Archive for April, 2011

Never pitch investors

Two weeks ago the Tetuan Valley Startup School, program I’m proud to be a mentor at, kicked off. On the first session Alex Barrera was explaining to the teams the ins and outs of being an entrepreneur and creating a startup. We actually came up with this definition for an entrepreneur:

photo Jump off by aJ GAZMEN ツ GucciBeaR

One of the things Alex told the teams shocked me: “Never pitch investors”. He actually explained the reason very well afterwards, and I have to say I totally agree.

Alex told us how entrepreneurs usually prepare their pitch, trying to give the investors all the information they need to instantly know if they are interested in investing, something like: “Hello, I’m John Doe, I just created a startup that wants to solve parking problems in major cities with a simple app you can have on your smartphone. We’re looking to raise $8,000 of investment to get everything finished.”

It is true that this is a direct and clear message, but nonetheless not a very effective way of raising money. Alex’s way of getting an investor interested in what you’re doing is much more in tune with the social aspect of today’s communications. The idea is that you see an investor at an event, probably during a coffee break and you go over and actually start a conversation with him, not just rant off what you do; the interaction would go something like this:

- John: Hi! So, what did you think of the last group that presented/the news about [insert trendy topic]/the coffee?

- Investor: Very interesting actually it made me think of…

- John: Yeah! I see your point, I thought… (don’t lie to impress, just give your honest opinion).

I’m John, by the way.

- Investor: Oh, I’m Mr. Angel.

- John: what do you do? (even if you know)

- Investor: I’m an early venture capitalist. What do you do?

- John: well, I just created a new startup that’s going to solve parking problems in major cities using cell phones. Did you have trouble parking when you got here?

- Investor: Actually, I did!

- John: see? If you were using our service you would have saved the extra 20 minutes looking for a parking spot!

- Investor: Interesting, why don’t you tell me more about the project?

- John: Sure, here’s my card, let’s set up a meeting.

That would be the ideal situation probably, but you get the point. The same concept as with the elevator pitch applies: it’s about getting the investor interested in what you’re doing. The only difference is instead of assaulting them whenever you get a minute of their time, you’re starting a conversation with them which is the best platform to build a relationship from.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation

Wednesday, 20 April 2011 11:06 Written by Byron Stanford 1 Comment

Changing the background for the whole Presentation

I just started the Back to Basics section because a lot of people often ask me how to do this type of things, and because knowing how to do them is necessary to follow a lot of what I talk about here in the blog. So here’s the first entry.

When you want to change your presentation’s background from PowerPoint’s default white color, you can do it in two different ways. Well, I’m sure there’s also other ways, but these are the two I use the most.

The first one is right-clicking on your slide and at the bottom of the drop down menu you have the option Format Background. When you select it, you see a window that will let you select what type of fill you want to give your slides. You can select a different color from white for your background; this is something I don’t usually recommend, unless it’s a soft tone, because it’s still one flat color. The next option is to fill it with a gradient, this is more attention-grabbing and something I usually use, if you play around with the options you can get some interesting looking backgrounds, like this:

The good thing about gradients is that they get rid of the boring flat background colors. There’s two more options, fill with a picture or texture and pattern fill; forget textures and patterns all together. When you want to use a picture as your background just navigate to the file (no clipart! I repeat, no clipart!). Finally chose if you want to use that picture or color as a background for one slide or the whole slideshow. You also have the option here to reset background and go back to the classic background.

When you use images as a background, be careful they have enough quality so they don’t look pixelated when blown up, and also try to use images that are not too busy and follow the rule of thirds.