Ben Wiener: How To Build a Winning Pitch Using H.E.A.R.T

Ben Wiener  00:00

For every Uber and Airbnb and open AI that we read about, there's another 1000 that were very similar that we never heard of because they didn't work out giving to founders, because it's like a free upgrade. When you check into your flight and you're flying in coach, and the desk clerk says, Sir, would you like a free upgrade to business? Yeah, of course, the founder is completely intoxicated with what they're doing, because they've committed the next few years of their life to doing it, and they've probably done a lot of research and work leading up to it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:40

Hello and welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead better lives through creating better businesses. Today's show is a little bit special. It feels like I'm going back in time, because I'm here talking with a venture capitalist who is all about helping investors to really sell their vision, raise venture capital and launch their startup, and that takes me back to my days at the Ice House. So today's guest has got a background in corporate law. He served as a clerk at the Supreme Court in Israel. He invests in 12 to 13 companies at any one time through his VC firm, and he now has an Amazon number one bestseller called fever pitch. He's going to share with you the heart that's H.E.A.R.T  framework of a perfect pitch. And not only is it relevant to startups, but it's also a great tool for understanding relationships, for understanding selling, for understanding storytelling. So Ben Weiner is the author of Fever Pitch and the managing partner at jump seed ventures. So welcome to the show. Ben, it's lovely to have you here from around the other side of the world.

Ben Wiener  01:48

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:52

Yeah, so we've just been having a chat, as we always do before I come on the podcast, and you've got a really interesting background, not your traditional kind of trajectory into being an author. So I'd love for you to start by telling us a bit about your background and how you got to where you are now.

Ben Wiener  02:06

Sure. So I grew up in the United States, in Pennsylvania, I actually grew up in a family owned multi generational business, a local business, so I have a lot of familiarity with like, the small, you know, medium sized family business environment. I went to law school in New York and clerked on the Israeli Supreme Court, actually, as a pathway for myself and my wife to one day get to Israel, which is where I'm talking to you from now. We moved to Jerusalem about 27 years ago. So I grew up here in Israel professionally, although I am an American, and about 12 years ago, I had a career. I left law pretty early and got into startups, which is the primary economy here in Israel. I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with that, and that's what I wanted to get into. I wanted to help build companies from scratch and see them grow in the world. And I had experience in small companies and then some big companies doing what we would call business development, or corporate development. And then about 12 years ago, I stumbled into a venture capital opportunity here in the city where I live, in Jerusalem, the startup ecosystem was going through a bit of a renaissance, and I was one of the early people to spot it. So I raised a little bit of capital to start investing, to switch sides of the table and become an investor and invest in early stage startups from the capital, and I've raised, you know, 10s of millions of dollars for that fund and invested in a couple dozen companies, some of which have become extremely successful. They don't all work, but the ones that do work, you know, pay for the rest of it. And very privileged to have worked with incredible founding teams, very diverse founding teams. So over a third of the companies that I funded were founded by a woman, which is pretty cool, way above the industry norm. And it's just been an incredible thrill to participate in the growth of some of these exceptional companies that have changed their industries, and, in some cases, changed the world.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  03:53

It’s interesting. You say that, obviously there's some really successful ones and some that don't do so well as well. I remember when I used to work at the Ice House, we used to say out of 10, you probably get eight that would kind of fail, or No, probably not that many, but seven that would sort of fail, a couple that would do okay. And then one really great one out of the 10. Is that about the right numbers, or is it a little bit different to that?

Ben Wiener  04:11

Yes, I think that is right. And I think we, I think fail. We use failure because you don't have another word, but it's a bad word, like when 98% of the participants end up in a result, it's hard to call them failures. Like even some amazing people with amazing technologies, their companies don't work out. It's not that they did anything wrong, it's just innovation is that hard. It's so hard to change people's behaviour or change companies behaviour en masse and achieve great success. We read about the successes, but we don't realise that for every Uber and Airbnb and open AI that we read about. There's another 1000 that were very similar that we never heard of because they didn't work out. So there's a lot of luck involved. There's a lot of talent also, and skill. And as an investor and as a founder, you have to have a very high tolerance for risk and for what we would call failure, when the presumption is that you're going to walk into the casino. And lose. You have to have an incredible degree of self confidence to believe that you're going to be the one out of or two out of 100 that are going to walk out with a payout. So it is a little bit of an area of investing or activity or a business that is very different than almost anything else. And luckily, I've been involved in that area for like, a couple decades, so I have some familiarity with the risk levels, but for newcomers, it can be very jarring when you've done everything right and you still don't succeed. It's hard to call it failure. It's just just the way things go. There's a great investor in Silicon Valley, Mike Maples, who says every startup starts off dead and has to prove that it's alive. So the presumption is that the startup is not going to work. And what I'm here to do, and part of a lot of my writing, has been about trying to help founders get over that hump of presumed failure, to better chances of success.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:56

And this brought you to writing your book, right, which is what we're going to be talking about today, and that's called fever pitch, and we're just talking about it before. It's a business fable, which I always love, because I think that really brings home the story. But tell me a bit about where that idea came from.

Ben Wiener  06:11

Well, I'm an accidental venture capitalist, and then I became an accidental author. I've always loved reading. I never thought that I'd be writing, but I tell people that I found out maybe this is like an offensive metaphor or weird metaphor. I tell people that I found out that I was pregnant, and then I found out I was pregnant with twins, like I had these two ideas for stories to teach something, and then I realised, well, no, I'm never gonna be able to read these stories if I don't write them, because they're my stories. I have to write them down if I wanna read them and find out what happened. So I just started to jot down some outlines, and then to make a very long story short, I was researching storytelling anyway, for fever pitch, for what became fever pitch, I was trying to understand, is there such a thing as the structure of a perfect startup pitch and research led me into learning More and more read voraciously, and for like, 2019, 2020, into the covid years, a lot of my reading took a turn into storytelling structure, movie script writing structure, novel writing structure. So as I was learning about story structure, these two stories came into my head, and I'm like, Wow, I'm now learning the skills to actually create these stories and craft them into something that could be commercially viable. I wasn't looking to make money off of the books, but I wanted something where I could give it to people who didn't know me, and they would say, Wow, this is like a properly written structure, structurally sound, you know, story. So it was a process, and I had these two concepts that I wanted to teach, the fever pitch, which became, which has become a number one best seller on Amazon, which is wild, which is the new book. Is a book about storytelling structure. It's specifically about the perfect startup pitch. So it's about a founder who can't pitch a startup to save his life until his life starts to actually fall apart. The mafia is chasing him. He's running for his life, and he needs to learn everything hinges on his startup and this pitch, and he does not have the right pitch. He has the right technology, but he's not able to tell the story properly. He thinks he does, but you can pretty see, you can see pretty clearly from the beginning that he's got something wrong. He's a well meaning person, but he just has the wrong approach. And the book, the story, forces him through what he experiences, to learn what I'm as the author trying to teach, which is the H.E.A.R.T  the heart, the five part framework of the perfect starter pitch. Then the only question is, once he learns it, while he's stuck overnight in jail? Is he going to be able to get out of jail and get, you know, save himself and his family on time? That's where the drama kicks in. So it's a fun way to teach this concept, sort of embedded into, like you said, into a fable, and teach what is a very serious topic, but through a fun, engaging story.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  08:58

Perfect. And so, as we were saying before, I used to work with the Ice House, and we used to get a lot of startup pitches coming in, and I have to say, some of them were absolutely shocking, and they were so focused on the technology and not so much on what the outcomes would be. Tell us a little about the heart, the H.E.A.R.T what is that? What's the principles behind that?

Ben Wiener  09:17

So the heart framework came out of a lot of research that I did, and the research was built into a couple of parts. So number one, I was testing my own assumptions, because I always assume that I'm wrong before I assume that I'm right. So as I became a venture capitalist, this is a long way to answer your question. I'll try to do it quickly, but I just want to explain, like, why, how I got to this, because it wasn't obvious. As a founder, I pitched my startups a lot. I was the one in charge of raising the money. As a VC, I had to raise my fund. So I had, you know, wealthy people to give me their money. And then as a as an investor, I hear hundreds, 1000s of pitches, hundreds in a year, 1000s over time. So you have a wide experience with listening to pitches. And like you said, many of them are they just don't write. Eight, and it's not about the idea, just the way that the information is structured seems to be off. But I questioned myself. I thought, okay, maybe I got into this late. Maybe I'm a bozo who just doesn't understand this stuff. I think I'm fairly intelligent, but maybe I just, you know, nobody trained me to listen properly. I don't know. Maybe it's me. So I did some research in 2019 2020, with a bunch of colleagues, we anonymously polled venture capitalists around the world only about startup pitches and pitch decks. The whole survey was just questions about your attitude and your approach towards the pitch and the pitch deck. And the results were completely conclusive and clear. Number One investors put a lot of weight on that pitch. Like over 90% of investors say that the pitch deck, that slide, that document of slides, is a critical part of their analysis. So there's a lot riding on that presentation. And then the next question was 80 over 82% close to almost five out of six, said that, on average, the pitches that they receive are poorly organised. And that was very shocking, because that's what I felt. But now I was validating that among my peers. And the question was, why, like, why in 2020 2021, have we gotten ourselves in a situation where there's so much the world's information is available on the internet? Why do founders not have the right information or the right approach, almost five times outta six. Why is it falling short? And when you're on the receiving end, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard, or it's like, somebody Imagine you go to a singing contest and five outta six participants are singing out of tune. Like, it's an out of body experience. Like, why is this happening? Why did nobody teach them? Why did nobody train them? Did you show up to a singing contest, you have to sing in tune. So I don't want to put down founders. I think I have a lot of respect for founders. I was one myself. The question is, what? Why? If so much is riding on that presentation, the founders need money to get their startups off the ground, and yet they're bungling these presentations. Why? And what can we do to fix it? So that sent me down the rabbit hole of research of how do we communicate in regular life when we have something compelling to say, and what are those principles, and then how can we translate them into specific like startup speak, so that we can use those principles of storytelling and explaining things to that specific context of a founder, speaking to somebody like me, to an investor, and that was the work that led to the H.E.A.R.Tframework. And it came out to five things, and then I was able to shoehorn them into an acronym that was easy to remember. The E.A.R.T were easy. The H is a little bit of a squeeze, but I needed a good letter to start the acronym with. We can go into the five parts, but they were basically adaptations of things that have already been proven in the world. I guess what I'm trying to say is these frameworks exist in screenwriting.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:48

In Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, right?

Ben Wiener  12:51

Correct. So a lot of it comes back to Campbell. And then you realise that, you know, George Lucas was sitting with Joseph Campbell's book when he wrote The Empire Strikes Back like the great writers and novelists and screenwriters are all using these outlines, either consciously or consciously deviating from them to shake you up. But they all know what they are, and once you read these books, if you read save the cat by Blake Snyder, who was a famous Hollywood screenwriter, Blake Snyder divulged, or like revealed, the outlines that every screenwriter was using to write Hollywood scripts, and you'll never watch a movie again the same way once you read this book, because you see like, Okay, on page nine, this is supposed to happen, and at minute 32 this is supposed to happen. And when it does, you're just cracking up in the theatre or watching the movie, because you realise what the screenwriter is doing. Everyone around you doesn't realise it because they didn't read the book. But there are funny call outs to the book in some movies that are historical, that are clearly like inside jokes to other screenwriters, and once you're in the secret like you can't watch a movie the same way again. So I tried to bring those structures and those frameworks into startup pitching, and that was the five part framework that I hit upon that I teach in the book, and that I teach all over the place, like I teach it to my founders in my portfolio. I teach it to accelerator programmes to business school classes all over the world. And I'm just it's a gift that I'm giving to founders, because it's like a free upgrade. When you check into your flight and you're flying in coach, and the desk clerk says, Sir, would you like a free upgrade the business? Yeah, of course, like the trip is just so much more pleasurable. I want to give that experience to a founder. I can't guarantee that they're going to raise money, but I guarantee that the process will be better. They'll have better odds of success, and they'll feel feel more in control of the information that they're presenting, because it's refined and distilled into its component parts that are in the order that is most likely to engage the person that they need to take action, which in this case is the investor who has the money. So that's, you know, we can dive into the five part framework, but I know that like in the Eos, you also have frameworks. I think you're into frameworks. I'm into frameworks. So frameworks are really, really important. When you're trying to affect change, you're trying to affect change as a consultant to a business. I'm the founder who's trying to affect change by getting me to write a check to their to their startup, and a framework can really help you streamline the information you're presenting to produce a desired action. So that's what I'm trying to do with this framework.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  15:22

And I think it's really interesting, because we know, yes, we definitely have a framework within Eos, and I always describe it as it's not prescriptive. It's not saying that you must. It's not the same for every business, not cookie cutter, but it does give you a little bit like the cat book. It gives you the framework that you should follow, and you can put your own flavour around it. I always describe it as we build the foundations of the house. You tell us what size you want to build the foundation of the house. We put the frameworks up so you can actually start building the walls. But how you decorate it, what you put inside there with, what taps you use, or they use wallpaper, or whatever it might be. That's entirely up to you. Just follow the framework. And I'm guessing this is the same with, oh, it's the same with the Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It's the same with the the H.E.A.R.T framework as well. So I'm really nervous now. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, I've written the name of the book down, and I really want to read it. But I'm also thinking, if I do read it, will this ruin my movies forever in terms of knowing how they actually do the script writing, and similarly, with us talking about your FIFA pitch book, and we're going to ruin the surprise for the people who might buy the book.

Ben Wiener  16:21

I’m not gonna give away the ending. My stories, the two books that I've written are both have a serious twist at the end, so even if you have a sense of what might happen, I don't think anybody's guessed what really happens at the end. And that's my devious kind of mischievous nature. My first book, murder of first principles, which is a book about a serial killer in Silicon Valley who's using a business strategy book that I'm trying to teach. I don't think anybody so far, I've never heard it's sort of an Agatha Christie style. So there's a lot of different characters in the book. I so far, I don't think anybody that's read the book has guessed who the actual killer is at the end. Again, it's a fun book. My kids have read it. It's not a it's not a violent book. All the murders happen off screen, but my writing style tends to be somewhat mischievous, or mischievous, as I would say in America. So there's no way I could ruin the ending. I don't think for anybody. It's a fun book. I wrote it to be entertaining as well as enlightening. And again, judging by the reviews on Amazon, I think people have enjoyed the people that have read it have really enjoyed it. So we were happy to give away any.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:22

Excellent. So before we get into the H.E.A.R.T framework, tell me a little about what are the biggest mistakes that you've seen as a VC people coming to pitch to you.

Ben Wiener  17:32

So the big, the biggest mistake, I speak in metaphors, and the easiest metaphor is like a train station. So we meet in the train station, and the founder is, you know, the captain of the train. In order to be a good technology founder, you have to be half crazy and completely convinced that you've got something that is often very counterintuitive, that's going to change the world. The problem is that, as the person you're pitching to, I'm not there yet, like I don't I might not know what you know about your market or about your technology, and I'm sceptical, because I'm in the business of saying no a lot, because, as we talked about before the show, like 98% of startups are going to fail. So when I meet anybody, the presumption has to be that this one is not going to work, not that, not that it's going to work. So we have very different approaches to expectations about this conversation. The founder is completely intoxicated with what they're doing, because they've committed the next few years of their life to doing it, and they've probably done a lot of research and work leading up to it. I'm not there yet, so what often happens is the train just rockets out of the station, and the founder is off on their story, and I'm still back at the station with a whole bunch of lingering questions because either because I'm stupid or because I don't know what they know, or some combination of the two. So it's very hard for founders to have that Pathy is like removing yourself from your persona and putting yourself in the shoes of the person you're talking to when you're so convinced that you have this like greatest thing since sliced bread, and I'm not there yet. You sometimes forget that, and the founder is off to the races already, assuming that I'm with them and I'm still back at the station with all these lingering questions. So the h e r t framework is designed to neutralise the most important questions that an investor might have in order, so that we're both on the train as it leaves the station, and even though you the founder probably still will always know more than I do about what they're doing, at least I'm with them, and the lingering questions are being neutralised so they're not keeping me back while the founder continues to tell their story. That's the design of the framework, and some of it is counterintuitive, because it answers it presumes certain questions before they come up. And again, as somebody who has pitched many times, it's very cool when you're pitching to somebody and you can see their eyes like Blink because you're anticipating the next question. Brain and answering it before they even ask it if it's done well, it's almost like a mentalist experience, where you're they feel like you're in their head because you're so empathetic. You've so designed your pitch structurally to neutralise their objections, that as a neuron goes off in their brain, you're shutting it down and moving on. It's very cool when it works. And, you know, I can't stress enough how much of a friction that can be in a presentation when the person talking doesn't have the full attention of the person listening, because the person listening still has these lingering questions or objections that haven't been answered in the in the storytelling or in the pitch. So again, I think that's the fundamental problem, is a lack of understanding between the person pitching and the person receiving the pitch, of what the person receiving the pitch might be asking or might be questioning in order before the person pitching takes off on their Lark.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  20:55

That's interesting because also I think that if you think about the founders, particularly of tech startups, which is where you have mostly focused your energy. They are very technical. They are very ingrained in their idea and their product. And it's the next, next best thing since sliced bread. Are they natural storytellers?

Ben Wiener  21:11

So some are. It's absolutely magical when you meet somebody who is so I've invested, I've been privileged to invest in a company that was funded by a female neuroscientist. So you think, like, okay, she's a neuroscientist. She has a post doc in, like, neuroscience. What's the likelihood that she's a natural storyteller? I met her in a pitch competition, which was a competition of 55 startups that each had one minute, 60 seconds on a clock to get up and pitch, which is torture. I mean, that's way too short for anybody to handle, and they're whizzing by and people are coughing and, you know, they're swallowing their words. It's just too hard. And this was up with a perfect British accent, and she delivers a 59.9 second, you know, direct pitch that was just perfectly structured. And it was so magical to experience that. And she had no training in improv or in acting or in public speaking. She was a PhD neuroscientist, but she had that natural gift to understand what people needed to understand about her incredibly complex science. She was able to explain literally in 59 seconds in a way that was compelling, that made you want to, you know, ask more, that made you want to find out more. You had a basic understanding of what she was doing. Clearly, she couldn't cover everything, but she understood how to distil it into its component parts. It was almost as if she had, you know, come out of my then unwritten book. And I've met a few people over the years that we're able to do that, but since most people can't do that naturally, I do believe that it can be taught. And you know, a lot of founders will say to me, oh, but I'm not a natural speaker. I'm not good at public speaking. It has nothing to do with that. If you apply this framework, you can be a very serious, very dry person, but if you just know how to say the right things, you can light up the sparks in an investor's mind. You don't have to be a dramatic hand waving compelling speaker. The information will be compelling if you can set it up right and say, here's what I believe, here's the problem, here's why it's not solved, here's what's at stake. Here's my game changing, radical solution, and here's why me and my team are able to do it. That's all you need to do. You can say that in with a straight face, with a calm voice. You can be very dorky or geeky or technical. It's fine. If you can say that in the right way, you're going to get an investor's attention very quickly. So I think there's a misunderstanding about storytelling or pitching, being performative or needing to be very emotional. It can be very dry, it can be very technical. It just has to be seriously presented and presented in the right order and context, and it can get the result that you need.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  23:54

Yeah, because as you said, it's about building up. It's answering the questions before the questions even come out. So you bring the person on the journey. So it's not a Quick Start train, but it's a we're leaving the station together. Makes perfect sense. Okay. Have you ever had anybody who has been unable to take on board the ideas around pitching?

Ben Wiener  24:14

So as an investor, I'm only investing two or three times a year out of hundreds of things I see, and one of the things I am trying to gauge in those meetings with founders is, do they have the capability of storytelling, or at least being able to learn it pretty quickly? If it's just too hard to understand them, then, unfortunately, that's going to be a red flag for me, and I probably will work with them. So the people I am working with have demonstrated some ability to communicate. Maybe we need to tweak it. Maybe we need to work on it. But I haven't had somebody in my portfolio that I've invested in that turned out to be a terrible presenter, because if they were that bad, I wouldn't have invested in them in the first place.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:52

So you're looking to see if they're actually coachable, really, aren't you?

Ben Wiener  24:56

Yeah, yes, I don't it's a little bit counterintuitive. It because I don't want to have to coach them too much. If I have to do too much, then it's just too hard. So I can't say that I've worked with people closely that have been uncoachable. It's not that hard to adapt. It's just reordering information. So somebody who's that stubborn and not unable to process it probably has other issues that make it difficult to work with them. It's really not that hard. It's like riding a bike once you understand the principles. It's designed to be very easy to use and implement. So I haven't had tremendous issues with anybody once I've explained it to them, and I could do it in an hour or even less, and have I would say, I don't want to call out anybody, all the founders in my portfolio, like my children. I would say there's one founder in my portfolio who's maybe a little more stubborn, and it was a little bit harder to convince him. He was pretty convinced that he was presenting well and it was working, and he didn't really, he didn't feel that compelled to listen to my approach, but he's a great person, and he came to one of my recent workshops, which was wonderful. It was really nice to see him, and he was sitting in the crowd, and I was explaining, you know, what I'd written about. I think he hadn't, he just hadn't really allowed himself to listen too closely to what I was saying. But being in the audience, he heard me describe more like, like we're talking now about how I got to it and why it was so important to me. And he was in the process of raising his next round at the time, and he wrote me a message a couple weeks later, saying, you know, I have to say I actually incorporated the H, E, A, R t framework into my pitches lately, like I heard you speak. And I said, You know what? I'll give it a try. And I reordered, and he said, it's just, it's magical. It's just so much different. It's resonating, I feel more empowered. It's resonating better with the investors. Thank you so much. So even that one who is a little bit more stubborn, once he decided to do it, it was incredibly easy for him to do and he started to see results right away. So I'm not trying to sell myself to anybody. It's free. You can download it and use it. It's meant to be a gift for founders to say here, I can't guarantee that you're going to raise money, but if you do this, I can almost guarantee you're going to feel better talking to investors, and you're going to increase your changes of success.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  27:19

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so I have to start asking now about the actual B, H, E, A, R, T, especially of the H, because the H is gonna be really fascinated now, because you said that you had a struggle to find the right thing for that.

Ben Wiener  27:30

So the H, the H really should be a, W, it's start with y. It's the famous Simon Sinek TED Talk, which, if anybody listening to this hasn't seen it, please stop the episode and go watch that TED talk right now. It's one of the top TED Talks ever cynic is is masterful. It's about a 15 minute talk. It created, it led to his book. Start with Why it's an incredibly important fundamental starting point, which is the greatest companies, the greatest revolutions, the greatest leaders in the world, always start not with what they do or how they do it, but why they're doing it. If you want to get people to change their behaviour and follow you in anything, in a new religion, in a new political movement, in a new company, you have to communicate clearly why you're doing what you're doing and why they should follow you before you get into what the thing is or how it works. So that's start with why all of my pitches, all of my portfolio company founders pitches start with a sentence that has the word belief. XYZ come we believe or I believe that, and there it's, if you want to really supercharge it, it's often something that's counterintuitive. So it's often a challenge to the investor. What I don't like to hear Believe it or not as an investor, is everybody knows that, or everybody believes that. If everybody knows that, or everybody believes what you're about to tell me, then maybe there's 20 other people working on it, or 15 other competitors that already have an adequate solution. What I love to hear is you may be surprised to hear that, or we believe something that other people don't yet believe, because we've seen the future and we're bringing it back to the present. So whatever it is, whether it's something that is well understood or not understood, ideally it should be something that you believe. Why it's not a mission statement, it's not a vision statement, it's a belief statement. We believe that. And Sinek, in his talk, I counted at least over 30 times that he uses the word belief or believe, just over and over again, reinforcing the fact that the greatest movements start with a belief with a y. So I call that H hypothesis, because I needed an H. So it's start with y. What's your hypothesis? We believe that, and that's what's causing us to do this company, to do this startup, the E is enormous stakes. And by the way, just listen closely to when we introduce the solution. We're not going to talk about this issue for a while. We're going to set it up so that the investor is pretty much begging to hear about the solution, and we're holding off because we're setting up the drama like equivalent to like a movie trailer. So in a movie trailer, which is always two. The song in an action movie, we set up the drama before there's a denouement at the end. So we have to do the same thing with our startup pitch. We're not going to introduce the hero for a while. So h, we have to start with why what we believe that is broken or that is, you know, untapped opportunity. E, enormous stakes. There's a lot at stake. So in a great action movie trailer, you see a lot of action in the beginning, you got a sense that some there's some lives at stake. Maybe the whole world is at stake. The future of the of civilization. In order to draw me in, I need to understand that there's a lot at stake, human life, dollars, pain, suffering, something. It can't be small. If it's small, we may not be interested enough, like it may be cute, but it might not be important enough for us to really commit ourselves, to pay attention or to invest, you know, money. So E and N of stakes. There's a lot at stake. I believe that something's broken and there's a lot at stake. I don't need to know the exact number, but just, I should get a sense that there's something really wrong and there's something, you know, there's a lot in the balance? Hanging in the balance? The A is the alternatives are grossly in the quid. This is also a little bit counterintuitive. In most startup pitch decks, the competition slide is all the way at the back. And pitch decks, there's no competition slide. The competition is referenced even before we introduce our solution. Because, again, as an investor or as somebody watching a movie trailer, it would be completely preposterous to see Tom Cruise or James Bond running around and not know who they're chasing. We need to know who the villain is before we see the heroic save the day moment. It would be ridiculous, but yet, all of our startup pitches are we're hearing all about the solution, and then only at the end are we hearing, you know, what the solution is up against. And as an investor, this is always a lingering question, and we proved it through the survey that we did of investors a couple years ago. Investors natural next question after they hear about the problem, after they hear about what's at stake their very next mental question? The neuron that lights up in their brain is okay, but clearly there's seven and a half like, really? You know, people on this planet, some of them are pretty smart. If it's such a big problem or big opportunity, and there's so much at stake, there's gotta be some current solutions. Or, Wait, didn't I see some company that does this before? Or didn't I eat about somebody? So if the founder starts too quickly into their discussion about the solution, I'm still back at the train station with all these lingering questions about but wait a second, there's lots of different ways that people solve that problem today. So what we need to do is reorder it. So it's H, start with y, hypothesis E and our mistakes and then a here are the alternatives really quickly. Here's all the different ways that people, computers, companies, have been trying to address this opportunity or solve this problem. And here's really quickly why they all stink. They all they all fall short because of this reason or that reason or this reason. And by now, as a listener I'm now embedding, please save us. This. The damsel in distress is tied to the railroad tracks and the train is hurtling toward please save us. And that we can't This is unacceptable. And then we have the R, so H, E, A, hypothesis, no mistakes. Alternatives are terrible. Then we have the R, and radically differentiated, game changing, paradigm shifting hero solution that we've invented or discovered or created that is so conclusively better than all of the terrible alternatives that we just described that if it were to exist in the world, it would completely save the day. Game Over, we win, but then we get to T, and T finally is the team, but specifically the traits and skills of the team. Why am I or me and my band of rebels? Why are we the ones who are the right people? We have the right capabilities and abilities. Credibility and ability were believable because of our track record, or because of our experience, or because something else, and we have the skills on the team to design and build it and sell it, to deliver the solution that we just described, and save the day and win. That's the perfect pitch, and that can be done in 59 seconds. It can be done in a minute. And 59 seconds, it can be done in 20 minutes with more expansion, and it can be done in an hour with even more detail. It's collapsible. But those are the five core elements of the perfect pitch. Everything else is gravy. Everything else is just descriptive and helpful. But if you meet somebody in an elevator, those are the five things you need to convey what I believe, what's at stake, what the alternatives are, and why they're terrible, what my radical, differentiated, game changing, paradigm shifting solution is, and why me and or my team are the right people to design, build and sell it. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  34:51

And I guess I'm loving it, and it is the classic kind of storytelling, but it can be used for anything other than pitches as well, right?

Ben Wiener  34:59

Well, a lot of this. Comes from, like I said, from the way we tell stories outside of business. This is often like this is drawing all the way back on how, like, back in the cave, when we were cavemen and cavewomen, who were the ones that we followed, we followed the ones who could come into the cave around the fire and say, the Sabre Tooth Tiger is saw it, it's out there. This is what we need to do. Or the woolly mammoth down the hill, we have to go get them so that we can eat for the next for the winter. The ones who could convey those, those pieces of information in a compelling way, were the ones that we followed. And so we're these are evolutionary skills of storytelling that then filtered into our mythology, which is Campbell, it filtered into our screenwriting, which is Blake Snyder and save the cat, which filtered into novel writing, which is all the amazing books that have been written about novel structure, the science of storytelling by will store all these incredible books that describe, over and over again what the structures are of storytelling outside of business. And it applies to sales too, like even people that just have businesses that sell stuff. A lot of this methodology comes from a course I took at Dale Carnegie 20 plus years ago on sales advantage. A lot of these principles were in that course too. Like, how do you make a compelling sale? Well, first you set it up. You don't come barreling in when somebody walks into your store to buy an air conditioner. You don't charge at them and start yelling about how amazing the air conditioner is. You first start talking to them, Well, what are you looking for? What's your problem? What is your house like? What kind of room are you cooling? And then you say, Well, you know, based on what you told me, I think I have an air conditioner that can meet your needs. But you set it up so that the you're aligned with the buyer first, and then you present the solution, finally, at the end that you think will meet their needs. These are all the same principles, and they're well studied and well used in other contexts, in business and outside of business. For some reason, they haven't been taught clearly enough in startup land. So I'm just trying to bring them and translate them and stylize them for the specific interaction between a founder and an investor.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:00

I think it's also a framework for potentially testing your idea as well, though, right? Because if you can't actually answer those five basic things and really create that compelling story, then do you actually really have a great idea, exactly?

Ben Wiener  37:15

And we've been using it. I've been using it, and other people that I know have been using it in ideation courses, where, in fact, I just met with a group here yesterday who have turned it into a little bit of an AI that they're using in their course on ideation for innovation and entrepreneurs, where every entrepreneur needs to feed their idea into this engine that then puts it through the H, E, A, R T analysis. And if it comes out, or if it comes out smelling funny, then you know that you might need to refine the idea a little bit better. So it is a good tool for checking your idea, too. And I've even put out for three on my author website, there's like a pitch generator. It's not AI, it's the opposite. It's just a character constrained set of questions that forces the entrepreneur to enter their best, most refined answers to these questions, and then it spits out like a five part, H, E, A, R, T, elevator pitch, and you can read that and try it over and over again and see what comes out and again. For self evaluation, it's a good tool to see, wow, does this really sound amazing, or does it still sound a little flat and need some extra juice? So I agree with you, it can be used as a tool for evaluating an idea, not just for presenting a fleshed out idea.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  38:27

Yeah, and pivoting, if required. I think the alternatives are grossly inadequate. Is one that stuck out a lot for me. I remember at the isas, we would get people coming in, pitching ideas, and you could open your laptop and you could look for alternatives, and there were pages and pages of them. And to be honest, if you couldn't prove that they were not grossly inadequate, then you wouldn't even look at the idea. Because you're like, Well, you're in a hugely competitive market space, and you're not showing me that there is a real differentiated solution here.

Ben Wiener  38:53

One of the one of the nuances. And again, I can't claim credit for this. I've learned from some of the greatest thinkers in my space. So there are some really brilliant people who have articulated this incredibly articulated this incredibly clearly, like Andy Radcliffe, who's a very famous investor from Silicon Valley, he can distil the entire startup investor question into one question, which is, what do you uniquely offer that people will desperately want? And it's really the uniquely and the desperately that where most startups fail because most startups offer something that some people will want. The reason why they fail is because it wasn't differentiated enough that not enough people wanted it, and not enough people wanted it so badly that the startup was able to get on its legs and get enough money and, you know, compete in the industry. And the sad truth, which is hard for entrepreneurs to swallow is that often, not always, but often, even a startup that is clearly better than anything else in the market may still fail because it's not better enough. And Ben Horowitz has written about this clearly in his book, The hard thing about hard things, I have the book on my shelf. I have the page 170 Nine underlined, and he writes, If your startup isn't 10 times better than anything else, it's not enough. It could be two or three times better. He says this clearly, black and white in his book, page 179 look it up. If your startup is two or three times better than everything else, it may not be good enough to succeed. And that's very disheartening for people to hear, because, oh my god, are you kidding me? I built, you know, we were told to build a better mousetrap. I built a better I built a mousetrap that is two or three times better than everything else. And you're telling me it's not enough to succeed and Ben Horowitz, not Ben Weiner, Ben Horowitz from Anderson, Horowitz is saying, Yeah, you know what? It might not be good enough. There are startups that succeed, that are only incrementally better, but they're very rare. Usually, in order to succeed, you have to be radically different. The alternatives have to be grossly inadequate, not just inferior. The solution has to be radically differentiated, not just better. And it's those two degrees of separation, the alternatives have to be so bad and your solution has to be so much better. That is what often, unfortunately, is needed for the startups to succeed. And a lot of founders miss that. A lot of founders think, just like on a test when I go to when I go to school, a lot of founders were very good test takers, like me, when I went to school, I got a 95 on my tests. You know, you answer your questions, you hand in the paper, get a 95 get a good grade. You move on. In startups, it's not like that. In startups, you need to get a 300 on your test, or a 500 or a 1000 and most people can't handle that, like, how do I do that? I didn't I don't even know how to do that. So it's, it's hard to swallow, but the great ones understand that, and what I'm to teach is okay, if you don't already intuitively understand that, I'm teaching you based on Radcliffe and based on Horowitz and based on psychology, you have to focus on the differentiation. Focus on the gap. Focus on not just the alternatives are bad, but how bad. Why are they so terrible? And not just on your solution being better, but how much better? It's a rocket ship. It's not just a kid jumping on a trampoline. It's going to catapult us into the next universe, because it's so different. And some founders, again, don't understand how they have to stress how radically different it is. They just think it's like a test. As long as I can prove that it's better, I should clearly get the money. And unfortunately, startup land is unfair and doesn't work that way.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  42:16

I was very privileged with Dr Rob Adams when I was at the Ice House, and he talked about it. You've also got to, you've got to, people have got to be compelled to actually open their wallets. And that's the two things that you're talking about. If it's not radically different, the alternative science grossly inadequate, then yeah, people are not going to open their wallets. Not I'm not talking about just investors. I'm talking about the people who are buying the product. And of course, if you haven't got a market for the product, then you're not going to get investors interested, either.

Ben Wiener  42:40

They may. You just need. You need a lot more. Like, I developed an app when I was younger. We got 5000 strangers all around the world to use it. It was really amazing, 5000 people in many countries. But 5000 people was not enough. Like, it was so cool that 5000 strangers used it, but we needed 5 million or 50 million. Like, you need just because a few people are interested doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get over the hump and and it can be misleading so often to get to those massive numbers to cross in Jeffrey Moore's book, crossing the chasm. To get across the chasm, you need to get that. You need to get the people that are lazy, that aren't compelled to to try new things. And it could be misleading when a number of people who like to try new things, try your product and like it. It might be a false signal that you've got product market fit. Shoot. Product Market Fit means you've got the mass market, which are people like me who don't like to try new things, and like, you know, will stay in the status quo for a really long time, until we see something that is so highly differentiated and just so radically different that we're almost forced, or were desperate to use it. And these are the kinds of words that Andy Radcliffe and Ben Horowitz and myself, this is what we're using to say, You got to focus on how wildly different it is, and not just assume that the investor or the customer understands that because it's better, they should invest in it or use it. It's got to be wildly better to force them, on average, to take action again. There are always exceptions. People can start yelling at the screen, saying, Wait, what about this startup? It was just like the other startup. There are some startups that succeed for a while that weren't so highly differentiated, but I wouldn't hang my hat on that, and I wouldn't coach any other founder to try that. Those are unusual exceptions, and those are exceptions to a very strong rule, which is differentiation, alternatives, grossing on but that's what's necessary to succeed unfortunately.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  44:29

I'm really interested to find out from your perspective, in terms of the companies you've invested in, what has been your star if you like your star performer?

Ben Wiener  44:37

Well, it's like asking me, which of my kids is my favourite kid?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  44:41

You all have a favourite kid? Of course, we did.

Ben Wiener  44:43

Yeah, I have certain schoberlor will tell you that they are my favourite child. But it's more than one, so I don't know if it works, and I'm very grateful to the ones that made me and my investors a lot of money. I was privileged to be the first investor. We were privileged to be the first investors in a company called breezometer, which became. World leader in air quality data, and was acquired by Google a couple years ago for a couple 100 million dollars. An amazing result. Ron the CEO, amazing person. Is he the best founder that I ever invested in so far, it was one of the better results that I've gotten financially. But I've had other founders that are equally amazing and talented, and one day, I think, may even exceed you that result. So we tend to be biassed by the results into, you know, to think, Okay, that was the best company because that was the best result. I've had some incredible founders who have done so far, some incredible things that have not yet been noticed by the world. Were valued at that, but I think may ultimately be valued like that. So I don't play favourites. I wrote I mean that sincerely, the same way that you really have to view each of your kids as special and talented in their own way. I have deep respect and admiration for my crazy founders in my portfolio who have dedicated their lives like I have the luxury of being invested in at any given time, 12 or 13 different horses in a race that if any one of them wins, it's great for me, but each one of those founders has dedicated their entire life to that one crazy thing. And I'm very, very sensitive and empathetic to the experience that they're going through, in fact, again, not to pitch the book too much, but what some of the sub themes of fever pitch are trying to teach subtly, like this poor guy, the protagonist. Okay, he cute. Pitch a startup properly, and you start to see that right away, but you also see some of his other relationships coming into play, his relationship with his spouse, his relationship with his kids, his relationship with his co founder. He means really well, but he's misreading, which is he's making a bunch of classic errors in judgement that are very common among founders, because they're so stressed and they're so independently committed to what they're doing, they sometimes don't always notice everything that's going around and who's really trying to support them and help them. So I'm trying. It's a little bit of a shout out to the people who support founders, these crazy founders who are crazily committed to what they're doing. We all have to love them and embrace them and understand them, because sometimes they don't always sense what's going on, because they're so maniacally committed to what they're doing, and they have to be. So it's a long way of saying I have deep empathy for each one of my portfolio founders, what they're going through. I don't favour one over the other. They're all doing incredibly crazy, amazing things, and I'm privileged to be along with them for the journey. Unfortunately, they're not all going to make it to success, and it's hard when you have to close one down. There's a lot of emotion there, and I try to share that emotion with them like it's not fun, but it's part of the it's part of the process. And I think those are the places I don't love them, but those are the times when I think my best colours come forward, when a founder is struggling. I'm ready for it and try to be there with them and get them through it, get their sometimes their family members, to grow a bit, and it's hard. So I don't have a favourite. I refuse to play favourites. I appreciate each one of them for what they do, and each one of them has done insane, unbelievable things in their own space that probably I myself wouldn't have been able to do if I was in their shoes.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  48:07

And I think just listening to you talk now, I mean, it sounds like the book, yes, while it's aimed at startups and pitching it has a huge amount of value in there for any founder, any entrepreneur who is going through it, because a lot of the traits you just described for founders are the also the people who are running sort of more established businesses. They're still putting their heart and their soul into it. They're still got all those relationship challenges with the people who are supporting them, and they still have to sell their story along the way.

Ben Wiener  48:33

As a writer, you know, I don't I'm no Hemingway, but I believe that a good book, a good fictional story, should have complex characters. I don't believe in cartoonish. Unfortunately, a bunch of the books that have been written about startups, like the fictional novels about startups, are very cartoonish, like you have these very one dimensional characters who you're meant to either love or hate right away. It's clear who the bad people are. It's clear who the good people are, and they're very cartoonish. My characters are not cartoonish. My good guys have flaws, my bad guys the mafiosos. In my book, there's a whole bunch of the protagonist gets mixed up with the New Jersey mob. There's something heartwarming about them, like they're it's meant to be a little funny, but like The Godfather, the mafioso, is very similar to the venture capitalists in the book, like he's got the same motivations. In fact, he uses the same language a bunch of times on purpose, because I'm trying to highlight like us venture capitalists can also talk like monk fioso Sometimes, and vice versa. So I tried to design it where, again, for somebody reading it from outside, you do have empathy for each of the characters. They're flawed. Nobody's perfect, and we as humans are not perfect. So the book should reflect, the story should reflect what real life is like, which is a lot of people that are well meaning but have flaws, or a lot of people that maybe not so well meaning, but do have some good intentions in their lives, and that's the way life works. So I think it was meant to teach a bunch of other themes outside of just the. H, E R T framework to founders. I wanted the founder's spouse to pick it up and read it at the beach and say, Oh, now I have a better understanding of what your life is like, because this poor guy is going through all this, you know, this misery, etc. So yes, I agree that it's trying to give some credence or just some more empathy to this crazy life that these entrepreneurs have chosen so that the rest of us outside can embrace them and understand them a little better.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  50:30

I've got a big library downstairs and in my session room in Melbourne as well, which I actually share books with founders and things just to help them on the journey. It sounds like it's going to be added to that library of books that I will be recommending. So thank you for sharing that. I must go and get myself a copy straight away, because I'm feeling quite away, because I'm feeling quite excited by it right now. If people want to get hold of it, I was, you know, it's number one Amazon best seller. So you can get it on your Kindle. You can get it as a, I'm assuming, a hardback, as a paperback, whatever which, whichever, which way you like to receive your books. Yep, through Amazon, best place.

Ben Wiener  50:56

Have not done an audio book yet, but that that should be coming later in the year, yeah. But it's available on Amazon, like I said, Kindle, hard copy, soft cover, or anywhere else you can buy books. You could find more information about it at fever pitchbook.com reason why I would send you there is because on the landing page for the fever pitch book, fever pitchbook.com There's also some free resources too, so you don't need to buy the book to get the h e r t framework, I've published a free playbook like slide by slide, what a founder needs to put into their pitch deck and what comes on each slide with pop up explanations and audio and video explanations and the free pitch deck generator, which is that tool to like, keep refining your print and spit it out. Those things are all free, and those are available at fever pitchbook.com so obviously, you can buy the book there, you know, find the links to buy it. You can also get access to the framework itself for free. Again, it's I've meant, I've designed it to be helpful. I'm donating the proceeds of the book to charity like it's not. This is not. I'm not making my living off of the book. I'm happy to sell as many copies as possible, but the important thing is to get the framework into the hands of founders and to upgrade their pitches.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  52:07

That's wonderful. Hey, Ben, look, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and we could talk for hours, I'm sure, with all the different sort of experiences that we have. But I'm really excited to get hold of the book. If you're a startup listening, I think you absolutely have to go to fever pitchbook.com if you don't, you're absolutely mad, because this is about how VCs, you know, view us, and what they would want to hear from us. So definitely go and do that. But it sounds like it has a lot of benefits and a lot of fun to read. So please go ahead and grab a copy. Just a couple of little tips and tools. I always ask my guests to give us a couple of tips and tools. So the book is definitely one of them. We've got the tips and tools on your website. What else has been the sort of two or three biggest things you would say people should think about when they're running a business.

Ben Wiener  52:46

I'm a huge evangelist for reading. It sounds very stuffy, and we're in a society where we're on our phones all day and we're consuming, you know, content in 10 second clips. I became a voracious reader by necessity. When I became a venture capitalist at age 43 I kind of stumbled upon this opportunity, and I what I understood was, at the time, was that I did not know everything I needed to know, and I needed to be able to make good decisions quickly with other people's money. And so, by necessity, I just started to read a lot. I'd been a reader when I was younger, but as I got older and had kids and got busy, I would not say that I had been a very, you know, good reader. I got back into reading 12 years ago because I needed to read stuff about venture capital and investing, and I just became addicted to re addicted to reading. I read between 50 and 100 books a year. That's a lot, but there is so much incredible content out there that's much more valuable. A good book has been edited, it's been vetted. It's stood the test of time. A book is going to be hour for hour, minute for minute, much more valuable than even the best blog post or LinkedIn post or anything you're going to read or Twitter that's going to go flying by. These things have been deeply invested in. And I would say that reading has transformed me as a person it and I've heard this from other executives that read a lot. We're almost embarrassed to talk about how much we read, because it sounds so old fashioned, but it has not just made me more intelligent, which it clearly has, but it's also made me, I think, more empathetic, more calm. And I've heard this from other big readers, that somehow it's had this like other effect on their personalities. I think I have some explanations about why, but I think reading history, reading biography, reading things outside of business, it gives you a just this wider perspective on the world. We're so narrowly focused on our crazy world and our crazy problems and the things that are happening in current events right now. When you read things that happened 150 years ago or 200 years ago or 500 years ago, you get the perspective of time. You realise, well, Human civilization has survived a lot of this crazy stuff, and hopefully will continue to survive. So there are all these other benefits to reading. I can't stress reading enough, especially to young people. When I talk to them, it's like the last thing they want to hear is some old guy yelling at them to read books. But for anybody that is willing to listen to me, I'm telling you, it doesn't have. Could be 50 to 100 a year. It could be one a month. But reading, actively, reading purposefully, choosing a reading list, following people who who recommend books, you know, picking books intelligently based on what you're interested in is transformative. It's a superpower. That's number one. Number two, the other thing I advocate, which, again, it sounds stodgy and annoying. Paying it forward, the greatest business successes in my life have, without exception, come from acts of kindness or things that I've done for other people where I had no intention or no belief that anything good was gonna come out of it. It was just the right thing to do at the right time. And I am no saint. I am not saying that I do that the right thing all the time. What I'm saying is I'm a bozo and I often make mistakes, but when I have chosen to do the right thing, it's crazy. How often that has led to some business success, it's nuts. So it just encourages me to try to stop being a bozo and stop doing the wrong thing and do the right thing more often, because when I do it bizarrely, it often leads to some unusual business success. So all I can say is, I'm not saying. I'm not advocating sainthood. I'm advocating when you can and when you have the right mindset, do the right thing. Do nice things for people. Don't do them because you're going to get some good outcome. But understand that with enough of them you're going to get some percentage of them are going to result in some crazy, real, you know, real term, short term business success, which is bonkers, and I have evidence to prove it. I've written about it. I talk about it. Those are the two things that are counterintuitive that people don't love to hear, but until you are absolutely time tested, read a lot, read actively, read intentionally, and pay it forward. Try to do nice things for people as often as you can, because they will result in business success. 10% 15% will turn into some unusual outcome that you couldn't have anticipated.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  56:59

I was very fortunate to have Bob Berg on my podcast about a year ago, and he's got the Go Giver series, which is all about paying it forward. And I had voraciously read those books because I just got hold of the first one. And he's got a whole series of them. There's the business one, there's the marriage one, there's a whole range of them that he's written. And, yeah, it's a really interesting, a really interesting read, but also the concept of just Yeah, give without anything, any expectation of anything in return, and it always pays back in space, proven.

Ben Wiener  57:25

Always, but it, but often enough that it makes it, makes it worth it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  57:29

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, look, thank you again for your time. I know you're a busy man. I really appreciate it. As we said, please go to fever pitchbook.com and have a look at that, the book, and also the free tools and things that Ben's got there again, Ben, thank you for your time. Truly appreciate it.

Ben Wiener  57:43

Thank you, Debra, for everything. It's a privilege, and I appreciate it.