Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Nobody cares about how you do it. We have sensors and AI and whatever. That's good. But you grab them with that story. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I'm your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode. Please log on to iTunes and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Let's get communicating! Now, you know, the very foundation of this podcast was for engineering professionals to improve their communication skills, their business presentation skills. My guest today is a specialist in that. In fact, she is known as the alchemy of storytelling for startups. She's the author of Sticking to My Story. a book you should get hold of immediately if you want to know how to present the perfect pitch to investors. And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show. Hi, Donna. Hi, Roberta. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to the show. When I read your book, I'm like, yes, everybody should get this if you get to pitch. Thank you. It's funny, because when I started off writing it, I had my first meeting with my publisher. And it was much more than just storytelling for startups. It was just storytelling for business and for tech and for this. And he's like, either you're going to have a 600 page book or you're gonna have to split it up into three books. And have like a series. And I guess I have two more books to write at least. I'm still like, from the first one, but definitely there's stuff in there for people that are not just raising funding. Really storytelling is something that in this day and age, none of us can ignore. Absolutely, no, we cannot ignore. And before we get into this meaty part of the conversation, please give us a little bit of your background. Ooh, that's always a fun question because like, where do you start with your background? So I didn't grow up thinking, oh, I wanna be a storyteller. It didn't even register on the radar as a job you can do as kids. And I've always acted and I've always loved working with people. I went to study my master's in drama therapy at NYU, which sort of combined the best of both worlds because going to be an actress wasn't something that I thought was feasible. And then when I found out what the employment options were for a drama therapist, I'm like, yeah, I should have gone into acting. But I thought, okay, how can I leverage everything I've learned with all of my passions and what I'm good at? One of my lecturers mentioned that her friend went, taught workshops all around the world. And I was like, yes, that's what I wanna do. Now how do you learn that? And I did a post-masters at NYU in training, organizational development, sent up my resume to the first place I saw looking for corporate trainers. And I worked for Boyer Communications for many years, traveling the globe, working with Fortune 500, C-suite and tech and sales, which was wonderful and amazing until 2008, which we're having a bit of a deja vu moment right now. Aren't we? It's so amazing how it's like a real mirror, but much more turbulent, I'd say. What always happens in a financial crisis is that tons of startups pop up to try to solve the new things, deal with the new reality. And they were having a really tough time raising funding. And part of the realization was, hmm, we better tell a better story. And then I'm like, okay, that's my new audience. You know, it takes a while to build momentum, especially with startups who don't think that they need story work. But here I am. many years later back in the throes of another financial drama. And I've worked with over a thousand VCs, startups, accelerators, and still Silicon Valley giants like Meta and Google, a lot of the Fengming companies as well, because they forget how to speak and communicate within an organization as well. Hmm, that's a very interesting one. And would you like to tell our listeners how much you've raised estimated? estimated $1.5 billion in total for all of the companies that I've worked with on their pitch decks. That number grows daily. I'll update it when it gets to 2 billion. But that tells us that you know, like you said, you know your story around storytelling. Now, as you said, a lot of them are resistant to the idea. Why do you think that is? I think part of it is they're a little bit embarrassed because people are like, well, if a CEO can't tell their story. And that's bullshit because not all CEOs are born storytellers. Yeah. And especially when it's your own, it's like when your own baby, you've got this blind spot and it's really, really hard to talk about. And they waste hours and weeks on trying to churn out these messages that just aren't clicking because it's so hard to see. We're blinded by our own stuff. And then they come to me. And in two hours, we crack. their story wide open, their pitch deck, their sales deck, and they're like, oh my gosh, I wish I had found you months ago. It's much easier to come in with an external eye, but also try to look at it from another perspective, even if you're doing it yourself, there are ways to do it the right way, which is why I wrote the book, to try to reach as many people as possible and give them the recipe to doing it. So let's go to some of the stuff you covered in the book. The first thing you said was, a lot of the time they want you to be in a team. So Mark Zuckerberg did not just come by himself and say, I have this brilliant idea for people to connect. Why is it important that it's just not one person? Why is that important to investors? Traditionally, it's been much harder for a solopreneur to raise funding because it's putting a lot of eggs in one basket for investors. It's very hard to be a CEO. and a CTO, the head of product and head of marketing and doing it all, they realize that the CEO is involved in all these processes, especially in early stages. But when you have partners that are in it and synergizing and come with complimentary talents and different backgrounds, it diversifies the risk for an investor to invest in you. And they see that the team works well together because they know that this is gonna turn into a bigger company. Right. Just seeing the dynamics of the partners of the founding team is extremely indicative of what lies ahead. So there's so many reasons why a team's important. I'm not saying that solo printers can't raise. It's just going to be much, much tougher to do. The blind spots again, just like Gwyn, like you said, it's their own baby. You need somebody to be the blind spot. Sorry, go ahead. And it's tunnel vision too, because when it's just you, you don't have the Having to partner and having to listen, and it slows you down in a sense, it also keeps you on track. And I've seen some beautiful partnerships and startups over the year where the founders have worked together for many years and they just totally complete each other. It's a lonely road. You wanna have good partners for the journey. Right. I love how you mentioned that this is not like Shark Tank. You give a more realistic idea of what it's like out there with the rest. It's not Shark Tank. I mean, I would love you guys to all tell stories the way the people that come on Shark Tank do, and I'm sure they're coached very well. And to give that kind of message in two minutes, and we watch it religiously with our girls. We're intent on giving them all the entrepreneurial skills. But it's like the thought of I'm going to walk out of the room with a deal and a handshake or a check is extremely misleading. And some people go out and think, oh, I have a great idea. I'm just going to raise funding. But even on sharp tank, they ask about numbers and growth and margins. And this is a good exercise for entrepreneurs to think about the questions. And I have a whole section of all the investor questions in my book, but it's not probably going to happen after the first meeting, even if you're amazing. There's a process that happens and you're setting the wheels in motion. If you've gotten them to pitch it to their partners and get another meeting, that's a great. indication that it's moving forward. Okay. If you don't even have to. When they give you that platform, even if the results aren't going to be a yes, that says something and it's positive and you should look at it that way. As long as it's not a hard no. And it's rare to get a hard no from investors because they don't like to say no. They usually will say, you know, not now, which could be more interested in the future and could be, we're just trying to let you down easily. And it's always good to try to get some feedback from that point. you're not gonna like usually get a no thanks in the room, if you might, and it's actually sometimes a relief because then you're not like thinking. Usually you're gonna get interest and questions, but you'll know they're interested if they take action. Just saying this is really great, this is really interesting, this is fabulous, fantastic is not an indication that they're moving forward until a next step is taken. When it comes to solving problems, which you mentioned when we were talking about the financial crisis, what are some of the criteria that they use when you make your pitch and they think, huh? This person is solving a real problem. So there's potential in this. And you have to be able to back that real world problem up with numbers, with urgency of trends that are pointing that direction, a clear moat, a clear difference, differentiation that you have from any other direct or indirect competitors out there. So the three things that I talk about, the credibility, likability, and momentum, showing that you know what you're doing and you're masters of your domain, that you have the traction that this is in motion, whether it's sales or whether it's an MVP and design partners or beyond. And the likeability piece is showing that you're coachable, showing that you're open to their feedback and they have something to teach you and you're not gonna fight them every step of the way. Nobody wants to work with someone who argues with them all the time. Yes, especially when you talked about how, even if they challenge you, don't argue, but have a way of responding with better figures, better numbers, better facts. Absolutely. Because as you said, there's a relationship building the element that I think some people, when they get the know, they think this is it. Can you talk to us about how you explain in the book so well, how even if those investors don't find you, but they can talk to others who may be interested in your industry. So don't burn bridges by saying, oh, they didn't want me and change your attitude for the worst. Yeah, if they've shown any interest and they're like, you know, this is not for us, but we love this aspect of it. We don't invest in this realm. You're too early for us. And say, totally get it. Thank you. A, I'd love some feedback on what would make us an option for you. And B, do you know any investors in your network, maybe angels that would be interested? We'd be happy for an introduction. It never hurts to ask. Right. But if they liked you and if they saw potential in you, it might be early for them or it might not be in their industry or they may have a conflict for some reason, but they might be able to pass it on. They pass deals on all the time to each other. So it's worth asking. I mean, if you don't ask, the answer is always no. So at least give it a try, yeah. Talk to us about getting to know your competitors. So it's always scary to think that we tend to get very defensive when anybody brings up anyone like us. And it's a natural response because we want to show how unique we are and how amazing we are. But in this case, the better friends you are, friends in quotations, with your competition and you know it better, the more at ease you'll be and the more you can focus on your differentiation. You never want to diss a competitor, first of all. Dissing anyone is a bad look. Nobody likes that. It speaks ill of you. Not then, because also you don't know who in the room might have been involved with that company at some point. They could have invested in it too, yeah. Yes, or been involved or an advisor. So we never want to diss. You want to know when they say something about your competition, say, oh, wow, they're doing great. They're doing amazing things. Our differentiator is build on their success, because the fact that you have competitors means that you have a market. OK, this is not. educating on an absolute new thing. So for example, anybody doing anything with AI and honestly, every startup should be doing something with AI today, because this is where everything's going. You're still going to have to show your strong differentiator and how you rise above the noise. I have several companies that have been working on AI for many years. This is not just like, oh, we just decided we're an AI company. They have the real deal and they've trained their models for many years. So it's important to show the proof in that. and what sets you apart, not get defensive, not get like angry and defiant to them. It's hard. It's really hard because our ego is hit if somebody says our baby is ugly. Yeah, back to the baby again. Back to the baby again. It's like having another baby. It really is when you have a company, you give in birth to it, you're raising it, you're growing it, you're putting, you're investing your time and your nights and your sleep and your... your mental wellness. This is an entity that you're building. It has a life of its own. You just mentioned AI. In one of the chapters, you covered how at one point you thought, is it going to take my job away? And I still have those thoughts. I'm storytelling. Every day I have these thoughts. And my new motto is brace and embrace. I just heard the chief scientist of OpenAI speak last week. I was at a small, large event here. And I got a chance to hear straight from one of the founders, what they built and what their vision is and how this is gonna impact. And it's gonna impact everything. If I continue the way I am in two years, I could be replaced. So now I'm also looking at ways that I can incorporate and embrace AI. I have an article coming out tomorrow on it. And I wrote a chapter in my book about it and how we can utilize it to improve ourselves. But at the end of the day, we have to find what's unique about us that AI... can't do at least yet. At the pace it's moving, I think they've created a golem in a sense and like this sort of brain that they have no idea how it works anymore. It's a little bit scary, but it's also very exciting. So I do hope that there's some guardrails put in place to let this grow without daunting people, without crushing us at the end as a human race. But we do have interesting times ahead and it's gonna impact us all. We can't ignore it. But I still feel at least that's the faith part in me feeling that even if it is gonna do the storytelling pitch that you do, but there's a human element, like you said, the differentiator that it's not gonna have that Donna has, or am I wrong? No, I call myself Donna GPT. I've been doing what GPT does for many years in the sense of ingesting copious amounts of data and spinning it into powerful messages on the spot. I think everybody's like. enamored by the fact that these answers come on the spot. When we started searching on Google, we'd also get answers on the spot. And that was like this moment of a real awakening. Now, Chatuchakiti is still at the point where it trained on models from 2021 and the information is not accurate. They make up things too. It's very amusing to see certain things you always have to check. You need to check and double check before you use that as a source and just to make sure that everything is very well in place. So it's... The creativity, the sensibility, the empathy is something that machines don't have yet. Once they reach that level of sensibility is when we're going to start to really wonder. And it's not there and it could come. Will they feel things? Will they be able to intuit? That's where I'm a little bit nervous. Will they start to be able to manipulate people's feelings? And if the wrong players get it in their hand, what will that look like? That's my okay. Hopefully that's not the road we're going down on an elevator pitch. You have a beautiful formula for how you can come up with an elevator pitch. Please explain it to us. So I just came from event, an event now of a batch of 10 companies. They come twice a year to Silicon Valley. They're selected very carefully and they have the opportunities here to meet a lot of investors and corporate executives. And we were just at the opening breakfast and everybody had a chance to introduce themselves for up to a minute. There was no timer on them. And every time in a moment of pressure, it's like, oh, I only have a minute. I better just talk about my product. And every time it just goes over their head. Now I have a session with them tomorrow and I'm going to beat them up for them. I'm just kidding. I'm going to beat them up. But I am going to show them how they can do that better. So you cannot ignore the pain. the problem, the villain story of it, even if you have a short amount of time. And I talk about this in the book, the four acts of the play with the villain or the problem, the hero, which is your solution, then the hero's combat plan and the aftermath. So you don't have time for all of that in a one minute pitch, but don't give up the story. Each and every one of them, when talking about the product, could have started off with one line saying, for example, one of the companies is a client of mine. I've worked with them in the past and they have technology that monitors through audio seniors being cared for in the home to make sure they're being cared for with dignity. To start off with a sentence saying something like, think about your grandparents for a second. Think about how much you love them or love them and how much you want the best for them. Now think about the fact that if you're not there, the person who's supposed to care for them is not caring for them in the right way. And they just aren't able to communicate. Wouldn't you want to know? we make sure that never happens. Nobody cares about how you do it. We have sensors and AI and whatever. That's good. But you grab them with that story. Emotion of that. Because we all have or have grandparents or figures in our life that were our caregivers and the thought that someone would harm them. And it happens all the time. It happens with kids too. You can't imagine the mental things that would go on. And if we can prevent that, now that is a story. And that's what you wanna grab. Well, it was the CTO that presented, if the CAEO had been there, I think she would have been a bit more on with the story. So never sacrifice the pain story that grabs people's heart and gut. Don't just go for the top of mind, go deeper. Those are the stories that truly stick. So that's your one minute pitch. Yep, a bit about the problem, a bit about the solution, and then some... fascinating thing. We're already working with over 8 million users in 400 different facilities and homes, whatever, just to give a little bit more, oh, this is exciting. Or we just closed a big round or we just signed a contract with, so you can still put something in the business. Your goal from a one minute pitch again is not to get a check. It's to move to a longer meeting to intrigue them enough that they come up to you saying, I want to hear more. That's why you're not going to bring graphs and data. There's a story where this person had this most complicated graph on your book. And even when you ask them questions, they would just keep going back to it. It's because they're stuck. It's almost like a record being stuck in a groove and playing the same thing. And until you get unstuck from that groove, it's impossible to play a new song. So you've got to get out of that groove and think like the person sitting across from you. And if you're seeing glazed eyes and you're seeing people that are not getting it, something's got to shift and likely it's your story. You sound like you work with people when they get to that stage. They've already had some customers where you talk about testimonials, where the investors say, can we talk about some of your cousin? So it's not somebody who's just has a business plan from spreadsheets and starts it from scratch and can get an investor's meeting. I have worked with Very early stage companies that don't even have a minimum viable product, an MVP ad or don't have users, they just have an idea. If you're a serial entrepreneur and you've had multiple exits or another exit, there's a better chance of being able to raise from an idea. In this day and age, it's going to be hard. It's again, not impossible, but to raise for just an idea, it's going to be hard to get in the door. I suggest to people at that phase, find a good accelerator, build your network. Learn from mentors, learn and glean experience. Let them give you some seed money, even if it's, you know, you have to give away 5% of your company, but if it's a reputable and talk to other founders that have gone through the program, a reputable program, it's going to really accelerate you. And that's what it does. It incubates and accelerates, just like any scientific accelerator of atoms. It's the same thing. You need that help. You need that fostering environment. Just going out to raise money. had many conversations over the past few months with people that have great ideas and might have something cooking with it. And I tell them, guys, you're not ready to race. Come back and talk to me in six months or a year when you get some initial traction, go as far as you possibly can. If you have an invention, get some IP protection. You can't just go out. I talked to someone who had like an idea for an automated kind of drink dispenser. I won't share just in terms of privacy. And his thought was to put it at music festivals and just have it kind of garner some eyes, but he had no IP protection. He just had a mock-up and it sounded like a really great thing. But I told him, don't just start sharing it out there. If you have something unique, you want to protect yourself. Not to say that every idea is patentable and every idea is defensible. Software is less patentable, algorithms are, but if you have hardware, that's going to be a big investment. You don't want to just, so get as far as you. possibly can before you speak to investors. One of the main things we cover here is making presentations, especially with PPTs. We discourage writing a whole novel because people just read and they're not looking at Donna anymore, especially if they read faster than you, their eyes are taken away from you. Would you like to share your thoughts on that? I think that blaming PowerPoint is like blaming the pan when you make a cake that doesn't come out good. Oh, it was the pan. It was not the pan. And it wasn't the ingredients, it's how you put it together. Because some people are baking delicious things in the same pan, using the same ingredients. It's all a question of how you do it. PowerPoint actually recently, thanks to Nadella's genius of incorporating open AI products into it very early in the game, which I think is going to give them a huge level up. Look at PowerPoint, there's a little button on the top right called designer. It's new. You may not have realized it's there, but it has AI incorporated that will design your slides in a very good way. You'd be surprised to you. There's a tutorial you can watch of like 10 minutes that shows you how to do it. And it's really mind blowing. And I think that is going to disrupt a lot. So you want clean slides, but it's less about the slides themselves and more about the content, the flow, the order, what's on the slide. and then making them visually appealing. If you shove a ton of data on it, nobody's gonna read it. And if they are reading it, they're not listening to you. So you don't wanna compete with your own words. That's true. And what if something goes wrong during the time that you're making a presentation, tech glitch? We've all had it happen to us. I've had it happen to me. I was giving a workshop for teens at Netflix last week for a teen entrepreneurship group. And at Netflix of all places, the screen kept. I had to turn it off and I said to the person in the room, I'm like, ooh, Netflix not streaming, huh? I was just, you know. Sounds like the Love is Blind reunion. Oh, really? Do you think? I watched the first season of that during COVID because we needed all kinds of escapism after that. I haven't gone back. But I just had to go with, I couldn't stop and get frustrated and get annoyed that my slides were kind of fleshed and unflashed enough. So you have to go with it. Don't call attention to it. Cause most likely, it's like if I had a spot on my jacket here. And I were to say, oh, you know what, Roberta, I'm so sorry. I didn't have time to change. I have this spot on my jacket. You might not have noticed it before, but now it's the only thing. Now I'm just going to stare at it the whole time. I was good. I saw a Microsoft presentation with the CEO and the screen went blue when they showed a film, I thought it was very apropos of it. So it happens so big that you just move on. Mistakes happen. Try to be as ready as you can. You know, your demo should not be live. if you can avoid it, have a pre-recorded demo that they can't tell the difference sometimes if it's live or recorded. You can do such good ones that it looks like, oh, okay. But also you guide it through if you're there. Don't just let a movie play. Because then they'll see that, yeah, it was all pre-recorded and rehearsed. Talk it through. You can even be, I've seen people be out there as if they're typing it in and I know it's pre-recorded and it looks really good. And then later you can say, you wanna give it a try and then, you know, hope for it, but it's a risky thing to have live things. You can also just have mock-ups, screenshots, anything that shows them visually what you're doing and takes them on a user journey of it. So be as prepared as you could be, have a plan B, but don't let it crush you if it goes wrong. And remember, nobody's sitting at a Broadway show with the script reading it. Ah, they just made a mistake, and they're not gonna stop. Just like I said, when you're speaking, nobody knows you made a mistake. And then what are you gonna just say? Ooh, I just messed up. Can I start over? You're not going to do that. Hopefully you're not going to do that. You just have to pick up and move on and not let it destroy the moment for you. Make jokes about it. Go with the flow. Did you have any mentors when you started this career or is something you figured out on your own along the way and do you still have mentors? So my biggest mentor was the man that hired me, Brad Boyer, Boyer Communications Group. And he was one of the dedicates in the book. He saw the potential in me before I saw it myself. And... He actually, after our interview went really well, he's like, but I need to see you on stage. And luckily I had an off Broadway show opening the following week. And he came to see opening night and then hired me the next day. And he taught me so much about thinking in stories and thinking in messages and thinking, you know, how to take very technical, very heavy duty things and bring out the magic of them that people get and people understand. And then I took it to the place of startups. So with him, I was working more with. the companies, the big companies, the big organizations, the entails of the world. I kind of develop my own thing, but I owe so much to him. Some people say, I don't have a story. So I don't know how to put together a speech where I'm talking about myself and I don't have a story. What would you tell a potential startup that says, but we don't have a story, we just have this brilliant idea, of course. Everybody has a story. And it might be covered up with cobwebs and dust and jargon. And it's about... It's like you go into an attic and you see all of this furniture that looks like junk, but you start to kind of move the dust away and you're like, oh my gosh, this is treasure. So you want to uncover the polish, scrub away the layers of tacky paint, get to the core. Oftentimes I'll be working with a company in a session and they'll be like, you know, that's the way we were telling the story at the beginning. I'm like, that's because that's what your story is. And people have given you directions over time. to add to it and take away from it and move it. And you listen to everyone and you've got this bloated deck. I'm about to work with a client and after our talk, then oh my gosh, their deck is a mess. And I know that what they're doing is great and they've got great traction, but we need to do a lot of peeling away to get back to the heart of the story and why it truly matters and what their success is. Because sometimes the deck just takes on a life of its own in the bad way, like a monster. And you don't want to create deck bloat. You have a patchwork. pitch. And the last words of wisdom, you have so much wealth of knowledge. If I don't let you go, we're going to spend all day here. There's so much that I could say right now. I just want to extend some empathy to our listeners. This is not an easy time to be doing this. There's a lot of turbulence. There's a lot of change happening. There's a lot of uncertainty. But like I said, brace and embrace. Embrace the changes coming, brace for the change, and see what you can do to rise to the occasion, to find your story, to show your urgency. And don't be discouraged by the no's. Think of it like if you had a chart somewhere in the cloud that said you have to get X no's until you get a yes, okay? And you don't know what that number is. Just think, oh, I'm one step closer to getting my yes. and keep on going, keep the belief going. If you get into a situation where you're in a choke hold, try not to show that because you can feel the desperation and it scares them, it really does. So you wanna just keep believing in what you believe, recalibrate, recalculate and just believe in yourself. Take a nice deep breath and give yourself a huge pat on the back because you deserve it. Words of wisdom from Donna Griffith, the alchemy of storytelling for startups, Arthur Arp, the best-selling, speaking to my story, the specialist in helping you pitch to investors. Donna, thank you so much for being on our show today. My pleasure. Good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for having me. And any of you listening that would like to explore further, mention Roberta's podcast, please, because it'll give you a special discount. Oh, thank you. Yes. And what is your website? DonnaBriffit.com. That's 2F's 1T. There's a story there too. No age like Melanie. And you can also just do sticking to mystory.com to find the book site and find it on Amazon as well. Excellent. Thank you so much for the discount for our listeners. We appreciate it. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on iTunes and Spotify and stay tuned. for more episodes to come.