I am reproducint this artcile by Dr. Earl R. Smith - Managing Director of the Federal Circle.


Makes interesting reading......

The beginnings of a good idea
Recently I sat in on a presentation that two founders of a technology start-up made to a front-line venture capitalist. What was most striking about the experience was that, from one point of view, the founders seemed very well prepared. Their presentation was polished and contained all the usual sections, their slide show was professional quality, and they spoke with passion and deep knowledge about their space. The materials which they provided were all neatly and professionally packaged. But early in the meeting it became apparent that the team was not prepared for what they were encountering. Their pitch was clearly more appropriate for a group of fellow technologists. They had not taken into consideration the predictable concerns and perspective of the person to whom they were presenting. The VC had interrupted the flow of their pitch with a couple of completely normal threshold questions and it went downhill from there.
After the session I asked the investor how frequently this kind of thing happens. He shook his head and responded “More often than I would like and far more often than needs be. The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to.” When I asked what he meant he replied “I’m probably the first outsider that they have ever given this presentation to. As a result their pitch comes to me without any real critical review. But what is most discouraging is that their entire presentation was not focused on my concerns as an investor but on a ‘preaching to the choir’ gathering of their peers. And what they don’t seem to realize is that mine is a very tight community and we talk to each other on a regular basis. What these guys did today was not only establish a negative brand with me but with any others that I end up talking to about them.”
I immediately understood what he meant. One of the services I provide to clients is the establishment of an advisory board designed as a high level, business development engine. I had built such a board for a company that is in the enterprise level software business. One of the company’s proudest achievements was that they had earned a high level of certification for their software development process. This certification was prominently mentioned in all of their promotional materials and on their website.
The senior management team was presenting during the first ever gathering of the board. The advisory board consisted of five very high-level individuals with an average of three to four decades of experience. Most had built businesses or run very large organizations. All of them had risen to the top of their profession. This first meeting was designed to bring the board members up to speed.
The software certification was prominently displayed on one of the earliest slides that the chief operating officer presented. One of the board members interrupted the pitch with a question, “OK, I’m one of your customers. Other than making your software more expensive, what is the value of this certification to me?” It quickly became clear that any answer which the team could offer was focused on the ‘choir’ – those individuals who had already bought in to the value of the certification process. They were not able to provide an answer from a client’s perspective. As a result, they lost the confidence of the board and had to work hard to get it back.
As I related the story my friend nodded and ruefully smiled. “I’m glad to see that this happens to other people. I had taken to thinking that mine was the only profession that encountered this kind of thing.”
As we talked and told war stories, a conversation with a former partner in the movie business came back to mind. Sy had been talking about how much more difficult it was for new talent to get experience since the demise of a vast network of performance venues that used to serve as incubators. Again, there was the pattern. People need a space where they can knock off the rough edges and focus their presentation.
What came out of this was a vision for a kind of ‘presentation boot camp’ – a space where founders could refine and focus their pitch without incurring the liability of having to learn under fire – and avoid establishing a negative branding in front of potential investors to boot.

I saw this article and thought I should share it with you.  

Editor’s note: Aileen Lee is a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she focuses on investing in consumer internet ventures. You can read more about Lee at KPCB.com and follow her on Twitter at @aileenlee.
Good questions have been asked lately of tech companies without gender diversity on their boards of directors. While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards.
Why should we care? For one, women are the power users of many products and it’s just smart business to have an understanding of key customers around the table. Could you imagine a game company without any gamers on the leadership team or board?
If you’re not aware, studies also show companies with gender diversity at the top drive better financial performance on multiple measures – for example, 36% better stock price growth and 46% better return on equity. And, studies show the more women, the better the results. This is likely because teams with more females demonstrate higher collective intelligence and better problem solving ability. So it’s probably not a coincidence the world’s most admired companies have more women on their boards than the average company.
There is a group of public companies that gets these insights – they are quietly adding some of the smartest women in Silicon Valley to their boards of directors. And most are not making much noise about it, perhaps they want to benefit from their savvy while their competitors are asleep at the wheel.
I was impressed by a move by AutoNation, the country’s largest auto retailer ($4.6B market cap). They did an extensive search and last year added Alison Rosenthal to their board – an off-the-F500-radar-screen, Brown and Stanford educated, early Facebook team member who led FB’s core BD activities for 5 years in social, growth, international and mobile.
Why add a 30-something female to a male board with an average age of 58? Mike Maroone, AutoNation’s President and COO explained, “We looked at our board [and realized] it’s male dominated, while women make over 50% of the purchasing decisions in our business. And, the travel, music and news industries have been transformed by digital. We’re trying to transform the auto business and connect with the thinking of the digital generation, and we need this level of insight at the board level.”
AutoNation is not alone in identifying next gen talent that adds diversity of gender, thought, age and experience to the boardroom, long the domain of (male) titans of big business, law and finance.
LinkedIn ($9.1B) was ahead of the curve when they added longtime Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore to the board in 2010. And in the past year, TripAdvisor ($4.1B market cap) added former Google International exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy to the board of directors; HomeAway ($2.1B) added Google Ads head Susan Wojcicki; LuluLemon ($9.3B) added FB local-and-mobile exec Emily White; Starbucks ($36.5B) added 29-year-old Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and author of The Facebook Era; and Scripps Networks Interactive ($6.9B) just announced the addition of Gina Bianchini, CEO/founder of Mighty Software.
Of this, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says, “Some boards may look for candidates already on other boards, or CEOs of other companies. In the case of Leslie’s seat, we were looking to add someone with specific expertise, CEO or non-CEO, to complement our board – and the results from broadening our consideration set have been outstanding.”
Christine Day, CEO of LuluLemon, offered similar sentiments. “We wanted a board member who understands how our target guest thinks, is a leader in the world of digital innovation and social, and understands steep growth. Emily is part of a new generation that is going to change the game.”
Ebay ($45.1B market cap) also recently added Facebook product marketing exec Katie Mitic to their board. Of this, CEO John Donohoe told me, “We were looking to add people who understand the web of the future and our consumer (50% of whom are women), and who are product and tech savvy. Katie is a 12 out of 10 on these. And, we have a strong commitment to attracting, developing and retaining female leaders. There’s also a cultural impact outside of the boardroom – it’s inspiring to our team members and community to see someone like Katie on our board.”
By adding new blood to the boardroom, these companies are getting a four-fer, or more: 1) gender diversity, and in most cases, age diversity around the table; 2) better understanding of core customers; 3) Social-Mobile-Local expertise and insight into digital platforms like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Path, Square, Flipboard and Pinterest that are fundamentally changing business; and 4) hyper growth and rapid innovation DNA.
These factors are driving a trend to change board composition. And from what I’ve heard from CEOs, the smartest companies will continue to diversify their boards rather than “checking a box.” Initiatives like 20by2020 will also help.
There’s an opportunity to make your board, and your company, smarter by adding diversity, especially of gender. And if you’re at a smaller company, there’s a greater likelihood that your board lacks diversity – and that’s an opportunity to seize, especially if your company counts on females as key users. Savvy companies are quietly changing up their boards of directors and teams, and this is giving them better collective intelligence, more community admiration, and better financial results.
PS if your company would benefit from new DNA in the boardroom, there is great talent to consider. Here are just some examples of female leaders who are savvy about digital innovation, customer experience and hypergrowth. I’ve listed talent with experience from larger companies, as startups are generally less able to share their talent:
Allison Johnson, former VP Global Marketing Comm, Apple
Anne Raimondi, VP Marketing, SurveyMonkey
Amy Chang, Head of Global Product, Ads Measurement, Google
Barbara Messing, CMO, Tripadvisor
Caterina Fake, Founder, Pinwheel; cofounder, Flickr and Hunch
Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook
Heather Harde, former CEO, TechCrunch
Jennifer Bailey, VP WW online stores, Apple
Jessica Herrin, CEO/founder, Stella & Dot
Jessica Steel, EVP of Business & Corporate Development, Pandora
Joanne Bradford, Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer, Demand Media
Julie Bornstein, SVP, Sephora Digital
Katie Jacobs Stanton, Head of International Strategy, Twitter
Kerry Wharton Cooper, CMO, Modcloth; ex VP eCommerce, Walmart.com
Lori Goler, VP of People and Recruiting, Facebook; ex marketing, eBay
Marissa Mayer, VP of Local, Maps and Location Services, Google
Raji Arasu, VP of Technology, eBay
Selina Tobaccowala, VP of Product and Engineering, SurveyMonkey
Stephanie Tilenius, Global Commerce Strategy, Google
Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter

TV Presenting V Pitching

        Occasionally I get asked what makes me qualified to talk to small businesses about how to pitch.   I’m not a business expert,  I have never worked in mergers and acquisitions, balance sheets are not my preferred bedtime reading, and yet I work successfully with lots of businesses to develop their pitches, and win them funding.

        What’s the first thing you have to do when faced with a panel of investors?    Answer – Get their attention.

        Do you know how long a TV presenter has to get your attention before you reach for the remote control?    Time yourself with your own remote.  Hop around the channels and see how long you give each presenter before you decide whether to stay and listen or switch over.   It’ll be a maximum of….10 seconds.

        That’s me on Sky News, and all I get to keep the audience's attention is.....10 seconds.   So broadcast journalists and presenters like me know a fair bit about how to grab people’s attention. The headlines at the top of the news?   They’re attention grabbers.  And we have to write them.  They have to make you want to stay to hear the rest.    Just like a pitch, you have to get their attention at the top and then keep it.   Investors are like TV viewers, they have a surfeit of choice, and they are easily bored.  

        Back to TV -  on a daily basis journalists like me have to take a blizzard of information, on almost any subject under the sun and turn it around very fast,  into short snappy scripts that are easy to understand.   We translate the information for the audience.   It has to be easily understood by everyone who watches, from any background.    Pitchers have to pitch to all kinds of investors, with different backgrounds and different levels of experience in the pitcher's field.   So the easier the pitch is to understand the better the pitcher's chance of keeping the investor's attention.

        The next time you're watching the news and are easily following some complicated economic story, or a science story, or even a showbiz story, remember that the journalist is pitching you the story.   And if you are still listening at the end, that journalist has done a good job.    That’s what we do, and those are the skills we can pass on to help businesses pitch better.

Public Speaking or Death?

        How afraid are you of having to speak in front of an audience of any kind?  
       
        Does this ring a bell?

        I have trained so many people who would rather sell their kidneys than have to stand up and speak.   But many of them are almost as afraid of having to admit they're afraid, as they are of the public speaking that’s causing their panic.
       
        How many situations does this apply to?  So many.  
       
        You have to pitch to a panel of investors for funding, present a report to your board, give a speech in public or face journalists with cameras, lights and microphones.
 
        I always start any training course or consultation by addressing the fear.   The first thing to establish is that it’s ok to be afraid.  I’m going to repeat this because it’s really important   It’s ok to be afraid.      You will not lose face by admitting to it, and it’s better to acknowledge it and tackle it than to pretend it isn’t there.   If you are putting yourself in an unfamiliar situation, you are right to be nervous, you are not on home territory.   Or you have done it a few times and it didn’t go well.  That does not mean it won’t go well in the future.   It’s a learned skill not a dark art. 

        Here’s a typical list of what makes people sick to their stomach with nerves.

            Being/Looking nervous
            Your mind going blank
            Getting it wrong
            Not getting the outcome you want
            Someone stealing your idea
            Difficult questions
            Someone contradicting you
            Looking Stupid

        How do you get over these fears?

        Know your message and prepare…..prepare…..prepare. 

        If you find yourself in this situation and you can only go into that room to present your pitch or do an interview if you know there’s a fast car with the engine running at the back door…….

        Take a deep breath and grab a pen.

        Write down a list of things you are afraid of……absolutely everything, no matter how small or silly you may think it is, if it’s making you nervous, write it down.   Then point by point, write a strategy for coping with that particular fear.

        Here’s that typical list again with an accompanying strategy.

Being/Looking nervous -   The more you prepare and practise the less nervous you will be. 

Your mind going blank –  Keep it simple.  Don’t overcrowd your message with too many points.  Have a keyword for each point you need to make, if you go blank you’ll only have to remember the next keyword to jog your memory.

Getting it wrong – See the above answer.   If your message is simple,  it’s unlikely you’ll get it wrong.

Not getting the outcome you want - You can significantly increase your chances of a good outcome if you are well prepared and have a simple message that’s easy to deliver. 

Someone stealing your idea - You have to talk about your ideas, you never know who will be able to help you.   

Difficult questions - Prepare.  If you know your stuff, you can answer anything.  Anticipate all the possible difficult questions, so that you have an answer for them at your fingertips and stay on message.

Someone contradicting you – if you’ve prepared and you are confident in your message, you can answer your critics.  If you can’t then perhaps they have a point which you need to take on board.

Looking Stupid -  If you take on the above strategies you will not look stupid, you will look confident and well prepared.

        You’ll have noticed there’s a common theme that keeps cropping up in the strategies for overcoming fear. Prepare and practise.  There is no substitute for these two.  

        And remember the Golden Rule……Keep It Simple.   Make sure your pitch/message/presentation is simple enough to memorise and easy to deliver.  Don’t overcomplicate it. 

        And prepare …… prepare …… prepare …..

One Liners

        Doug Richard, a former dragon on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den now runs a really good enterprise called School for Startups.  I don’t really need to explain what it does, the name does, as they say, what it says on the tin. www.schoolforstartups.co.uk

        If you are an SME or thinking of being a startup I highly recommend you check him out.  He has a huge amount of valuable advice which he passes on freely.

        He’s a very astute man, he’s made a lot of money from a standing start selling computer parts, and he’s a really good and charming communicator, so his training sessions and talks are worth listening to.  I watched him run a session for small businesses at the Royal Society, on how to get a pitch ready for investors, what figures you need, how to value your business etc.

        He asked me afterwards for a critique of the session, from a presentation skills point of view.     I thought it was really excellent, but there was one element missing.   He invited a few of the businesses up on stage to pitch to the audience and then invited comments on their pitches and made his own comments.  He asked them questions to get them to improve their pitch.  

        But learning to pitch is not as simple as taking a few notes on how its done them suddenly being able to do it.   It takes guidance, and there was no room for that in a very packed day to a large audience.   But it was a great introduction to the traps many pitchers fall into.   And it’s not just the inexperienced who fall into those traps, almost everyone falls into one of them.

        One of the biggest is to not have boiled down your idea to its very essence – the elevator pitch if you like.   The one thing that struck me instantly when listening to Doug’s pitchers was that when he asked each one of them to sum up their business in a single sentence, they couldn’t do it.  Or they managed a sentence that was either uninspiring or didn’t focus on the most attractive part of their business from an investors point of view.

        There was one business presented by the business owner, who was a very accomplished academic in a technical field.  His pitch was so confusing and technical it left everyone in the room wondering what it was and what he was selling.   After a lot of questioning from Doug I managed to work out that he had managed to create a revolutionary waste management system for heavy industry that made the waste saleable.   But he’d buried the fact that the businesses would also get a grant for proper disposal, and that they’d manage to avoid the fines many businesses end up paying.

        So what would his one-liner be?   When chatting to various participants over a glass of wine after the session,  I asked them to come up with one for the project.  They struggled, a few people came up with quite technical answers.   I asked Doug, he scratched his head.   Then he looked at me and said “OK Genius what would you say?!”.
 
        I told him if I was pitching to him, I would look him straight in the eye and say “I can make you three lots of money from one lot of rubbish, do I have your attention?”.  He roared with laughter and said “Absolutely!”

        Keep it simple folks, always works.

Can I Use My Notes?.....Please!

        It would be lovely wouldn’t it, to be able to use notes when having to pitch/do presentations/ media interviews.   Have your notes handy so you don’t have to memorise everything and you can go back to them if you go blank.  They’re the perfect safety blanket.  

        BUT………

        Put yourself in your audience’s position.  Someone stands in front of you, you are expecting them to know what they’re talking about, and they’re using notes.  What would your reaction be?  You’d doubt their knowledge and therefore doubt them.

        I recently did a pitch training session with a very successful businessman who was going for funding for a new venture.  He was about to face a panel of VCs. 
       
        The conversation went like this…..

Him “I need my notes”

Me “You don’t, you’ll be fine without them.”

Him “Yes I do!”

Me “But you know your business, what makes you feel you need notes?”

Him “I need them…it’s fine it’s not a problem”

Me “You are risking looking as if you don’t know your business”

Him “It’s just technical information, they’ll expect me to be using notes”

Me “There’s a lot of competition for this funding, if it’s a toss up between you and someone who doesn’t need notes…….”

Him “I’ll put them on the table so I’m not holding them”

Me “Have you been in the room?”

Him “No”

Me “ So what if there isn’t a table?”

Him “……….Well there’ll be a lectern”

Me “ If you haven’t been in the room how do you know there’s a lectern?”

Him  “Look, I’m using my notes, it’ll be fine”

        I realised that I would have to physically demonstrate another reason that notes are not a good idea in order to get him to accept my first point that investors don’t like it.  The other reason is…….nerves.

        I casually picked up my own notes as I was talking to him.  As I kept talking I started to shake the papers very, very slightly as if I was trembling.   Despite the fact that I was still talking, his eyes kept darting to the sheaf of papers involuntarily.  The more he looked at them the more I shook them, still talking about something else.   His eyes kept darting…..
   
        So I asked him why he kept looking at the papers.  

Him “er…..well…they’re….”

Me “ Shaking?   Yes I know, and I lost your attention completely the first time your eyes dropped to see why they were shaking.   And that’s what will happen to you if you use notes.   If you have even the slightest nerves, the notes will show it.  And as the VCs eyes go to the paper,  you will notice them looking at the paper and that will make you more nervous and they will shake even more.”

Him “................Ah!”  

        If you don’t believe the effect shaking papers can have, try it yourself on someone else and watch their eyes.   You want your audience looking at you not at your shaking hands.   You want their complete undivided attention.   

        Notes are a very very very very very bad idea.    They will give away any hint of nerves and they will make you look ill prepared and ill informed. 

        If you want to know how to do without those notes, keep reading this blog.  Making your pitch easy to deliver is a subject I return to again and again.

Tech Entrepreneurs Week

Spent a headspinning week as the pitching coach at Tech Entrepreneurs week in London.

        www.techentrepreneursweek.com

        Techie startups had to compete in several pitching rounds for a £50K prize and the chance to pitch to a room full of hungry VCs and business angels.

        With only 10 places in the final, competition was fierce.  £50K with no strings was good enough, pitching to an entire room of potential mentors, investors and people with weapons-grade usefulness was a chance everyone wanted, badly.

        As the pitching coach I sat in a room with industry advisors as a succession of entrepreneurs rocked up in front of me.   I listened to their pitch, worked out what they were trying to say and guided them towards what they should have been saying and how to say it. 

        Seeing so many eager entrepreneurs in such a short space of time really crystallised the biggest problem people have with pitching.  The fact the businesses were tech businesses and that many of my trainees were techies,   made it even more obvious.

        They almost all suffered from the same malady – The Curse of Knowledge.   They knew too much about their product/business and couldn’t stand back and just tell me what made it an attractive business.  They could tell me why it was clever, complicated, cutting edge, why it came in four colours, had more whistles, lights and bells than an Indian Bus in Diwali.     

                                   What they couldn’t do was explain their business simply, tell me why anyone would want to buy it, invest in it, or how they were going to sell it.   Many of them had been up and running for some time, had already had some investment, had board members with more pedigrees than Crufts.    They were seriously clever people, with good businesses.  But the Curse of Knowledge tied them up in knots so they couldn't make a simple and effective pitch.

        What they didn’t get is that when you are pitching you have to hear your own pitch with someone else’s ears.   You have to work out what they want to know, what will excite them, not just what you want to tell them.

        Pitching isn’t an art, it doesn’t come naturally to most people,  it’s a learned skill. 

        I’m happy to say that I coached the winner, Last Second Tickets, most of the finalists and those who narrowly missed a place in the finals.  None of those final pitches bore much resemblance to the ones they tried out on me on day one.   I rolled up my sleeves and off we went………..

        I was very proud of the final performances.

All Decisions Are Emotional

        Using logic and facts to persuade people of something rarely works.   We are emotional creatures.  We might think our logical mind is making all our decisions, but it’s our limbic brain that’s really turning the cogs.   It’s this primitive reptilian brain that’s responsible for our gut reactions, the fight or flight response.
       

    All our decisions are at core, emotional.   They are based on two things, GREED or FEAR.

    “I want it, it'll make me look clever if I choose it..”
    “I’m afraid to take that great job in case I'm hopeless…..
    “I want him/her so I’m not lonely any more……”
    “I’m afraid I’ll lose face if I make that decision………….”
    “I want that investment, it’ll make me rich……….”
    “I’m afraid if I don't invest someone else will get it….”

        If you are pitching for money, you need to appeal to this part of the investor’s brain as well as the logical side.   Make an investor feel that you are the last bus leaving the station and they have to run to get on before it’s too late.   Not only do they have to run, but there’s only one seat left on the bus, and there are 10 other people in the queue in front of them.  You want to make them want to run and knock everyone else over to get to the door before it shuts and the bus moves off.  Sweet white haired grandmothers, mums with prams, dogs for the blind ……..they’ll knock over everyone to get to the bus.
        When you have pitched, you don’t want a logical considered response, you want to see some Tom and Jerry moments …. Tom’s  eyes turning into those fruit machine wheels with pound signs on them or Spike the dog’s tongue rolling out like a giant wet red carpet.
        All decisions are emotional, excite their emotions.

Devil's Snare

Remember the fairy tale Rumplestiltskin?   Let me remind you of the plot.
              To make himself look more important, a miller lied to a king, telling him his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king shut the girl in a tower room with straw and a spinning wheel and  demanded she spin the straw into gold by morning, for three nights, or be executed.  She had given up all hope, when an impish creature appeared in the room and spun straw into gold for her in return for her necklace, then her ring…. then when she had nothing left to give, for a promise to hand over her first-born child.
    Pitching for investment can feel a bit like being in that tower trying to spin gold.   Faced with this kind of pressure many entrepreneurs work themselves up into a frenzy, trying to get every dot and spit of information about their business into a 5 minute pitch.   They feel they have to appear stupendously impressive to get what they want without giving too much away to an impish creature who wants their first born…..sorry, investor.
    Staying with the theme of fantasy, it reminds me of Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, when Harry, Ron and Hermione get caught in the strangling tendrils of a plant called Devil’s Snare.  Hermione, cool in a crisis, realises that to fall out of it, all you have to do is relax.  Ron, panicking as usual, struggles violently and the Snare tightens.

    Struggling pitchers are Ron, trying so hard to muscle their way to a good pitch, they get caught in a tighter and tighter strangling knot.  What they need to do is follow Hermione, stand back, relax, and just do what’s required.  Get the investors attention, don’t try and wrestle with everything you know about your business and force it all on them in go.    Devil’s snare retreats with sunlight.  Nothing is as simple as sunlight, so keep it simple . 

Despicable Me

 Have you ever seen the wonderful animation movie Despicable Me? Steve Carrell voices Gru, a would-be international villain of the Blofeld variety.   He is large, bald, with heavy brows, spindly legs and a menacing countenance.   His goal is to steal a piece of tech so fiendish, his dreams of world domination will soon be……you know the rest… 

He speaks in a bizarre Eastern Europe accent and when he has an idea,  booms out the words “Light Bulb”  very slowly in weird pseudo-Muscovite. 

Now when running a pitch session or media training session, I think of Gru when my pupils argue with me with cries of ……

“You’re wrong, you’re dumbing it down!”

“You’ve missed the point!” (actually anywhere between 3 and 103 points they think they need to put in one sentence)

“But we NEED to use the jargon!”

I take them on a gentle tour of the concepts I am trying to get them to understand and embrace -  Less is more,  Keep it simple,  Don’t talk over the investor’s head ….….. and then ….. on cue …. it happens …. light dawns, pennies drop, scales fall from the eyes and clatter to the floor.  

From now on it will be very difficult for me not to roll my ‘L’s in my best Russian-Bond-Villain accent and boom ……. “L-L-L-Light Bulb!”