This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I I’m not saying the companies were bad – many were not.  But Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime

We started with our financial statements.  We So I changed things up and became much happier with my results.  Here 1.        Set two strategic topics per board meeting and start with them – I bet most of you feel that you have pretty talented people around the table but you get stuck talking about the minutiae of your business.  You You put some update slides on things like key hires or biz Like many of you I’ve sat through my fair share of Board Meetings over the past decade.  For For the most part I’d call them Bored Meetings.

A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core. This kind of a simple model also helps: Define the early proof points for the company. In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models.

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  Many startup companies hire advisory boards.  prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company.  It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the company in a positive light through association. It’s very tempting.  It’s mostly done by first-time entrepreneurs who want to persuade (bribe?)

I think this is a perfect way to think about the world when you’re designing your product / company.  Quite Quite honestly I see way too many company pitches that are designed for Techies but I only want to invest in products designed for Normals.  Here’s Start by defining the problem you’re solving – I see way too many early-stage entrepreneurs who start their companies with a product definition rather than a market problem.  You Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals ” in which he defined “Techies” as people who are not just “early adopters” but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent.  Normals

started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity . Street Smarts - OK, so you’re a tenacious person – you never give up.  Well obviously that’s meaningless if your startup idea sucks.  I don’t think it takes book smart This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute of an entrepreneur :  Tenacity .  I 8230; my last start-up was seed funded by a mega-successful angel … [but] they would not be investing in the third tranche … I had already burned the little savings I had to get the business going and with the story of this investor pulling out hanging around us, it was going to be very difficult to raise from somewhere else. But This is part of my new series on  what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of

also recently wrote a post about a company that came in for a presentation and never even got the slides out or presented a demo.  I Can you just show up without one?  Short You’re goal in starting the meeting is to establish rapport.  You photo courtesy of Atlanta Braves This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC .”

Sometimes a company presents at a partners’ meeting that has been well vetted and thoroughly discussed prior to the meeting so all partners know a great deal about the presenting company.  Either way, don’t assume that the entire room is up to speed on your company.  Also, you might be presenting your telecom company to a 6-person team where 3 people I’m writing this post as part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital but will file it under Sales Tips as well since it applies equally to both scenarios. Congratulations. 

This involves a person who leads a PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter feels more comfortable racing through pre-practiced slides and rattling off charts & bullet points than having a discussion. The presenter comes out of the meeting proud at having gotten through all 30 slides (and maybe even a demo) with a bunch of smiling faces and nodding heads and no discussion.  After This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC .” 8221;