How To Do A Great Pitch with Guy Kawasaki

everyone welcome to Global Entrepreneurship Week we are joining more than 170 countries in celebrating entrepreneurship and the amazing innovators and entrepreneurs who make this world a greater place my name is Steve Rodriguez I am with tech starters on the startup programs regional manager for the US and Canada and we're part of the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs like you succeed we do that through various programs like tech start start weekend techstars startup week or one of the many accelerators we have all over the world and we're super humbled and inspired to bring you character today we have none other than Guy Kawasaki for those who may not know guy is a serial entrepreneur serial investor he's a host of the hip Facebook watch series wiseguy he's also involved with canva.com cheese brand ambassador for mercedes-benz and world-renowned author of titles such as hard to start to point out wiseguy lessons from a life and he's about to start his own podcast the first week of December guy Kawasaki's extraordinary people remarkable people sorry guy thank you thank you and so without further ado you want to introduce you to Guy Kawasaki who will share more as to how to do a great pitch take it away guy all right thank you so welcome to my home in Northern California in Silicon Valley I'm going to provide a very tactical and practical mini lecture about how to improve your pitch I have been an entrepreneur as well as venture capitalist so I've been on both sides of this process pitching and being pitch to and I just like to pass along some very practical tips so that you can improve your pitch so if if there's no Stephen am I ready to go just fire away can I just do it yep you are live okay okay so some tips for you so the first thing is resist the temptation to send your pitch in advance to the people you're pitching it to I think a lot of people say well I'll send it in advance this way they'll have a chance to study it they'll be familiar if you're doing it remotely that reduces the dependence on technology because you know they'll have a piece of paper or they may print it out or at least have it on their local computer so I don't have to worry as much about internet access etc etc I understand all of that theory but I think that if you send a pitch in advance actually the worst case is if they look at it in advance because they're gonna look at it without any kind of information emotion eye contact anything like that they're going to rip through it and they will already have decided about your pitch before you even come in now if they don't look at your pitch then you know logically the question is well why did I send it so the way I look at it is if you send it and they don't look at it you didn't have to send it and if you send it and they did look at it there's more much more downside than there is upside but look at the concept that you're gonna send the pitch in advance and they're gonna look at it and oh my god they're gonna be so blown away that as soon as you walk in they're gonna say well we need your your banking instructions because we don't even need to hear what you're gonna say we love your pitch so that we're gonna send you the money today yeah I mean that's about as likely as me becoming a professional surfer okay so it ain't gonna happen that way so yes don't send it in advance you need to perform this pitch in real time in person if possible and don't let anything precede you that's tip number one tip number two is kind of a shall I say de ISM that the greatest pitch is a great product this is called guys golden touch so guys golden touch is not whatever I touch turns to gold that's not true guys golden touch is whatever is gold guy touches so the key to a great pitch is is not the the keynote file or the PowerPoint file or actually you can do this in canva now canva has presentation templates sixteen by nine it's not it's it's not the pitch that makes the page great it's really the product and the people and so you could have the work the shittiest pitch in the world in terms of the document but if you have a great product you probably don't need a pitch at all so the key is to remember that it's all about the product or the service it's not about the document and if you would remember that I think one of the consequences of that is you know we got to finish our prototype finishing a prototype is more important than finishing your pitch and if you finish your prototype and now the dogs are eating the food that is the absolute best case that you know now you have a product or service and your pitch is well we released it a month ago and 10,000 people are signing up for it per day you know hallelujah I mean that's the kind of pitch I want to see as opposed to you know going into the typical drivel about we have patent-pending curve jumping paradigm shifting enterprise scale herbal product and service that can scale and is easy to use and my Rockstar co-founders and I are really passionate and we really believe and we're gonna deliver on time and we're hardworking and honest I mean you know everybody says the same thing it's all so if you can have a product that speaks for itself that's a great pitch the third point 1/2 for you is called the Guy Kawasaki rule of pitching which is 10-20-30 the 10-20-30 rule is that your pitch should have approximately 10 slides it should be able to be done in 20 minutes and the smallest font should be 30 points 10 slides if you would Google you know the only slides you need in a pitch plus Guy Kawasaki you'll find an article where I list the 10 slides that you need in a pitch it ain't 20 in 840 it ain't 5 it's 10 so you know maybe it's 12 but it ain't 20 so google that and find out the 10 things that I think are necessary in a pitch no more and it's okay to be less so 10 slides 20 minutes because meetings start late leadings end early and 30 points the reason why I force 30 points is because it forces you to put less text on your pitch and I will tell you that the less text you have on your pitch the better your pitch will be and and if you think you need 8 10 or 12 because you need complete sentences and lots of bullets and lots of graphs with lots of call-outs and all that you're deluding yourself so take all the text in all your pictures and just select it all change them all to 30 points and then keep cutting until everything fits 10 20 30 another power tip about this is that you should make your background black or at least dark I think a black background shows gravitas so seriousness it makes your pitch easier to read it just looks much more professional than a white background because basically a white background is saying I booted PowerPoint or Buddha keynote you'll never make a white background pitch with canva because we just like we refuse to put that template out there so so you know it shows gravitas and seriousness and professionalism so make your background black black is the new black the next concept is and I use an airplane analogy to to explain this you know I think a lot of people they think they need to build to a crescendo so they start off by saying yeah I'd like to introduce you know all the members of my team I want to tell you about each of our backgrounds starting from when our parents came over on the Mayflower or our parents came over from Mexico or our parents came over from Canada or you know whatever and so you tell everybody's story and then you tell a story of you know how you came up with the idea and then you tell a story of how you develop the idea and like you know 15 minutes into your pitch the people are still wondering what the hell do you do is it hardware is it software the software as a service is that you know what is it that you do because you're trying to build to this crescendo so the airplane analogy I want to use for you is yeah at the extreme there are two kinds of airplanes hey Steven can I suggest something can you mute your end because every time you move you're making noise on this okay so so here's the airplane analogy two kinds of airplanes one kind of airplane is a 787 or a 747 even though they're retired NASA 787 dreamliner 747 Airbus 380 at the other extreme is an f-16 and the Airbus 380 the 787 dreamliner it takes two miles of runway you know it kind of goes and finally to everyone's relief this you know half a million ton kind of thing takes off at the other extreme does the f-16 the f-16 is on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific it has a hundred and fifty meters catapults off it goes booth one point two seconds it's either off or in the water there are no choices all four in the water you should think of yourself as an f-16 so you want to take off fast you don't want to spend 15 minutes talking about your team talking about your education talking about your technology you know talking about the potential size of the market you're not a Dreamliner you're an f-16 get the hell off the deck as fast as possible if I were pitching canva to you in the first 30 seconds I would tell you canva is an online graphics design tool boom you know what I am you know it's it's for graphics its online it's a tool it's not content that's what people want to hear they want to know okay 30 seconds into it I get it canva is an online graphics design tool you could embellish canvas and online graphics to design tool to democratize design think of us as Photoshop for the rest of us in that twenty seconds I explain what the hell we do I didn't talk about the history of graphics the size of graphics a number of people on the internet how Instagram has you know a hundred million objects lay uploaded a day none of that bada bing bada bang f15 airplane the next thing is I want you to sell a dream selling the dream means that you get people to fantasize about how important it is that your product exists that your service exists that you say that you know in a world with so much noise the social media the presentations the Flyers the business cars the things that have beautiful design that have graphics that have you know pictures they work better they communicate better and so the person hearing that would say yeah you know that's right I mean a flyer with a great picture a great social media pose with a great picture is more effective than plain text so you're getting people to fantasize you're selling this dream of democratizing design so that everybody can have great graphics and you don't have to be a graphic designer you don't have to buy or rent Photoshop or the Creative Suite you don't have to spend six weeks learning Photoshop you know sell this fantasy that when everybody uses canva the world is gonna be a better prettier place hallelujah so sell the dream as opposed to selling the technology you know I don't tell you that canva is the SAS based platform you know written in I don't even know what it's written in Ajax or whatever it's written in and talking about all this kind of technology and all this stuff and you know hosted on AWS and I'll just like cut the and sell your dream in this world that you're proposing how is this world better sell your dream the next point the next point is to understand that the purpose of a pitch is not to get to a yes the purpose of a pitch is to avoid getting to a no it's a very very important point so I think a lot of people think ok I'm gonna pitch this thing shock and awe and at the end of this hour or in my case 20 minutes people will be so overcome with my awesomeness that they're gonna say can we get your bank wiring information we don't need to do due diligence we're gonna write you the check right now okay that ain't gonna happen so what you're trying to do is get to the next stage as opposed to being eliminated at this stage so the next stage in an investment is we like to begin our due diligence we'd like to talk to some of the people who are using your product we want to begin the investigation when people are talking about due diligence and next steps it means you haven't been thrown out and all you want to do at this point is avoid being thrown out as opposed to OMG they wrote a check in real time that is not going to happen next thing is when you're in the pitch you should be taking notes there's two reason why you're taking notes one is god forbid the people watching your pitch may have legitimate questions and concerns you need to write this down you could actually learn something in your pitch what a concept the second thing is when you are taking notes it flatters the people who are talking so if you're pitching and people are taking notes you think ah these people really care they pay attention they think I'm smart they're writing down what I'm saying so this is a very important form of flattery so when you're writing down notes when you're paying rapt attention the people around the table are thinking aloud this entrepreneur smart this entrepreneur smart because this entrepreneur is listening to me what a concept play that game and the other consequence of taking notes is now within a day follow up on the questions and the notes and if if you say in the presentation that you know you're going to follow up with answering this question something that was more technical than you wanted to go down that rat hole some market size fact that you had to have to get you know some reference that you'd like to provide some reference to some white paper you know whatever it is follow through and the way you follow through is of course you have to be smart enough to take the note to remember to follow through so I actually follow through within 24 hours and so my last point my last point is you know I told you about the 10 slide theory and you of course are going to Google that and look up what the 10 slides are but I will tell you that for me the best kind of pitch is one that actually derails even the 10 slide approach and so the way it would work is you take off like a f-15 right so canvas is an online graphics design service we have democratized design think of it as Photoshop for the rest of us we enable anyone to create beautiful graphics they don't have to buy a read Photoshop they don't have to spend weeks learning Photoshop they don't have to submit a creative spec to the designers and wait for weeks for it to happen anybody can create beautiful graphics boom done you know what canva is and then you say we're currently getting tens of thousands of people signing up for it and rather than you know me try to explain the market size and me trying to explain our competitive advantage let me do a short demo so then you go into a demo and you show them how easy it is to use how they could use it and the five-minute demo becomes a 15 minute demo maybe a 20 minute demo and then you look up and you say oh my god I only got the slide three and then we went down this rathole called my demo but people are so enraptured by my demo they don't want to hear about the rest of the earth you know seven eight slides about your depending group jumping paradigm platform with your world-class team that's never created a company before they're so enamored by what they saw that their heads are exploding and all they can think about is oh my god my kids could use this for their homework my spouse could use this for his presentations my parents could use this to make Christmas cards the PTA could use this for flyers my real estate office now every real estate broker could create their own flyers for new listings it's all because of the demo so in a perfect pitch you derail your pitch and you have a great demo and then you look up and you say oh the meeting has to end and the people say we'd like to continue this discussion we would like to talk to some people who are using canva we would like to also begin due diligence about your corporate structure your capital table your cap table you know whatever it is so you haven't been thrown out there is another step which is due diligence and I will tell you if you will do these things which I just discussed in the last 18 minutes your pitch will be better than 95% of the pitches in the world just do what I just said and that is the art of the pitch in 20 minutes because if I'm telling you to give your pitch in 20 minutes I sure as hell should be able to give mine in 20 minutes so that's the art of the pitch so we got any questions yes Gaiam thank you so much I guess one question that came in was how do we get the slide to it I know it might be on your website the the slides to what the ten slides at any entrepreneurship should use well I mean again they should just Google you know the only slides you need in a pitch by Guy Kawasaki and there will be a list of slides and listen you know yeah obviously provide you a template but like give me a break okay so I'm telling you you only need ten slides with very little text you're telling me that you can't type ten slides I mean let me see let me just see if you can't handle creating ten slides you're not gonna be successful as an entrepreneur I mean this is not gonna be the hardest thing you have to do so the hardest thing in this process is me telling you what ten slides to use not me providing you a template so you don't have to type in ten pieces of text give me a break man now another person asked them what was the best pitch you saw oh yeah I'm taking so long to answer that question good I can't remember that many good pitches I I will tell you that for me anyway and maybe I'm the only person in the world the best pitch for me is not using keynote or PowerPoint or even canva the the best pitch for me is starting off by saying let me show you a demo I think a demo is worth a thousand slides now for another one you know how did you get involved with canva did you get pitched yes yes so I was very active this is five almost six years ago I was very active already on Twitter and I believe with every tweet goes a picture so someone who was working with me or is still working with me on social media named peg Fitzpatrick see she was using canva to create all my Twitter graphics and so canva noticed that I was using canva and they sent me a tweet and you're asking if I like the product and you know can we meet etc etc so I reach out to peg I said Pig canva is that the thing you're using to make our Twitter graphics and she said yes I said is it good she said it's very good and I said you think I should help them and she said yes you should help them and that's how canva found me I didn't find canva now guy they said you know when it comes to this and this way of pitching and this move how do you make it work for a social enterprise that's geared towards more of a social cause like let's say mental health I don't think that the rules change very much I mean you still have to take off like an f15 you know yeah you need to explain in the first 30 seconds you know we address K through 12 kids who have learning disabilities with a software application duh now I understand what you do so that's the same you have to sell a dream where you know kids with learning differences they're not handicapped they can have productive successful lives that's your dream 10 slides to explain this dream you know try to try to devolve into a quick demo of what you do how does this dream get realized you know so far I haven't come up with a big difference here another question is you know we're repeatedly hearing that just 2 to 3 percent of funding goes to women for example yeah yeah it's your perspective on that and how can we change those numbers ok so first of all the fact that 2 to 3 percent or whatever that low number is is women to me is just so freakin stupid I cannot even relate to that like it seems to me that it is so hard to find good stuff into to invest in right so it's like one out of a hundred things is worth investing in so it's so hard to find a good investment it's so hard to find a good team it's so hard to find a good CEO why would you make your job harder by saying I don't even know if it's conscious but why would you make your job harder by saying well I will only invest in young male white Ivy League graduates that is such a dumbass approach because you know what it's so hard to find the right people why would you reduce the the the gene pool from which you can draw so that's how I feel about that number I mean listen if you have a world-class idea I don't care if you're male female transsexual bisexual heterosexual homosexual uh-uh like I could the real question is are you gonna dent the universe and are you gonna make money doing it that's the that's the only salient question so there was two parts to this question so first of all what do I feel about it was second part do to do how do we change those numbers okay okay okay okay so you know what as an entrepreneur I don't think your goal in life should be I want to change that number right you know you don't go into a potential investor saying my goal in life is to get more women funded that's not your goal in life your goal in life is to get funded and build a great company if you get funded and build a great company you will add a tick mark to that percentage so the goal is to get great companies built and if you do that and I say without limiting your gene pool then that number will change and for any particular entrepreneur I don't think you should let that number get to your brain okay because if you start thinking oh my god you know only 2% of women get funded I'm a woman it's just not gonna happen you know the statistics are against me well statistically you are probably right but that said your concern is not to get 50% women funded your concern is you just want to get your deal funded so I think if you look at national sports professional artist professional musicians professional hockey players professional surfers anything you know it's it's one out of a thousand people who are successful so if you look at those numbers to be professional athlete musician artists whatever the odds are one of a thousand but but to be that one of a thousand you have to ignore that statistic and believe you are for one of the thousands so the key here is I mean yes it's good to know that you know what the odds are what the math is but you know what at the end of the day it's not about getting everybody else funded all you care about is getting yourself funded and you should ignore that macro statistic another example along these lines let's say that you know we'll take two cases one is you read in TechCrunch or verb or you know verge or whatever that ah venture capital funding is down for seed stage down 50% year-over-year so what's your reaction oh my god funding is down 50% I'll never get funded know if that's your attitude you are not an entrepreneur your editor should be well funding is down 50% but do I give a about that backwards statistics no I just want to get one company funded mine so the key here is to get your company funded not to change the macro statistics now the flip side also works the flip side being you pick up TechCrunch sure you pick up Vox or you know whatever and you say ah year-over-year venture capital funding has doubled oh my god twice as much money has come in for early-stage compared to a year ago but you're not funded so this is the opposite case yeah things have doubled but I'm not funded well does that make you happy that the macro statistic is much better no because you're not funded so the bottom line is look out for number one just get your old ass funded thank you guy and we're gonna take two more questions and we're okay time one how can somebody pitch to you guy is there a website is there a venture that you're a part of um no I really I am not active as that invest there anymore my life is dedicated to canva mercedes-benz brand ambassador I do 50 something speeches a year I have four children and I have a podcast so I very very seldom write a check anymore I can't remember the last time I wrote a check I almost will never write a check sometimes I will get involved for options because of my expertise but I I'm at that stage of life where my currency is my expertise not my money so if you just want my money I'm telling you it ain't gonna happen my expertise and might happen if you you know knock my socks off with your demo so yeah its I'm in a different stage of life thank you guy and last question any any parting words of wisdom any inspirational quote anything you want to leave with the community well I just want to leave the community to remember that the purpose of a company is not to get funded you know I think many entrepreneurs they're so obsessed with PowerPoint and Keynote or even canva and Word and Excel because they're gonna create this like just shock and awe pitch and they think that oh you know once we get the money that's the hard part the easy part is building the company man you are clueless so when you get the money that's when the real work begins so just remember that the purpose of a company is to create customers not pitches not raise money and that's when the hard work begins so understand the game you're getting into so that's thought number one thought number two is that I think you should approach venture capital as your last resort not your first resort because the odds of receiving venture capital are roughly equal to standing at the bottom of a pool and getting struck by lightning on a sunny day you know the odds are just very poor again you only care about you getting funded but you should know the odds are very poor so don't look at venture capital as well that's the starting point I get that and I begin you should believe in your concepts so much that you're going to begin whether you get venture capital or not that's the fundable deal and so so today with the democratization of servers and the democratization of tools and social media as a marketing engine it costs a lot less money to start a company hallelujah good news is cheaper to start a company easier to start a company bad news is more people start companies but you know life's a so I think you you have to remember that and the the third point which is kind of a returning to the first point is focus on your prototype because the object of a company is to create customers you cannot create customers with pitches you create customers with prototypes so work on the prototype one more thing okay yeah I want all of you to subscribe to my podcast ok so this is a reinvention of myself as a podcaster because I have never done it before and you could find out information and subscribe to my podcast at remarkable people.com so you know I gave you all my knowledge I'm gonna give you a lot more knowledge in my podcast so remarkable people.com awesome we've just included in the stream thank you so much have a great weekend have a great Thanksgiving take care everybody you

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Length: 34min 56sec (2096 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019