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Startup Camp SF Revisited

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Startup Camp San Francisco was this past Sunday and Monday. In addition to my Live Feed updates, here are my impressions regarding Monday, which was primarily focused on the Best Startup Competition. When working on building something, you can get deep in the details that you forget how to talk about it with someone who doesn’t know anything about it. This is what the Best Startup Competition was there to help the Startup Founders work out, the kinks of their elevator pitch.

21 startups signed up to pitch their company/product to 21 groups of people, 5 minutes per group. This is where the rubber meets the road. If you can’t explain what you are doing and why someone should care within 5 minutes, you’re not going anywhere. I wanted to be kind to each group and give them their time and due, but eventually, some startups were so painful that I had to start just walking away.

Here are a few hints from someone who has given pitches like this for his living for the past 10 years:

  • Look your audience in the eye, at least once in a while! If you give you pitch looking at the floor or off into space, you can’t connect with the audience. (The one gentleman who I walked away from after 2 minutes, this is the biggest reason why….you know who you are…)
  • Talk about the Forest, not the Trees. No one cares about the little features your system has. What is the big picture value to me…a potential user? Why should I care, state that first…you have 30 seconds (or less), go…
  • If your a technology company doing a presentation, use technology to present! While the guy who did his presentation using old fashion flip charts got retro points, he didn’t get my wooden nickel. (nor did he get my full attention)
  • To really capture your audience, tell a story…don’t do a PowerPoint read along. There was one company who had a presentation that was exactly this, a story about the value his solution provides to his target users, then it went into a brief product demo of the key screens you see to use the system. (I don’t know for sure, but I think he was the winner…see below).

Everyone who competed at the competition gets huge points for doing it. It’s not an easy thing to do especially is such a format. I also think everyone who competed would get value out of the books presentation zen and How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less.

Unfortunately, I had to take off before the winners were announced. But based upon the piles of coins that I saw as I was leaving, Lil’ Grams looks like they either won or placed in the top three. This is the only company that had a presentation that was a story. The startups that I think you should watch out for are (in no specific order):

  • Lil’ Grams – vertical social network for parents to share their children’s growth with family and friends in a micro-blogging format. And they have a model to make money right away…what a concept!
  • Velocious – voice ordering platform for restaurants to enable customers to order food en route for pickup. Think no more long lines and waiting in the morning for your coffee…
  • MarkMail – archiving and discover tool for email. Both public email like lists serves and private email for companies. Their presentation needs a lot of focusing, but I could see thru to the value regardless.
  • Ultimate Football Network – Another great vertical social/mashup service. All the information you need for making your Fantasy Football picks in a single location…or to just catch up on all the latest details of the football world. Based upon the stickiness factor and size of the market they service, this one is a serious contender.

Zen, Presentations, and VCs

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One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book.  (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.