SlideMagic Blog

A post by VC Brad Feld about pitch fatigue: when people have told a story too many times, they get bored and lose the passion to present it with all they have got. Your audience hears the story for the first time though, and they probably evaluate you 50% based on content, and 50% on the emotional delivery of the story (your body language). A bored presenter will not convince. What can you do?

• Do not run off a standard script like a tape recorder, but as you get more experienced with your story, deviate from predictable patterns
• Make the story a dialogue rather than a monologue. Try to make it very specific to the audience. Use case examples, analogies that are tailor-made to that client, or that potential investor.
• Now that you know the story in and out, you can rely less on slides and visuals. Make more eye contact, and tell your story verbally
• Fire yourself up before the pitch, and think about the outcome you want to achieve, getting that investment or signing up that customer. The objective your meeting is not to deliver the pitch, it is to reach your objective. That should bring that spark of adrenaline back into your system
• Make sure you are not physically tired (eat a snack 30 minutes before, have a coffee)
• Do a make over of your deck, after 999 run throughs you have probably some pretty good ideas how to delivery the story better, but you somehow never have time to sit down and implement them. Create the time, and make more minimalist, bolder slides and create a piece of true art that makes you excited to deliver your pitch.

Sometimes, making the effort to communicate well is almost as good as doing the real thing. Effort gives you instant audience credit.

My wife is a venture capitalist and received her first Prezi investor pitch last week. “This movements make you a bit dizzy, but I must say that the team got points for trying something different”.

For this very short introduction presentation that was competing with an overloaded inbox full of other pitch decks, she was OK with some motion sickness. For a second, longer interaction this is probably not the case.

Yesterday evening I attended a dinner in honor of a famous scientist who received a honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv university. The setting was a beautiful coast-side villa of a successful businessmen, the audience: scientists and healthcare technology investors (corporate and venture capital). On the menu: some good food and 6 presentations. Here are some suggestions for scientists who get put “on the menu” for these types of events.

Investors. You have 6 minutes, you have 2 audiences: scientists and investors. This is probably not the right time to get insightful feedback from your science colleagues, however, you might hook the attention from a potential investor in your research you would not have met otherwise. So take the investor as your target audience and shape your content for her. Out with the detailed methodology, the detailed statistics, the history of your research, but in with the need (why is this such a horrible disease and how many people suffer from it), why is what you did so clever (other technologies fail, yours takes a fundamentally different approach), and why the early trial data shows that it works. And oh, if you are raising money for your project, say so.

Only charts when you need them. Six minutes: no bullet points, just pictures you need (statistical data, pictures of team members). Put black slides if you do not need the projector. A huge white screen in a dark garden completely overpowers the presenter.

Simplified statistics. Putting up the full scientifically responsible data chart over dinner is not effective. Laymen do not know how to read it. First explain what benchmark matters (survival rate for example). Then, make an incredibly simple char that compares the 2 benchmarks without the footnotes, n values, p values, standard deviation. All that can be discussed over coffee, not a glass of wine.

Fred Wilson wrote an interesting blog post yesterday about the sequence in which a startup should nail the following items:

1. First the product
2. Only then the strategy (who is your target market, and how are you reaching them)
3. Only then the business model (how you charge for things)

Most VCs will ask you about the business model and strategy in your early-stage investor pitch. The true answer: “I do not know yet”. Stopping the discussion there is not a good answer. Making up something and selling it is the truth and the only truth might cost you credibility points.

The middle ground is better. Admit that things are early, and discuss 1-2 strategy/business models scenarios that seem sensible given the stage of development you are at and what you know about the market at the moment. It shows that you are a sane person and a trusted pair of hands as you embark with your investor on an uncertain journey in which everything will deviate from plan for sure.

A bit of ambiguity in your pitch is OK.

Yes, most venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) investors need to rais money themselves, usually from institutional investors (large insurance companies and asset managers).

When pitching, these investors often make the same mistakes the companies pitching to them make.  The most common one: a story that is not very differentiated. Careful deal selection, deep involvement with your portfolio companies, really working with management. Institutional investors get pitched all the time by VC/PE funds that say exactly the same thing.

The best VC/PE investor pitches are those that tell a story about a really distinctive type of investor, where everything reinforces each other: the backgrounds of the investment team, the deals you picked, the exit track record. Some funds have great access to deal flow in the telecom industry, some funds are really good in bidding for privatizations, some are really good in turnarounds, some have a really deep understanding of bio molecular structures,  some have a unique skill in stitching together innovative financing structures. It is very rare that all of the above work for one fund.

This cartoon of Nikola Tesla (who do you say?) pitching VCs highlights many of the dynamics that are happening in VC pitch meetings (unfortunately).

Two comments to this though:

1. While entrepreneurs have no shortage of ideas to make a parody about VCs, I think VCs might have equally rich material to make fun of entrepreneurs pitching.
2. But more importantly, anticipate this sort of VC behaviour. In this video the entrepreneur did not manage to get across what it is that he is actually doing early enough, and as a result the investor focused more on their email. VCs probably make up their mind whether something is worth listening to in the first few minutes of your pitch, partly maybe because they are arrogant, but also partly because it is the only way to deal with thousands of ideas being thrown your way. Get that elevator pitch ready, and the objective of the elevator pitch is not to land the investment, but to get the attention for the next 20 minutes.

As I am making slow but steady progress with my presentation app I have had a chance to sit on the other side of the table: being the one who pitches an idea, rather than my usual role as a presentation designer who gets pitched with business plans. Observations:

• Yes, not everybody loves your idea like you do (but all designers do)
• Most people form an opinion about your business without actually understanding/getting to what the truly great thing about it is
• Spending dollars on designers becomes a whole different thing when it is your own money
• When you live and breathe your own story, you actually do a lousy job pitching it to an outsider who has never heard of it. Having a pitch deck at hand (guess what, I do not have one) might actually be handy to slow myself down and take someone to the story that I assume to be common knowledge.
• People point out - rightfully - that it is not only about product, I need a market strategy

When listening to these people I hear myself speak when discussing client presentations. Funny. In any case, the process is making me a better presentation designer.

Most business presentations address the financials of an idea at some stage. Resist the temptation of using a cartoonesk clip art image to introduce the topic. Financials are serious stuff and you are not asking for your weekly candy allowance from investors or corporate decision makers.

Last night I attended a startup pitch event in New York where contestants had 60 seconds to pitch their idea, followed by 2 minutes of questioning by a panel of judges. Some observations on elevator pitches:

• No slides (everyone got that right)
• Get right to it, no uh oh, my background is, a small joke
• Most important thing in 60 seconds: get people to understand what you actually do. When rehearsing the 60 second pitch (easy to do) test not only whether people like your idea, but more importantly, do they understand what your idea is. I struggled to understand about one third of the ideas, and I am used to deciphering startup pitches, so it must have been worse for other members of the audience. Luckily the panel of experts was helpful and dragging it out of people in the Q and A. Example: an in-restaurant ordering system actually turned out to be a $3,000 table where guest could order food using an integrated touch screen.
• Avoid going down a feature list, a user can do this, a user can do that, instead stick to the overall concept
• Do end your pitch with something more uplifting than “That’ it!”, even if you feel embarrassed that there are still 25 seconds left on your clock. This is actually a good thing.
• Tell people why the thing you do is so tricky. Example: nobody really got excited about a group video chat app until we learned that they solved a very complex technical issue in establishing a 1-to-many live video connection in 2 seconds
• Breathe, pause, speak calmly. It is better to skip a few points than speaking to rapidly, nervously.
• In this case, the audience had a say in selecting the winner. They use different criteria than the professional VCs in the panel. For an audience entertainment value, or actually even the ability to remember what you were about after 20 pitches might be more important than the credentials of the founding team of your company. Pick the right battle, at the right time.

I enjoyed talking to Israeli and Palestinian MEET graduates last Thursday about pitching at demo days. Here are some of the things we talked about:

• Objective: get to the next meeting rather than landing the full investment which you will never be able to pull off in five minutes
• 101: bullet points are boring (everyone knows this by now) and buzzwords do not work
• Entertainment: marathon investor pitches wears out the audience. When you are the first up, you need to make sure people still remember you at the end of the day. When you are number twenty seven, you need to make sure everyone is still awake. Make sure your pitch is high on entertainment value, while staying professional at the same time
• Five minutes: you cannot solve the time limitation by cramming in more content (denser slides, speaking faster), so chop those slides that are not important for the purpose of your pitch (getting to the next meeting). Detailed financial forecasts, team bios, technology explanations, can all wait for later
• Carefully plan your app demo. Show what you want to show, do not spend time on boring log in screens. Tell what the audience is seeing, it might be obvious to you that things are beautiful and fast, the audience does not see it. If you can, avoid a live demo in a 5 minute pitch and instead go for fail-proof screen shots
• One story throughout. If possible tie everything (consumer problem, your solution, demo) to one consistent case study throughout the entire five minutes.
• Rehearse until you drop. Five minutes of content can be rehearsed until you know the content in and out. Spontaneous guitar solos sound spontaneous because the guitarist knows her scales  and melody lines so she can improvise them