David S Rose on TED

David S. Rose on Pitching to VCs

In this talk, David S. Rose, former serial entrepreneur and now serial investor talks about pitching to VCs. The most important aspect that the VC is interested in is you.  You have about 15 minutes to about half an hour to make your pitch.

The most important part of your pitch is your integrity. The second most important thing is passion. Then comes experience. (I have done this before). If you have failed, maybe you have learned from this. You must have domain expertise(knowledge). Then come the skills to run the organization. You must exhibit leadership. 

Commitment comes next. You must have vision but still be a realist. Finally, you must be coachable. Your pitch must include all of these without your mention of them. 

You have 10 to 30 seconds to grab their attention. The rest of your pitch must have an upward path. It must get better and better and at the end, knock them out of the park. Make sure that no threads are missing. 

Begin with the market, the how and why you are going to do it. Reference things the VC can relate to.  Show validation through something that has been done before or awards you have received.

You must then have a believable upside. There may be things that may take a VC's mind down. It is your job to recover from these. One of these is when you speak of competition. The VC may have heard of a widget similar to the one you are creating. Some things mentioned may not be true.  Even things that make the VC think could be detrimental.

Make sure the figures add up. Watch out for silly mistakes and typos. If you cannot make a good presentation, how can you run a company? 

Bullet points are OK. Headlines are better but images are best.(A picture is worth a thousand words)

Your presentation need not have introductions like 'I am presenting...' (The VC knows all this.) It must have your company logo. Then proceed with a overview of the business and give a sense of context.  Then talk about the product. Do not do a live demo. Then tell them how you make money on it. Talk about your distribution relationship or a partner.  This helps validation. 

Tell them exactly what the competition is and then tell them how you are special. Your pitch must have Financials. Speak about your growth plan for about four years. (About a 100 customers the first year...) . 

How is the money you get from a VC going to help you get there? How much are you looking at? Two or Five million? Are you invested in it? Do you have other angel investors?

The conclusion: Go back to the logo. Wrap it up by 'sending the VC into space'. 

• Use ovation or other presentation software.
  
• Always use the remote control.
  
• Your handouts are NOT the presentation. The handout must stand out without you.
  
• Never look at the screen. Connect to your audience instead
  

 

Read more...

Gladwell on TED

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
The author of Blink and the Tipping Point speaks of a psychophisicist named Howard. What is the right amount of sweetness for Diet Pepsi? This was a question posed to Howard by Pepsi. The data was random.

After years of speculation, Howard realized that there was no single 'Sweet Spot' for a whole population. There were many sweet spots. Then when Cambell's came to him for a suggestion to beat Raghu spaghetti sauce, he created 45 varieties of Tomato sauce based on many factors.

After an experimental tour of the country to test out his 45 sauces, he now had data for the best spaghetti sauces. He did not look for a single silver bullet. He grouped them into three clusters: Plain, spicy and extra chunky.

The last is what he went with and Prego(Cambell) created a chunky sauce and created $600M worth of spagetti sauces. This resulted in many varieties of spagetti sauce on the market.

This an enormously important development in the food market. It meant that the method of asking customers what they wanted was wrong. No one knew that they wanted chunky spaghetti sauce. 'The mind does not know what the tongue wants.'

Howard also made us realize that the importance of 'Horizontal Segmentation'. There were two mustards in the market not long ago selling at $8. Grey Poupon came along and sold it at $4 and reaped big profits. Howard said that this was not the way to go. There was no single great mustard.

Howard also proved that there was no single best way to make a dish. (Also called the platonic way to make dishes.) Italian Tomato sauce was thin with no visible solids. Howard proved that giving everyone the culturally authentic sauce was the best way to please others was not necessarily the best strategy.

Science too now looks for understanding variability than searching for universals. Howard said that the search for universals was a disservice to ourselves. When we embrace the diversity of human beings, we find happiness.

Read more...

Talks on Creativity

Continuing on the theme of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's creativity and Zen, here are a couple more online talks on creativity.

Tim Brown:The powerful link between creativity and play

In this talk on TED, Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo the design consulting firm shares his ideas on creativity. One of the descriptions of the Zen state is to become a child again. This is what Brown challenges us to do. This humorous and insightful speech, shows us how we can tap into our talents:
1. By making our workspace more nurturing of our creative talents. Among some of the examples, Brown shares are the Swiss office of Google that has a slide.

2. Children are creative, as they are not afraid to restrict their talents. As we grow up, we forget this innate doorway to creativity. We tend to edit and restrict our 'flow'.

3. Playing and seriousness go hand in hand.

4. There is a time to play and a time to stop playing as there is with kids.

Watch the rest of this presentation for some fun exercises that Brown gives his audience.


Lewis Pinault, LEGO Senior Director and General Manager, LEGO Serious Play for Business and Mark Hansen, Senior Director, LEGO Digital Play Studio

This speech by Pinault and Hansen combines ideas on creativity with the wisdom of crowds. Lego blocks have a vibrant history and have been used as playtools for kids, and as modelling and simulation tools by engineers. Engineers have constructed lifesize models of Dinosaurs, retinal scanners,etc. It is the user community that has used Lego blocks to build things unanticipated by the company.

Lego managed to tap into this user base and help them cobuild some of their kits. They then followed up by bringing users and have them build user kits by themselves. Further Lego then decided to give users the tools to create, license and publish their creations.

Now Lego supports new businesses and partners to create emergences and simply let it happen. Audiences spread across the globe can now collaborate digitally on models and share ideas on 3D models.

The executives feel that the younger generations could use lego to simulate new models and solve future problems. I loved this talk.

Read more...

James Surowiecki on TED

James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news
Surowiecki, the author of the Wisdom of crowds uses blog entries and amateur video coverage from the South Asian Tsunami of 2005 to illustrate his point. Blogs, he says could be classified as 'Before' and 'After' the Tsunami. Never before have we had this sort of 'current' and up to date information on an event as we did in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

He then poses the following questions:
What do blogs tell us about the motivation for people to do things?
What do they tell us about accessing a collective, previously untapped collective intelligence?
What are the disadvantages to blogs?

• Most people blog and put together images, audio,links for free. There is no financial payoffs.
• People have found a way to work with each other for free.
• We need to expand out idea of what it means to be rational.
• We need to change our idea on Payoffs.
• The notion of voluntary coordination is powerful
• Under the right circumstances, groups can be intelligent.
• They can be sometimes smarter than the smartest person in the group.
• Google uses this information to sort out the sites with the necessary information.
• The Blogosphere offers collected distributed information.
• The 'dark' side is that when we follow others we can fall in love with the decentralized model to the point of loosing our own independent ideas.
• Groups are smart only as long as its members are individual thinkers.
• Networks make it hard to maintain your individuality.

Read more...

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Ted

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow

It was years ago when I first read 'Finding Flow'. It is one of those smaller books that deliver a giant message. If I were to epitomize its content, it is a scientist's explanation of happiness. Many great writers have written books on approaching happiness. Most of these are 'How to' guides.

Mihaly approaches this elusive topic differently.

He provides a glimpse of people who have happiness. Many do not have great career success and many are not wealthy. Lack of material goods makes one unhappy but having material abundance does not, by itself guarantee happiness.

Much has been written also about the Zen state, a state when an artist forgets himself, a scientist is drawn into a solution mindset. There is a sense of contribution to others but gives a person joy. It is about loving what you do and find meaning in it. It is a time when time itself stops for the individual. Few can describe this state as Mihali can.

This speech on TED epitomizes Csikszentmihalyi's research on 'work done for its own sake.' This state need not just come from work. It can be when one is with friends or sometimes (very seldom) when one watches something that moves her on TV.

Read more...

My Web Findings for 11-3-2008

Mena Trott: How blogs are building a friendlier world
I loved this presentation. I am a blogger, Mena says modestly. The company, she founded with her husband has the following offerings: Movable Type, Typepad, VOX,Blogs.com, TypePad AntiSpam, TypeKey. For someone in her twenties, Trott shows incredible maturity and shares some really profound thoughts.

Her presentation here is not about her company but something else that close to her heart. It is about her personal blog and how she connected to others in both good and bad ways. She believes in the blogs that tell personal intimate stories rather than the subject oriented ones.

Another of my favorite quotes:

"We have a successful company because of timing and perseverance. But, it is simple stuff. It is not rocket science."

Read more...

My Web 2.0 surfings for 10-15-2008

TED: Chris Anderson (Wired): Technology's Long Tail
I did not hear anything about the long tail in this speech.

• In business, one needs to forecast interests, and also build a product.
• Answer why and when about about the product
• The unified theory on technology trends states that there are four stages for a technology to get.
  
• Each Stage is a collision.
  
• These stages are:

1. The technology must fall below a critical price.
2. It's users must rise above a critical mass.
3. It must displace another technology
4. The technology must then commoditize

• WIFI has reached the 1st two stages.
• The DVD has gone through all the four above stages.
  
• Netflix could capitalize on the DVD model as DVDs was smaller in size to VHS tapes.As DVDs get cheaper, the premium brands like Sony loose out.
• Gene sequencing is falling in price to 40 million from billions a few years ago.At the same time, more genes are being found
• Another example is the generic drug. The effectof the generic drug is is dramatic. The cost of these is typicallyis now 50c a day. More people can be treated cheaply.
• Linux has now switched to critical mass.
• The hybrid car is another technology. Electric motors are now being introduced. This can lead to new era of automobiles
• VOIP is another example. Skype has 4M users.
• Harddrive space is being made almost free these days. This is an example of commoditization
• Fiber Optics: Calls to India costed $2 per minute in 1990. The prices are now about 7c a minute.
  

See the presentation here

Eric Schmidt's short take on 3.0

• Web 2.0 is mostly Ajax.
• Web 3.0 is about applications in the 'cloud' which are fast and customizable. They are distributed virally: Social Networks, email.
• This is dramatically different from the mainframe and the PC era.

See the presentation here.

Read more...