These days have drained us all:
- Show you've got traction.
- Build your narrative.
- Practice your pyramids!
The reality is that you need to expect the unexpected, so here are my three top tips to not screw up IC (because in hindsight, everything is simpler!).
Chances are that you have prepared for a great introduction:
- Every year, millions of $ are wasted in ...
- We can change that and improve this by 100X, by doing X, Y and Z!
- We are the best team to do this because we have 2 PhDs in ...
It's very likely that you are going to be interrupted, so don't just keep it short (I'm sure that plenty of people have told you so), but practice each bit in isolation, because the committee could ask you to focus on only one of those aspects.
We've been asked the following:
Why don't you guys introduce yourselves and the company?
VERY LEGITIMATE WAY TO START A CONVERSATION!
But we had practiced our intro as a whole, so even such a small change to the script made us look nervous. Practice answers, not whole intros!
If you are talented (and you guys are) at playing football and somebody you don't know invites you to play basketball, just turn him down and play your own game.
In the context of IC, this can happen if the committee doesn't understand your proposition straight away.
In our case, X was trying to understand our product in practice. He's told us:
Let's say we have x, y, and z. How are you better than current solutions in this scenario and how do you provide value?
Turns out that this scenario was not really relevant to our business. X was not trying to trick us: he just wanted to understand better what we were proposing and the most natural way to do that was to use a scenario he was familiar with.
Here's what we should have said:
That's an interesting scenario, however this is not particularly relevant to what we are doing. Instead, consider this other scenario where...
Instead, we wanted to look prepared and tried to provide a solution for a game that wasn't ours. As a result, X thought that he understood our game better than us (no, he doesn't! We are playing the wrong game!) and things really started going south!
When you are in a tough situation, you cannot afford to lose any small chance. Instead, you need to keep sharp and give your best as soon as that opportunity comes!
It was clear that things were not going as we wanted, but at some point investor Y, who clearly likes us, goes:
From your application, it looks like you have great traction. Can you tell us more about that?
That was an 80K question: an unbelievably kind gift! We surely have great traction:
- Working prototype.
- Advanced pilot conversations with 4 multinational companies.
- Few talented engineers that already want to join us to build the whole product (come talk to me in few a months when you need to do hiring, because it's going to be tough!).
All of this in five weeks of work!
We should have used that chance to come across as 100 times more powerful, but instead we were carrying the marks of the previous defeats and had no more energy to turn the match into our favour.
Talking to investors is very difficult, especially if you are solving a non-obvious problem that requires domain expertise.
You are all very talented individuals, so I'm sure that you are going to pass IC, but in case you fail, here is some advice I feel is worth sharing:
- Do not let such failure define you. You ARE talented and this was just a bump on your way towards success.
- Learn from this: defeat can be very valuable if you learn what you did wrong. Surely, you don't need to torture yourself with ifs and buts: try go replay your IC in your mind and detect where things really started to go towards the wrong direction. If you can highlight that moment, next time you will realise when things are going wrong in the same way and you'll be able to change the course of events.
- Get back on your feet quickly! Building a successful company is a painful, yet very rewarding journey. You can't possibly let such a small setback stop you!
Although we have not passed IC, we are talking to big companies and they are really interested in what we are building, so I can't wait to put the next feature together and demo it to them! The same should apply to you: you are building a business, not an EF business! If EF is investing on you, then great: you have amazing support! If they are not, then breath in, breath out, and start a new day as an entrepreneur: EF can help, but they can't make your company successful for you!
Good luck :-)