 Hello, my name is Daniel Durazo and I'm a Foreign Service Officer here at the U.S. Department of State. Thank you for joining us. I have the pleasure of being your moderator for today's Global Innovation through Science and Technology, or just Tech Connect Conversation. Today we'll be talking about perfecting your pitch, tips and tricks. For those of you unfamiliar with the term pitch, it is the process of presenting or describing the primary features of your product, innovation, or idea. Those often pitch to potential investors, partners and customers. And remember, you can join today's conversation by sending us your questions and comments through the chat space next to the video player, or through Twitter at hashtag JustTechConnect. Let me begin by welcoming our panel of experts. Joining us today is Michelle Messina, the CEO of the International Training and Consulting Firm Explorer International, and the co-author of the bestselling book, Decoding Silicon Valley. Also joining us is Janesh Sinha, a former GIST Catalyst pitch competition finalist and the founder of Geyondon, India's first education financing start-up. And joining us in the chat space to help answer your questions and share links to resources is Janine Elliott, a Program Officer at VentureWell, managing the early stage innovators program. Thank you all very much for joining me today. As we wait for viewers to send us their questions, I'd like to kick off the discussion by asking you to explain the value and purpose of pitching. Janesh, let's start with you. Absolutely. Thanks, Ananya. Pitching is central to any business. As you mentioned in the introduction, entrepreneurs need to pitch their business first to investors, then to customers and to partners, because no business can build itself on its own. You are going to need partners. You obviously are going to need customers to sell to and investors. Therefore, it's important to know what are the right ways to approach perfecting your pitch. And there are two parts to a pitch, I believe. One, the pitcher itself. So one thing that I'd like to point out here is that you yourself are the presentation. And by the same time, the presentation itself is also fairly important. So it's important to prepare. It's important to prepare and practice. As you prepare your pitch, you should plan to get to the question of why should the other person care as soon as you can, with the right context, of course. And an important aspect of that is knowing your audience. And this gets ignored often. I've seen several of my friends, even, using the same pitch, the same practiced pitch, to several investors. But the reality is different investors value different things. And therefore, the pitch to different investors has to be different. So it's important to what we do differently is research a lot, go to LinkedIn, go to whatever media available, news articles and whatnot. And the same goes for your customers and partners. The problem of your customers and partners is the key to making, to clarifying your value proposition and answering the question, why should they care? Why should they give you the time of the day? And the sooner you are able to answer that question with a clear, articulate value proposition, which is supported by facts and figures and examples, the closer you are to winning their confidence and getting an affirmative answer. So it sounds like it's really important to, like you said, do your homework, know who your audience is and send them a message that really speaks to their needs and their desires. Thank you very much, Janesh. Michelle, can you share your thoughts with us about what a pitch is and why it's important? I think when you're building a company in the early stages, you have to be able to articulate what your value proposition is to your customers, primarily, as Janesh said. Then you've got to be looking at where your partners fit into the whole process of building your business. And then finally, to investors, if you are in fact going to raise investment capital. The Janesh made a very good point about knowing who your audience is and your ability to connect with them on an emotional level and show that you've done your research and your homework to understand their perspectives, their interests, their beliefs in such a way that you can connect with them. There are a couple different things associated with the pitch, not just the content that is presented in your slides, for example, if you are using a slide deck, but the ability to provide context around the message that you're delivering. So how impactful are your technical or commercial milestones, providing context around that, I think helps your audience understand better why the point you're making is actually in fact important. There's also the element of the content that goes on the slides. There's also the aspect of your personal style and the form at which you communicate and interact with your audience. So I think that there's a couple elements associated with content, context, form and style, and all of those make up for a great pitch for customers, partners, and ultimately investors. So it sounds like a pitch is actually a rather complicated thing. You have to put various different pieces together so that they all kind of speak in the same direction to your audience. Thank you. Thank you both for those explanations. Still ahead, we'll ask our panel of experts to share the various ways entrepreneurs can present themselves, their ideas and their ventures to potential investors, customers and partners. Now let's dig into the poll question we asked on social media in the days leading up to this program. We asked our audience what aspects of pitching do you find most challenging, and you can see the results on the screen. The top answer was simplifying your idea or innovation at half of all the responses that we received. The next most popular response was public speaking as a challenge with about a quarter or 25% of the responses. And finally, the best way to follow up to a pitch. What comes after that initial interaction with a client or with an investor? Michelle and Janish, what are your reactions to this poll? Michelle, we can start with you. Well actually no surprises on any of those things. Certainly public speaking is something that it takes practice. It takes rehearsal. It takes getting feedback from a friendly audience, for example. That's a practice thing I think that really is one of the challenges that we, none of us are really born as great public speakers. We have to rehearse and practice and get better at that, just like an actor in a show might do so. So I think public speaking is one of the big challenges that all of us have that we just have to keep working on. You mentioned practice, would you say that there's sort of a fine line to be walked in terms of practicing too much where a pitch might seem a little bit too rehearsed perhaps? I've never actually seen that and I've heard 5,000 pitches or so. So I don't believe that you can get too polished in your presentation. There is the ability to read your audience and then have the right type of responses as you are reading your audience to understand if they're getting it or not and being able to adapt your responses, your style of responding, the types of words that you use, going back to Janesh's point about you have to know your audience, but I actually have never seen anybody who's so polished that it looked like they were a professional actor. Interesting. Janesh, what are your thoughts on some of the responses to the poll? Yeah, I think the first question is extremely important. How do you simplify something that is so complex for you? It's a problem that is so complex that it deserves a solution and that's something that you've been working on. I found that to be very challenging when I was preparing my pitch. We had to simplify the fact that why is it that students don't get loans here, but this is a challenge that there's no escaping from. You have to attack it head on. Take help from experts, take help from folks who have what experience in a field, but at the same time also take help from various kinds of presentations, in fact, even movies or documentaries, newspapers, articles, articles about complex issues. They're writers and authors simplify an idea that's very complex using simple name and language. Ultimately, if the message is strong, but it doesn't get across to the audience, then there is no value in that message. So this is something that you need to discuss, refine and keep refining. I believe over the last two and a half years that we have been running our business, we've had over 100 revisions of our pitch deck. And I'm sure Michelle can speak from her vast experience in carrying several pitches and how often do people revise. And the reason is not because we found a font that was not in the right place, but more of, we just thought of a way of saying this in a better manner. So it sounds like, and it sounds like, no, that's right. It sounds like simplifying complex ideas can often, what form that takes can often depend on the audience. Like you said, what type of message the audience is likely to respond to. That's very interesting. Thank you both. And now we're going to take some questions live from our online viewers. One question coming to us from our audience. How does pitching to investors differ when you've already received around the funding compared to when you're seeking your first round? This is from the viewing group at our embassy, the US Embassy in Monrovia. This is Michelle. I'll take that one. I think that the investors as an overriding objective, they want to get a return on their investment. So if you have taken a round of funding already and you're pitching to investors for your next round, you need to be articulate in communicating the commercial and technical milestones that the company has achieved during the first round of funding and how the company has how you as the CEO have built value in the company during the prior period of time. So the the how do you project where you're going to go? So here we are today and tomorrow we're going to be here. So how are we going to get there? Your investors are very interested in understanding that. They also want to understand that you're the right team to execute upon this next phase of growth in the company. But in general, the overriding interest of the investors is momentum, timing, how is the company going to grow? And as I and as an investor, am I going to get a return on my investment after a certain period of time? So it's not that different, but you do have typically more commercial traction that you're able to report when you're going for your your second round of funding, for example. Excellent. The viewing group at the embassy in Monrovia also asks, is there an ideal length for an elevator pitch? And perhaps one of you can define what this term means elevator pitch. Some of our viewers might not be familiar. Dennis, perhaps you'd like to tackle this question first. Absolutely. So the concept is sometimes you just have 30 seconds or a minute or some such short time to pitch to your customer partner investor. Right. And it's difficult to collapse your long elongated to 30 minutes, 45 minutes pitch into that period of time, unless you actually have a version that fits into that period of time. So that is the pitch that is passionately called the elevator pitch because that's the land of time you typically get in the elevator. Right. And the key there is an elevator pitch, you have to get to your current statement value proposition, traction numbers right up front. And the other very important point from my side is you have to choose what you're going to say. See, because, for instance, in terms of a validation, you might have five validation points. But in an elevator pitch, you can perhaps only talk about one validation point, because that's all the time you're going to have. So you have to do a lot of thought for us. You have to put a lot of thought into choosing what you want to present, and then practice, put it all together and then practice. It's important to get that time right. As Janess said, be very clear and only use one validation point. But most importantly, what's your objective of an elevator pitch? It's really about starting a conversation and doing enough interactive dialogue with the other person to figure out if there's an opportunity for you to meet and talk in more detail. So the objective of the elevator pitch usually is just to start a conversation. That's a great point. You're just trying to get the next meeting. So it sounds like elevator pitches typically are somewhere between 30 seconds in a minute, and they need to be very carefully crafted so as to prioritize one thing in particular and are often simply a way to start what will hopefully be along their conversation. Thank you both. Another one of our viewing groups asks, how much of the venture's financial information should be included in a pitch? I think that you have to be selective about the kind of financial information that you present in your initial pitch to an investor. Obviously, you want to have done your homework about the investor to see if they are in fact the right type of investor for you. In Silicon Valley, we typically have very specialized investors, meaning they invest in specific categories of technology and at certain stages of maturity of the company. So if you are talking to an investor, you're trying to raise your series A round, for example, but you're talking to an investor who is mezzanine financing. They're not necessarily a qualified investor for you at that particular stage of your company. So doing your research in your homework is very, very important. And then the second part of it is if you've got a qualified investor in front of you, your first initial meeting with the investor is not a lot of detailed financial information. You're providing basically a 360 degree view of the company and overview of the company so that they can understand as many attributes and aspects of the business as possible. If you get to a second meeting, which you hopefully will, then that's the opportunity for you to discuss in more depth the financial picture of the company. Janish, anything to add to that? Two points. So investors are going to slash down your financial projections by by a big multiple. So in order to see them that a bit, you want to define and drive home the point as to why your projections are actually grounded, conservative, and something that investors should not, you know, slash down by a big multiple, maybe a small multiple. And the second point that Michelle mentioned that, you know, again, focus on what the investors care about the high level. Right? That's the that's what you put in the first pitch. Have your backing numbers ready, but don't go into a lot of depth. In the second, what we have found in our experience, by the time we are at the third interaction or so, that's when the investors typically ask you for a financial model, detailed calculations, and so on. That comes in later. Understood. So it sounds like, like so many other things, you really have to tailor how much information you include depending on the audience and depending on which conversation you're having with your investors. That's very helpful. Another question coming to us is, what are tips to pitching proprietary technology that you don't have a solid patent on yet? Sounds like a very specific question. Michelle, perhaps you'd like to tackle it first. Sure. I think that you again have to know your audience. And so if you know your audience, then you can determine how much confidential or proprietary information that you're willing to share with that particular person or organization that you're meeting with. I think that every investor, if you are pitching to investors wants to understand the secret sauce, the unique aspect of your company, your technology, your go-to-market strategy. And if part of that secret sauce or unique aspect is proprietary technology that's not patented, then I think you need to be very careful about how much information you do share. Most investors, if not all, will never sign a non-disclosure agreement about the information that they hear in the meeting because they meet with so many different companies in the same sector. So they have a very good understanding as to who the players are and what the value is that each company might deliver to the market. So I think that it has to be, you have to understand who your audience is. You have to have good trust between one another. And then you have to determine how much you're willing to share and at what point or stage in the process makes the most sense. So it is actually a case-by-case basis. And you just have to be using your good judgment about what makes the most sense and what feels right. Moving on to the next question, Gustavo Adolfo asks, how can an entrepreneur from Latin America pitch a business idea to customers or investors in another country, for example, the USA? And I'm sure this question could apply to a number of different regions, investors making or companies making pitches to investors or customers from other parts of the world. Janish, why don't you start us off with this question? Absolutely. And there's something that we actually do. So in terms of our partners and customers, we have American institutions. So I'm sitting here in India, we have American institutions that we have partnered with and that customers as well. A couple of things come to mind. One, network. So somebody sitting in a different country is usually going to have a bias as to why should we be interacting with somebody from that apart. So to answer this, or to build more confidence, what I, the couple that we took was we identified folks that could connect us to the people that we wanted to get connected to. So leverage you in network as much as you can. And network comes in the form of great initiatives like just where you can leverage something and a program like this to get connected to the right people. So that connection helps. And secondly, again, would come down to the thing that we've been talking about a lot is knowing your audience. So again, why should somebody sitting in a different country care about something that you're doing in Latin America? And what does the solution, what problem do you solve? And again, I hate to repeat myself, why do they care? We have to be very clear about that articulation. And then you can start reaching out. We are in fact, just wanting to add the fact that a few pictures on LinkedIn and heard back from quite a few people, it was a 10% response rate, which is great for, you know, cold emails. I think we got there by having a very clear, small paragraph describing how we could add value. And that resulted in a lot of interesting. Thank you, Dennis. Anything to add to that question, Michelle? Yeah, I think that it's challenging presenting to another individual in another country, especially if you've not been there physically to understand the challenges and the problems in the market that your potential customer might face. So, before you actually do a pitch, my suggestion would be to spend some time doing some Skype interviews, for example, with people who match your customer profile and doing enough of a discussion or an interview process with them to ensure that you do really understand the problem that they may be facing in the market or the gap opportunity that there might be there. And doing enough of the Skype interviews, for example, can help you sort of build a profile and deepen your understanding of the market, which will hopefully get you in a position to feel more confident and be more effective in your presentation to a customer in another country. And then, of course, understanding how you present via Skype or phone or what have you and presenting in your second language or your third language, for example, helping, having someone help you a little bit with coaching through that process of presenting in another language is always important. Excellent advice. Marquez Del Valle from El Salvador asks, how much should you tell a potential investor about yourself in addition to focusing on your startup during a pitch? I think that team matters a lot, especially if you're an early stage company and investor is going to invest in the team as much as they would invest in an idea. So as you tell the investor about what your idea is, what validation points you have, the question that they're going to have is fine. You have an idea. Somebody else could have the same idea, but you're the best group of people to solve this particular problem and and to implement the solution that you propose and need to preempt that question by having that slide in there. You need to, you need to highlight your strengths and you need to be, you need to make it absolutely clear that guys, we are the team to solve this particular problem. Michelle, anything to add? I think that investors and customers want to know that as Janess said, this is the team to make this happen. Some of the ways that you can do that are by talking about the how long you've known your co-founders, for example, and have you worked together in previous companies? Did you go to school together? I've met lots of entrepreneurs that have known their co-founders since they were four or five years old. So they have this 20 year long history of knowing this particular person who's been their friend. And so they worked out the communication style and the differences in their relationship. So that lowers the risk for an investor, for example, that there's going to be founder conflicts and what have you. Secondly, it's about what kind of accomplishments has the team made? So did they bring other products to market? Did they build software successfully that solved the problem in the market? Did they use their experience in a particular market sector to address a very specific discreet problem, for example. So I think that accomplishments, working relationship between the founders, you know, the roles and responsibilities of the founding team, that all helps. And then additionally, you know, where have these founding team members worked previously? Have they worked for large companies or small companies? Or have they done very specialized research that shows they're an expert in a particular category? So there's lots of different facets of talking about the team that are important, because in the end, you really want to have an A quality team more so than a B quality team and an A idea. So you always want to have an A quality team more than anything else. And so presenting that picture of the team and why you're the best is very, very important. And just one thing to add there, Diane, before you go to the next one. The other one other reason why it's important to highlight about your team is because investors are also looking at if you face problems, how will you deal with those problems? How will you find solutions? And that is dependent not on your idea. It is dependent on you and the group of individuals that are driving the data. So that's another reason why team matters a lot. Very interesting. It sounds like from the perspective of talking about the team, or the person, the founder themselves, there should be a purpose. And it sounds like part of that purpose at least is to establish a sense of trust. In other words, convincing the investors that they can trust that team or that that founder to resolve problems and to execute a good idea on behalf of the company. Very interesting. For those of you just joining us, you're watching the GIST Tech Connect conversation on perfecting your pitch. I'm joined by a panel of experts, Michelle Messina and Janish Sinha. And we are currently taking live questions from our viewers. You can submit your questions through the chat space next to this video or on Twitter using the hashtag GIST Tech Connect. Michelle, going back to you, what would you say are the 10 key points if you had to choose 10 of a successful pitch to an investor? Well, I think that the important parts of a pitch really boil down to making sure that you have a properly branded presentation. So your cover page, your company information, what your job title is, etc. Those are all really important. And then moving into how do you articulate the problem that the market is experiencing? So what's the profile of the customer? What's their problem that they have? And then how do you quantify that in the economic terms? Thirdly, you want to be talking about what your solution is to that problem and how your solution works, why it's different and what's the value that it delivers to your customer. After that, you want to get focused around the market. So that specifically is around the customer profile. Ginesh and I have said a number of times you have to know who your market is. And you want to quantify that how large is that market because investors are interested in understanding that this is a big ongoing market opportunity, and not just a small quantity of customers. Then distribution. So your product doesn't sell itself. So how does it get to market? Do you have channels? Do you have service and support? How does your product get to market? Because all that affects your business model and how much money that you make. So the investor, for example, wants to understand your business model. How are you going to make money? And is this revenue that's going to be long term and sustainable? Then there's the issue of competition. So how do you compare to the competitors out there in the market? Who else is solving the problem? How do you compare? And this is more around value rather than feature by feature comparison. Team, we've talked about team. Team is really important. So who are the key people? What's their background? Why are they the right team to win at taking this product to market? Then your milestones. What are your financial milestones? So commercial and technical milestones. What results have you achieved? And what results will you achieve? And then finally, what is the financial picture of the company? So we want to understand how big the company is going to be, how fast it's going to grow, how much cash it's going to need, and then what are all the underlying assumptions associated with building that financial picture? So how long is your sales cycle? What's your average lifetime value of your customer? Do you car sell, upsell other products, etc. So you really can present these 10 things in five minutes. It's not easy. It does take practice, but it is entirely possible. Thank you, Michelle. Very comprehensive outline of how to make a successful pitch. Now we're going to go back to some questions from our online participants. A viewer at the Binational Center in Nicaragua asks, what do you think is more important for a great pitch to know your audience or the description itself of your service or product? Janesh, maybe we can start with you. I think that's the most possible to rank. If I had to pick, I would say knowing your audience. If you know your audience, if you know the problem that they have, the experience they've had, even if you don't exactly know, or you don't know your solution in that bunch of depth, you can structure the answer to suit what they need and get their attention. Because see, in the first pitch, in the pitch, which is usually the first meeting, what you're trying to get the customer partner investor to stay is that, yes, this is a team idea start-up that I'm interested in. To that, knowing your audience for me would rank better. But it's a very, very tough choice to make. It's like choosing between your two children. Interesting. Michelle, do you agree with Janesh or do you have a... Absolutely. I do agree that you've got to know who you're talking to. And then everything will flow hopefully more naturally from there. Because you understand their interests, their beliefs, their perceptions. And it makes it easier to tailor what you're talking about. So I would always vote for understanding who your audience is. Very good. Makes sense. Going to another question. The viewing group at the Embassy in Monrovia asks, what advice do you have on explaining the technical aspects of venture to non-technical customers? I would like to take that one. Please. I would suggest that you always start out with a description of your venture that your grandmother could understand, for example. So use that picture in your mind, your grandmother, when you first start explaining what you're talking about. And then the next step is to read your audience to figure out whether or not they are understanding and getting what you're talking about. And if they are, then you can gradually increase the complexity of the explanation. So always start out at sort of a baseline level and then go up from there. The alternative of starting way high and then coming back down is a strategy for failure because you never know at what point in time you're going to lose your audience as you're clarifying your business or your product explanation. So always think about your grandmother first when you explain your business. That's interesting. It's interesting that you mentioned that reading your audience isn't only about sort of doing your homework ahead of time, but actually when you're in the room and you're explaining things to them to get a sense from sort of visual feedback from them as to how well they're understanding what you're explaining and kind of adjusting your explanation on that basis. That's very, very interesting. Moving on to our next question, another viewer asks what are the different variations of pitches an entrepreneur should prepare for investors and how might they vary depending on the audience? Janish, maybe you'd like to tackle this one. Yeah, so time becomes a very important aspect. So you could have somebody who you meet at a conference and they're there with you for a minute. Then you need what we earlier talked about, you elevate a pitch. So I'm just going to use time as the first parameter or differentiate. The second would be when you have a short meeting. Usually I see that when investors, so let's talk about VC firms and investment firms. There are different levels of folks. The folks will usually reach out to you first or you will reach out to unless you have a connection, will be analysts. Folks will join relatively more recently. They're going to want to do a yes or no in a 30 minute conversation. So your first goal is to convince them and make them say yes. So for that you need a 30 minute pitch of your you know, they have already discussed how the pitch should flow, but essentially a 30 minute version. And hitting all the keynotes. Again, is it a big business? Are you solving a problem that has defensible solution? Is your solution defensible from other competition? Do you have validation of a solution? These are three key points for me that they were looking at. Then you have the longer pitch. And usually you go to partners, venture partners, principals, senior folks in an investment group. Or perhaps a decision maker in an angel group. There you'll be interacting on a longer time period. I've had, you know, investment committee pitches that have gone as long as one and a half hours. There you have to be ready for not just pitching. I think the pitch is around 45 minutes to an hour, but for Q&A. You have to really put Q&A. You have to be ready with facts and figures. You have to know your costs, your genomic several things by on the tip of your tongue. So you have to be able to answer those questions right away. So that is a classification that I will give out. Very helpful. So it sounds like sort of the amount of time that you expect to have you should be prepared to present whether you have 30 seconds, five minutes, an hour, or longer. And each of those presentations should be structured a little bit differently. Michelle, anything perhaps another parameter our viewers might use to sort of think about how to prepare different pitches? Yeah, a couple other parameters beyond the time segment that's been allowed for the presentation are focusing on an overview pitch. That may be the 360 degree view of the company. Then you may have stuff that, a pitch, for example, that's more focused on the business aspect. So the sales and marketing strategy, the marketing plan, the go to market strategy, you may have a third pitch that's very technical in nature. And that talks really about some of the unique aspects of the technology, for example, about how it works and why it's unique and how it does things different, better, or faster than another solution on the market. Those are some parameters I would consider for different types of pitches. Lastly, Janesh made a very good point is the Q&A discussion can be anywhere from five minutes to 55 minutes. You never know what kinds of questions that a potential investor might ask. My guidance and recommendation on Q&A sessions is that you spend time with your team writing down the questions that you might get asked, writing down answers that you want to give, and then also how to bridge from one type of question to the answer that you actually want to deliver, so that they remember certain things about the product, the company, or the team. So preparation for the Q&A session is really, really important. And I've seen lots of companies do a great job in pitching, and then they fail when it comes to the Q&A session because of lack of preparation, or they just didn't anticipate certain kinds of questions and weren't prepared for it. That is one point that they wanted to make on this topic was there are some one other kind of pitch might be where your investors have actually read your deck in advance, and they are prepared with questions. So, and this has happened to me a lot of times, we go into a meeting, anticipating that we're going to speak for about 30 minutes. Turns out they already have read through your deck, which is fantastic by the way, which means you can actually focus on the meat of the presentation, answering your question. And then the Q&A section just takes the utmost priority, right? Then you have to the moment you hear your investor and there's just a personal pitch at the personal tip, the moment you hear investor say, I've gone through a deck. The moment you hear these words, you say, fantastic, can we go to Q&A? Because that's the conversation that you would have otherwise had in the third or fourth meeting. Excellent, very good advice. And speaking of sort of the deck or the presentation itself, another online viewer asks, do you recommend using audio-visual presentations for a five minute pitch, for example? And what are the best ways to use audio or video in a pitch? In my experience, I have found that five minutes in a presentation is very short, can go by extremely quickly, and defaulting or abdicating your responsibility as a communicator for the organization by showing videos and audio clips and things like that is not necessarily the best way to start off a presentation to an investor because they want to hear you, they want to understand you, they want to know how you think and how you articulate because they're investing in you as a team. So I recommend against using video clips and things of that nature, especially in your first presentation. Interesting, Janesh, anything to add to that? I agree 100% and the first reaction that I had when you asked this question was watch video pictures, I haven't prepared any videos or audio because I stick to, again, you are the presentation. That's a video or a demo of your product is something that you show to investors when you have time and then they ask for it. A video is something that you can mail after the presentation. In the presentation you want to get their reaction, you want to show off, you want to perform. It sounds like using too much audio or video support you're sort of giving up on an opportunity to do this thing that you had both mentioned earlier which is to really present the team or the the founder as a person that the investors can trust. Very interesting. Going back to our questions, the group at Tech Buzz Hub in Kampala, Uganda asks at what point in its development is a startup ready to pitch to potential investors? Always. In other words it's something that, sorry go ahead. No, I was going to say that a bunch of investors, including some of my friends who are investors, they tell me the best time to talk to investors is when you don't need the money. And the simple reason is you have leverage. If you need the money they have the leverage and hence it's always a good time to talk to investors. At the worst you're going to get feedback. Excellent. I've heard entrepreneurs tell me if I get this big contract next month I'm not going to need to raise capital and I always tell them good grief that's the best time to raise capital because you're so attractive. You just want a great contract and you never know what the future holds so you never know when you might need the money. So I always recommend that they practice pitching from day one. For the very first day they sit down with their co-founders and think about how they're going to build the business. They need to start pitching and presenting to one another to a group of friendlies and then to investors that they're going to cultivate relationships with over a period of time as they build more value in the business and actually get ready to raise around. It sounds like both of you agree that startups should always be pitching always be pitching practicing pitching and looking for opportunities to pitch their business. I think that's very good advice. Another online viewer asks us is there a format or a checklist to use in order to create a document like a powerpoint or a presentation for example to support your pitch. We went through sort of 10 key points that could be in a five minute pitch and we went through those earlier. Those would be the baseline structure I might start with or I might suggest a founder start with as they're building their pitch and you can create slides. I see most entrepreneurs that do use slides in their presentation more as a guide and as a narrative to help them tell their story but I've also seen entrepreneurs that have successfully presented without slides. That's a bit more of a challenge but I think that that's a that's definitely something to consider as well. So the the 10 slide format we were talking about earlier on in this webinar is a good format to start with from a structural perspective. Excellent. Janish any particular details you might add to the structure of that presentation? Not really. So as Michelle is going through it's all encompassing those are the key points to focus on. Michelle Samuel asks how do pitches for social enterprises differ from a traditional for-profit enterprise? What are some of the similarities? I think it depends on your audience again. So if you're looking at an organization that will give you a grant like a trust then versus an organization that's a for-profit investor like you might have heard your investors who not only financial returns but also social returns they're called impact investors. So an impact investor would look at financial returns however. So they are going to want their monies back as well. So depending on who you're pitching to you want to have the balance of you know the social impact of the problem versus the financial impact. Two other things that I highlight one is your if your enterprise is a social enterprise let that be not as a side product but as as a result of the problem statement that you saw sometimes as enterprises that would you know give back every one person of the revenue that they make. That is not something that even sustain that's not fundamentally a social enterprise. Secondly when you're talking about the social aspect when you're talking to impact investors and trust you should highlight the social aspect. You should add in stories you should add the examples that further illustrate that the social nature of the problem that are going to solve and the kind of impact that will create. So impact investors will judge and more so trust who will give you a grant they will judge foundation right they will judge your presentation as a social enterprise on the number of people you're able to impact and the extent in which you are able to impact them and not so much especially if you're talking about foundation on the money that you do making but if they're impact investors might come out they are investors they are going to care about money so even if the business has a big social impact and it doesn't have return they are not going to invest. So it sounds like the way that you prioritize the value proposition in the pitch will will differ depending on what audience you're you're pitching to. Moving on to the next question the viewing group at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia asks what are the pros and cons of presenting the same pitch to multiple investors Michelle maybe you can start us off with this question. Well I think that at least with investors in Silicon Valley they do talk to one another because they are connected to one another so they do know when an entrepreneur is out shopping their pitch to a number of investors that's what we say when investors have all seen and heard the pitch. I think that the challenge really becomes being very laser focused and finding qualified investors that make sense for your sector and your stage of maturity or growth. So if if you're going to go that route of being finding investors that are very qualified that pool of potential investors is probably much smaller than if you were going to go to a much wider group. So it's obviously you want to find the right investor for your organization and there are lots of different investors that might invest in your particular sector and so you have to be I think very laser focused on on who are the right ones and when do you talk to them. So it's not unusual for for an investor to talk to another investor and find out that company A has also spoken to them as well. That's that's part of the whole process. So I just think you need to be very careful about who you do talk to and try to get warm introductions to an investor from another founder of a founder entrepreneur that you know for example to that helps with the qualification process and that helps in ensuring that you know you do have an interested attentive investor that wants to hear your presentation. Thank you Michelle. We've received a question from Twitter as well. The question is how do you articulate the secret sauce that you mentioned earlier of the company while protecting your competitive advantage and if your competitive advantage is a more efficient operation how can you effectively communicate that sort of a two-part question. Janish maybe you can get us started. Yeah so I think the second part is fairly simple. I think it would be results right. So if your process is better you must have validation. A simple design of the process itself is not going to convince anybody. Answer the first part how do you convey the secret sauce without actually giving up too much is focus on the problem. Remember that part of your pitch is going to be educating your investors or whatever you're pitching to and that again goes back to knowing your audience. Focus on how you're solving it and then focus on showing that it works. When you're narrating how you're solving it you don't have to go into the patentable details of how your or what your IP is. You have you can always go at the or stay at a higher level and talk about hey this is the manner in which my solution for instance we have a model that predicts to future income. So we stay on that level. Like we talk about that our model uses parameters that has to prior to that ground but we don't talk about these are the advantages different parameters use and these are the data science technique that we use to model. That's something that may happen in our end discussion and again you will never give out the rate it is. So that's the balance with an example. Thank you Janesh. Going on to our next question a participant at the Binational Center in Nicaragua asks is there another way to reach out to clients and potential investors that is not a pitch. In my country the viewer asks there are no angel investors or pitching practices to speak of. Do either of you have any experience in a situation like that. I would suggest that building your network is a continual and ongoing process that entrepreneurs have to do and maintaining that network is equally important. So how do you stay in contact with people on a regular basis. Showing momentum in the company showing traction showing growth all these things can be done through short updates and short communications to your network and you can do those through a short email. A couple paragraphs for example demonstrating you know last quarter we were here now this quarter we're up here. That's a great way to continually keep in touch with people to show them what what kind of traction and momentum that you're getting and keep your name forefront in their mind. And you could potentially have people reaching back out to saying congratulations. I'd love to work with you more closely. I'd love to mentor and advise you. I'd love to connect you with someone in my network. So ongoing updates short little communications I think are great. Janish any other advice for our viewers in places where perhaps angel investing or sort of the culture of pitching isn't quite as prominent. Right I think I disagree with the premise of the question of everything is a pitch. So even an email as Michelle mentioned is a pitch. A paper advertisement, a newspaper advertisement is a pitch. But besides that I'm getting to disturb the question. When there is no defined network of your investors, potential investors if the question is about how do you then reach out to potential investors it is through network as Michelle suggested or getting inbound interest and there's nothing more beautiful than getting inbound interest when you're trying to raise money. Right and the way to do that is publicize your achievements, publicize your work that you've done so far. And you were able to actually get some press articles going press just by calling newspapers and telling them what great work you've been doing. So that's just an idea let's track and it works. So that's something that you could try out just as an example. And using other media to publicize what you've been doing could get you in more interest. Classifies websites that list solutions. Those are some of the other examples that you could use. And once you have the interest then you can obviously go into the actual pitch. Thank you, Dennis. So it sounds like there's more than one way to make a pitch and there's more than one audience for a pitch and there's many ways to do that. Thank you both for clarifying some of those perspectives. Marquez Del Valle from El Salvador asks us how do you secure a second meeting during a first pitch and how do you follow up with the investor or client? Michelle, maybe you'd like to tackle this one. I think at the end of the first meeting there is the opportunity to summarize what's been discussed and ask the investor, for example, if they're interested if they have any further questions or if they'd like to schedule a second follow-up meeting. So you basically you have to ask for the next meeting. That's really, really important. The second thing is once you leave the office you do need to follow up with an email and you need to basically delineate a couple of the key points or things that were discussed and confirm the meeting time if you did in fact organize that while you were sitting in front of them face to face. So it's the the onus is on the entrepreneur the founder of the company to be pushing for these next meetings. Investors typically are going to want to sit back and think about it a little bit and do I really want to talk to this company. They may want to push you off to somebody else in the organization at some point in time but it's really the responsibility of the founder to push for the second for the second meeting. So you've got to ask and that's a really important part of the whole process is being assertive appropriately. Well it looks like we have time for one more question from our viewing audience. The viewing group at the embassy in Monrovia asks what advice do you have for shy people or people who aren't comfortable with public speaking to help them pitch more successfully. Janish maybe you can bring us home with this question. Yeah so I think and there's been an advice I've given fairly often to this question acting in front of a mirror right. It lets you observe how you are acting or reacting and therefore you can use that as a feedback to instant feedback to yourself. The second thing that has helped me a lot was pitching to friends and pitching to also to pitching to family members because friends and family members they are very comfortable making fun of you. They'll be happy to give you candidate feedback. And finally if you can if you have friends in the same community in which you're going to pitch the partners customers or investors it's fantastic if you can get that opportunity and pitch to them because then they can also give you or even networks or seniors right. Whatever networks you can leverage for a friendly pitch where you can get some feedback will be advice item that I have. Thank you Janish. Any final words of advice Michelle for folks who are a little bit less comfortable with public speaking. Practice, practice, practice. I thought you were going to say that. Get better. Practice sounds like good advice. Well it looks like we are almost out of time and I thank our two panelists for joining us yet again and I wanted to ask them if there were any final key takeaways that they would like our audience to remember from today's presentation from today's conversation. Michelle I turn it over to you. I would suggest that anybody can be a great presenter. It's something that you can learn to do and we all have it within us to become a star presenter. Thank you Michelle. Janish any final key takeaways for our audience. Yeah I'll repeat the things we've defeated a lot in this session today know your audience and know your value proposition. Thank you Janish. Thank you Michelle. Thank you both very much for joining us and a special thanks to everyone viewing today especially to the hosts of the viewing groups who joined us from around the globe for bringing entrepreneurs together to be a part of this conversation. We had audiences at the U.S. Embassy and the Universidad San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador the Binational Center in Managua, Nicaragua the Youth Network for Reform at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia the Colomboamericano American Space in Medellín, Colombia El Centro Cultural Ni Caragüense Norteamericano in Managua, Nicaragua the Instituto Guatemalteco Americano in Guatemala City, Guatemala the American Space in Lusaca, Zambia the American Space at Copper Belt University in Kittway, Zambia the Tech Buzz Hub in Kampala, Uganda the U-Tech Ventures in Lima, Peru the Baku American Center in Azerbaijan and the GIST iHubs at L Space in Tunisia Barritech, Beirut, Lebanon Innovation Village Kampala, Uganda iHub, Egypt and the Oasis 500 in Jordan Please continue to send us your questions in the chat and on Twitter at hashtag GIST Tech Connect as our panelists will stick around for a few more minutes to answer those questions I very much hope that you enjoyed our discussion today and thanks again for joining us Goodbye