's basically what, like 10 different revenue models, 10 or 15 different revenue models generally. And they're all fairly recognizable, like they're all fairly well recognized by consumers and by people, by users that may be using your platform. And so we don't necessarily need to innovate on complex revenue models because they're usually fairly standard. People are either making a one-time purchase, they're doing an ongoing purchase, maybe there's a lifetime license, maybe there's a high-end concierge service, maybe there's a pay-per-use use angle, but it's not particularly complex, right? So whatever revenue model you're going with, I would just include it in the product section relatively briefly and then speak to how much money you actually made off it if that's applicable. If not, then just leave it out because you can, because your revenue model also may change. So, so I wouldn't necessarily spend too much time on it. So that was the, so, so if you don't have revenue, what do you put on the revenue slide? Well, I think what we're talking about there is traction. If you don't have any sales, then talk about how the market is reacting to the product. Who's used it? What do they say about it? What are the beta users saying? The revenue mechanism, keep it short and sweet and relatively simple. Don't try and over-innovate the revenue model early on because it's probably not the linchpin of the company is like an innovative revenue model. It's probably something else. I might be wrong. But generally speaking, the revenue model is not like the huge differentiator, unless there's maybe like some two-sided marketplace vendor affiliate kind of dynamic. But that even is still a fairly recognizable, simple revenue model. What was the second question again, Elijah?

Yeah, it was the question about the roadmap slide.

Roadmap. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So there's 3 different things you can put on a roadmap. Essentially, you've got user growth, you've got product growth, and you've got finance. So how much money have you raised? How many grants have you secured? How much funding have you put in yourself? What's been going on there in terms of the cash that is driving the engine? Because those can be indicators of your competency in fundraising, your ability to leverage non-dilutive funding like government grants or support programs. Especially here in Canada, we've got tons of government funding. It's a bit of an unfair advantage for some Canadian companies, how much funding we can get from the government for stuff. But also, so that's kind of the financing side or finance side. Also, it shows like if you put any of your own money in, that's like an extra sign of commitment to the project. Like I put $50K of my own money into starting this company, et cetera. The user growth is like how many users do you have on board and how fast are they growing? That's an indicator of, because these are all like leading indicators, right? It's not necessarily like, oh, we need to know what the dollar amount that you have left. So no, we need to know how good are you at raising funds and getting money into the organization because you're going to have to continuously do that throughout the lifetime of the company. Product growth— oh, sorry, user growth is, you know, how many users do you have on the platform? How fast is that growing? You know, where are they coming from? Those are indicators of maturity in the product and that you've got— and that you're kind of cruising towards towards product market fit. Like, product market fit is not going out and asking 10 people, would you use this fantastic product that would make your life so much easier? And they go, yes, I would use that product. That's not product market fit, right? Product market fit is if you get a bunch of users using your product, they repeatedly pay for it, they're banging on the door asking for new features and evangelizing it and bringing new people in and to a point where your company is busting at the seams because you just can't handle the user growth. That's product market fit, right? So user growth, what is, you know, maybe some indicators of what is causing that, that user growth? Like, oh, we partnered with this organization, we're entering these markets, we launched this update that spiked our user growth or, or, or, or tanked it. And then product is just technological milestones, right? We got a prototype up, got the first version up, we've got X, Y, and Z kind of technical milestones covered. Forward. That's the kind of product. And you don't have to be super comprehensive about all of these points, but those are generally like the 3 categories that we would be looking at on a roadmap. Because the roadmap is like— because I would also— I wouldn't look much further back than like 6 months back, 12 months forward, because that 18-month window is really the only relevant time frame. I mean, there may have been things that have happened 2, 3, 4, 5 years in the past that have informed the company or serve as a basis for the company. If they're super relevant, then okay, we can bring them up. But I don't care when you incorporated the company or when you built your first landing page, right? What I care about is when was the product launched and at what velocity from product launch to user growth? What did that look like? Because if you launched the product and then it lingered in the App Store for 3 years until you made an update, that's kind of hurting your demonstrated ability to execute, right? Are you somebody that moves and builds and gets stuff done? Or are you somebody that has a hobby project that they're trying to turn into a company and has been lingering for multiple, multiple years? And not to say there's anything wrong with that, because that is actually where a lot of companies come from. What I'm saying is that those multiple years back, if it has been lingering, let's not talk about it because it isn't relevant. The only thing that's relevant is what have you decided to do right now? In the current climate, in the current market, in the current position that you're in, and where are you gonna take it in the next year? Anything past the year you can put on like an extended roadmap. Like here are some of the goals that we want to achieve in the future, but that year is all you can really predict. Anything past that is, is, is staring into a crystal ball. The number of decks that I put together in 2019 that made all kinds of assumptions about what was gonna happen in 2020 that then had to be corrected was, was pretty astounding. So it's like, spoiler alert, 2020 didn't quite pan out the way most people planned, right? So, you know, all kinds of things can come up. And I mean, my favorite kind of catchphrase at this point is like, it's always a good time to be in the chaos business, right? And chaos happens in short intervals, in short intervals on short timelines. And so help us understand where you're at right now, where it is that you're going in the near to immediate future, right?

Absolutely. And then we've had some questions about practicing pitches and getting feedback on pitches and ideas, and I just wanted to give a plug for the next event that we're hosting actually next week about the same time. I'll be posting it in the chat here and pinning that so you're able to see that, where you're able to get feedback on your pitches from FI mentors and experts for your pitches next week. So if you do want feedback and get some helpful, friendly feedback, make sure you register for that event. But I did get a question that I really appreciate because I think this has happened to probably everyone. It doesn't matter what kind of presentation you present in any kind of form. But Jose asked, how do you respond to a question that you are answering in a future slide?

Yeah, I mean, I would just do it very— so it depends on how comprehensive the question needs to be or how comprehensive the answer needs to be. If you can answer it in like under a sentence, like just a couple of words, I would do that and then just mention, yeah, so this is what we actually do about that. I actually get into a little bit more detail about that on the next couple slides, but I wouldn't like discount the questions like, wait, I'll get to it. You want to be like, great question. We're actually doing this and this and this about it. I'm going to get into a little bit more detail on that in a second. Thank you. Right. You always want to be appreciative of the question because appreciative and respectful of all questions and not kind of dismiss them for any reason. Because even nasty questions, right? If you get a really spicy, nasty question, there is a remote possibility that you're being tested. In terms of how do you respond under pressure? Sometimes people are just dicks and they'll just ask you a spicy, difficult question just to kind of mess with you because they just don't like the company. It's not often, but it certainly does happen. But even in those situations, if you just come across ice cold, calm, cool, collected, friendly, take the high ground. It's a great question. Sure, here's what we can do about that. Now, 'No, let's move on.' You kind of 4D chess them out of, you know, they're trying to get you with a zinger, but if you respond all, you know, calm as a cucumber back, you kind of disarm that, that, that poke, right? Um, and so, uh, because it's an indicator of what are you going to be like as a founder or as a leader of a team, or what are you going to be like, uh, as somebody to, to talk to and to engage with as a, in a, in a founder-investor relationship as Well, right. So whenever those kind of things come up or interruptions like that come up, answer the question as quick as in, in, in as short form as you possibly can with the caveat that, oh, we are gonna get into detail on that in a second. I would love to, love to dig into it a little bit more. Right. So respond quickly, wrap it up, move on so that you, it doesn't knock the cadence off. I wouldn't go into lengthy in-depth conversations or detail on the question. I would take control of the, the engagement and just answer cover it, move on, and then go into detail when you're on that applicable slide, right?

Exactly. That's, that's great, um, information. And do you have time for one more question?

And then sure, we can get into our, our, uh, networking.

So make sure you stick around, uh, once the Q&A is over. You feel free to go into any of the networking tables. Uh, we still have about 250 people in here, participants. And so thank you everyone for showing up again. But the question that we've gotten a few times is how familiar should everyone on the founder team know the pitch?

Yeah, I mean, schools of thought, right? Some would say everybody should be able to pitch the company at any given point at the drop of a needle, right? At a pin drop, right? The reality is, is the C-suite. Right. So if you're a CEO, a CTO, or COO, anybody that is brought in to present in any of these kind of like high-level conversations should be able to pitch. Right. There are going to be scenarios where maybe a question is better suited for a CTO. 90% of the time your CEO should be presenting because they are the visionary leader of the company. I know there's all kinds of hierarchy and kind of status considerations around some of these things, but the role of a CEO in my mind, again, my opinion, so I'll put my opinion hat on. My opinion is that the CEO is a visionary leader that kind of ties together all of the different components of the company from operations to tech to marketing to all of those things and kind of guides them with a unified vision. They kind of carry the banner that everybody can rally behind or can rally to. Right. And so if they're kind of shining the beacon and showing the way, they're not necessarily the apex person in the company. Even like, there's a big difference between seniority and leadership. Right. You can be seen more senior than somebody doesn't make you a good leader. Right. And good leaders lead from the front and they empathize with their with their subordinates and whatnot. And there isn't as like this heavy kind of hierarchy structure. It's more of a collaborative environment. So I would at the outset consider that for your C-suite, whoever the CEO is or whoever the CTO is or whoever the COO is, you are all visionary leaders for different components of the company. The CEO happens to be like the overall visionary kind of leader, but the CTO is, they're the visionary leader for the engineering team. This, the, to make sure that the, the, the the tech is excellent. The COO is keeping the wheels on the wagon and making sure the operations go well. And they're leading that team and kind of advocating for that team. All of them together, it's often a co-founding team. So they should all be able to speak to the major goals of the company. The CEO doesn't necessarily have to have the full breakdown of the tech stack memorized in the same way that a CTO is. And they don't necessarily have to have like a full breakdown of every operational component of the business like a COO would. But you all need to have that basic strategic overview, right? The 13, 14 slides that we ran through today, everybody needs to be familiar with that and be able to pitch because it's just a strategic asset to be able to send multiple people out into an ecosystem and pitch every day. If you do that, by the way, always introduce yourself as a co-founder because you don't want to— because the thing is, well, like, you don't want to send any junior staff members or salespeople. Even let's say, like, maybe you have somebody on the team that's really good at sales. Sales and they're just excellent at pitching, you don't want to send them in because when things get tough, they're going to lose their job before the CEO does. So if an investor is developing a relationship with someone and trying to see who's going to lead this unit or who's going to lead this group, then, well, who's going to stick around for the longest? And it's going to be the C-suite and the co-founders, right? So CEO, CTO, COO should all be competent in the overall overview of presenting Anybody below that can kind of skip it, but be at least familiar with what the general narrative of the company is. Like, why are you doing what you're doing? Where are we kind of generally speaking? Because they're also not really supposed to be exposing a ton of information. And they can, like, junior staff members can accidentally— there's a lot of information. Sorry, just a second. Can accidentally expose information, but I would just keep it to the C-suite. And if you have like COO, CEO, CEO, CTO pitching in the same room, it's perfectly fine to bring them in to answer a question on a technical thing if that's, if that's concerned, because I just remember that. So that's a frequent one that comes up as well.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you, Ben, for coming on and putting up this awesome presentation. This was really informational. Can we get a hand for Ben in the chat? A little reactions down here. Um, so we are gonna go over to networking right now, so feel free to stick around. Um, but yeah, thank you everyone for joining, and feel free to stick around for networking. Bye-bye.

Excellent. Thanks a lot, everyone.