Barn Ventures

Builders Club · Waterloo

The Demo.

Week 2

Convincing people to pay attention.

In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem. [...] Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets? It probably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because these people don't become famous.

Your primary goal is not to describe everything your system might one day become, but simply to convince investors you're worth talking to further. So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer by successive approximations. Begin with a description that's gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the extent you can. It's the same principle as incremental development: start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at every point have working code. In this case, "working code" means a working description in the investor's head.

What you must not do is seem nervous and apologetic. If you've truly made something good, you're doing investors a favor by telling them about it. If you don't genuinely believe that, perhaps you ought to change what your company is doing. If you don't believe your startup has such promise that you'd be doing them a favor by letting them invest, why are you investing your time in it?

Don't read your slides. They should be something in the background as you face the audience and talk to them, not something you face and read to an audience sitting behind you.

Rule four

Tell stories. Make sound bites that stick.

Advice to YC founders presenting at Demo Day (and any similarly early stage startup): You don't have to prove that you'll become huge. If it were provable, you'd already have your future valuation. You just have to show that you're a sufficiently good bet to become huge.

Mundane as it sounds, that's the most powerful motivator of all, not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be genuinely interested in what you're building. This is what really drives billionaires, or at least the ones who become billionaires from starting companies. The company is their project. [...] One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. [...] What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do.

Thank you

See you at dinner.

Jesse Rodgers · jesse@buildersclub.ca
Hosted by Builders Club with Barn Ventures. Thanks to Osler, TD Innovation Partners, and Communitech.