Presentation and Pitching skills for Entrepreneurs

One of the more undocumented benefits of Y Combinator is that Paul Graham is very good at advising YC companies on how to present and pitch their companies. I have watched YC companies transition their pitch from awful to awe inspiration.

As an entrepreneur you are always ‘selling’ your idea. Half of your sell is obviously how good the business opportunity is. However the pitch and how it is delivered can change everything.

I am on a fund raising panel in Y Combinator today and Jude and I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Seedcamp a couple of weeks ago. An important topic that I talk about is presentation skills. Here are some notes I made:

Be Confident

Confidence is probably more important than anything else. You should:

1. Talk loudly and clearly
2. Look straight at the audience, not at the slides or down
3. Be calm and relaxed, but at the same time convey your enthusiasm and excitement
4. Make a joke or two

A lack of confidence can really undermine a whole pitch. Entrepreneurs have to sell their business to clients, employees, acquirers, themselves etc. If there is a noticeable lack of confidence in the pitch it is assumed that would also carry through to other attributes of the business.

Practice a Lot

Practice goes hand in hand with confidence. By the time you get to an important presentation you should have every single line memorized. You should be able to deliver the presentation without looking at the slides or q-cards.
Steps to practice.

1. Practice to yourself at least 10 times and write down every single point you plan to convey
2. Pitch in front of your co-founders/friends
3. Pitch in front of people you respect, like other entrepreneurs and get their feedback
4. Constantly iterate your slides, pitch based on feedback

Know and Convey your Market

How big is the market opportunity? Sometimes the answer to that question is obvious. Most of the time in early startups the market opportunity is not obvious. You should know what your market is and have at least one slide which clearly states your market opportunity/size with some justification.

Do a Good Demo

It is particularly annoying to me when someone goes up on stage and says they are building “a new way to discover and share content” or “a new enterprise productivity tool” and fail to give an actual product demo. There is nothing that can explain a web app better than the app itself. You should fire it up and step through a few screens showing your most exciting and differentiated features. Demos go a long way to showing that you can actually execute on your vision.

Don’t say Anything Negative!

Statements that should not be in your pitch

1. We are young and inexperienced
2. The market size is small
3. The product is still buggy
4. We are having a hard time raising any money.
5. A lot of people have failed in this space
6. We are going to give this idea 3 months to see if it sticks

Pitching is not the time to talk about negative things. If there is a big elephant in the room then talk directly about how you are going to solve it, or have it resolved before pitching. The pitch is not the place to be negative.

Address the Core points

Venture Hacks has a good post about what should be talked about in a pitch: http://venturehacks.com/articles/deck. In a more public pitch you probably want to change the contents slightly, but don’t miss the core, obvious points. Make sure you cover your team, market, traction, technology and financing.

Explicitly Talk About your Current Status

Often after a presentation I have no idea whether the product has been launched or when it is going to launch. Sometimes the fact that the product is launched is mentioned very late into the pitch. Talking about your status early on puts the whole pitch in context. If your second sentence in your presentation is

We launched last month and are already serving 20k people a month and growing 20% every week

Then you already sound awesome and you haven’t even started your presentation.

Show Graphs of Traction.

If you have launched show graphs of some real numbers. People often have absolute numbers with no graphs, which always seems strange to me.

Only One Person Should Speak

The audience develops a relationship with the presenter and the presenter controls the story. Sometimes people switch the presenters half way through or even worse throughout the talk. This is hardly ever a good idea.

Make Jokes and be Light-Hearted

This goes along with the point about confidence. Have one or two lines lined up that are amusing, don’t take this too far but if you can say something funny to break up the presentation and be memorable then take the opportunity. If you seem friendly and funny people will know you are good to work with and confidant.

Finally...

Based on the situation how you pitch and what you say will change dramatically. There are specific bits of advice that I could talk about for sales pitches vs. 1-on-1 investor pitches. I might put those in a separate post or I am happy to answer questions on them.

Interview on Mixergy about Y Combinator

I had the pleasure today of doing an interview on Mixergy with Sachin (Posterous) and Howie (Etacts). Mixergy is awesome, Andrew does a great job of getting insightful entrepreneur interviews. Original interview is here.

I am still not used to the sound of my own voice! Enjoy:

Internet stocks Predictions for 2020 (GOOG, AMZN, maybe FCBK?)

One thing I would like to do more of is invest in Internet stocks. Since I live and breathe the Internet, I’m more adept to make better judgements of companies than the market. I thought it would be interesting to go through the top Internet (tech) stocks now and predict where the companies will be in 10 years time.

I am including companies like Apple and Microsoft, who are not all about the Internet, for now at least, but clearly will be shape it in the next 10 years. This won’t be a comprehensive list of tech companies, as I like to make informed predictions.

Factors to be considered for a 10 year prediction

I was analysing companies for the following attributes:

• Foremost is innovation, in 10 years the Internet will be a different place and the only companies that will grow are those that innovate daily.
• Strong technology and network affects. Both of these factors lead to long term stability on the Internet.
• In large markets that have lots of room to grow.
• Either already sufficient diversified or have the positioning to be diversified in the future. Diversification goes hand in hand with innovation, all innovative companies would tend to become diversified in the long term.

Winners - Predictions of the rising stars:

Google (GOOG)

I am always in favor of the under dog and feel that the Internet is dynamic enough that most cash cows will die and other things will take over within 10 years. However Google never fails to impress me. They are vertically and horizontally integrating into every part of the Internet (YouTube, Google DNS, Google OS etc). Their constant innovation will ensure that they don’t become irrelevant. They clearly missed Social Networking, but they keep doing everything else right.

At the end of the day as long as Google controls search, the conduit to the Internet will still be theirs. Without a strong social network, they do lose the random “discovery” aspect of the Internet, but I think they can control the rest of how people get to data. Or conversely, if it becomes important, they could buy Facebook, Twitter or Digg. For now, their search deals with Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, ensure they won’t be totally left behind as the social web expands.

Amazon (AMZN)

Amazon is a ridiculously smart company. They continue to innovate in areas that most people don’t realize; they control e-commerce and continue to extend themselves to be much more than an e-commerce site but a platform (through fulfilment and their market place etc). With One-click payments and Amazon Flexible Payments, they are also one of the easiest way to pay for things online. AWS make them the leader in cloud computing infrastructure.

The things Amazon does in-house are leading the technology world (AWS, Kindle), they also make great acquisitions (see Zappos, Alexa, IMDB). It is really hard to see how Amazon will not continue to own e-commerce online and extend themselves in to synergistic verticals/ horizontals.

Apple (AAPL)

There are enough fan boys out there that I don’t need to sell Apple too much. Their Achilles heel is that they are more closed than Microsoft and that might hurt them, but in terms of the ability to innovate and change hardware they are un-paralleled. Hardware and computer interfaces still have a long way to go, and Apple will probably be the one to push them for the foreseeable future. Their only weakness is their Web app ability (and their closed nature), which in some ways might kill them if hardware innovation becomes too commoditized, but I don’t think that is happening too soon.

Activision Blizzard (ATVI)

ATVI has a market cap of 14bn, but there’s still opportunity for them to expand. World of Warcraft is under-leveraged yet continues to reap large revenues. Diablo III will be a big hit. Guitar Hero is awesome. Almost everything they touch is high quality and does very well. If they do a reasonable job with launching on new platforms (Facebook + Mobile) and take advantage of Virtual Goods based models, they will continue to be successful.

Comscore (SCOR)

I didn’t realize ComScore was public until I was doing research for this blog post. The Internet is going to become even bigger in terms of Market Share and usage, on top of that, analysing the Internet has yet to be perfected. I think there will be more innovation in this space and ComScore will push/ buy a lot of it. It also seems very undervalued.

Facebook (not public yet)

I was going to put Facebook in the next category (unstable), but actually I think most tech people underestimate Facebook. Even though they are not yet the biggest website in the world, they have, by far, the most information about their registered users. Facebook has really changed the Internet, and they are collecting together smart people to continue innovating. The thing that might destroy them is similar to what might destroy Apple, they are a walled garden. The Internet and entrepreneurs don’t like being imprisoned in walls and so will fight it. If they open up or become more infrastructural then they might stop the anti-wall tide. So far, it seems that that is their goal with Facebook Platform.

Facebook could at some point switch on a revenue stream that would surprise us all. That might be in Facebook payments or it might be in something else, but as long as they are experimenting, I am sure they will find it and when they do they will be very formidable. As they have leverage with their userbase and don’t have to solve the “chicken or the egg” problem.

Zynga (not public yet)

Perhaps I am slightly biased (Union Square Ventures invested in Heyzap and Zynga), but Zynga has grown ridiculously fast, and I am sure they will have a long way to go before they peak. They define a whole new era of gaming and execute tenaciously on their goals. I imagine they will continue to do bigger and bigger hits across many more platforms.

Skype (not public yet)

I love Skype. They have a massive and growing user base. They control Internet telephony and even before they were spun off they were making great moves in Video Chat and offline phones. I can imagine in 10 years, every mobile/ land-line will be Skype enabled. I am sure if they do more innovation for a couple of years and re-list it will be much higher than their spin-off price.


Unstable - Predictions of the ones that will go either very high or fall very low

Paypal (EBAY)

Paypal is in a great place as they could effectively be the “Bank of the Internet.” On a personal level, I have been locked out of my Paypal multiple times, and their recovery procedures can be a real pain so that bit I don’t like about them. Also I don’t really see that much innovation coming from them. Overall I really don’t know what will happen with Paypal, options are:

• A disruptive startup comes along and takes their market. Something like Square, Facebook or a better Internet bank
• They keep their share and nothing much happens
• They innovate more and start taking on other banks more directly

Twitter (not public yet)

Really undecided on whether Twitter will be around in 10 years. They still have some time to go before they are really mature and have a scalable business model. They do provide a lot of value and have a good network effect of users so that’s something that they could leverage to continue to grow.

Microsoft (MSFT)

As much as Microsoft missed the Internet, they are still around and still making a ton of profit. No one is really making a dent on their enterprise foot hold of the OS and Office, though many are making valiant efforts (Google Docs). They are also finally doing something right with Bing. Also they are owning the traditional console market with Xbox 360. Given their cash reserves and overall impetus, I wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with other cash cows and preserve their existing ones. Alternatively, they may just continue to miss the boat and Windows+Office could become completely irrelevant as everything moves to the web. That’s why I put them in the unstable section.

Yahoo! (YHOO)

They are so low that the only way is up. They have really made some awful strategic moves with giving away search to Bing, but I do think that they could come up with something. Yahoo has a lot of users with their portal, mail, IM and Flickr, so if they could just do something right then they could galvanise those users in to making money. Also Yahoo Finance is still way better than Google finance hence the links below, (still nothing beats Bloomberg, why not?).


Boring - Predictions of the neutral

I won’t comment on these companies. Mostly they have some strong sites/ domains in their portfolio and are likely to survive and continue to acquire other good companies. I wouldn’t expect much actual innovation though.


Expedia (EXPE)


Flowers.com (FLWS)


Netflix (NFLX)

Note on Netflix: I think the whole market is shrinking, prices of on-demand Movies are going to go down and people are going to either pay very little at home or lots in the cinema. Maybe 3d movies and other technology could save them.

Fail - Predictions of the fallen

Myspace (part of Newscorp)

Myspace is quickly becoming irrelevant, and that is FIM’s biggest site.They are currently under-leveraged, but alas don’t think it’s going to happen.

Ebay (EBAY)

Ebay seems to have forsaken its auctions business, the consumer experience has not improved for 5 years and everything is about power sellers. I think Amazon is going to beat them at the power sellers business, and someone else may come along with a dedicated consumer auctions business and take that market.

[Update removed Omniture as it was acquired by Adobe in 2009]

Priceline (PCLN)

Was tempted to put Priceline in neutral, but I still feel like in 10 years they won't be around. Not very impressed with my experience of them. Seems very gimmicky and slightly scammy (see CNET article).

Verisign (VRSN)

I don’t have a good feeling about Verisign. SSL and .com seem like their cash cows and those are not long-term businesses. A lot of other stuff they do seems to be more of giving an impression of security rather than true security. This part is not that well researched so take it with a grain of salt.

Conclusions

I am very optimistic about the Internet. I am certain that at least 100 other companies will be on this list in 10 years time and most likely even my favorites will disappear. The Internet is still in its infancy, and there is still room for tremendous growth. It certainly is an exciting time to be in the industry!


Notes:

Nasdaq Internet Index (QNET) - Was a useful source of info

Thanks to Dru Wynings and Jude Gomila for reviewing this post.

All views are mine, and don't make any investment decisions based on what I say :).


Heyzap is hiring

We are always looking for talented engineers and entrepreneurs to help us grow: Check out http://www.heyzap.com/jobs and email us jobs@heyzap.com!

Definition of Success

I think people's views on business and personal success are too simple.

It is fairly routine for the tech community to criticize some companies and founders because their company is not yet profitable (especially 37signals). I think they are largely missing the point of what success is. Twitter has changed the way millions of people communicate and it is routinely used and talked about, even if it is not profitable it and the founders has achieved something rare and remarkable.

37signals recently put down the success of the Mint.com acquisition. I am sure the founders have had an amazing journey and in no way could you say they have not achieved personal success.

What is (Business) success?

Profit

On one level, profit is what every business should aim for. But pure profit does not necessarily maximize the long-term viability and success of a company so I would not consider a business successful purely based on that especially when it comes to relatively new innovative startups. Here are some other factors that may be equally or more important.

Employing Great, Highly Talented People

People are the backbone of any innovative tech company. If you lose talent or don’t employ the best you would quickly squander any profit.

Long term Viable Market Position

There are many things that can destroy a company.

• Insufficient R&D - falling behind its competitors
• Legal problems
• Unhappy customers
• Potential commoditization of product
• Squeezing on the supply/demand side

Disrupting Markets and Creating Innovative Products

If you don’t continually innovate than someone will come and take your market. The best companies like Google know this and invest a lot into new products, acquisitions and people.

Scalable business model

Some models such as consulting do not scale very well. In order to increase profit you have to increase staff, and it tends to be time consuming to build up scale like that. Other models such as on-line market places scale tremendously well, such that 40 people can run hundred-million dollar revenue companies.

Having High growth

When specific metrics that increase the companies “long term viable market position” are growing exponentially.

Large customer base

Corrolary to High growth is companies that have a large customer base. These can potentially up-sell very well and presumably already have some data and brand with their customers.

Powerful Market position

Market ecosystems are interesting to try to map out.

• Who are the players?
• Who are their suppliers?
• Which plays are in the most powerful position?
• What are their potential risks?
• What are their potential future plans?
• What are they in a great position to execute on?

Some market positions lead to minimized risk and maximized potential. Here are some attributes of a powerful position.

• Great data on customers – data can provide lock-in and understanding data can help you create better products
• Amazing brand and respect from customers
• Inextricably linked to a valuable point in the flow of money. For example a search engine.
• Fragmented demand-side and supply-side dynamics.

That is in no way an exhaustive list.

What is (personal) success?

Although I have no where near achieved what I want to, in many ways I consider myself successful. Here are some personal ongoing definitions of success I have:

• Learn new things
• Try to achieve as high as possible
• Work on something meaningful where I have a big impact
• Work with great people.
• Build a large network of friends/associate.
• Never work on anything I am not passionate about

Obviously money would aid some of these goals but it would not change everything.

When I evaluate a company’s success, I try to look at the above criteria for business success, which hopefully helps evaluate how successful I think it will be on an ongoing basis. Hope that helps and makes you think twice about what success is.

Heyzap is hiring

We are always looking for talented engineers and entrepreneurs to help us grow: Check out http://www.heyzap.com/jobs and email us jobs@heyzap.com!

Heyzap story Q1-Q2 2009 :)

I seem to be very bad at keeping this blog up to date (as you can see from the last 4 months). A lot has happened this year and I thought I would sum it all up for myself and you.

January – Heyzap Launch

In January we launched Heyzap, we were very focused on launching as quickly as possible and we had to work hard to meet the demands of our partners. We worked very long hours launching new sizes, APIs, reworking the front page and number other critical pieces for our product.

March-April – Raising money

Raising money from Y Combinator is very different from raising money from Angels/VCs. Although Jude and I have both done business for 2 years this is the first time we were pitching to investors and raising a sizable chunk.We found out we had a lot to learn and Y Combinator alumni were a great resource for us during this phase. We then reached Y Combinator demo day in the right place. We had some investors interested and the product was doing really well.

We closed our funding with Albert from Union Square Ventures Leading, Naval Ravikant (Hit Forge), Joshua Schachter (Delicious) and Maurice Werdegar (as an angel but a WTI partner) also took part.

April - Swinefighter

In early April, Jude and I had the idea of doing a Swine Flu game: Swinefighter. This was inspired by the success of Sock and Awe and we thought it would be funny and successful. This deserves another blog post but it was truly successful. It was featured in TIME, USA Today, Reuters and a ton of other places. It had millions of game plays. The overall exercise probably took 2 weeks from conception to peak distribution and taught us a lot about creating massive word of mouth successes and how the press works.

May onwards – Scaling

James, an old friend of Jude and I, joined the team. We also have a couple of interns now and are recruiting. It is really cool to be a larger team and have our vision combine with new blood and push the product forward. We are going to grow as aggressively as possible.

May-July – Heyzap Payments

Heyzap payments launched this month. There is a lot of engagement in flash games both on the Heyzap platform and thousands of portals, we thought there was a huge opportunity to integrate virtual goods in a better way and monetize users directly. Launch has been great, here is a game with Heyzap payments that I love: Mobster Defense

Conclusions

Albert and USV have really exceeded my expectaitions in terms of intelligent support and advice they give us. I have learnt a lot about investors in this time and I am pretty much certain we chose the best investors).

Heyzap goes through phases of working very hard on a given objective. It really is exhilarating.

The list of things I have learned and what I want to talk about in the future include understanding press, how to raise funding, how to iterate. A lot about partners. How to build scalable systems. How to burn the fire when it is in place.

Heyzap launches! The forming of Heyzap and some lessons learnt

As most of you already know I recently just launched my latest start-up Heyzap.com with Jude Gomila.

Heyzap is Y Combinator funded (like my previous start-up Clickpass).


Since Clickpass has been in acquisition discussions for some time I have been unable to talk about most of what was going on in my life publicly. I left Clickpass in September and setup Heyzap with Jude , and its been crazy with exciting developments and learning experiences.

For me personally the team is far more important than the idea and I have known Jude for 10+ years. His skills fit great with mine, he has a brilliant product+design sense and works like a machine. We brain-stormed quite a few ideas and quickly decided that we both really wanted to work in gaming. After a few iterations and lots of thinking, the idea behind Heyzap was born.

Since the conceptualization of Heyzap, about three months ago, we have been working non-stop. After launching the work has increased by several orders of magnitude, and the hours I work have become insane. Before a product is launched there is always a little hesitation and concern, regardless of how bullet proof all your assumptions are.

The response has been amazing. We were covered by Techcrunch, Mashable, Venturebeat, TinyComb, Geek, as well as many of other websites in various languages (heyzap.com/docs/press).

It has now been two weeks since we launched but the excitment is still pumping in our veins.

From my experience at Revmap and Clickpass and most stories I have heard from entrepreneurs, I was expecting a big fall in traffic post launch and that we would have to fight our way to growth. But for Heyzap it has been completely different. The longer tail Blog pick-up (google Heyzap) and the hundreds of Heyzap installs has seen us sustain the game play tempo.

As of last week we were almost catching with our launch traffic which is impressive enough. Since last week however we have seen some astronomical rise in growth and are now doing approximately 10 million minutes of game play per month! Yes I know that is a crazy big number. Heyzap has not only seen a lot more uniques than I expected but we have seen great engagement per user.

(I would be more specific but that is probably going to be on our Heyzap blog when we are ready to release figures.).

Here are some places you can see us in action

• My blog side bar :)
• Cooliris - Great integration with their addon. Looks amazing
• Weebly - Drag and drop module on their site.
• Wireclub (requires signup), http://gattune.blog.br/jogos, http://www.6-eren.dk/spil, Dhingana
• and many many other sites and blogs.

So here are some lessons learnt about things that we probably did right.

When to launch

Don’t launch in December. We were probably ready to launch from the 17th of December, but decided against it. That was a good decision.

Launch Early! I know everyone says this and I am contradicting my first point :). But we could have build a few more features and waited for some partnerships that were in the pipelines. The launch has brought us a lot of opportunity, traction and coverage. It has also directed the company to work in the right direction (that last point is probably the most important)

Press

Get as much press as possible. Talk to as many blogs and media as you can (obviously don’t spam). The emphasis varies from start-up to start-up.

Distribution and marketing is a major part of start-up success. Press can definitely play a part in that, and in this phase of Heyzap it has worked really well for us. Partly because our Heyzap’s publishers are tech blog readers.

Mashable was very good for creating a lot of follow-on non-US blog posts. This press part could have a whole blog post about how we contacted press and what we prepared, I will leave that to Jude to write about.

Another thing about getting multiple press articles is that they talk about you in different ways and help you understand better how to market your product.

Other things we did right.

• We kept to minimum feature spec. I think that is always very important. It is hard to determine what to do until you launch.
• This is the first time I have worked on a big project with Jude. Definitely happy with the co-foundership.
• As usual we learnt a lot and adapted.

Things we can learn from

• Keep admin work to a minimum. We did a lot of stuff at the start that wasn’t strictly product. Focusing fully on product would have been a better strategy because once its out it develops itself and admin can always be slotted into smaller time spaces.
• Don't spend too long on technology that you aren't making progress with. Stick to what you know and keep executing fast.
  

Conclusion

I want to thank everyone for their support and feedback. I encourage you to go and waste at least 30 minutes on Heyzap right now :P

Synthasite acquires Clickpass!

Just in case anyone missed the news, my previous company, Clickpass, was acquired by Synthasite. This is great news for everyone and I am happy I can finally talk about it :).

I wanted to congratulate my co-founder, Peter Nixey, on this great accomplishment and his hard work. I moved on to pastures new a couple of months ago, and he is entirely responsible for the Clickpass acquisition. He is a smart guy and Synthasite is sure to benefit from his expertise and what we have worked on at Clickpass for the last year.

We have had a crazy ride at Clickpass for the last year. OpenID has gone from strength to strength, though for most Internet users it still remains a major uptapped opportunity. I want to thank our partners: Plaxo, Scribd, Disqus, Backtype, Ma.gnolia, LittleCarbonFeet, Skribit etc. These guys joined us very early on and to trust us to help them in such a crucial part of there service (login/registraion) is obviously a big step. We would definately not be where we are today without their support. Here is our compete graph, Clickpass is distributed so we get a lot of hits, but clearly we are doing well and the trend should accelerate!



A lot goes behind the scenes in a start-up and that is even more true in the middle of an acquisition, I sometimes think its a shame I can't talk about some of the things that happen. Once everything settles, and provided everyone is happy for me to do so, hopefully I will be able to talk more about the details.

We were thinking of and working on several things internally at Clickpass and it would be great to see how Clickpass and everything we have done grows and integrates within Synthasite. Peter has a great title as Vice President of trust, identity and reputation and it goes to show that Synthasite is ahead of the pack in taking a close look at identity and what follows from identity.

Synthasite is a great service, in a big market and I have every confidence that Clickpass and our users have found a great home.

On an unrelated note, stay tuned to learn more about what is next for me! ;)