 Ms. Jazz Ozary from the Department of State's Office of Science and Technology Cooperation. I welcome all of you to a very special Guru Series today, we're broadcasting live from the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Silicon Valley. The Global Entrepreneurship Summit brings together aspiring entrepreneurs and investors to create new opportunities for partnerships, collaboration and investments. I'm thrilled to be able to introduce today's topic and our esteemed experts, Jeff Hoffman and Oldtouch Unsull, who will be speaking to perfecting your pitch. Jeff and Oldtouch will create a mock interview where Jeff will be playing the role of a young entrepreneur with a startup and Oldtouch will be the venture capitalist. After this presentation, we will take your questions and comments by using the chat roll on the right hand side of your screen or going to our hashtag just guru series. Now let's get to our experts. Jeff Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur who has played key roles in numerous companies and their establishment such as Priceline.com, UBid.com, CTI and Colorjar. He has received numerous awards, including a best of the best award from the Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization and he has also been inducted into the Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame. Jeff also co-authored the book Scale, A How-To Guide for Growing Your Business. Oldtouch Unsull is an early stage technology investor with over 47 seed stage investments globally. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Department of State helping to advise on tech and innovation activities. Oldtouch led World Bank InfoDev programs to promote finance and also helped InfoDev to become a leader in the development community through access to innovative financing facilities, angel co-investment facilities and technical assistance for technology entrepreneurs. Jeff Oldtouch, thank you so much for being with us today. It's really a pleasure and welcome to the guru. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'll tell you what we're going to do for this role play. I am going to pitch my actual first startup pitch ever. So we're going to do a real pitch that I did for my first startup as a young entrepreneur so that when we discuss it afterwards, we can give you real results, how it really went and what really worked and what didn't instead of a hypothetical one. So if you're ready. And I'll be the meme. This is how it starts, right? This is how it starts. Jeff, you came highly recommended. I only have five minutes for you and it took me four months to get this five minutes. But I want to thank you very much for giving me this time and I'm really, really excited to tell you about my startup and our idea and we think you're going to love it. So here, let me tell you a story. I was in an airport. I was waiting in line to check in. The line took an hour at the end of an hour when I got to the front of the line, the woman looked at my ID, hit print and handed me a boarding pass. And I said, how can we take an hour? It's just a printer. You just hit print. And she said, sir, you need a boarding pass to get on plane. I said, I understand that. But I stood in line for an hour and all you did was hit print. She said, you need a boarding pass to get through security. And I said, I get that. It's just a printer. Why can't you put the printer in the airport and I'll print it. And she said, sir, it doesn't work that way next. So I turned to the people in the audience, not the audience, to the line. And I said, hey, I got a question for all of you travelers, mostly business people. I said, would you guys pay me $5 if I could give you a boarding pass right now and you could skip the line? And I'll attach people in the back of the line reeling $15, $20. So I thought, I think I have a business idea here. So we went and did the research. I know the question you're going to ask me, is this a big opportunity? Is it a big market for people care? So I did the research. Yes, there are 44,000 airports in the world. There are 100,000 flights a day. And 100,000 flights a day turns into times 365 days a year, 36 million flights a year. The average flight we did this research has 100 people on it. That's 3.6 billion people a year standing in an airport somewhere trying to get a boarding pass. So the market is huge and the market is global. So we went back to the lab and we said, what's the product? What's the opportunity here? And here's the idea we came up with. We're so excited to tell you today. We're going to create a kiosk. We built a prototype of a kiosk that lets travelers in an airport check themselves in. So you have to wait in line to get to the front of the line for an hour to getting boarding pass. You'll walk up to a kiosk in the airport and you'll check yourself and imprint your own boarding pass. We even did a little time in motion study and we're estimating that we can improve the traffic to the airport by like 80% better flow through the airport instead of everybody standing in four lines. So I'm sure you're going to ask, what's the business model for this? The market's big. The problem is real. We can build the product. So we did the basic research. I think we can build these. We talked to some manufacturers. I think we can build these machines for about $600 each. We think we can sell them for probably about $1,500 each. But think about this. The average employee in an airport, this is their employees that are checking you in, they cost fully loaded with benefits. They cost like $40,000 or $50,000 a year per employee. Now I can replace $40,000 and $50,000 employees with a $1,500 machine that never calls in sick, never argues with its coworkers and never has a bad attitude. Well, it might sometimes. So that's the business model. Or we were even thinking we might be able to charge consumers. We don't know yet until we test. But banks charge consumers, you and I pay to use the ATM even though it saves the bank money because we didn't even come in. So maybe we can charge consumers. We'll test that, but certainly it's a better solution for airlines. So I know the next thing you're going to ask me is competitively, what's out there? Right now there is no self-ticketing, self-check-in solution that we've seen. We assume that once we get to market, people will say that's a good idea. So we checked already, and there's no patents of anything like this. So we've already started the process with our design of patenting the design so that we can protect the IP. So that if somebody does want to do this solution, they'll have to license it from us. So we're here today to ask you. We don't need a lot of money, but we need about $250,000 from you. I need money to build the prototype. We need money to go out and do market research. We're going to visit airports. Once we build the prototype, we probably need to build half a dozen of them. We need to do a pilot program, put these in airports, get airports to cooperate. So we'll have some travel expenses, some time spent. And then we just need to do the study. Will consumers trust the machine? Will they check in? How much time will it save them? How much money will it save the airlines? I need a pilot program, and I need some prototype machines. And then you just start finding out how to build manufacturing molds. That's what I need the money for, plus to file the patents. So I think with your help, if you like the idea, we're so excited about it. If we could get $250,000 from you, we think we could create a solution that's unique in the world right now. The self-check-in kiosks have an opportunity to be at airports, thousands of airports, serving millions of customers, but we can't do it without you. So thank you so much for the time, and we'd love to know what you think. Sure. I mean, I'd be a customer. I spend so much time at the airport. Something like this would really help me along the way. But now I got a couple of questions. One is that airports tell me it's all about regulation and rules and security. So how do you attack that angle? How do you attack the government angle when it comes to putting something in an airport? And how do you make sure that I am who I am to check into the... So that is an absolutely great question, and we worried about that, because we knew that just like when you sell software to corporations, sometimes you can't get behind their firewall and their own internal IT requirements. So we've been holding meetings with airline IT people, asking them what the standard is. The security standard for these airport boarding passes is high, but they have told us, they gave us, here's the security requirements. And we now know from looking at those requirements that we can meet those IT-wise and we can meet them facility-wise, excuse me, hardware-wise, in the kiosk. In the past, if you remember, airport tickets were printed on real ticket stock, and the ticket was currency, but we did our homework, and the airline industry went to something called ATB. And the ATB is the automated ticket and boarding. The ATB, excuse me, is not currency. Your boarding pass today is just a piece of paper with a barcode. So we looked at their requirements. We can meet the security requirements physically in the printer and in the back office. And from what the airlines told us, you asked a very good question, but we can do it. Now, you seem like a very smart, dedicated young man, and in my gut, I feel like you're going to change the course of history with some reverse auction thing in the future, I don't know. But who's in the team? Who's going to sell this? Who's going to manufacture it? You told me a little bit about the manufacturing processes, but tell me a little bit more about the team. Sure. We think that we are a uniquely qualified team to do this. And we know that you as an investor. One of the questions you always ask is, what unique advantage? What unfair advantage does your team have over other teams? And we're glad you asked that. Because as entrepreneurs, we pursue things and we wouldn't pitch you anything that we didn't think we're uniquely qualified to do. So I've rounded up, it's only a small group, there's only five of us and three of them I can't bring on until we get this initial funding. But we went and found people that worked in airline IT, that worked in airline security. And me and my business partner in this project have also previously built software for airline and aviation customers. So the airline industry, all the programming is written in a very specific, proprietary, undocumented language. But we've all spent the last few years working in the industry and it's a language that we know. So we think it's a barrier to entry competitively. If someone else wanted to do this, it would take them two years to learn how to write airline code in the first place. So we think we are the right team for you and you can count on us to develop this technology faster than anybody else can. That's great. Well, look, I think I'm going to invest. Well, of course, how do we value your company? And I know that you want to get $250,000 from us, but what's the price that we pay for it? So have you thought about how much of the company you're going to give in exchange for that money? We have. We are not sure at the evaluation as young entrepreneurs. That seems to be the big mystery. We've been told that in any given period of time, investors like you tend to do deals in a certain range. So people told us that we probably wouldn't do any deal for less than a third of a company. But we think because of your relationships and your expertise and your background, that you're going to add so much more value to us than just the money. So we're willing to do a deal in that kind of a range, giving up a third of the company because we would rather own a smaller slice of a really big pie than to own 100% of nothing. Yeah, you're such a great entrepreneur. That understanding of the valuation scene is invaluable in and of itself because as you know, usually what we see is an entrepreneur such as yourself would think of your startup as your baby. So you would get to $250,000 in exchange for 0.1% of the company. And of course, I have the money and usually my usual stance would be, okay, I'll give you the $250,000 and then you give me 90% of your company plus your first born. But I'm glad you did your homework because you're right. I think something like this, it's a great idea. It's the beginnings of a team and it's well researched. And I know that you could get the prototypes in a handful of airlines out there. And one third seems a bit reasonable. These days, of course, perhaps you can get it in terms of the pricing, but don't shop it around. I think we have a good relationship. Well, and that's what we want. We don't just want money, we want a partnership. We want to partner with investors who are part of the team that do more than just write a check and we think that's you. We didn't just come to you because you got money. We did a lot of research and said, he's the investor we need on our team because of his expertise and his relationship. So we came to you first with this deal intentionally. Thank you. I appreciate it. Now, I have no other questions, but what are the next steps that how, when do you think about starting these things? So here's what we'd like to do. We know that as an investor, what you care about most is milestones. If I give you this money, what is the money by me? And so what we did, just so you'll know, many entrepreneurs, we know you get this every day, sort of arbitrarily say I need $500,000 and then if you give it to them, they figure out what they're going to do with it. We did that backwards. We said to advance our company, here's a list of milestones that Oltash is going to ask us for. So we laid out a calendar of the prototype development of the first airline installations of the pilot program of the data collection of the testing. We want to give that to you, that 90 day timeline. The money we're asking you for is the cost of completing all those milestones. So the first step is we'll review our 90 day milestone plan with you, get your sign off on those deliverables, and then we'd be ready actually to take money and start building the prototype. So, what do you think? Hey, I mean, I'm in man. All right, thank you very much. Let's just do this. Well, I'll do it, I'm done. So it's so fantastic here. And obviously these days, we have kiosks. I will tell you guys that that was my first startup when I was 20 something years old. Because we understood the market, we understood the core economics, we could make a business case. We were milestone focused. We said we would build a pilot program. We knew how much the prototypes would cost. I actually was lucky enough to end because of what we just told you guys that we intentionally picked our first investor very carefully. Most entrepreneurs definition of investor is anybody with money. And guys, that's a bad decision. Anybody with money is not a good investor. Somebody with strategic value and money is a good idea. So we carefully picked some of the web relationships and aviation and airlines. So I gave the pitch I just gave you. The very first investor I went to funded the company. We built the prototypes. We started selling these check-in kiosks and airports all over the world. I actually get a kick now. Even today, sometimes people will send me a text from an airport and say, thank you, I just checked myself in. And the company was very successful. We sold them all over, like I said, all over the world. And then at about three years in, we sold the whole company. I'm not a money focused guy, but to give people an example, what happens when you execute a plan? We sold that company for over a hundred million dollars three years later. So the investor did really well. Everybody did well. It wasn't $250,000. Was it $200,000? We started with $250,000. He wound up at the end giving us a total of a million dollars. But then we sold the company for a hundred million dollars. Everybody got a great return on the business. We all learned a lot. And we solved a real problem. Now you also mentioned to me earlier that you wanted to first sell to your customers because somebody like me would want to pay you for the privilege of printing out myself. But then you pivoted to, you actually pivoted the idea and the business. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, and I think that's very important from the investor standpoint as well. We really thought to get the business up and running, we needed a million dollars. The reason we only took ask for $250,000 at the beginning is because we needed to prove the business model. We were actually wrong. We thought we had the ATM model that you would pay a couple of dollars to skip the line and get a boarding pass. Put a couple coins in this machine and you can get your own boarding pass. But in fact, what we got wrong we didn't know until we funded the pilot. When we got out there, the airport said, no, no, no, the airlines, excuse me, the first airline we went to said, no, no, we don't want to charge customers. We want to be competitive. We want to beat the other airlines to say, if you come to our airline, you don't have to stand in line anymore. Our airline has automated checking. So the early airlines said, we'll pay for it so we can offer as a benefit to the consumers. We never saw that coming. So we had to redo the business model to have the airlines paying. And the good news is they paid more than the consumer would. And then what was nice was every other airline we went to, we said, look, do you want to be the only airline that doesn't give consumers convenience? And so one by one, all the other airlines came as well. But we did pivot and you can't do that until you get out in the market with a pilot program, which is why we needed that initial funding. And also tell me a little bit more about the fact that your first customer was probably your partner. So maybe you gave them discounts. Maybe you gave them preferential access to all your brain power. So you probably treated them as a partner because you'd know that in the future for other airlines, you can charge your fair price. So tell me about your first customer, which is where our entrepreneurs struggle with. The first customer slash partner, how do you treat that? Sure, again, a great question. The first customer is always the reference customer is the term, your reference customer, you do not try to sell them anything. You go to them. And by the way, the best way to do this is somebody knows somebody somewhere. So I started asking all my friends who's got a relative or a friend that works at an airline and high level. And somebody knew somebody and we went to them and we said, look, help us out here. We say, if you think this idea is good, do a pilot program. We know you're not going to put it in every airport, there's too much risk, but do a pilot with us, put one machine in one airport, one little city and promote it for us and test it and we'll give you something in return. So what we asked for them to do was be a friendly tester, meaning if it breaks, don't yell at us. You knew it was going to break, it's brand new. Call us and say, hey guys, help us with the development. The screen shouldn't look like this. It's too big, it's too small, it's too hot, it's too whatever. Help us develop the product. In exchange, you'll get yours free up to a certain amount which no one else will. So you'll help us develop, like you said, you'll be our partner, but you'll also be a reference customer. If you like it and it works, we're going to send all the media. Call this airline and ask them what they think because the best way to sell your product is not for you to sell it, it's for a customer to sell you. So we wanted that airline to tell every other airline this thing is amazing, you should try this. They had to agree to be a testimonial for us, but your reference customer is someone you make a partnership deal with just as you said. You don't charge them anything, you give them something in exchange for their help and you try to find a friendly person that will help you do that. Yeah, I think one way to take what Jeff said and apply to other types of the companies is usually these days an entrepreneur or an investor would not invest per se until they know who that reference customer is going to be. Especially when it comes to internet businesses, what I see is an idea is not as good as it used to be. So I would wanna know since I may not use the kiosk, I wouldn't be a perhaps a reference mind, I might say, well, how many customers are gonna buy this or how many do you have them signed up already? So I have a little bit more traction and this concept of traction, actually I wanna ask it to you Jeff, like, what do you think about traction? Because do you see that in the internet businesses, especially the concept of attraction and have you changed over time since the making of a business gotten less expensive over time? I think you hit it exactly. The reason that traction became a bigger deal is because it is less expensive now to launch a business and test it. Back when it took a lot more time and a lot more money to launch a business, getting traction was hard to do. Now, under a world of lean startups, agile development, MVPs fail fast. Under all these ideas, we can get a product up, get it out in the market and collect some feedback fast. So investors care very much about traction. And for those who don't know that word, traction just means I don't wanna hear, it's old-tash telling me, Jeff, I don't wanna hear your pitch. I wanna see somebody in an airport use it and tell me they like it. So traction is about getting a lot of customers to test the product. I gotta tell you a really quick, funny story. So we finally get a product out of the market so we finally get a prototype. We put it in an airport. I'm standing over there watching. We're so excited. It says, there's a sign over it. It says, why wait in line, get your own boarding pass here. The very first person looks at the line, looks at the kiosk, looks at the line. He walks over to the kiosk. He swipes his ID. It prints out a boarding pass. He looks at the boarding pass and then he goes and gets in the back of the line. So I ran over there and said, what are you doing? And he said, I just gotta ask them if this thing is real. And he went all the way to the back of the line again. So our initial traction was bad. So, but it's a learning lesson. We said, why do you think it's not real? He said, I don't know if the airline will take it. So there was a big lesson about traction. We had to get the airline to put their logo, not mine, on the machine and said, yes, these boarding passes are real. This is our logo. You can go to the gate. So traction only happens when you have a prototype in the market and people are using your service. But all investors now want to see a real person use the product. Okay, well, I don't have any other questions. So maybe we might wanna put it up back to the audience or are there any questions from our audience? Yes, so first I wanna say thank you to you both. That was a fantastic overview. Jeff, we love having the real life example of what you went through. One of the first questions that came to mind was you told a story. You had a narrative that really brought in the investor and you said you had a specific investor so you could tell this narrative to that investor. Is that normally the best way to start a picture? You mean by telling a story? Yes, to be able to capture the investor and get them interested in your idea. So yeah, let me explain that. And by the way, I'm gonna apologize to everybody. This is not my attempt at a sexy voice. I have a bad goal. So I apologize if I sound like a fraud today but I'm doing my best. Here is the thing that people miss entrepreneurs. Investors, this is a person. This is not a bank account, okay? Investors have stories, they have backgrounds, they have interests, they're people. So investors sit through pitches all day, every day, all week and it gets boring and monotonous. What investors are looking for is passion and interest in something that captures their imagination and their heart, not just their wallet. So what entrepreneurs need to learn to do is to tell a story. Make this a story that's compelling that gets people interested in it. I had somebody the other day tell me a story about his sister was dying of a specific disease and he was by her bedside in the hospital and the doctor said, there's nothing else we can do. And he sat there and he said, I'm gonna find a solution to this particular problem. I was totally engaged in that story. So when I tell my story, I was standing in an airport line, I missed my flight, it took an hour to get through it. People are listening to a story instead of a bunch of slides. So if you have a story, tell it and tell your whole presentation like a story. You were out in the world, you saw this problem. You said, this is ridiculous, I'm gonna fix this. You did some research. Storytelling is really important. And one more thing, if you're an engineer and you're not a good storyteller but it's your idea and you're the founder, let someone else tell your story. Get your ego out of the room. Whoever tells the story in a passionate and exciting way is the person who should be telling your story to investors into the world. And if you're a founder and that's not you, don't tell the story, let the best person on your team tell the story because he wants to be interested and excited about a great story. Thank you. No, I think that's all very insightful. And I know that the word from previous sessions that we have passion is basically the adjective that comes up the most frequently. So thank you for that, Jeff. The next question we have is, it's actually a comment from a viewing party in Jabulana Flats in Soweto, South Africa. And the comment is, I always thought that a good pitch should have an introduction, which we just spoke about, a unique value proposition and contact information, but should one always have a demo of the service or a product at hand? Why don't you take that one first as an investor? What do you want to see? Well, let's differentiate between what we can do as a formal pitch, as in we're sitting in my office, let's say, we have a computer or a demo unit or what have you, usually you'd have what we call the 12 slides. So it starts with introduction, it has a value proposition, it got how big of a market it is, it's got the team slide and all of those things you can find even online. It's a very standard way of pitching these days. But what Jeff did here today is he grabbed me, let's say, at an elevator. So it's an elevator pitch. He's got his five minutes. He starts with a good anecdote and a good way of explaining his personal passion about this product. And then, of course, you can't really, we're in an elevator, we can't really do a demo or a presentation like that. So a good friend of mine told me that you're always pitching, right? You're always constantly pitching and so you have to have a one minute pitch, a two minute pitch, a 12 minute, 12 slide presentation. So all those things have their right attributes for the right occasion, but the lesson remains the same. It's always, you're gonna have to start with the value proposition. Why am I interested? Why is this a painful product? And for Jeff, and for me, of course, for anybody who uses the kiosks, it's the fact that you don't wanna stand in line and it's just painful to stand in line. And if you can do it on your own, if you're gonna do it fast, why wouldn't you do it? And so I start with that, it grabs me, it says, okay, that is a painful problem I wanna solve and can you make money solving it? So immediately it goes to what Jeff explained, who's gonna pay for it? How much are they gonna pay for it? And then after that, it will immediately go to, okay, how much is it gonna cost? First, as an investment dollar because the dollar's coming out of my pocket. And two, who's gonna pay for it in terms of the unit economics cost? So all these things in my mind, and of course, team. You know, one thing that is always neglected in the face of an idea is the team. It's really the team that makes these things happen. And so somehow you can weave that in any conversation, I'm sure. You can weave it into a presentation, you can do all kinds of things. But the comment is, and here Jeff demonstrated within five minutes only by talking what you can achieve. And of course, if we had a computer and a demo, maybe a demo unit, maybe a little mock-up, he would have done that too. Those would be contributing to the effect of the presentation. So I wanna add something that I completely agree. That yes, the sooner you can get to a demo, the better. If I had a prototype and I could say to him, can I get you to stop by the airport tomorrow? We're doing some testing. I want you to see the prototype. The sooner you show the investor anything real, the better. But I wanna make sure that entrepreneurs heard something that Altash said that was really important, which is that don't get fooled by people loving your product or your demo. It's all about value equation. And let me explain that. I get entrepreneurs now that come in and say, I showed my product to everybody and everybody loves it and everybody wants one. So therefore it's a good business. And what that doesn't comprehend is a value equation. So let me tell you what I did one time. We already grew. And an entrepreneur told me, everybody I told about my product wants one, everyone loves it. So obviously this is a good business. So I just read an article that morning about there's a new machine where you can actually man-make it. It makes man-made diamonds instead of mining it. So I said, watch this. I asked all the people. I said, who wants a machine that you can make your own diamonds? 100% of the customers that saw this machine said I want that machine. And I said, see, everybody loves my product. Everyone wants one. This is a good business. They said, oh wait, I forgot to tell you it costs $20 million each. And everybody in the room said, I said, keep your hand up if you still want one. Nobody does. The value equation has to come up front. It's not just to people want these. If I had told people, you can get your own boarding pass, but it's $30, they would have gone back in the line. Okay? So just because people like the demo of your product doesn't make it a good business. It's all about value equation. What's it gonna cost and who's gonna pay you just like Oatesh said? And in fact, one of the things that people forget is that they have this beautiful chart that shows the hockey stick. Usually, you know, it starts slow, but everybody wants it. And then of course, on that very slide, we would want to see the unit economics. So how much is gonna cost to get a customer? How much are you gonna make out of that customer? So for instance, in the kiosk business, if it were in the original instance where people are paying for it, I would have want to see, okay, it costs about $600 to put this product out there and then if you service X many amount of people and then we're gonna use your time. And so I will make it in such a way that each ticket or each person's use of a ticket would yield me a price, let's say $10 or $2, $1. And then I'll also calculate how much it's gonna cost to print that ticket, how much it's gonna cost to serve that ticket. So I'll look at, okay, per ticket, my profit is let's say $1. And then of course, how many tickets are we printing per year? I get immediately the market value. Wonderful. No, thank you so much. It seems like we're talking about the business model, the business process, how well the entrepreneur understands these two areas before they make the pitch. But one of the questions that we had was if you don't have experience in business, even if you have a good team, how can you convince, if you can convince an investor to still invest in your product, if it's just something that you don't really have experience with? So then I'm gonna have to challenge your definition of a good team. If you're saying you don't have experience in business but you have a good team, you in fact do not have a good team. The definition of a good team is having somebody play every position on a field. If you had a soccer team that had defenders and strikers but no goalie, you'll probably lose. Okay, so you have to fill every position. And our advice to entrepreneurs is don't fool yourself into thinking, listen, you're never as smart as you think you are. There's no, I've never met an entrepreneur who can do accounting, taxes, engineering and marketing, the same person, right? Just like in a big company, you would never ask your engineers to go do the accounting and you wouldn't ask your accountants to write advertising slogans. All of us have one thing we're good at and you have to round out the rest of the team. So you have to team up with somebody that knows business if that's not you. You have to have all of the experience on one team that you build piece at a time. By the way, sometimes you go to an investor and you say, old Tash, we don't really have a good business person. Do you know somebody? So you know what makes him feel even better about investing in you? One of his people is on your team now. He says, yeah, I know a guy. I've done business with him before. I'll put him on your team. Now he feels even better about this investment because it's his business guy that's on your team. So fill out your team, but don't be afraid to ask the investor for recommendations. I want to add one more thing on this because I do feel very strongly just like Jeff does. So entrepreneurs get the equation backwards. They come to the investor saying that give me money. I take that money, I go better people in my team. Now, I always want the entrepreneurs to explain to me why is it that they would think I give the money first before they could actually take their equity and go to a friend or another business person or an engineer. Why if they can't convince somebody else with their equity to invest in their company because an employment is investment, why would they come to me and convince me? I am a bit more removed than a team member. So I figure, you know, first go to your friends, go to other people, network, find, round up your team and then go to a customer, convince the customer first, the first customer reference, and then come to me. That should be the logical flow as opposed to, I have an idea, I go to get the money and then I'll go get the customer and then I go get the team. It doesn't work that way. It should work first round up the team, get your first customer, then come to me and that's when you accelerate the business much better. And even if you can't hire all the team, some of them will come for equity, but if you remember when I gave the pitch to him earlier, I said, we have five people, two are already started and three, we can't hire until we can give them a little money, but I already have them. I picked them and they said, yes, so you shouldn't, he's right, you should get everything together before you ever visit him. So very much so, you do have to do your research because it might seem daunting for some of these entrepreneurs to find a good team as we were saying, the people who do have the technical expertise. So in this vein, we have the Just Tech Eye finalists as you know who are now at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and many of these individuals come from countries where it might be difficult to find the experts that you're talking about, you might not have an engineer who's close by, you might not have someone who understands the regulations either within that country or if you're going to a global market, there are global regulations that need to be considered. So how do you find these team members if you must have them to be able to produce a good pitch for the investor? So we're gonna give you advice to the entrepreneurs you probably already heard and we're gonna repeat it, network, network, network. Every day, all the time, I will tell you something, I've been doing startups my whole life and every conversation I ever have with any human being starts with me wondering, could I hire her? Could she help me? Everybody I meet, I'm wondering what their unique talents are and if we could be teammates in some way. Everywhere you go, network, attend events, join organizations. There are, it's great right now, one of the best things about this just Tech Eye competition is that our just entrepreneurs are meeting each other and building networks and then here at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at GES, people are meeting each other. So I always tell people, if you ever walk into a room and leave without introducing yourself to at least three people you did not know before you walked in, you probably just missed your teammate, your co-founder, your investor, somebody that could have changed your life and you didn't even say hello to them. So you're right, it's hard to find those people but it's even harder if you're not networking all the time. I mean, I'll be negative on this again to answer your question. If you cannot form a team, then your idea is fairly meaningless to me because it is the team that makes things happen and if you can't convince somebody else through networking or through friends and family then that means you're not a good investor. You're an investor of your time and before coming to an investor, I'd love for you to see that it is so hard to form a team to make the idea happen. Not every idea is meant to happen by the way, not everybody should be an entrepreneur. We often miss this point and we hype entrepreneurship beyond what's really reasonable. Now, I would really want you to think like an investor. If you don't have a team, we'll find it somehow or if you can't find it, then maybe you shouldn't be an entrepreneur. I completely agree. If to the question that you asked Jazz, if you really can't find anybody anywhere that knows something you need to know, find another problem to solve, right? What you're looking for as an entrepreneur and what he's looking for as an investor is this thing we call an unfair advantage. What unique advantage do you have to solving this problem? Now, I told you the story of us working with airlines all over the world. So guess what happened later when we started Priceline? And for those of you around the world that don't know the name Priceline, it's also booking.com or go to.com. It's all one company. But when we were starting that company later, what was our unfair advantage? We already knew that the management of every airline in the world, we'd already done business with them. I could get a meeting with airlines all over the world. So if you have, if you cannot to your point, if you cannot build a team that can cover all the things you need to cover, maybe you should spend your time solving a different problem and not do that one. Great, no, that is absolutely perfect. Cause I think that's something that a lot of the entrepreneurs miss. And the other point that was made from one of our other guru experts was that you're spending 12, 14 hours a day, maybe seven days a week with these individuals. So you also have to like them. Otherwise your business might not succeed, but thank you so much. Now I'm gonna switch topics a little bit to the idea of having a unique product. Instead of being competitive and a pre-established market, many of our viewers are interested in these cutting edge technologies in areas such as clean energy or robotics is becoming more popular. Do you see a lot of opportunity for investment in these areas? Yes, so there are a lot of, so every time I wake up every day, I feel like it's a world of full of wonders and opportunities. And it's so amazing to me that today we'd be talking about robotics. My fears from now would be talking about something completely unknown. Why? Because we keep advancing that way. So there are opportunities, I mean, 10 years ago when I first started investing, the opportunity was business to business transactions and XML and all these things that nobody would even pay attention to these days. And now the rage is all about artificial intelligence. We're talking about that. We're talking about Facebook and Google investing millions and billions into these type of opportunities. And of course, all the folks around the world, they're also looking into things like robotics. They're looking into telemedicine, all kinds of opportunities. So not only I agree with you that there are very exciting things going on, especially in the industries you mentioned, but there's also all kinds of other things that get me excited personally. I wanna see more of it, but let me caution you something here. And Jeff, I'm gonna ask you to talk a little bit more about this. What I normally see is only one to 2% really cutting-edge technology that somebody thought about. And they said, okay, this would be a very nice addition to human experience and make money out of it. What I normally see or expect is that, let's say you're running a new industry, you worked there for five years, you know the problems of that industry and you wanna solve a very particular problem that somebody you're sure would pay money for. And usually I like these type of ideas better only because it's extremely hard to do really cutting-edge technology and you probably might wanna be in Silicon Valley for that competitive advantage. If you're somewhere else, then maybe the cutting-edge technology that you're dreaming about might be a little bit harder to pull off. So I usually say, okay, are you working in an industry, do you solve a particular problem which may not be as sexy, which may not be artificial intelligence, walking robots who are gonna kill us in the future, but maybe it's something so mundane. So easily overlooked, but you could make a great business out of it. So what do you think of that? Excellent, so I'm gonna hit both parts of that. First, I'll answer your part. Second, first I do wanna say though, there's always some new field of investment. There's always something we never saw coming, even when it seems like every good idea or any interesting things happen. If you think about it, for example, my mobile phone, none of us saw that coming. I think it's crazy that today on my mobile phone, I use text, I use WhatsApp, I use Viber, I use emails, I use GPS. You know what's the one thing I hate using my phone for? When somebody calls me, it's really annoying when my phone tries to be a phone because it kills my productivity to talk on the phone. I never predicted that my phone would be everything but my phone. Now, the trend to your point, driving here in Silicon Valley to the GES, every other billboard says artificial intelligence. So now there's three new things. AI, VR and AR, virtual reality and augmented reality. I just was asked to speak at Microsoft's conference and I got to spend time with their new CEO, Satya Nadelli, and their whole future as robots, software robots. I also just took a trip. I went to the UK with Steve Wozniak and Woz and I spent the whole time talking about the future of robots. So there are some big, exciting technologies and new fields of opportunity like clean tech, like digital healthcare, but you're right. Those are big, expensive areas. There's also, for all you entrepreneurs, you don't have to worry about competing with Microsoft and Apple and companies on that. Here's a really important thing I wanna say that what differentiates successful entrepreneurs from everyone else and it's exactly what you just told them. Every day, wherever you live, when you go through your life, you encounter problems. And here's what everybody does. They go home and complain. How was your day, dear? It was horrible. Those idiots made me stand in line for three hours. And you go home and you complain because some inefficiency ruined your day. Here's what entrepreneurs do. They stop and say, sort of like I told you when I was in the airport line, entrepreneurs do three things that everyone else doesn't. They say, wait a minute, instead of going home, does this problem bother everybody? And if the answer is yes, this bothers a lot of people, they do a second thing. Is there a solution? They do research. And I just don't know about it. There's no solution. Entrepreneurs do a third thing that everybody else does not. They say, you guys go home without me. I'm not leaving until this is fixed. So to your point, every day, you see a problem that you have expertise in your industry. Don't go home and complain like everyone else. Be the person that says, I'm not going home until this thing is fixed. There are so many problems for you every day as an entrepreneur to solve that you have the expertise to solve. Just quit walking away from them. Yeah, to that point, Jeff and I were in Tanzania a few years back. I still remember a couple of entrepreneurs. One of them actually could be here at the GS now about farmer essentially intelligence for the lack of a better term. It's not artificial intelligence, but it's farmer intelligence, like prices of crops that you can find online that you can text to each other. And that there's a vibrant marketplace for things that are related to farming. Why? Because that community really needed it. And this person is probably thinking, okay, there should be a way to solve this. And I remember distinctly that we were helping him and then we could see the passion in his eyes. And now, of course, fast forward a few years. Now this product is actually in reality. And from Tanzania, it's what a fascinating concept. Absolutely, there is, for every one of you, there is a problem somewhere near you that you have the expertise to solve. And I think we find that a lot again with the tech eye finalists that we have. Some of the examples are that in many of the countries there's a lack of access to education. There aren't the resources. So individuals who create apps are online resources that everyone can share and everyone can benefit from. The agricultural example you gave Altouch was particularly interesting because the Washington Post recently just had an article about how they're using these robots to be able to go through the fields, find the right vegetables and pick those and leave the others. They say it's more efficient than using a person for a 15 hour day job. And it's more effective because the robot can detect it better. So absolutely, these are fields that are expanding. Probably will continue to expand. And it's an exciting time to be a science and technology entrepreneur. Now, one item we wanted to get to was that a viewer said, there are many examples you've given about all the positive aspects of a pitch. Could you give us some examples of pitches that did not go so well? I'll jump right in, we'll both do this one, but here's what drives me crazy. Entrepreneurs, because I sit on both sides of the table now, entrepreneurs literally read their slides. Are you kidding me? You could have just emailed me that PowerPoint and saved me the time I could be at lunch reading it. Do not read your slides. Secondly, do not be owned by your slides. Here's what I make entrepreneurs do. I say, unplug the projector. And they say, I can't, I need the PowerPoint. And I say, come back when you can tell the story with no PowerPoint. If you can't tell your own story, how am I gonna believe in you as an investor? So the slides are backup, they're behind you. You don't look at them, you don't speak to them. You just tell your story like I did earlier, doltash with no slides at all. So you should practice your pitch with no PowerPoint. If you cannot give it without a PowerPoint, you are not ready for an investor. We can read a PowerPoint. What we wanna hear is your story, your passion, and your understanding of the business. I think I'll definitely agree with that. I'll add a couple more, my pet peeves. One is that, as you all asked earlier, Jazz, that usually there's a set of motions that we go through in a pitch. And the things that the content of a pitch is, it must be well known by now, why? Because if you write the term how to make a VC pitch on Google, you get three billion items. And I'm sure Google sorts them out nicely. The first page, if you follow everything on that first page, you will do no wrong. So if it is so easy to create a pitch, why wouldn't you be able to create a pitch? Now that's my pet peeve. If it's so easy to know that you need a value proposition page and you don't have a value proposition page, that just shows me that the entrepreneur is either careless or the entrepreneur doesn't really wanna do the work. So my pet peeve is more like, if it's so easy to do it, why wouldn't you do it? And the other one that shows stops for me is the competitor slide. If there are no competitors on a competitor slide or if there is no competition slide and then meanwhile, of course, I have my phone under the table, I'm checking on Google, the competition and some key terms. And I find one, heaven forbid, I find something that's remotely close to what they're saying. That's basically a game over there. Because- Never say that you're the only person in the world doing this. Unless you've talked to everyone in the world, we don't believe you. I gotta add one more. What is the point of every single slide? If one, figure out what the point when you're doing a presentation and put that as the title of the slide. Too often you show us a slide in a PowerPoint and we say, okay, not sure what point you're making here. If the point is the market is growing, then the title of the slide needs to say the market is growing. And the next one, if the point of the slide is, we think we can build this cheap, then say we think we can build this for under $500. Whatever the point of every slide is, tell us. Don't make us guess. Search and present it well. Don't make it too cumbersome. So we had a little bit more of a specific question from one of our online viewers, Luz Adriana, who is asking about the reference customers that were mentioned earlier. And Luz asks, does this apply also to consumer products? And do you need to show that there are many individuals interested? And I think, Jeff, in the initial part of the presentation, you were saying that you would talk to a lot of individuals and something like the kiosk is applicable, not just in the US, it's applicable globally. So what are your thoughts? The answer is yes and yes. As many customers as you can, there is no magic number. The more every day you can, and it does not matter if it's B2B or B2C. If you're selling a product to airlines and you need as many airlines as you can to say they like it, and if you're selling it to consumers, you need as many consumers as you can. So after the reference customer, then you need testimonial customers. Those are early customers that love your product. They're not that big reference customer. They're more casual. I tried it and I loved it. I'd use it every day. That's all they're gonna say. They're not your partner. So whether you are B2B or B2C, collect as many testimonials as you can. By the way, you know what we do today? You have a phone in your hand. We just say, so Altash says, man, I just tried it and I liked it and I say, could you say that again on video? But I put it on the website. I put it in the PowerPoint. I show it to the investor. Taking a 20-second video of somebody saying why they like your product and then having 10 of those makes an impact on an investor. Okay, well, unfortunately, we're down to our last question. So at the end of every reviewer, what we ask our experts is of everything that you've said today, what is the one takeaway that the viewers should have and they should walk away and immediately start with that advice? You know, actually my one takeaway, I don't even think I said it. The most important takeaway I can tell you is segment investors like you segment customers. Too many people take investor meeting, well, I did say this earlier, their definition of investor is anyone that will get a meeting with me, anyone that has money will take a meeting with me. Do not do that. Do a whole bunch of research and find out an investor. They would be a great partner for you and then it's likely to like your startup. I specifically look for people who like travel and aviation before I call many investors at all. Segment and analyze and research investors and pick the one like you do a customer that's probably gonna like you. Well, my takeaway would be all the entrepreneurs out there to think of themselves as investors. It shifts the mind in such a way that you go look in the mirror and say, okay, I have 24 hours today. Eight hours hopefully go to sleep. Eight hours would go to my loved ones and now I have eight hours of economic output. This is my currency. I need to invest this. Where would I invest this? How would I invest this? So if the entrepreneurs start thinking of themselves as investors, I think two magic things happen. One is that they start thinking a little bit more rationally and rationality is a good thing. And two, their passion, if it still flows through them, trying to solve this, you know, that craziness that comes from having the passion and being an entrepreneur gets a little bit more checked by the rationality of being an investor. So I'm basically saying that as an entrepreneur, think of ourselves as investors of our time. We're gonna cry a lot. We're gonna sweat a lot. We're gonna have joys beyond belief. But all these comes at a price and that price can be more appreciated by thinking of ourselves as an investor. So that would be my takeaway. Fantastic. Well, as always, it's unfortunate that we're already out of time. I know that I learned a lot. Practice your pitch, find the teams, inform the teams that are strong before you find an investor. Don't find any investor. Find the investor that's right for you. And I think, again, noting that you have to persevere and you have to have the passion, but with the pragmatic view, really is the way forward. So for me, those were additional takeaways and I really appreciate you taking your time. So thank you, Jeff. Thank you all touch. Thank you. Thank you. And so to our viewers, I would encourage everyone to continue to watch the Global Entrepreneurship Summit Activities by going to the website, www.ges2016.org. And that's it for today. I'm Jazz Azzari reminding you to think, innovate and improve our world.