How to Develop the Perfect Pitch with David S. Rose, Founder and Chairman of Gust

Thank you everybody. Welcome. Uh, sorry for the one-minute delay here. Uh, but we're ready to kick this off. Uh, I am pleased to be joined again by guest founder and chairman of our board, David S. Rose. Today on an event all about pitching. This is, uh, part of our Grow curriculum, which is going on right now. We're kind of right in the middle of it. Um, and we thought this was a great opportunity. Uh, you might have seen David before, you know, pitching on everything from the motivations of angel investing, how the nuts and bolts of angel investing works, what's the nuts and bolts of starting a company, and which companies you're choosing. But David's original, when I joined Gus 10 years ago, David's original like media sensation was his pitch coaching, um, and working with founders, probably hundreds, if not thousands of founders, I imagine by now, over almost two decades, or not more, of a career in and around startups, entrepreneurship, and angel investing.

So we thought, Grow is that part where everything you're doing as a founder CEO is pitching your company. Whether you're pitching your company to raise funds, whether you're pitching your company to new hires, you're expanding your team, whether you're pitching your company to strategic partners, or who knows, insurance providers, so that you get good cyber coverage and, you know, they can cover you in the ways. So here he is, the pitch coach himself. He's going to walk us through a rapid presentation, uh, all around the principles of pitching your company. As always, we're going to record this. We will send it out. We're a little delayed. Um, I heard literally the people processing our videos, laptops were catching on fire because we've had so many videos going into their thing. But we will get this out, uh, within a week or so to anybody who RSVP'd. As always, the Q&A will be open, and we'll have the chat. Feel free to throw your startup name and your location in the chat, and use the Q&A if you have a question. That's the easiest way for us to actually get to to the questions. I don't guarantee we'll have time for all of them, and we'll save them to the end so David can get through his presentation. But without further ado, David, take it away.

Thank you, Ryan. Hello, everybody. Uh, it's a pleasure to be here. Um, and today we're discussing the pitch, the perfect pitch to pitch your venture to potential investors, whether they're angels or VCs. And so, before we start into the nuts and bolts of actually pitching, there is a basic fundamental thing that everybody needs to keep in mind, and that is, what is the purpose of a pitch? There isn't some magic secret thing. There aren't some words you can use. Every day I get asked by founders, well, what is the one thing that investors are looking for? Or how can I generally guarantee to get that investment? And the answer is, there isn't one thing. And that's because you have to understand the core of a pitch. Investors, every investor has a thesis for what they invest in. They don't randomly throw money out. They are thinking about investing their money into something. So some venture firms have very, very detailed theses. They only invest in later-stage companies doing SAS products in Arkansas designed for the insurance market, or whatever. Some angel investors have very broad theses. I'm not sure how I could put it in words, but I'll know it when I see it. But that's still a thesis of what they're trying to do.

And so, ultimately, the question is, they know what they're looking for, and you have a business. And so the whole goal of a pitch, not to convince, but is to clearly state, this is what my business is. This is what the venture is. Because therefore, if you're clear about that, and they're clear about their thesis, then it's binary. Your venture fits their thesis or it doesn't. And the bottom line is, if your venture is what they are looking for, then you both need each other. They need you for their investments, and you need their money. And that's a very good thing. And then it's just a question of getting to the close. On the other hand, if your thesis, their thesis does not match with what you have, nothing you can do. You can't poke and prod and twist. You can't sprinkle magic words on it to make them invest if they don't invest in AI and you're an AI company, nothing you can say or do will have them invest. And so therefore, the goal of your pitch is to be really clear about what your business is. And it helps if you understand who the investor is and what they're looking for.

That being said, investors, regardless of whether they are a VC, a big VC, or a small angel, regardless of whether they have a very narrow definition of their thesis or a very wide definition, they start with three things. Three foundational theses that every investor is looking for. And the first of those is people. Great people. Because it turns out that investors will tell you, they would invariably prefer to invest in a top-grade person at a second-grade business plan than a top-grade business plan run by a second-grade person. So it is the people. And and when you're looking at people, there is one particular person that they are looking for, and you have to be very clear in understanding what that is. Now, in this era of rapidly advancing technology, and every business being amplified by technology, technology is really critical. So when investors are looking at your company, looking at your team, looking at you, they're looking at the technical person. But the technical person is not the one key person they're looking for. Because technology, when it interfaces with the customer, has to have some instantiation. And there is an interfacer, design. And that is something that in the last couple of decades has become really critical. So the interface, and how you see that, is vital. But that's not the person they're looking for either. It's not the UX designer. Because it doesn't matter if you have a great UX if nobody is actually using it. How do you get customers? That's sales, right? Next, getting to the market, getting your product to the market is critical. And so they want to see that you can get to that market with the appropriate sales and marketing people. The salesperson isn't the core either. Because sales and product and UX and tech only exist in the context of a business. And a business has an office, or distributed, or one place that has supply chain, it has all of the HR, it has everything that goes involved in running a business. So they will look and see, are you, is this a one-person, you know, phenom, or is this a business? But the business person isn't the key person either.

So now I'm sure you're sitting here thinking, okay, well, uh, look, I'm around my team, and I got the techie, and not the UX designer, not a salesperson, not a business person. Who is this person? Their magic person they're looking for? And the answer is, they are looking for the entrepreneur. What does that mean? The entrepreneur is the person who is going to create this business out of whole cloth, pull everything else together, and make it work. And therefore, you can combine an entrepreneur with any of these specialties. You can mine an entrepreneur with a techie, you get Bill Gates. You combine an entrepreneur with a user experience person, you get Steve Jobs. Combine an entrepreneur with a salesperson, Richard Branson. Combine an entrepreneur with a business person, Mike Bloomberg. Right? These are all four completely different people with different skill sets, but each of them is a consummate entrepreneur. And that's what they're looking for.

So therefore, when you get up to give the pitch, then the question is, who is the entrepreneur in which they're investing? And there is, and can only be, one answer to that. And that is, the entrepreneur is you. And that's why you're there. So the question you have to ask yourself when you get up in front of the pitch that you're giving to these investors is, why are you standing there? Hmm. And the answer is, you're standing there because the investor is looking at the most important person, which is the entrepreneur. And they have an internal rubric, an internal list of things that experience has shown them are really important in an entrepreneur. And they are judging everything you're saying and doing and how you relate to them in the context of, do you fit these characteristics? Do you display these characteristics that they have found to be important for a founder? And what do you think the number one most important characteristic is of anything you've got as an entrepreneur? You want to take a guess? And those of you who have seen my video or have heard things like this before can't answer. But for those who are wondering, no, it's not passion. No, it's not experience. No, it's not skill. No, it's not money. It is integrity. Integrity is really the number one key thing. And you can say, well, wait a minute, that's, I mean, is that more important than everything else? Well, how about this, fake it till you make it? Stop. Whatever is no, integrity really is that important. And it's not because investors are all good, you know, YouTube shows or saints. They're not necessarily. But integrity means that they know that you are there for the good of the business. And you are making decisions every single day, every single hour, every single minute. And if you make a decision on the basis of what's good for the business, that's good for them because they're an investor in the business. But if you're instead being totally self-interested and making a decision about what's good for you personally as opposed to the business, they won't be able to trust any decision you make, and they will have to second-guess it. And they don't want to spend all their time second-guessing you. So integrity and their read on your integrity is absolutely critical.

After that come a whole bunch of other kinds of important characteristics. Passion, really important. Being an entrepreneur, as everybody who's on this call knows, is a very, very stressful, crazy experience. Bad stuff happens all the time to every founder. And so you need something to drive you through from beginning to end, and that's passion. I have never yet seen a successful entrepreneur who didn't have passion about the business. Not necessarily passionate about the specific subject matter or the type of product, but passionate about the business they were developing. And so then to take this integrity and this passion and apply it to something, here comes the experience question. And there are actually three kinds of experience that investors look for. One of them is startup experience. Have you ever done a startup before? Have you been through all of the challenges, the stress and emotions, the the various issues you had to deal with? And so that's why serial entrepreneurs are a great thing. Investors love investing in successful serial entrepreneurs because it turns out that if you had a prior success as an entrepreneur, that makes you statistically more likely to be successful going forward in your next venture. But if you had experience and you failed in your first investment opportunity, that doesn't mean you're more likely to fail in your second one. It's neutral. So therefore, experience can only be a good thing. It's neutral to good. And they want to see experience in starting a company. As my father used to say, I'd like to learn, uh, you to learn how to shave on somebody else's whiskers before you take a blade to my face. And so the other kind of it, so if that's the first kind, startup experience, then you have what's called domain expertise, or knowledge of the industry that you're in. We often see people pitching us new ideas for businesses because it just seems obvious to them that, well, all these people who are in this business can't see, and I can think out of the box because I'm an out-of-the-box thinker. Sorry. It turns out that if everybody who was in the industry can't see something and you outside the industry have this brilliant vision, you might want to think two, three, or four times. Because virtually all this innovation has tended to come from people who know the industry. Allergy season. Um, the third kind of of experience that investors look for is, in addition to startup experience generally and domain expertise, is the skill, the skills that are needed to make a company startup. That's where the technical skill of product development, skills, user design and experience, sales, marketing, um, you know, organizational stuff, operational, legal, IP, all of those are the kinds of skills that go into having a successful company. And every company ultimately needs all these skills. Now, if you're running McDonald's, you may have a second assistant vice president for the Northeast region in charge of purchasing fresh chicken. But if, on the other hand, you're running a little kebab cart, you may be not only the person doing counter service at the kebab cart and the cook, you may also be the second vice president in charge of buying chicken pieces, right? So whether it's one person or a million people, all these skills you have to have for a company. And when you start a company as a sole founder, it's you. And so therefore, the next thing that investors want to look for in you as a skill is the question of leadership. Do you have what it takes to recruit all the other skills that are required to make this company work? And so leadership is one of those things. It's easier to see and feel than to describe in words. But one question investors often ask is, would I be willing to work for this person if I were in that kind of mode? I mean, and if you see somebody who's narrow and prick, and you wouldn't do it, that tells you something about their kind of leadership skills, right?

And one of the things when you're hiring people to work in your startup that's really important is their perception of your level of commitment. And that's also true for investors. One of the real dramatic investing experiences I had was where we invested in a really cool company with two co-founders. Each put in $300,000 into this great company. And one of them, the the co-founder and engineering co-founder, had led a whole team at Apple and brought a whole team of engineers with him. Literally 90 days after we invested in this startup company, has stock vested in Apple or whatever, and he said, oh, you know, I've got a new kid. And, um, you can keep my $300,000 bucks in the company, but I'm going to leave and move on. And we said, uh, we're just investment in your company. Well, he left. The whole engineering team followed him out the door. And if the company died a slow and an awful death. Um, and that reminded me, as if I needed the reminder, that you should always be careful of the commitment. And investors want to know that you are committed to this company from the beginning to the end. And one of the things that drives your level of commitment, internal level of commitment, is whether you believe that this company has a future. And that future is really big. And that's called vision. Can you envision where this company is going? Can you envision how this company is going to have a major impact? Apple Computers' first motto, for those of you who recall that, was two lines. Apple Computer, changing the world. That's Steve Jobs' vision of changing the world. But the second line of that motto was, the next thing we're looking for under realism. Because investors want to know that you're not just a starry-eyed idealist. They want to know that you can realistically build a company. And Apple Computers' second line was, Apple Computer, changing the world, one person at a time. And so investors want to know if you have this great vision, who's your first customer? And your second? And your third? And how do you get to your fourth customer? They want to know in detail that you understand how you get from a standing start, as zero, to building this world-changing vision out there. And then the final of the the top 10 things investors look for, um, you can call it flexibility, you can call it coachability, you can call it the ability to pivot. Nothing ever works exactly the way it was planned. And nobody, I've never seen one business plan that carried out exactly the way it was written down. And so when things change, they want to know that you can change with it. They want to know that you will listen to your investor, not take what we say as gospel. I'm not running the company, I'm investing in your company because you're running the company. That being said, I've been doing this for half a century, and I have had a lot of experience and learned from a lot of failures and both successes and non-successes. And so if I give you some advice, I want you to listen to it. I don't want you to necessarily go out and do it. I'm not running the company. You have to make the calls to whether you're going to follow my advice. But I want you to listen. And that's what coachability is all about.

Okay, that's the first thing investors look for, which is people. The second thing every investor in these early-stage companies look for is scalability. And what does scalability mean? Scalability means that when I'm investing in a company at the early, early days, I'm looking to invest in a company that can start small, that where you can show that you have done something that is working, some product-market fit, some service or product that has been, that you have been able to do with a little bit of your own money and your seed money, you've shown that it could work. And therefore, I know that if you then take what you're doing and add my money to it, you can actually grow and expand and scale that business from something really small to really, really big. Because I need to make a really, really big return on my money. But there are two pieces to scalability. The first is the ability to start small and add more money on it to grow very, very big. The second piece to scalability is that as you get bigger, it has to get better. And that means that as you get bigger, whether it's economies of scale or network effect or something else, makes the business inherently better the bigger it gets. So, for example, if I ask you right now to take one of my books that I've written and sell it online, you could do it. You would figure out how to code a website and put it up there, and then you'd buy marketing dollars for people to come to it, and then you'd ship it via FedEx or whatever. But the cost of you spinning up a website to sell my one book to one person is going to be really expensive, more than the value of the book. On the other hand, if I ask, if I ask Jeff Bezos to sell a book, well, the marginal cost for Amazon to sell my book is literally zero. We're so close to zero as makes no nevermind. So therefore, you want something that gets better as it gets bigger. And that's what scalability means.

And the third thing that all investors want to see, no matter how they describe it, no matter what words they use for it, is this fascinating word that I'm sure you've all heard, which is traction. Now, think to yourself, I can't hear you, so you have to think it internally. What does traction mean? Um, and I'm sure you have all kinds of ideas about developing the product and, and, you know, getting patents and getting people to, you know, sign up for, you know, your free test or whatever it is. But for those of you who remember the, one of the great films of all time, The Princess Bride, I don't think I miss what you're thinking is, um, that's not what traction means. There's an enormous gulf between what founders think traction means and investors think traction means. And founders think traction means all these cool things: a great idea, I've hired employees, I've got wonderful advisors, I've signed up, I've got live patents, I've got issued patents, I've built the product, I built my MVP, I've got a business plan that shows exactly how I'm going to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, I've been marketing all over the world, I've got press coverage and people writing about the stuff, I've taken Google AdWords and got people to click on my thing all the time, I've raised $10 million from all kinds of cool things, I've been accepted at Y Combinator. None of that is traction.

So then you say, well, David, what is traction? Of all these things that I've been doing, spending all of my time on, is traction? Traction in the eyes of an investor is very special. Traction is something outside of your control. And that's critical. That you can't force traction. Traction is something outside of your control that demonstrates that you've created real value for somebody, that they are willing to pay for, and that that value is getting bigger and better every day. So let that sink in. And none of that other stuff that's within in your control that you can do, it counts as traction. It's the results of all that that count as traction. And, and so what is the best kind of traction to get that proves it's outside of your control, that you've created value for somebody, as getting bigger and better? And the answer is, of course, ta-da, paying customers. Right? If you have got a paying customer, that implies they're willing to part with their money to pay you for something that, if they believe is worth more than what they paid for, because they're paying for it, right? And so that's why sales are so important as traction. Now, there are other ways that you can show traction other than sales, but sales is the big one, and it's outside of your control. So you show me you're signing up future customers or long-term things or whatever it is where there is a, with somebody who has value and has economics, is willing to to work with you. And that's what traction is all about.

Okay, so those are the main things that investors look for. The three foundational, um, aspects of of the pitch that you're, they're looking at. And so now, how do you give them the pitch? What is the pitch? And what are the components of the pitch that you need to have? And so there are a lot of things that great founders have when they go out and start their pitching for funding over there. So let me start you with what I call the startup founder's pitch utility belt. This is the stuff that you, like, that means utility belt, and you keep on you at all times. And the stuff that you have to have, otherwise known as the absolute essentials. Right? Do not leave home without these. So what are the essential things you need to have before you pitch your very first angel or VC? Well, first thing is a one-sentence or sentence fragment tagline for the company. Right? We are eBay for dogs, or we are Breakfast of Champions, or whatever. Say something, a really short, snappy that actually says what the heck you do. Next, whatever your company is, product, service, whatever, you want to have a logo. Why? Because a logo provides a visual hook for investors to remember you. They associate your name with a logo. Whenever they see that logo, it's shorthand for everything they know about your, your company. It ties it together. It's a unifying force. So you want to have a company logo. And you can get these done for free these days. Um, a business card. Oh, that's David, that's so old school. Who has paper business cards anymore? But you know what? I guarantee you, first of all, investors tend to be older than you are, because investors tend to be people who have been there, done that before. Not all of them are as adept with digital business cards and stuff as you may be. And when you're at a cocktail party or at dinner, and somebody says, oh, how do I get in touch with you? You don't want to fumble with your iPhone or or dictate your URL or something. Give them a business card. So have a physical business card. Um, next, you want to have a very carefully crafted, short, one-paragraph email description of what you do. This is useful for when you cold call, cold email somebody, an investor, or if somebody introduces you. And that's the best kind of thing, which we can get to in the future, when somebody introduces you to a potential investor, you want them to use this one paragraph you've crafted, which encapsulates your entire product, company, and everything else in one carefully done set, you know, paragraph. And so you need that. Next, when people talk to you, they say you're the founder, they're going to check you out. And in business, how do you check somebody out? You don't go to Tinder, you go to their LinkedIn profile, right? And so therefore, make sure you have a LinkedIn profile. I can't imagine anybody on this call doesn't have one. Um, but you might have one. Make sure it's up to date. If you can spring the extra few bucks for the professional level at LinkedIn, that means you get to craft a URL with just your name, instead of miscellaneous members out there, and you have more control and more analytics. So have them, have your own personal LinkedIn website, which people, which is up to date, and people can check you out. And by the way, see how, how big, you know, you see how they can, you know, get a second read on you from people who know both of you and so on and so forth.

Next, you want to have, before you start, um, pitching your, your big pitch, you want to have a 30-second elevator pitch. And your elevator pitch is a verbal pitch. It's short. It's really, really short. So what goes into your elevator pitch? Well, in this really short 30 seconds, what's exciting about your company? You know, what is it you're doing? If you, you know, if somebody doesn't understand what you're doing, no matter how exciting it is, they won't invest. How do you make money? Investors are looking for a return on their money. They want to know how you make money. And then why you? Who are you? What's the background that led you to make money to make money from this vehicle over here, right? Whatever you do. This is not a long, complicated thing. You want to keep it really, really simple. You're going to aim for 30 seconds, if not less. You can do it in 15 seconds or 10 seconds, that's great. But you have to have this down absolutely cold. So, so if somebody wakes up in the middle of the night and poaching the belly, you should pop up and spit out your, you know, 30-second elevator pitch. This is what you do. And for those who are having trouble figuring out how to do this, the founder is the two created a very helpful, uh, startup Mad Libs, right? Um, so my company, insert your name of company, is developing a defined offering. What is it you're doing? To help, who? Not everybody in the world, to help a defined audience. And what are you helping them do? Solve this problem. What is the problem that they are solving? With what's special about you? Why are you not your competitors over there, right? So that's a very handy way, uh, to do it.

Okay, so we've got the, all those things that you have. And now the reason you're here to this call is the next big thing is the pitch. And when people refer to a pitch, a venture pitch, they are typically talking about an 18-minute live presentation, and done by you. In it's often PowerPoint, sometimes in Keynote if you're a Mac person, um, or Prezi if you want to do those leading edge of this kind of stuff. When you do your presentation, you also want to have it in a couple of different formats, right? There's the format that you will show when you get up live in front of somebody, and that can be whatever is on your computer. It can be PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, or something else. You always want to have a PDF version of that, which you can hand out and send to somebody. And if you're going to somebody's office, you want to have a PowerPoint version, a backup version. And that's okay, because all the others are export to PowerPoint, um, if you need to load it on somebody else's computer. Okay, so that's what you have to have. And so now we're going to start the pitch. So everything I've just given you, the last, you know, 20 minutes, is all the lead-in to how you pitch and what the pitch is. And if there's one single takeaway you get out of today's presentation about the pitch, is what a pitch is. The essence of a pitch is storytelling. It's not a factual recipe. Keep it. It's not just pure numbers. It's not biography. It's story. You are telling a story. Um, and you were telling a story to your audience. I love this picture. This picture, by the way, which is a wonderful work of art, the great American storytellers out here. See if you can, as I'm talking, figure out who they are. But in any event, um, as you sit around the campfire, telling the story where people, your listeners are spellbound, um, to the story you're telling, and they want to hear the end, they want to participate in this kind of story. So how do you do that? Well, every good story, whatever form it is, whether it's a campfire story, or a TV sitcom, or a multi-year Game of Thrones, or a movie, or a novel, or a short story, every story has what is known as a story arc. And if you haven't studied English literature, or literature of any language, for that matter, and you haven't studied how people write things, you may not be familiar with the term. But basically, stories of all kinds have arcs. They have emotional highs and lows, right? The hero's journey, you know, Achilles, Hercules, struggling through to get something, you know, boy loses girl, sort of Sleepless in Seattle, except for the very ending over there, right? Or, um, you know, people who, who overcome something and then, you know, are overthought on the end. And so you can say, so, so here are are a dozen different story arcs for for different ways, you know, up, down, in, out, backwards, forwards, around where you come from. There is a specific story arc for an investor pitch for a startup. And he, here is what that story arc looks like. It starts out, so this is the emo, the x-axis here is the time of your presentation, and remember, you're aiming at an 18-minute presentation, um, plus or minus. The y-axis here is the emotional level of your audience. And so what do you want to do? Well, you start out right at ground zero, you're neutral. Your audience doesn't know coming in whether they're going to be excited or depressed by what you're saying. You actually start out better than neutral, by the way. You start out a little above that, because if you are getting an audience with an investor, that means definitionally, an investor wants to hear your pitch. Investors have many, many other things to do. It's like listening to your pitch. So if they're taking the time to listen to you, that's a good thing. So they are already for some reason predisposed. They're in a demo day, you've been introduced by somebody they know, or, or whatever, right? So you start there. You get up and start your pitch. And what happens first? You have to come right out of the box like our rocket ship. You gotta jump out with something that really captures them. You have maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, no longer than that, to grab their attention. You want everybody when you get started to live for, to lean in, to look forward about what you're doing. And you tell them, you're here, and you've got this amazing thing. And you tell them about the market that you're in. And this is the market that's going to be this really interesting, big market. But then something happens. Oh, there's a problem with this market. There are a million people who are all trying to do what, but they can't, because something is stopping them. The problem that they all have is this. But then your story goes on. What happens? You come in, and who's the hero of the story? You come in, and there is a solution to this problem. And it gets bigger, and it gets better, and it gets better, and it gets bigger. And the more you go through your presentation over 18 minutes, you get better and better and better, like the little engine going up the hill. I think I can, I think I can. You get to the top. And then how do you end it? Do you tie it back at night, bro? No, it gets better, it gets better, it gets better, it gets better. And then, a womb orgasm to the moon. You want to have the end of your thing has to be so self-evident that you want people to say, well, here's a check, please. Take my money. I gotta do this. This is, you've nailed it, right? And so that's the story arc that you're looking for in your venture pitch.

So as you go through this pitch, what happens? And what do you do to make them go up an emotional level as opposed to going down? Well, the first thing that you do is counter-intuitive. You say, well, some really exciting, sexy story or whatever. No, it's actually the boring thing about having a logical progression in your story. When you're telling a story, unless you are a super Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, you don't jump around over time and over beginning to end and so on and so forth. Start at the beginning. The very best place to begin is, Julian tells us, um, and logically progress. When the Egyptians built the pyramids, they didn't start from the pointy thing at the top. They started from the base at the bottom. And similarly, you start from the base at the bottom, telling your story and teaching as you go along. You should think of your audience as really intelligent sixth graders. Right? They don't have your knowledge, but they're at least as smart as you are. So don't patronize them. But they don't know necessarily what you know. So you're going to teach them and logically progress as you go from beginning to end. And the more you can bring in things that they know or understand, right? That's why the formulation of, we are, you know, eBay for dogs, or whatever, is, um, they understand that. Breakfast for Champions. Well, I know what breakfast is. I know what champions are, right? So basically, anytime you can bring in a, a parallel business model, a brand you're working with, if they've heard of before, these are are good things.

Next, investors are all about making money. So you have to show them that whatever it is you're doing makes money and has a real upside. And the two words here are believable and upside. The upside is, it's got to make money. It's got to make a lot of money. The believable thing is, if you come in and say, hey, we're going to have $50 million in revenue our first year, no, you're not. I've invested in about 120 companies, and not one has come remotely close, even if they thought they were. So make sure that the projections you have are rational and believable, um, projections over there. And then the next thing that it will come back time and time again as you pitch is the idea of validate. You're selling this great story, you're selling this great vision of the future, but the question is, who else, right? So it's like the, um, the old joke of the the mother who goes and sees her, her rich son has just bought a fancy yacht. He's all decked out in his blazer and his hat, and and he says, you can call me Captain Bob. And she looks at him, and she looks at his cap, and she says, huh, by you, you're a captain. By me, you're a captain. But tell me, by captains, are you a captain, right? So by other people who can validate that what you're doing, right? And so, is, and, and validators, obviously, what's the best validation? Paying customers. Remember traction? But anything else that's short of that, this closest you can get to validation is really good.

Okay, that's all the good stuff. Now, what are the bad stuff? What kind of things take you down? Take your audience, the emotional level down? I mean, you have to not only stop going up, but you don't have to recover from going down. Well, think back what I said about the very first thing investors look for, that integrity thing. So the number one downward spiral over here is if you tell me something that I know is not true, right? Because if you tell me in your presentation something that is not true, there are only two possibilities. Either one, you know it's not true, in which case you're lying, in which case you're dead to me, and that's the end of the presentation right there. I won't tell you that, but I've just tuned out. Or number two, you, um, it's not true because you don't understand what you think it's true, but it's not. In which case, you're wrong. Um, and that means that you're incompetent, and I don't want to invest in somebody who's incompetent. So be damn sure that every fact you give me is absolutely true. Next, if you tell me something I don't understand, that's going to stop my comprehension of your story. It's like us walking the parallel sets of stairs. But if my stair is missing a tread, and you keep walking up, and I stop, that's a real problem. Um, so you make sure that I'm with you all the way as we go along. Have checked, look into their eyes. If you can, maybe stop occasionally to make sure they don't have a question about that, right? You'll often hear people say, oh, help your, you know, audience think, make them think. About no, don't. In the case of this 18-minute presentation, you have to control from beginning to end. You can't allow any outside things to possibly knock you off the track over here, right? So you don't want your, your investors to think, you want them to follow your little Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs, right, into writing you a check at the end of the day. When you do your, your presentation, be very careful about internal inconsistencies, right? So, for example, if you're in your opening thing, you say, we'll do $10 million revenue this year, and then when you get to your financials, you'll say, and you're doing, you know, 9.8. Well, 10 is not 9.8. It may be because you rounded up. It may be because it's gross versus net. It may be because of whatever it is. But they will read that as, oh, it's inconsistent. So therefore, if it's inconsistent, one of them is wrong. If one of them is wrong, it's not true. Therefore, you are the lying or wrong. So make sure all of your stuff is consistent. And then finally, there is no excuse for typos or errors in data or not, or spreadsheets that don't foot, or things like that. Because as far as the investor is concerned, you had all the time in the world to prepare this presentation. We've only had 15 minutes. But as far as they're concerned, you requested this meeting, and you had your entire life to prepare your presentation. And they want to know that. They expect that this is representing you at your very best.

Okay, that's the kind of stuff when you're making your, your overall presentation. And there are three things that you, now having understood the fundamentals and having understood the story arc, and, and when you're giving your pitch, we now go into how do you actually create your pitch and deliver it. And there are three particular things here. And the first of these is content. What information do investors want to see in your pitch? What do they want to hear and know about, right? All right, what's the very first slide in your deck? Think about that. And the answer is, it's your title slide, right? So that's the first thing that's up on screen when you, when you come in. So here's the title slide from a typical, um, investor pitch that when I was running New York Angels, uh, we got. You can see this is quite a while ago, but it's still a good example and still typical of many, if not most of the pitches that I see today. But now look at this from the from the perspective of an investor. What is it? Well, I don't know the smallest thing here is that that picture. I'm not quite sure what it is. I can't see it very clearly. Okay, well, maybe it's a caption. Is that a measure? I don't know. A very small caption. I can't really see that either. Not even sure what it is. Well, forget that. Turnkey developer programs for API. Then what the hell? Well, if you know what an API is, you know that there can be a vendor or somebody who sells something. So how can you sell an API? It's like selling half a handshake. Um, and so, um, that's actually meaningless. So it's confusing and it's jargon. Um, okay, the next thing, converter for the series A2 update. What the hell? That's the context about what you're doing. But I don't know. I don't know if it's just a, what was series A1? I don't have any background for that. I get that without context. The date. Well, you know what? I have a fancy watch. I've got an Apple Watch. It tells me what today's date is. I know what today is. Presented to God. Standing in front of me. I know who's presenting to me. New York Angels. I know who I am. New York, New York. I know where I am. So basically, something I can't read, something that doesn't make any sense, something that is out of context, and something that I already know. So the bottom line is, this title slide was totally and completely useless.

So back then, New York Angels, the early days, we used to do mandatory presentation training for all of our people who were pitching us. So we went off on into the woodshed and had a little one, full frank and open exchange of views, as it were, with the founder over here. Um, and I said, I told them all that stuff is useless to me. And the one thing I want to know is missing. And what is that? Well, think about it. What's the most important part of the pitch? It's you. Right? So I said, who are you? Nowhere in this life to tell me who's pitching me. Oh. So therefore, after he redid the pitch, this was the solution. Well, okay, now we see it's our logo. I can actually see it over here. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I guess it's a potato masher. But okay, fine. Oh, the biggest, Mashery. That's the name of the company. Not the smallest name, it's the big, the company's picture. Me as Mashery. And who is pitching me? Or Michael's. Oh, this is the guy in front of me. And validator. I know he's the guy I want to bet on because he's the CEO, right? So therefore, that's what I have. You'll notice that there's not all that extraneous stuff in there. And what's most important about this is when that slide is up there, how long are you, as an investor, going to be looking at that slide? Right? How long will it take you to get 100% of the information that exists on that slide? I mean, think about it now, right? Mashery, even if English isn't your first language. Oh, Ryan Michaels, CEO. Is that five seconds? Four seconds? And then what? And then you can sit like a bump on a log and stare at that. Or where do your eyes turn? They turn to me. You're back looking at me, and I'm the most important thing about this presentation, right? So that's your title slide. You want the company name and logo, maybe a one-line tagline about what the company does, um, and then who you are and why you're the person I'm betting on, right?

Okay, so starting with that, that's your, that's your first slide. And so for the regular full 18-minute speaker presentation pitch, um, after that slide, and that's when up there while you give me your punchy, powerful 30 to 60-second opening that's going to come out of the box like a rocket, um, and that's what I want to, you know, that's in the slide. I'm looking at you. You're giving me this great thing. And then the next slide after that is what I call the context setter. Some people will tell you, you put an agenda out there. You know, you want to put an agenda out there. I know what the agenda is. You're giving me a freaking venture pitch. I know you're going to tell me about your backup financials and backgrounds and so forth. I don't need that. But I do need a context setter. Because if you just jump

right into a market. You know, the market for Easter eggs? Well, I don't know. Are you the Easter Bunny? Are you a baby? Are you, you know, a basket maker? Are you, uh, you know, I have no idea what the context is. So I need a context, which is like the outside picture on a jigsaw puzzle box, right? Get all these pieces, but the outside picture shows where you're going, so you know what to assemble. And so the context setter here tells me in one sentence, in one line, what the company is actually doing. So now I can listen to everything else you say, and I have the appropriate context for it.

Then, next up is typically the management team. The management team slide can go in one of two different places. It can go up here at the beginning, or it can go at the end. And where, where you put it depends on the relevance of this particular management team to this particular venture. So, for example, if you're an oncology venture, and you are, you've got a Nobel Prize in, in, you know, curing cancer, then you should be right up front over here, because that will then cast a halo over everything else that you tell me in this presentation, right? So if you have domain expertise or some experience that is really applicable to this kind of venture, then I want to have it up here, because that will make me think positively of everything else you're doing.

On the other hand, if you're just a typical entrepreneur, and this is not an area in which you have a lot of expertise, but you have general competence, then you're at the back of the deck, where you show me having pitched me and sold me on this whole wonderful story, that now you have the confidence to be able to execute that over here. All right. Once I know who you are, now you're starting in with the pitch. And again, remember, it's a very logical progression. The logical progression here is, what is the market? Is this an area where people are spending money? And is there a pain? We say investors will always invest in aspirin as opposed to vitamins, right? Why? Because if you have a headache, and then you wake up at three o'clock in the morning, if it's bad enough, you will get out of bed, get dressed, and go to the pharmacy to get aspirin. At that point, you will not do that to get your Flintstone vitamins. Vitamins make things better, faster, cheaper, but they don't cure a real pain problem. And so we're looking for a pain problem that needs to be addressed.

And then the next thing you're going to tell me is all about the solution. What is your product? This is how you solve that particular pain problem. Again, logical progression. There's a big market, it's got a pain, I've got a solution. Over here, and the next up is the business model. Critically important, but how do I make money by solving that problem? So I want to know what the business model is. And whenever you do X, I sell on X. It costs me less to buy it than it costs me to sell it, so I make margin in there. Or whatever. Or my business model is, I do a whole lot of things to put out a free newspaper and give it away free to customers, but I get paid money by advertisers who want to reach the person I'm giving the free thing to. I want to know your business model.

And then the question is, well, if there's a business model, there's a customer. I want to know who your customers are, exactly. Isn't it? It's not just everybody. Nothing is aimed at everybody. I want to know which customers are your target. If you have customers now, I want to know those customers up front. I'd love to have testimonials or something about it. But if you don't have those, at least tell me who you're aiming at. And then I want to know how you get in front of them. What's your go-to-market strategy? This turns out to be a critical thing for the vast majority of early-stage businesses. How do you get your product in front of somebody who will actually pay for it, right? And so what are your market channels? Do you do it through distributors? Is it B to C? B to B? And you sell online? Is it viral? I mean, how do you get out to your, your customers?

And then when your customer, when you're in front of your customer, and they're now looking at your product, what else are they looking at? What's the competition, right? And so who was out there? And you better be pretty accurate about this, because I may not be an expert in your field, but I hear a lot of pitches. And so it would not be surprising if I had heard from your competitors. And I know they exist, but I've seen their competitor slide, so I know who other people in the industry are. And if you don't tell me about a serious competitor in here, because you think you're going to hide it from me, bad news. Don't do that, because that comes back to your lying or your incompetence, right? I should not know competitors that you don't know that you have.

And then, having identified the competitors, then what's your unique advantage? And you can do this in the form of a typical four-quadrant chart, where you're in the upper right-hand corner, um, or you can do this with a matrix of features or or advantages, um, but I want to know why are you better than those things. And it's only after you do all that, then you get to the financials. And the financials now build on everything you've done before, and show me how you're going to make money. And what's important here is that you're not showing me a giant 80-column spreadsheet. I want simple, you know, four lines. All right, you know, what is the primary driver of your revenue? What is it that you have to do to get people to buy things, right? Is it open storefronts, develop products, get sales channels, you know, whatever it is? I want to know exactly what the driver is of, of getting to, um, those sales.

Next, if you do those sales on the basis of the, however you got there, remember your business model, you have. I know for every time you sell an X, you make Y. So I want to know what the revenue is, which will be a direct result of having driven those sales. So, driver, the top-line revenue. What are your costs? What did it cost you to get those sales? That's the next line. And then what's your net, right? What's your, your EBITDA or your, your net on the, the entire operation? And I, and I want to see that for at least three years, probably four. I won't believe your fourth-year revenue, third-year revenue, may not even believe your first two years of revenue, but at least I'll understand how you're thinking and what your whole product vision is for the company over here, right?

So now that I have that, and, and so therefore, if I've read and followed everything you've done so far, and you just give me those few numbers out there and projections, I can quickly look at the first one, which is your revenue driver, and say, "Oh, uh, you have to get two products out this year." Okay, yeah, I see one, I see the other in development. That's great. Or you're going to have, you know, open storefronts where you've got one or two or three, and I, and I, and I, yeah, I think you can do that. So then I buy everything else that you're selling me over there. Okay.

Having got to that, you now can put this in the context for me. And where are you in this path to getting to a very successful company? How did you get started? If you didn't give me the origin story up front at the beginning of the presentation, this is where you can be the art of the story. And this is where now I see the traction, which at this point serves as a validator for all the stuff that you can get customers, that you can deliver the product, then you're adding value for them, and you're making money at the other end over there. And it's only after you get all that done, then you're now talking to me about how much money you're raising, um, and, and what the, uh, the, um, you're talking to me about, um, what you're trying to raise and at what kind of money, right? What kind of valuation? And that's a whole other story about how you get price valuations, which we can't go into now, but that's going to be one of the things I'm going to look at as well.

And then finally, with all that, that brings you to the end of your presentation, and then you have your closing, where you wrap this all up. And that's where you bring the, bring it, you know, home with this giant, "Yes, here, take my money! Here's a check, please. I can't, you know, I can't not invest in this company." So that's the content that you want to have in your presentation.

There is another kind of pitch, which is not the 18-minute full venture pitch. You know, when I say 18 minutes, it could be 15, it could be 20, but that's the range. 18 minutes is a TED Talk, which is the average attention span of an average adult, um, so that's a good place to aim for this, um, but, you know, the other kind of pitch you'll often be asked to do is a five-minute quick pitch, right? And this will be used for venture competitions, business plan of things, things at school, things at accelerators, demo days, things like that. And so here, this is effectively an abbreviated version of what you've done. You bring some things together. You start off with the initial slide again, logo, name, you know, tagline, maybe a photo here. You know, who the management team is, right? Now you're giving me, you know, the market, pain, and the, and the market, and the pain, and the product, and the solution, right? Now you're combining the business model with the financials, so I know how you're making money and what you're making. You're combining, you're, you're dropping out the competition per se, we don't have time for that, but you're giving me your unique advantage, and you're combining that with traction as to what you're doing. And then you have the ask, which is the raise and valuation over here, right? So you effectively take your 18-minute presentation, condense it to five, but keep the salient, important points over here.

Okay, that's the information that I want to see in this presentation. So now, how do I see it? What is the actual presentation? What do your slides look like when you're doing this over here, right? So now let's discuss the presentation. And when I say presentation, what do you think about it immediately? If you're like 95% of the founders that I talk to, you think about a PowerPoint presentation, right? And we all know exactly what a PowerPoint presentation looks like. It looks like this. It's got all those bullet points. Um, I wrote a whole essay about Death by PowerPoint and put it out there. This is exactly what happens. Your audience will just kill over and fall asleep because this is boring. And this may have been one way to potentially 40 years ago, not a pitch, but not today. We have all these wonderful computer-based presentation applications that you're going to use. And so we want to have graphics in there. So you want to include graphics. So, for example, this is the graphic, um, that the US armed services use to show when they were doing a presentation and how we're going to get out of Iraq. Not particularly helpful, right? They actually got a lot of grief because this was such a convoluted, ridiculous slide that didn't really show anything. So they got taken to task by everybody from The New York Times to whatever it is. So they learned their lesson. And when it came time to get out of Afghanistan, they had a much more colorful, better version of it. Um, no, in case you were wondering, this does not work either. Anybody who tried to do this as a pres, as a presentation for your venture pitch, um, would be effectively either left out of the room, or you would not get an investment. And I can say this because I know, because I used to do presentations like this when I started out as my first company over there. Gorgeous, amazing presentations, but completely incomprehensible to people.

Okay, so what do you do? Let's look at examples of successful, you know, entrepreneurial executive, successful tech executives, right? So one of the world's most successful tech executives, Bill Gates, over here. Here's a typical Bill Gates presentation. What do you think? Should this be our role model for it? Um, probably not. Anybody have a better version? Better suggestion for who we should role model on? So I tell you what, since this is a one-way webinar, I want everybody to think, all simultaneously, send me your brain waves. Let me see if I can figure out who you're saying. Yes, yes, I have it. It's coming in clearly. It's coming in dark. It actually, I think you're all visualizing this. Yes, this guy dressed in black on a dark stage. Steve Jobs. And why? Because if you think about what he was doing, he understood everything I've told you. He understood that you were there not for a product rollout that I could give you a data sheet on. He was there for you to see him and hear the story that he was telling you, right? And so even when you're, you're talking about using graphics, right? Um, I mean, so this is a graphic. I mean, it's just not the worst graphic. And what does this show? Can you, can you get any kind of clue with what this is showing? Just the worst graphic you've ever seen? No. The answer is no, because this is, um, I mean, Microsoft actually had a marketing department. Somebody sat there and did this slide for Gates to present. I mean, and, and so you wonder why they stopped Kevin Gates presenting notes over there. And this is this is why.

In contrast, from a similar time frame, you know, Steve Jobs introduces, you know, the iPhone. You know, we've got three new product rollouts today. A new iPod, an amazing telephone, and internet iPod, iPhone, internet, and puppy pulls out the the iPhone, right? Um, and so really, really simple. And so your graphics and your visuals are going to be really, really simple. Now, with all this ranking on Bill Gates, by the way, he started out as a techie nerd who couldn't present, but he has grown up. And in his old age, he has actually become a very effective presenter. So just to give a little props to Bill Gates, this is some of his, his recent presentations, which is just as good as some of the Steve Jobs stuff over there. But the bottom line is that when you are presenting, one of the important things to keep in mind is that you have a deal with your audience. You have a literally sworn in blood deal that they have signed on to in blood. And you have no clue even exists. So what the heck is this deal that the one-way deal that they've made with you, but you haven't made, but that you made with them, or they think you've made with them, but you have no clue. And that is very, very simple. If you so put a slide up on the screen and show something, well, guess what? They will read it. Because why else were you putting it up on the screen? There is no person, no purpose for you to put something on the screen if you don't expect everybody to read every single line, word, jot, and title of it, right?

So, for example, take this a typical graph. It's a pretty simple graph kind of thing you would see in, in, you know, many presentations over here. But I want you to look at this graph and think about, what do I need every single thing here? Do, do I want my audience to read 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100? Don't want to read every single word. Do I really need every one of those horizontal lines? Doing the answer is no, you don't. What are you trying to convey here? You're trying to convey that over the course of the program, things are dropping, maybe a little pick up at the end, right? So you take the exact same data here, and you redo this, and it looks like this. Oh, look, now you've got exactly what you need, right? If nothing extraneous here, you're the headline is what you're trying to convey. We're losing our students' attention. And why? At these, these very four things you want them to read every single word in the slide. The scaling is just there, zero to 100, so they know it's percentages over here. I put in a little bit of a very subliminal left or right wipe, because it's a time sequence, so it adds some action to it over here. And that's all you need.

To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince, "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." And I'll give you a great example of this, and the deal that you made with your audience, right? I remember telling you about Oren Michaels and, and, uh, and that presentation for Mastery there. Okay, freeze right now. Everybody freeze exactly where your eyeballs are. And I will tell you, sight unseen, thank you, Ryan. Good phrase. That you're all looking at the side of the screen where you're reading the public messaging, and you're reading what is written in there. And you know that this is a 60-year-old presentation that you have nothing to do with. There is zero you can get out of that presentation. And yet you were all looking at it. Why? Because I put it on the screen. And that's the deal. I put on the screen, even though I told you that it was useless, you were looking at that. So text like this, big text, is bad, bad, bad. What is good instead? Short, short bullet points. But you know what's even better than short bullet points? Skip the bullet points. Just give me the headline. Okay, think of the Steve Jobs, you know, 50 billion sold or whatever. And, you know, what's even better than the headline? No headline at all. Just give me an image. You say, "David, hi, what do I like me? I've never heard of a presentation with just images and no text." Well, yeah, that's what a PowerPoint should be. There's a reason that TED Talks have become so well known, because they spend a lot of time working with their speakers to get this done. And I'll give you some examples over here, right? Take a look at this image and tell me what you see, right? What did you get out of that image? Um, it was a man and a woman, sure. But you likely got out of that image things like senior citizen, companionship, love, retirement, old age, support, um, contentment. All those things. That slide was there for one minute. You got all of that stuff in literally one minute. And when they say a picture's worth a thousand words, the thousand words that that picture was worth was not, he was wearing a green sweater and she had an earring and so on and so forth. Instead, the thousand words that that was worth was everything you know about senior citizens, your grandparents, about, about, you know, retirement and so on and so forth.

Let me give you another one. What do you get out of this one second? What did you get? Ah, stress, college, um, exams, studying, um, frustration, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everything you know about stress was encapsulated in that image. You looked at it for one second, you got all that thousand words about what's going on. And you're back looking at me. Give you one final one. What'd you get? Achievement, uh, Latina, graduation, um, success. All those good things that you get about that come from that one second of an image. And that's what you're trying to do. So that's why images are so powerful. You combine that with the fact that when you are pitching, they're here to see you. They're here to hear the story. You're the storyteller. They're looking at you, they're listening to you. You're telling them all this kind of stuff. And the whole purpose of the slides is simply to add emotional resonance to what you're saying. This is not a narrated slideshow where the noun is the show and you're just the narrating of it. Here, this is the pitch from you. You are pitching. They're there to hear you. And these slides are just extras. You should be able to have the screen behind you blank out and just give the entire presentation, and it should hold together without any visuals. The visuals are there to add emotional resonance to what you're doing.

So let's, for example, take all the information you know about your venture, right? You've accumulated all of the market surveys and the technology and the, what you're doing in the sales. So what do you do with all this information? Where does it all go? What is it used for? What? Well, all that stuff that you've accumulated, all of the hardware knowledge and the plans, that goes into your business plan, right? Um, and the business plan is not a financing document. The business plan is your roadmap as to how to build your business. Um, what you do is you take out the key pieces. Remember, new stories are written from the top down. You take out that first paragraph from each of these things, and that goes into your executive summary. And then, oh, now you're doing a pitch. The speaker presentation. Uh, oh, now you're adding in primarily the images and the headlines, maybe a couple of points of text, but it's very image-heavy and headline-heavy because you are giving the information. And you say, "Well, wait a minute, why is this called a speaker's presentation? Isn't this, there's only one presentation, your pitch?" No surprise, there's not one pitch. There are three pitches.

When you do your venture pitch, there are actually three different presentations that you're doing. The first one, the one we've talked about, is the 18-minute speaker presentation. This is the one that you show. This is the one that is up there behind you or in front of you when you're giving your speech, where you are providing the information, and this is providing the emotional resonance for your thing. This is illustrating what you're saying. It's not you narrating it. It is it's supporting you. And this is the 18-minute graphic-heavy visual pitch that is there just to support you. But you do another version of this, a very short version of this, um, which is the teaser deck. This is the, the send-ahead. This is the, when you get to get the meeting where you can give the pitch. And this is an abbreviated version. Doesn't go into heavy-duty detail. It's the high points. It doesn't go into the negative competition slide. Doesn't go into the problems or whatever it is, or the essentials of the raise. This is just to get their attention enough so you can get the meeting.

But then the third version of this is a detail to leave behind. This is what you're probably close to doing right now. This is the 18-minute speaker pitch with adjusted visuals on its graphics, but you add in here now all the stuff you were saying, because this has to exist without you. And you don't give it to them in advance, because then they'll read it instead. This is what you leave behind after you finish. So we call it one to throw, one to show, and one to go. You know, throw out the teaser and send ahead to get the meeting. You're showing the presentation, the 18-minute presentation, when you're up there doing it. Um, and then you have the leave behind, which is the one to go. And so therefore, you have the speaker presentation that you start with, which has mostly the headlines and the images and some of the headlines. You take out some of the stuff you've shown, so you just go a really short version for the teaser. And then you add back in that plus the text and some of the numbers over there to give as your, as your leave behind.

Okay, we've done what you're gonna do. It. We've done how you're gonna do your slides over here. And we're gonna end up the finale over here with how you actually deliver your presentation. You're going to get up there and show your, your pitch. Um, you're standing up there in front of your, your VCs or your potential angel investors to deliver your pitch. And here is one of the top secret, super professional presenter takeaways. I'm going to give you the behind-the-scenes thing. And once I tell you about this, you will never look at presentations again, right? So, for example, if I was pitching what was on that, that Wall Street New York Times full-page thing there, the lead article was about the changing nature of religion and storefront churches. So if I was pitching that to you, I will be sitting here telling you about how religion is changing America, becoming more, more popular, more populous oriented. It's happening going down to the street level. And as I am telling you this, up behind me comes the visual that reinforces that. Say it, then show it. Don't show it, then say it. Put another way, always lead your slide. Talk about the next slide before you, before you show it, right? Because what this does is this says, "Oh, they're focused on you. You're where all the new material is coming from. The information stuff that's just support." You say something, and you throw it over your shoulder, and that serves to reinforce it over there. Say it, then show it. Don't show it, then say it.

Now, watch from now on. Whenever you watch a presentation, 98.9% of the people who give presentations will always, what do they do? They change the slide. Oh, change the slide. Oh, look around and slide, see what it was, and then they go and talk about it, right? The super great presenters, the TED speakers, the really great things, Steve Jobs, will talk to you, and then up behind them will come this. So how do you talk about your slide before it's on the screen? You have to memorize your whole deck. Well, yeah, that's called preparation. You better know your whole presentation. You better know it backwards or forwards. Some code. You had better have rehearsed your whole presentation two dozen times before you take it out and, and talk to your first investor. And then you cheat. Because while you are looking at me, I am looking at you. Metaphorically, the webinar audience over here, I'm looking at all of these speakers there, but I'm also looking at what I'm looking at my slides. Because in front of me on my laptop computer, or if it's a large monitor on confidence monitors at the front of the stage, or in the audience behind the stage, I'm seeing a special thing which shows me not only the slide I'm looking at, it shows me that next slide that's going to be coming up, so I can lead into that before I see it. And that's done by special software. You know what that special software is called? PowerPoint. This has been built into PowerPoint for 25 years. And it happens when you plug your laptop into a large projector, which you will have in most cases, a large screen, and you set it up to not mirror displays. The default is to show the same thing on the big display as you see on your laptop. But if you uncheck that in the settings on either Windows or Mac, you will, it treats it as two different screens. And it intelligently will show your slides on the big screen, the outside monitor for the audience, and it will show what's called presenter view or presenter's desktop to, to the order, to, to you as the speaker. So this is the version that you see in PowerPoint. It's also in Keynote, even better in Keynote. And even things like Prezi have the same presenter view as well. So it doesn't matter what technology you're using. You can use PowerPoint. If you're a Mac person, you can use Keynote. This presentation, by the way, is being done in Keynote. Um, you can do PDFs and show things like, um, you know, Adobe Acrobat presenter. You can do it in Google Slides. You can do it in Prezi. Doesn't matter what. Use everything I've told you will work on any one of these technologies.

And so now for the finale, because we're coming up right on our one hour here, and then we'll take some questions. I will give you the top 10 delivery tips for delivering your pitch. Now that you know how to, what your investors want to see, what the thesis is, what the story arc is, how you design your slides, here's how you deliver it. Tip number 10: The only person who can give the presentation for money is the CEO. Why? Because remember, I'm investing in the person, the entrepreneur. That's the most important thing. So if you can't be there to give your pitch, reschedule it. Your VP of Sales can't give it. I don't care, you know, how fluid he is in doing your pitch. I don't care how gorgeous she is. Only the CEO, and whom I'm investing, can give the money pitch.

Number nine: Technology should be invisible, right? Make sure it all works. Get there the first thing. If you walk into a new venue, if you have any opportunity, check out the projector, check out the equipment, check out the monitors. Make sure it all works. If you can use your own laptop that you can present from, because you can control the environment, so this should be totally seamless over there.

Number eight: The presentation should be smooth, right? Roughly, as an order of magnitude, one slide per minute. So that 18-minute presentation, 18 slides, could be 15, could be 20, but roughly one slide a minute, because you're talking, and this stuff is coming, coming up behind you and appropriately supporting what you're saying.

Number seven: When you're in front of an audience, don't fidget. Don't walk around going, "Oh, it's, you know," how you control yourself, right? You should be in control. Um, and that means you come across. If you're in control of yourself, the expectation by the audience is you're in control of your subject matter. You can be funny in your presentation. You can have some humor. That's been a little humor in this presentation, but whatever you do, don't tell jokes. Jokes don't work all the time. Why? Some people literally have no sense of humor, not good or bad, they just don't. Some people, I guarantee you, will be offended because of the way jokes work. Um, and if a joke that falls flat is much worse than having no joke. So don't tell jokes, ever. I shouldn't have to remind you, but we'll say it again. Handouts are not your presentation. The speaker presentation is the speaker support, emotional resonance. Handouts have a lot of the detail in it that you leave behind afterwards. Always use separate handouts from your speaker presentation.

Number four: When you present, always, and I mean always, not usually, not only in giant venues, always use a remote control. Even if you're presenting to one person at their desk in an office, you always use a remote control. Why? Because if you don't, what happens? Oh, it's time to change slides. I'm going to change slides. Oh, I'm looking away from you, looking at my computer. Oh, I'm going to change slides. Dang. Oh, this is the important thing. And you loosely break the whole flow, right? Always remote control. Um, this happens to be the Logitech Spotlight, the one illustrated there, which I really like. It's my favorite current, small, and powerful, there, um, but always use remote control. If you don't have one, now get one. Put it in your computer bag and always use that to pitch.

Number three: Whatever you have, do not do a live demo. Remember, you've got 18 minutes. That 18 minutes has to be totally in your control. And if you do a live demo, something can screw up. Don't do a live demo, not even of a pet rock. And if you say, "But I know I got a locked-in demo, I know it works." Who is the best presenter of all time? Steve Jobs. I was watching as Steve Jobs presented for the very first time FaceTime. And you know what happened when he did that? He rehearsed this thing to a fairly well. He was renowned for investing, for investing hours in these presentations. He got up to show calling Phil Schiller at FaceTime, and it didn't work. He couldn't get through. Why could he not get through? Because every time they had rehearsed, if they'd rehearsed it in an empty auditorium, and they hadn't counted on the fact when you have an auditorium filled with 800 Apple Fanatics, they were all on Wi-Fi blocking out the real time, what was happening, and they couldn't get bandwidth to do the demo. He had to stop for five minutes until everybody turned off their Wi-Fi so they could do the demo. Don't do that. Never do a live demo.

Number two: Whatever you do, don't read your presentation. I don't think there's anybody who thinks that I'm bringing you a canned script over here, right? But if you do, "Hello, my name is David S. Rose, and I..." you lose half your credibility. You are the one who has the information. You are speaking to your audience. You're giving them really important information. So you should know your stuff, know your slides, know your topic, but don't have a pre-canned script that you're reading.

And then the number one super tip, in addition to the ones I've given you before about, you know, lead your slides and so on and so forth, whatever you do, never, ever look at the screen. Why? Because that says, "Well, I mean, I, I don't know myself. I got to refer to the things. Oh, that's where the important information is, not for me." Uh, you don't want that. You want them looking at you. And if you turn around and look at the screen, what can't they see? You.

All right, there we are. An hour on the nose. Um, I hope this was helpful. Happy to stick around and answer questions. I've given you a link over here. There is the, the very short version of this done, uh, talk about how to pitch was in 10 minutes, was done as a TED Talk, which has been viewed about a million and a half times. And you can, there are links to that on the, at that QR code there, as well as various other stuff about my books and Gus products and services and so and so forth. So feel free to get some more information over there. So with that, Ryan, I turn it over to you. And we're happy to take questions. I see we have quite a few. Oh, yeah, we have tons. Uh, can you give me just an idea of how much time you have for Q&A? 30 minutes. I'm actually, I'm actually cool. I'll ask here as long as you want. Okay. Well, then I'm going to put a stop to this eventually, but let's get through some of these, uh, Q&A questions, uh, because we got some really good specific ones. I tried to answer any ones that were kind of, you know, orthogonal to the topic today, so I'm going to focus on the ones that are about pitching and about all that stuff. But there were some great questions asked about fundraising things and investor returns and whatnot. We'll have tons of other content to get to, uh, for that, and check out other resources that I shared in the chat. But going all the way back from the start of the presentation, Zachary asked, "How are med tech pitched? Is it uniquely different when pitching?" So med tech startups, or startups, maybe let's expand this to, you know, something that, you know, non, you know, Shark Tank viewers could actually understand the business model. Well, Shark Tank stuff can't have a very, you know, my my analysis of the Shark Tank is that Shark Tank is to angel investing what, um, Indiana Jones is to archeology. Uh, so there is literally no relation between Shark Tank and, and real angel stuff. It's a wonderful show. I love them. Barbara Corcoran and several others are very close friends of mine, um, but that's not real angel investing. The kind of things you see there are often consumer products that a consumer can get a hold of that can be sold on QVC. And that's, we don't see any of those kinds of things. If you look at a typical angel, though, like deeply vertical industries like biotech, but everything I've just said remains the same unless you're speaking to a total expert who only invests in this one thing, and you're, you're a drug discovery stuff, and it's a pharma thing where you can assume, where you have a very good sense of, of what they actually know. Ready? You have to assume the intelligent sixth grader approach, right? You can scale a little bit if you're doing it to a totally broad audience of unknown people. You can start, you know, more elementary. If you know you're pitching to industry, you know, gurus, you can, you can jump right to those, some of the later stuff out there, right? Um, but it's the, the essentials are very much the same. Um, the economics are a little different. Things like drug discovery, because of the, of the FDA trials and the way that pharma comes in after trials to put lots of money in at low cost, they're sort of different things. But essentially, all of what I'm saying in terms of telling the story and the whole sequence of stuff applies to virtually any kind of pitch you're doing.

Excellent. And that actually flows into Joe's next question about specifically drug discovery. What does traction look like in that case? You might not even get revenue. Your company might get acquired before it even has the potential to get product to market, which is fine. But but again, traction. You know, traction is have you, is, is outside validation? If you have been, you know, doing talk, doing tests and trials for 10 years with not with inconclusive results, that's not traction. In short discovery, if you've done something and you managed to cure, and your, your test sample of, you know, 20 people in an FDA trial at work, oh, whoa, that's great. It doesn't matter, you know? And at that point, big pharma will come in and, you know, invest 100 million bucks for, you know, a tiny percentage of the company, kind of thing, right? So, you know, traction is it, once you start thinking about it as something outside your control that shows value creation for somebody else, it makes everything a lot clearer. Yeah, I think that outside validation answers a bunch of the other questions in there because there's always the specifics of like, well, what about, you know, you know, a hardware company that needs to produce things that needs a minimum run? So I'll close some of those. AJ, you asked a question about short paragraph that I've lost the context on. So if you have more details, can you re-ask that one?

How do you differentiate between a business model on paper, like a Lean Canvas kind of thing, as part of the pitch? Perfect. Oh, well, this is an interesting one. I think I'm going to broaden this to more of, so what is the business model canvas relation to your pitch? Yeah, so, so for those who aren't familiar with with the business model canvas, it's a great tool. Just check out business model canvas. There are lots of tools and lots of books about it. Um, Business Model Generation is the original book about it by Alexander Osterwalder. Um, and it's a graphical visualization of, you know, the assets you have and the customers you're going and the services you provide and the resources in the outside context and so on and so forth. So that's a great way to envision your business model. But ultimately, business models can be boiled down to a relatively few things, right? I mean, what are you doing and how is value created? A business model canvas is a great way to show everything, but at some point, there has to be crystal clear in your presentation as to how you make money. And you would be amazed at how many presentations we get and sort of skip over that piece. Or if I have a lot of people, they'll make money somehow. Well, no, how will you make money? I said, advertising. Is it B2B? B2C? Well, you, you are you buying through channels? Whatever it is, be very clear about how you're making money. And a business model canvas, well, nobody will will request that day one, and you won't do it in a pitch. It's too complicated. But it's a great kind of thing for you to share with investors during your deep dive and due diligence sessions after that meeting, when they say, "Okay, great, let's have a meeting and then discuss it." Then you can bring it out and walk them through it, which can be really interesting. But the business model canvas is really designed to help you think through your business model and develop one.

And here's a more detailed question about cutting down to that five to ten minute pitch from the 18 minutes. Do you slash slides entirely, or do you try to summarize them? Oh, great, great question. Yes, that I should have mentioned that, Joe. Thank you very much. The answer is absolutely, you cut out slides, right? You should still have about, you know, that one slide per minute. If you do your slides correctly, it's about one slide a minute, which means you're cutting out, you know, two-thirds of your slides in doing that, um, which means you can, and you're gonna re-cut it a little bit, and you're gonna combine a few things in there. But they still should be simple. Um, you know, I think it was Mark Twain, um, who was once asked to, you know, write a, you know, a short story, um, and he said, "I don't know. I don't have enough time. I could give you a long novel, but I can't give you a short story." Writing a short story takes more time. And so, similarly, doing a really tight presentation takes more time to develop than a longer one. Is a, you know, when I was presentation trained by some of the greatest presentation trainers around, a guy named Granville Toogood, I did my first venture pitch, and it was an hour long. It was an amazing pitch, wonderful builds and charts and graphs and stuff. He said, "Okay, great. Now come back tomorrow morning and do it in half an hour." So half an hour, I gotta cut out 30 minutes. So I cut out 30 minutes, and I can't really say, "Oh, okay, much better." And now I have to want to come back and do it in 15 minutes. Is it 15 minutes? Just cut it back from an hour to 15 minutes. And so by the time we finished two days of training, I had taken that hour presentation and cut it down to eight seconds. And at that point, I was total wreck. I mean, it was completely, I had never went so much hours, you know, but son of a, at that, with that eight seconds, I had boiled down that hour, and I knew what those, let's go from 15 seconds to eight seconds. I know what knew what it cost me. I knew what I had to take out. And I said, "Oh, if only I had 10 seconds, I'd put in this one more thing, right?" So this is a great, wonderful exercise to cut it down to a really tight. And then you could be back in those little things as you have more and more time. Okay, that is, yeah, that's it. That's, uh, what was it? The like The Shining approach where the director like made the the actor go almost exhausted so that it would actually be as legitimately terrified and exhausted as they would be at that point in the movie. Fascinating.

Switch back to traction. And this is probably going to change a little bit industry by industry. But what is the minimum amount before embarking on a fundraise? How is there like a statistically significant base of traction? Definitionally, no. That's the whole point. Definitionally, it's traction. Depending on what you're doing, traction can be a million users. It can be one. It could be two users, right? One last week and two this week. It is, remember that the def, the slide I used was a very good one, right? Something, and it's, think about, get this bored into your brain. Something outside your control that shows that you have created economic value for someone else, and that value creation is growing bigger and better every day. I know, but the nuance here is before going out for a fundraise. Yeah, so it's all the same. That's what traction is. You have to have traction before fundraise. The minute you have traction, go fundraise. I don't care what it is, right? Follow my definition. And it can literally be, if you had your first customer, how? Okay, that's

The start, right? You have your second week. You got two more customers. Okay, you got traction, right? And hopefully, as you're going out doing your fundraise, next week you'll have three customers and then four customers or whatever, and then eight and sixteen. And you'll be able to show that kind of rage. And that's wonderful.

But the answer is, until you have legitimate traction, defined as I just defined it, not the way founders define it, right? Do not fundraise. The minute you actually have traction, then you can go and fundraise.

Awesome. This one's actually really, I'm excited for this answer. Uh, so Darren points out that with the information you know, the internet information is very, you know, out there, and people are getting their pitch decks to be more generic because they're all following like a similar formula or whatnot. Is there any moment in your Angel Investing career that a pitch deck was standing out that surprised you? That actually stopped you?

Yeah, sure. The, the, some guy presented to the New York Angels, and he basically said, "We have an interesting product here. It's, you know, better, faster, cheaper than everything else. But what's interesting is about our business as a company, um, we actually have, um, negative raw material costs, and we have negative manufacturing costs, and we have negative packaging costs, and we have negative marketing costs, and we have negative distribution costs." And like, everybody's sitting here is saying, "What? Yeah. How is that in any universe? How is that possible?"

And then, would that start in? He then delivered on every single one. Then you say, "How the fudge can he actually do that?" And it was the guy, because he later wrote a book, the guy's name is Tom Zaki. Um, and his, his product was an organic fertilizer. Like it was competing with Miracle-Gro as an organic fertilizer. Yeah. And it was made out of worm poop, right? It turns out that excrement from worms is this really amazing organic fertilizer. Works better.

So how did it have all these negative costs, right? Well, his feedstock that the worms ate were the, the waste product from beer distributors and stuff, right? The extra hops, this up, that they were paid to cart away. So they got paid to take the excess stuff. And breweries, they then fed it to the worms, right? Who were eating this stuff and pooping it out. They then were packaging this stuff in consumer recycled, um, uh, containers, like spray bottles and stuff. They got excess stuff that they were taking out of landfills instead of going to landfills for the excess caps that were being done. They marketed this through schools where they were doing ecological programs for, you know, for students. They got paid to do. They had the students bring in their ex, their parents' excess spray bottles and stuff. So they got negative package, that caused negative marketing, distribution, negative production, and negative raw material, of course.

So, so that was the, the sort of the standout pitch. And, you know, you can't often have that level of things in there. And by the way, we ended up not investing for other, other kinds of reasons. Um, but it was, that was an amazing pitch. Yeah.

I think one of the takeaways is you want all the content that David puts in there. Like, your pitch needs to answer all those questions for investors. But if there is something unique to your business that you can like make that content surprising or something like that, or lean on one piece of it or another, you know, that's in your advantage. But, but by the way, the important thing here, it turns out that, remember, keep your audience in mind. Your audience are investors, right? And they're looking to make money. They're looking for things. So therefore, you know, in, in the same way that, you know, you know, Princess Fiona for Shrek, um, was a big giant green ogre, and that might not be Ryan's idea of a perfect girlfriend, as a giant green ogre, but for Shrek, it was a perfect thing. So therefore, for an investor, a, you know, if you do a presentation the way I showed you, and you hit all those things, and you show that you've got a, there's a real pain, you've got a real solution targeted to great customers with a business model that makes sense, and the ability to execute, and their ability to reach your market, and you're better than the competition. Remember, it's better, it's better, it's better. You do that, I won't have an orgasm. I mean, that will really be, you know, if you show me a business that will actually have all of that, you know, all those things in there. What I'm looking for is a business that can check those boxes. And that is what is sexy and exciting and really wonderful about it.

Awesome. Uh, what we got? Oh, so this was asked in the chat a little bit. Uh, what about video pitches? I know there's a video on the Gust website. We say it's much shorter than 18 minutes. What if they're requested, you know, maybe applying to a group or an investor?

So, so there's a whole other, um, thing that I, that had we had more time, and maybe we'll do a future master class and future session on doing video pitches, um, and how do you do things online in over Zoom and so on and so forth. Um, and so he's a live Zoom pitch is different from a recorded video. With a recorded video, you are being held up fairly or unfairly, you were being viewed against every high-end TikTok video, Hollywood film production, or whatever it is that you see. So people are expecting that if you were delivering a video, it's going to be high quality. It's not going to be, you know, done in your bathroom with with bad audio and bad lighting and so on and so forth. It better be clean and professional, right? I mean, if you take a look right now at Ryan and me, right? You will see some, you know, both of us here, well-lit. You can hear us clearly from from clear mics with appropriate backgrounds that are, you know, you know, and we, you know, he's got a mic right in front. I've got a mic right, you know, literally six inches from me over here. Um, so you want to be, it's the same thing that applies to what you're talking about. We were talking about for the for the pitch.

But think about where it's intended for. In the Gust case, where that's a very short video that shows up on the front page of your thing, that should be a, you know, one minute. I would say, you know, aim for one minute, 60 seconds. You can go to maybe two, but that's getting pretty long already, right? 30 seconds probably isn't enough time to get the word out there. So probably aim for a 60-second video that encapsulates, remember, that's like the teaser deck. Oh, it's really good and interesting. You're only trying to get people to click to the next slide, look for your full deck, watch the whole thing. So the answer is, it, and you, and with all this stuff, it's never a question of speeding up and rushing it. It's always a question of cutting down. So you can use. Now, I'm talking faster and cramming a lot of stuff into one hour, but I usually talk fast. Why? I have to slow myself down a little bit, but you should be speaking at your normal pace, you know, with appropriate emotion, not rush through it. And I would also say, specifically answering the chat, but the Gust profile video is not meant to be your pitch. One, it's publicly available if you publish your profile, and you generally don't want to discuss investment terms and offerings on a public platform unless you're doing the right kind of fundraising through a 506(c) exemption. It's really meant to be a sizzle to get somebody attracted to your company and or solution. So it marries hand in hand with the pitch, but it's not just a recording of you pitching, nor should it be the pitch itself. Um, usually highlighting the product in the company instead.

You mentioned three different kinds of pitch decks, and one is the to get a meeting pitch deck. Any, uh, other comments on what the format of that? Because you can't do just images with that one.

Nope. That's why I went through the New York Times picking up various pieces, right? So the, so the, remember the three different needs. The need for the pitch deck is to convey why you're exciting, what you're generally doing. So the, remember the goal is to match the, the goal is, do you match the thesis of the investor? And so therefore, the, all you're trying to do is to convey enough information to say, "Do I, you know, match your thesis?" So therefore, if you're in gaming, they want to know it's a gaming thing. What are you doing in gaming, right? What's your business model? How do you make money? What's exciting about it, right? And you can do that in four or five slides. How you're better than, better than whatever it is. And, you know, and it works. So that will be images, but also text explaining what's in the images. Not pages of page text, they won't read it. But I mean, a sentence or two or three, or, you know, no more than what, four or five sentences. That will be already a lot. But, you know, short sentences, bullet points, headlines, images for the teaser. All you're trying to do is to get them to invite you to do a pitch.

Awesome. This is a great one from Jeff. Uh, what do you think of the use of view control, eye replacement tech, like the new Nvidia Broadcast to use during virtual pitching? So if you're not familiar, this is something that makes it look like you're looking in the camera more than, uh, if you aren't, you know, if you're looking down or at your, your whatnot.

So eye contact is really important, right? So you guys will note that I have maintained eye contact with you through this entire presentation, right? So I'm presenting here live on Zoom. I'm sitting in front of a screen. I've got my presentation with presenter view, by the way, up in Keynote, so I see the slides and I see what's coming ahead. But I am looking at the camera. Now, I'm going to experience. But I don't know. I've been doing this long enough so I can actually do a pitch looking at the camera and use my peripheral vision to pick up the next slide and occasionally glance away to do something and come back to you. There are other interesting ways of doing things, right? So, and I, by the way, I've tried everything. And so the latest one that I am trying, which we will see, is actually right here in front of my desk. Is this? What is this? This is called a Center Cam. This is a teeny-weeny camera with a suction cup that I can stick right on Ryan's face right over here. And so now, if I can look right at you, if I were doing that, right, while looking at my slides. Um, there is a periscope you can get that fits over your thing that lets you look into the periscope and and do that. Uh, there are a bunch of different ways to, there are teleprompters and so on and so forth. Um, how? So the answer is, you, the goal is correct. You want to make eye contact to the extent that you can make eye contact by training yourself, by using other kinds of devices, that's fine. But authenticity is the most important thing, right? The integrity, authenticity thing. So if whatever your technology you're using makes it look like you're using technology, that's not good. Better that you, you know, glance away to the extent that you can actually do it with, um, uh, you know, seamlessly, that's great. Okay.

Awesome. Um, this is a bit more general. Uh, when I clean up some other, but, um, what are the the factors that, um, no, you've answered this. Never mind. I, I think we might actually be out of fresh questions.

Actually responded to the context that I lost. Um, and he asked, what elements of the pitch should be in the well-crafted short paragraph for intros and referrals?

So if you're gonna, like, business model terms, right? So, so no, so, so the, the, it depends. So the former, the, the Mad Libs from Founder Institute, right? The company is doing X for, you know, for, for, we are doing this for that company, this audience, to solve that problem, using our secret sauce. That's, that's the short paragraph, right? You fill out that paragraph, that, you know, plus or minus, is your thing. If you're then doing an ask, we are, you know, we are raising a seed round, you know, right now, and you want to know, you know, we're raising a seed round of X. And if you have a term sheet, if you have a signed term sheet from an investor that you're trying to fill out, then you're raising X amount of money at Y valuation. If you don't, then don't put an evaluation, right? Then you're raising X amount of money because you make it a binary thing. So, but that, that Mad Libs is a pretty good way to start it.

Uh, this is an interesting one from Joe. Um, so say your startup is a platform with proven applications of how, you know, whoever's using the platform as the customer. Would investors want to hear more about the success cases of how the customers are using the platform successfully, or more about how the platform itself works?

Remember, investors don't care about the platform. As far as they're concerned, it could be some, you know, organic offspring of Oobleck, or it could be something done with with whatever, as long as it works and as long as people are using it. So they would, as long as it's not smoke and mirrors, you can deal with the tech in a very short way, provided, and then you're then showing the, remember, it's all about validation and traction. And traction is validation, validation, abstraction. And that's how people are using it. If they're using it and you're paying you for it, that's 90% of the battle right there. Then the only question about the tech will be, is this generic tech that anybody could use, or is there something secret about this or how you're doing it? But the, the tech/product piece of your presentation, if you're talking about an 18-minute thing, no more than five minutes, and probably three, because it's the almost the least important part of the whole thing. You've got to show me what you're doing, but don't spend a whole lot of time on it.

Excellent. I think we just have one more. Um, and this will be interesting based on your background, David. So an entertainment company where they're not actually doing anything different. So they're not like Solid, they're not like an innovation entertainment tech company. You know, they're just producing more entertainment content or media. You know, how do you pitch something like that? If you're just selling a new TV show or, you know, a production company?

And you're not going to want to hear this, but those kinds of businesses are not fundable by angels or VCs. They're the angels are VCs funded very specific types of businesses where they're funding a business that is scalable, right? It is growing. That doesn't require, you know, you, the, you know, things like a fashion business, a fashion brand, or a, you know, a story or entertainment business, or record label, an artist. Those are those are very different kinds of things that have very specific in people who fund those things who are looking for various industry-specific things for that. They are looking, "Are you the picker? Are you the, are you a hit maker? Can you do that?" That is not something that you would pitch to an angel group or a VC because that's just not the kind of businesses they invest in.

Which is hilarious because I believe Angel Investing got its name from the theater business.

Which actually operated on. Yeah, well, because they weren't. The Angel Investing got its name, 1920s, from rich young men who would invest in Broadway theatrical productions because they wanted to go backstage and hang out with the chorus girls. And they were, because nobody in their right mind would have invested in the theater, they were regarded as angels or dropped out of heaven and came down with money to do this. And then eventually, by the 1970s, the term was became to be applied to people who invest in businesses.

So excellent. So that's all the Q&A. If you haven't seen the chat, it's been blowing up. People are absolutely psyched for this. And thank you, David, so much for staying extra to go through the Q&A, um, and be on the lookout. There were some questions about the motivations of, you know, angel investors, what kind of returns they're looking for. David gives phenomenal presentations on that. We have some on our YouTube channel if you want to check them out. But there will always be future ones where we can have an interactive live audience, we can be engaged with David's eye contact and not looking away from the screen and following most of his own principles on how to at least not pitch us necessarily, but deliver educational content. Um, so David, if you have any, uh, parting words, otherwise, I will wrap this up and kind of let people know what, uh, what to look for.

For me? No, it's, it's been a pleasure. And remember, the, the real core takeaway points here, right? Are one, the foundational thing, you're just trying to not fit into somebody else's, you know, magic template. There is no magic word, there is no magic plastics, right? That will that will do it. You are trying to provide a very clear, positive spin on what you're doing. And the investor is just trying to see if what you are doing, not want to do, whatever you are doing, matches with their thesis. Number one. Number two, you're telling a story. It's all about story. It's, it's not about numbers and anything else. You are, you are trying to emotionally to give them a story. In terms of the actual ways you're you're doing things, the slides should not should have heavy on images and a light on text. You want to look right at your audience, not look at your slides. You want to lead your slides by talking about it first and then showing it. You don't want to read your script. Um, these are the, the key takeaways. Less is more. It's all about story. And do you fit there? That's the goal. Good luck with all of your presentations. Thank you very much.