“if you made me send the slides in advance then why the fuck am I now going to spend 10 minutes talking you through them?”
Brad Feld linked to this post from an entrepreneur (co-founder of koral.com in the interesting 2.0 enterprise freemium space - vNext as MS types call it) that sounded more seasoned than the well overdone tasteless VC prospects he was PowerPointing and doing a dance for. Funny, esp for those of us who live outside the 40 miles of Silicon Valley and find ourselves in these situations too frequently.
The great thing about the post is the play by play psycho-analysis of each character in the script. (names are offered up by email) Locally, I find successful entrepreneurs who have worked in the online industry that may now also invest, are the best to deal with (at an early stage) : Or it's back to (the sometimes inverted because of knoweldge gaps) teacher/student roles and today's class is google, mixed in with some big numbers arent they baby-talk and we can delete that clause-chatter'ing. It's all fun, if you come out the other side.
Koral.com Blog : "I started by trying to think I could explain my concept without having to patronize everybody with artificial PowerPoint slides. I thought, what would I do if I was trying to sell to a customer. My plan: verbal 5 minutes to explain the business then straight to product demo where I could cover all of the concepts that would have been in my 2-by-2 charts in my deck. Doh! Dare I steer off the course from the tried-and-true PowerPoint ritual? This approach generally works well with customers because I find it much easier to build rapport when we talk like humans than when we all stare at the PowerPoint slides being projected on the wall.
I was immediately reminded that they were interested in seeing the slides as the main partner who had courted me at DEMO in San Diego shuffled nervously through the print outs of the slides I had sent him in advance. All I kept thinking was, “if you made me send the slides in advance then why the fuck am I now going to spend 10 minutes talking you through them?” I was wrong. “Slides, please.” Okay. This is going well..."
The great thing about the post is the play by play psycho-analysis of each character in the script. (names are offered up by email) Locally, I find successful entrepreneurs who have worked in the online industry that may now also invest, are the best to deal with (at an early stage) : Or it's back to (the sometimes inverted because of knoweldge gaps) teacher/student roles and today's class is google, mixed in with some big numbers arent they baby-talk and we can delete that clause-chatter'ing. It's all fun, if you come out the other side.
Koral.com Blog : "I started by trying to think I could explain my concept without having to patronize everybody with artificial PowerPoint slides. I thought, what would I do if I was trying to sell to a customer. My plan: verbal 5 minutes to explain the business then straight to product demo where I could cover all of the concepts that would have been in my 2-by-2 charts in my deck. Doh! Dare I steer off the course from the tried-and-true PowerPoint ritual? This approach generally works well with customers because I find it much easier to build rapport when we talk like humans than when we all stare at the PowerPoint slides being projected on the wall.
I was immediately reminded that they were interested in seeing the slides as the main partner who had courted me at DEMO in San Diego shuffled nervously through the print outs of the slides I had sent him in advance. All I kept thinking was, “if you made me send the slides in advance then why the fuck am I now going to spend 10 minutes talking you through them?” I was wrong. “Slides, please.” Okay. This is going well..."
posted by redbarren at 7:54 PM
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