The Wisdom Wall
10 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“numbers on their own are meaningless. I can make numbers say good or bad, no matter what.”
“A great startup pitch is made when an investor can see the future that that person is talking about. The reality is a pitch really is a story, but deeper than that, beyond just a story, it's actually an exercise in world building.”
“the reason why I say to do it this way is future and then go back to its working is if an investor already knows what the end goal should look like. And then you come and say, here's all the data points that show us that we're on the right path. They're going to be able to actually fill in that gap in between and say,…”
“When we like somebody, when we believe in them, when we connect to them, we look for green flags. We look for reasons to say yes. That's just human nature.”
“And so what I've actually come up with is this idea of what I call approachable expertise. And it's a tone that you want to deliver where it's like, Hey, I know what I'm talking about, but Alex, like if you have pushback, let's have the conversation. Let's, let's have a discussion about it and see where we come out.…”
“And investors also, in my experience, want founders who are willing to stand up for themselves and to push back because it's a, it's a microcosm of, of their experience as a CEO long-term.”
“And I think a story when you're telling the vision story, it should be about three minutes long. Three minutes for anyone out there is about 600 words. Um, it's, it's a little bit less if you're speaking slower, but many founders tend to speak fast. So anywhere between 500 to 600 words is about three minutes. That's…”
“And if you get an investor thinking through the lens of what if I'm right, that's how you get them thinking about, oh, this is the fund returner. This is the outlier inside of the fund, because now they're just thinking about the biggest upside case instead of all of the downside risk. And that's really... A big…”
“The best impromptu speakers are never speaking impromptu.”
“So if you're really tackling something that's, you know, a little bit more challenging to describe the problem where you really need them to feel that pain because maybe the investor doesn't understand it right out of the gate, dig into the problem and then go into solution, the why now, why us, all that normal stuff.…”