There's a Swedish word I keep coming back to. Dumsnål. Translated “StupidCheap or even better “pound-foolish”. Trying to cut cost but in a way that it ends up costing you instead. Saving a hundred dollarsand losing ten thousand.
I get lots of request for different coaching assignment - bu...
Ok so today I might sound harsh. But it's just so frustrating.
Let me tell you what's happening.
A founder has an important investor meeting coming up. The stakes are real. This opportunity really matters.
And instead of practising the pitch, pressure-testing the story or preparing for the har...
Last week I told you about the one sentence that survives a pitch meeting - the soundbite. This week I am sorry to tell you that even a great soundbite can die if the ten minutes around it exhaust the investor first.
I have seen this more times than I can count. Not because their company was wea...
Last year I watched a pitch that wasn't one of my students.
The deck was genuinely good. Clean design. Solid numbers. A founder who clearly knew the business inside and out.
And afterward, none of that mattered.
The investor who'd watched it tried to explain the company to a colleague. She ski...
Interesting Is Not the Same as Investable
One of the most dangerous things a founder can hear after a pitch is:
“This is really interesting.”
Because it feels positive.
It feels like momentum.
It feels like the room understood.
And sometimes it is a genuine signal of interest.
But sometimes it...
Over the years watching thousands and thousands of pitches, very often I've seen a strong business walk out with a weak response from the investors.
Not because the idea is bad - because most often it wasn't.
Not because the founder isn't smart – because most of them were really smart.
But bec...
I get contacted every week by founders who tell me they are raising soon.
Not now.
Soon.
They just need to sign a few more customers first. They just need to fix the deck. They just need the story to feel sharper, the numbers to look stronger, the pitch to feel more investor-ready.
Those are...
An international accelerator keeps bringing me back to coach their portfolio companies on exactly one thing: positioning. Not the pitch deck. Not delivery. Positioning.
I have seen endless of founders rewrite their pitch deck ten times and they still hit the same wall.
The story doesn’t land.
In...
Did you miss last week’s newsletter?
Wondering if it ended up in spam?
It didn’t.
I just didn’t write one.
For the first time in 81 weeks.
That is more than 18 months of showing up every single week - and last week, life happened.
It was my birthday.The kids had a field day.And somewhere in th...
Let me tell you about the moment I usually stop listening at a pitch
At almost every pitch I hear, there's a point - around twenty seconds in - where the founder stops pitching and starts reciting. The voice flattens. The features start stacking. And I feel myself having a hard time focusing.
...
One thing that has struck me over the past few years is how obsessed the startup world is with HOW.
How do we raise funding?How do we build the MVP?How do we scale faster?How do we sell to customers?How do we get investor attention?
Everyone is Chasing the Perfect HOW
And I get that.
The HO...
Why Clarity Beats Impressive - Every Time
I was sitting in a room full of investors last month, watching back-to-back pitches.
Some founders were polished. Perfect slides. Rehearsed delivery. Industry jargon stacked neatly on top of more industry jargon.
And they were completely forgettable.
T...
