…then I cannot stress these books enough. Taken from a Harvard Business School course on Entrepreneurship, these books provide a solid background and insight into the world of startups, new businesses and VC mindset.

You can order the whole set directly from Harvard press by clicking here.

The book set is as follows:

Description:
Surviving and thriving in your own venture requires more than guts and a great idea. You need to understand both the opportunities and the pitfalls along the path to success. This collection is essential reading for anyone involved in a startup.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan

“Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan’s bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as “Discovery-Driven Planning,” the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs.”

Harvard Business Review on Entrepreneurship by Various Authors

“From the preeminent thinkers whose work has defined an entire field to the rising stars who will redefine the way we think about business, The Harvard Business Review Paperback Series delivers the fundamental information today’s professionals need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.”

Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories by Udayan Gupta

“Until a few years ago,” notes journalist-consultant Udayan Gupta, “venture capitalists were hardly on anyone’s radar screen.” That’s not the case these days, as financiers who used to work behind the scenes now regularly set markets afire with their public support of high-profile technology and Internet stocks. In Done Deals, Gupta allows 35 of the brightest stars in what has become a $30-billion-a-year business to tell their own stories in their own words.”

The Monk & The Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living  by Randy Komisar

“Prospective entrepreneurs may think they know everything there is to know about starting a business in Silicon Valley. They can draw up business plans, have meetings with venture capitalists, maybe even get funded and actually launch a start-up. However, in The Monk and the Riddle, Silicon Valley sage Randy Komisar reasons that’s only half the equation for success. To illustrate, Komisar takes the reader through a hypothetical Silicon Valley start-up, with an eager entrepreneur named Lenny trying to get funding for an online casket-selling business. As Komisar helps Lenny find the real purpose of the business, the passion behind the revenue projections, he reflects back on his life as an entrepreneur. Komisar emerges as a master storyteller, the kind of guy you’d feel honored to share a bottle of wine with. And you believe his conclusion: “When all is said and done, the journey is the reward.”

Read them all.

When you are done, read them all again.

You’re welcome.

It must be frustrating not to know first hand what to expect when pitching to a VC or Angel for the first time. I mean, you can read all you want and your friends, mentors and other people who have gone through it can reenact the experience but what about if you could sit and watch a real pitch to some Angels ‘as it happens’? I say ‘as it happens’ because the show is recorded but there is a show that is on BBC America which originated in the UK called Dragons Den and is as close to being in a pitch yourself as it gets.

It gets intensive when you are doing those PowerPoints. And there are so many of them, to so many people; friends and family, prospective clients, strategic partners, Angels and of course, VCs.

You just want to make it so right and believe me, the way the slides start out are never how they end up being presented. It is a good feeling though, when you see your idea and vision take fairly impressive shape. If like me it is something you are not used to – I was a Technical Project Manager for Cisco Systems, building WAN & LAN networks across Europe, Middle East & Africa. Tactical as they come!! – then you bring people in, read a shed load of books, learn and repeat strategic principles over and over again until they become second nature. I was only thinking the other day if I could go back to an employee at a big company again. My brain is definitely coded differently now but in a good way. The ability to seek out and identify opportunity is something you can never turn off once switched on.

But you can get stuck on ‘over detailing’ the nonsense because you are so intent on making that lasting impression. It doesn’t matter. Really. Let me give you an example and then let you know what Angels and Venture Capitalists are really looking for based on an evangelical proposal from a VC guru you made have heard of, Guy Kawasaki. By the way, if you haven’t heard of Mr Guy Kawasaki, click on the link, have a stroll around his blog and subscribe to his daily offerings. Very good advice and some really useful book and general business information links.

Okay, so building one particular presentation that had two audiences; some angel investors and a major rail system operator in the US, I became so wound up in making sure the presentation looked perfect that I started to stray away from the content (which is something you will tend to do towards the end of the process of building the slide content – at the point when it is almost right) and started to focus on the colors, the photographs, the format of the graphs, the master slide format, the color and shape of the horizontal bars and the bullet points. It started to consume to the point I felt the presentation was never going to be ready. I would sit up, obsessed with making perfect bullet points out of a gif of the logo of my company. And not just one night. Oh no, many nights would I fret about the way the presentation was going to be perceived and the subliminal messages I could give on the attention to detail and professionalism of my company and the people running it. At a certain red eyed point, I had a revelation and I don”t remember whether I got to it myself, or whether my wife came down during the night and beat me across the head or whether my business partner gave me the wake up call in the form of a booted boney foot up my ass.

It’s all relative and bigger in my head.

If you knew what the people on the other side of the desk would be thinking, you – as I did eventually – would not give a flying feck about the shape of the horizontal line on slide 6 and 8. It really doesn’t matter one tiny iota and the cold hard fact is that it is only you that is watching.

So Mr kawasaki has read and listened to literally thousands of pitches in PowerPoint format and so I am going to echo his rules for pitching to any VC or Angel. Only tip I can give on top of this is make the slides clear and easy to read. Understand that they may be sent electronically, passed around after being photocopied and even faxed so make sure the PPT, just like any good logo can be read just as well in black and white.

Guy Kawasaki and the 10/20/30 Rule

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.

The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that Guy sees have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. Guy guarantees it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the he offers an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

On top of that, make sure the slides are neat, clutter free and able to translate to a black and white format. Forget about fancy photos, leave the over designed horizontal rules and above all else:

Don’t sweat the bullets.

Grin Fucking.

Doesn’t sound like something nice does it? We British have a way with words that my Sister in Law calls ‘Politely Offending’. “Sometimes Tony, you say something that appears to be nice and I think about it as you walk away and then I realize … hold on … he just insulted me!”

Well, Grin Fucking is a second removed American cousin of Politely Offending and is used frequently at conferences right at the end of a conversation and is immediately preceded with something along the lines of “Yeah, lets keep in touch!”. They say that phrase and give you a smile that you think means ‘Yeah!! Let’s keep in touch!’ and you exit stage left with a spring in your step that only an executive at a large catch could give you when he smiles like that.

You follow up by phone, no reply.
You send emails. Again, no reply.
You were Grin Fucked.

Happens to the best of us. I was at a conference in Washington in the early days and had a really good conversation about a technology I had been building with a VP of a company that sounds like Girth Blink. He gave me his business card, we shook hands, promised to keep in touch and he gave me a big smile.

On talking to a very seasoned mentor friend that night over dinner, I pulled out the card and noticed a lack of contact details, just a main switchboard number and no email.

“Yeah” said my mentor friend, “He Grin Fucked you”

You live and learn.

“Good businessmen climb over, under or walk around walls
True entrepreneurs learn to walk through them”