TSP084 | Jon Levy – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest, Jon Levy, is the author of The 2 AM Principle, and he said, “At 2 am, you should either have an epic adventure, or time to go home.” He really defines what an adventure is, including having some excitement, some risk, and some growth for you, personally, at the end of that adventure, and it sounds very similar to what the entrepreneur’s journey is.

When he talks about having fun, he says, “You create the fun. You don’t go out and have fun.” We really go through the epic model. Establish, push boundaries, increase, and continue that really will help you craft the right message when you get in front of an investor. He said, “The quality of our lives is defined by the people we surround ourselves with and the conversations we have with them.” He’s the expert at that as he hosts these secret, invitation-only, influential dinners that has changed his life and the number of people he’s met.

Most importantly, I think, he talks about routines are the enemy of excitement, when to have a good routine and when to change it up. Finally, he writes about Ben Franklin saying that, “People will like us more if we ask them to do us a favor, but there’s a good way and a bad way to do that.”

The interview begins in 45 seconds right after this information on how you can get funded fast.

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your startup funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in Crack the Funding Code. Join host, John Livesay, and Judy Robinett, bestselling author of How to Be a Power Connector and board member of Illuminate Ventures, on their free Crack the Funding Code webinar. Simply go to judyrobinett.com – that’s J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com – and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into their network of investors from around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.

Hello, and welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. I am very excited to have Jon Levy on today, because Jon is the author of the 2 AM Principle. He is literally a human behavior scientist, a consultant, and keynote speaker. He is the expert on influence, networking, and most importantly for me, adventure, and that’s the element that people don’t usually have in their lives, let alone in their business. So, he’s going to give us some great tips on how to have your business become an adventure and what that does for your world. He’s known for having these incredible dinners that the New York Times has written about, and how that transforms your life when you give people a reason to get together in a unique situation. Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon:

It’s great to be on. Thanks for having me.

John:

Well, one of the things that I really find so fascinating about you is starting with your Twitter handle, not just your name, but the initials after it: TLB. Would you tell everybody what that stands for and why? Because, I think that’s a really fun place to start.

Jon:

Absolutely. So, I was about 17 years old. I was about to graduate from high school, and I was kind of thinking, “What do I want next?” and I noticed that a lot of the adults around me were seeming unenthusiastic about life. Kind of like the only reason that they got out of the bed was that they didn’t die the night before, and I wanted to understand why it is that I can hang out with my nieces and nephews and they’re excited about everything all the time. Then, there’s a certain point where things kind of changed.

So, I went back and started reading a lot of children’s books, and one of them that I read was Peter Pan, and Peter Pan has this group of rambunctious kids that go along with him on his adventures, and they’re called “The Lost Boys”. So, I wanted to dedicate my life to wonder and adventure, and in the hopes that suggests that same excitement that we see in youth is retained throughout life. So, it serves as a constant reminder that, in admiration of these characters, that it’s JonLevyTLB, or The Lost Boy.

John:

Isn’t that great? Well, one of the things I’m constantly telling my clients when they’re pitching for funding, is you have to be memorable and you have to brand yourself in a way that people instantly get who you are and what you do, and you do that better than almost anybody else I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing because it’s so specific, and it pulls people in. Can you tell a little bit about how you started the idea of these incredible salon dinners?

Jon:

Sure. So, just to give the listeners a sense of what these dinners are, 12 people are invited at a time, none of them know each other. They’re not allowed to talk about what they do or even give their last name. They cook dinner together. When they sit down to eat, they get to guess what everybody else does, and they find out that it’s a famous author sitting across a Nobel Laureate, the president of a television network sitting across from the editor-in-chief of one of the top magazines in the world, or a two-time Olympic gold medalist sitting across from a famous actor or actress.

So, I hosted about 900 people across close to 100 dinners and everything you could imagine from members of royalty through Grammy-award, or Tony, or essentially, any kind of award-winning artist, or even fields medal winners, or mathematicians. So, it’s developed into this community that’s pretty wild and incredibly humbling to spend time around.

John:

It’s so interesting because investors say all the time, “If you can’t figure out how to get a warm introduction to me, you probably can’t figure out how to get to your customers.” You have some amazing ideas not only of what you’ve done and how it’s changed your life. But, also, you have some suggestions, I think, from listening to some of your other interviews on how people can not have to spend a lot of money and make it their own, right?

Jon:

Oh, without a doubt. So, one of the things I suggest is that if you want to connect with people, the first thing is it’s not about networking. So, networking brings up ideas of people at conferences handing out business cards and trying to find clients. It’s a very one-way interaction, where I’m trying to collect as many names, or people for a specific objective, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not a very powerful context to be in.

The reason is that if you look at research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. They wrote a book called Connected, and it’s all about the surprising impact of our social networks. And what they started off studying was the obesity epidemic. They were curious if it passes from person to person the way a cold does, or if it’s a percentage of the population kind of like Alzheimer’s. You don’t get Alzheimer’s because you’re hanging out with somebody who has it. It’s not contagious.

What they found was obesity actually transfers from person to person. If you have a friend who’s obese, your chances increase by 45%. Your friends who don’t know them, 25% increase, their friends by 10%, and their friends by 5%. Which means that if I meet somebody extraordinary — what they also actually found was, that everything passes through our networks like that, from happiness, to voting habits, to smoking habits, exercise, all that.

So, this also means that if I meet somebody extraordinary, it’s not only important that I get to know them and spend time with them, but that they end up spending time with my friends, because that will lead them to having a positive impact on my friends, who will, in turn, have a positive impact on me. So, it’s less about networking and more about community building.

John:

I love that. We’re going to tweet that out. “It’s not about networking. It’s about community building,” and what you’re describing, Jon, sounds like the ripple effect in the whole waves, the physics behind it right?

Jon:

It’s absolutely that, that if you can find the right people and bring them together, then by having a positive impact on each other and being able to change the cultural conversation taking place, you can achieve, essentially, whatever it is that you want for your life, your business, your community.

So, the mission of the Influencers became to impact the quality of our members’ lives, their communities, and hopefully, one day, the world with the understanding that by bringing extraordinary people together, we would be able to have further and further reaching goals. Not only that, but the age or the time when a single human being could have a dramatic impact on the world has kind of changed. Now, you need such a diversity of knowledge and experience to create major impact.

So, what you need to look at are groups of people from varied backgrounds. So, I’m a huge supporter that, let’s say, you have a startup, right? It’s a tech startup, you’re used to hanging out with tech people. Adding another tech person might be nice, but it won’t necessarily increase your knowledge. You all are reading the same books, you’re all hanging out in the same social circles. It’s a bit of a stagnant experience. But, adding somebody in finance, adding somebody in medicine, all these people that bring new ideas that can trigger inspiration and also expand your second-degree network significantly.

Because, a study was done that looked at how people actually get their jobs, and what they found is that most people get their jobs based on loose ties, so the people you kind of know, because there are far more of those than the people that we know closely. So, if we diversify our communities, then it increases, in general, the number of people that we kind of know or have ties to.

John:

Right, it’s so valuable. Well, speaking of reading the same kind of books and not reading the same kind of books, the 2 AM Principle is a very different kind of book for people to read and I love the title. So, let’s start with that. What does it mean? The 2 AM Principle?

Jon:

Well, let me start off with I spent a lot of my life searching for adventure. Last year, I went to all seven continents. Every ideal big travel project like I once did one where, every month, I travel to the biggest event in the world, wherever it was, and what I found is that there’s this kind of line in the sand where either things become completely exceptionally fun and exciting or you should just go home. There’s no benefit. In New York, that line is 2 am. So, the book title is “The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure”, and the 2 am principle is that nothing good happens after 2 am, except the most epic experiences of your life.

So, if you’re going to stay up past that point, you better make it incredible, and also know that, in different cities, it’s a different time. So, Chicago, it might be 1 pm, and certain Latin American countries, it might be 3 o’clock or 4 o’clock in the morning because you don’t even go out until 2.

John:

Got it. Well, in your book, The 2 AM Principle, you have a great definition of adventure. Would you break those three concepts up for us?

Jon:

Oh, gladly. One of the things I really was happy with, when I was looking to define adventure was, as an entrepreneur, to find the incredible overlap that it has with the entrepreneurial experience. So, as I see it, an adventure is an experience that is one, exciting and remarkable. Now, this is important because, as a society, or as a species, we’ve passed down our knowledge through an oral history. So, if it’s not worth remarking about, actually speaking about, it’s not culturally significant. As an entrepreneur, if what I’m doing isn’t remarkable, if it’s not worth talking about, it’s not relevant as a company.

John:

I love it.

Jon:

So, if you’re pitching, if you’re selling, whatever it is, you have to really be able to express that element of what you’re producing that is remarkable that people will then talk about. Two, possesses adversity and/or risk, preferably perceived risk. So, what does that actually mean? Well, in an adventure, you have to overcome an obstacle, but people often confuse these dangers, like climbing Everest, with perceived risks, like going parachuting. Now, the important thing is that, as an entrepreneur, there’s always this impression that we take on immense amounts of risk. But, if you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, they mostly take risks that are highly mitigated, highly calculated. Did you ever read Originals by Adam Grant?

John:

Yes.

Jon:

Excellent book, and Grant is a brilliant researcher and writer. One of the things I loved is he shares the story of the founders of Warby Parker, and these people are brilliant, because what they did was they kept their, I think, jobs and internships long past the point that Warby Parker was profitable and showing signs of success, and the reason was that there’s no need to take on the additional risk, that you can have a startup without throwing everything else aside that does great and that makes money and grows at a healthy pace, and once it’s fully established at a point where you can support yourself and you’re not spending your time worrying about how are you going to pay for lunch, or you’re stuck eating Ramen noodles, then you go full-time into it.

John:

It’s almost like the Maslow Principle, right? Get the basics handled of food and shelter and then you can start doing self-actualization. The Originals really talks about you can be yourself. Don’t think that if you’re not an early bird, you’re not going to be successful. That’s, I think, a big sink with what you’re all about too. It’s like be who you are, and no matter what time of day that is, then you can work, right?

Jon:

Without a doubt. People often ask me for advice on networking and so on, and one of the things that I often emphasize is that there’s this perception that the right way to be in American culture is this extrovert that is a larger than life personality and so on, and there’s no real evidence that that makes you more successful. In fact, you just have to be respectful of if you’re an introvert, that’s the way you are and you have to just take on different practices.

John:

Right. So, be remarkable, mitigate your risk, and then the third part of an adventure?

Jon:

Yeah, it’s exciting and remarkable, it possesses adversity and/or risk, and the third is it brings about growth. The person you are at the end is distinct from the person who started. Meaning that if you look at any great journey, it’s not necessarily reaching the objective that’s important. It’s the growth that the characters take on or experience as a byproduct. They get to be expanded versions of themselves.

John:

That really explains, in a new way for me, that whole phrase that I heard as a kid and never really understood, which is it’s about the journey, not the destination, and when I was a kid, it was like, “What are you talking about? These car rides are boring. I want to get to where we’re going.” Now, the way you framed it, I totally understand that it’s about the growth you experienced during that journey, not just arriving at whatever location you’re getting to.

Jon:

Yes. So, I go out on these wild adventures. I’ll like drop myself off in a foreign city, and I won’t have a place to sleep, I don’t know anybody, I don’t speak the language, and either I convince somebody to put me up for the night, or I sleep on the street. So, I have a clear mission and an objective, and it’s not necessarily about the success of it. If I have to pull an all-nighter and just walk the streets, I’ll survive. I’ll be fine. But, the type of person that I have to be in order to get a stranger to take me in is an expanded version of myself.

John:

A-ha! This is what fascinates me about you, Jon, and how it relates to getting investors to trust a startup to invest with them is they have to trust them first. You’re giving an extreme example of someone having to trust you that they just met you to invite you to spend the night on their sofa or what have you. It really is a microcosm of what’s going on when someone’s getting an investor to trust them to give them all this money, right?

Jon:

Without a doubt.

John:

Yeah, what’s an expanded version of yourself? How could someone take what you do – or I’m going to have you tell what you do – to expand yourself and then go, “Huh, so the next time I’m in front of an investor, or even just connecting with people at an event, how can I be an expanded version of myself to break down the initial trust issues?”

Jon:

So, one of the things I do as a practice is that if something scares me and it’s not going to kill me, it’s probably a good idea to do it.

John:

Well, that’s like that opening to your book, right? Tell that story really quick, because that’s so riveting.

Jon:

Okay, so it’s about 9 o’clock in the morning, July 7th, 2014. I’m in Pamplona, Spain and I’ve just made it through the running portion of running at the bulls, and I end up at the stadium, and inside — well, there’s this really weird thing called the “winner effect”, which is if you have a success, your body fills with testosterone to kind of prep you for the next battle so you have a higher chance of winning. The problem is that if you keep winning, and keep winning, and keep winning, you flood with so much testosterone that you don’t make really good decisions, and in nature, animals spend too much time in the open.

John:

Vegas?

Jon:

Yes. No, that’s exactly it. And they’ll get killed or they’ll get into unnecessary fights and die. So, in my case, what I thought would be a really good idea would be to run up to a bull and smack it. So, I do that a couple times, and then I realize, “Do you know what would be super cool? Is if I let a bull jump over me at the entrance. So, that’s how they get in and out. So, I take the safest position I could and the bull comes in full speed and it slips and tries to make the jump, but I realize I’m totally in a bad situation, and it misses its jump and lands on my back and crushes me, and I lose all feeling in my torso, and literally everything goes silent, time stops, and I’m pretty sure, in that moment, that I might be paralyzed, because I can’t feel anything, I can’t move.

So, I have this internal conversation where I’m like, “Okay, Jon, you’ve decided to live a life as this adventure and it may have totally screwed you. You have to be okay with the fact that you did this, and that it was just a fluke and you may not get out of this, and you may be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.” I was like, “Okay, I can handle that,” and then time started again, and I somehow managed to stand up and search for medical assistance, but nobody could help me because they were literally dragging bodies out of the way from people who were hit 10 times worse than me.

Eventually, what we found out is that, I went to triage, and that it had crushed my left shoulder, and luckily, miraculously, nothing was broken, but the pain was so intense, I started going unconscious, and I ended up needing wheelchair service at the airports and all that, and six months of physical therapy.

John:

Woo! And a great opening to your book.

Jon:

Absolutely well worth it.

John:

Oh man! Thank you for that. I just had to let everybody hear that story personally, because reading it is a page-turner. So, now back to how do you, so we can learn from you, create an expanded version of yourself to create trust in a stranger to let you spend the night on their sofa.

Jon:

So, there’s a few things. One is I — well, there’s two ways to kind of look at it. One is understanding the science behind it, and the second is understanding the practices that fulfil on that. So, from the practices standpoint, I speak to everybody. I speak to everybody and embarrass myself pretty consistently, and the reason is that I’m willing to be uncomfortable. I believe that the scope or the size of your life is in direct proportion to how uncomfortable you’re willing to be.

John:

Oh, that’s fascinating. “The bigger your willingness to be uncomfortable is, the bigger your life will be,” would that be accurate?

Jon:

Yes. So, your tolerance for discomfort will define the size of your life. So, I am willing to be incredibly uncomfortable and it’s something that I embrace. I know not everybody’s like that, but I’m very clear that most of the concerns that I have are completely perceptual. I might end up feeling like a jackass after, but those feelings will fade. But, what I’ll learn in the process about engaging people is invaluable.

So, that’s kind of the practice. Now, the science behind it is interesting. So, there’s certain things that clearly make people trust you more, in general, assuming you don’t have a creepy smile. But, there’s also some interesting characteristics, like the “Ben Franklin effect”. The Ben Franklin effect, we all know that if I do you a favor, you’ll like me more. That’s reciprocity, right? These are general rules. They don’t apply to every single person, but in general.

Then, the Ben Franklin effect, Franklin had this contentious rival, politically, and rather than trying to win him over, he decided that what he would do is ask a favor, and that way, the rival will have to invest effort into their relationship. So, he asked to borrow this very book, the man does it, and what happened was his demeanor totally changed after that point, because now he’s invested into the relationship rather than fighting something.

So, I’m a strong believer in asking people for favors, because, one, it will get them to invest into the relationship, and two, then it will make you more likely to invest into them. So, it serves to build community, which is something that I’m always committed to. Now, when you’re asking for favors, there’s additional research that suggests that you should stack them from small to large, meaning, if I can get you to invest a little bit of effort, you’ll then invest even more effort, because I am seen as somebody worthy of your effort. So, if I wanted to ask a stranger for complex directions, I would first ask them for the time, and then for the complex directions, because once they’ve invested, they would be more willing to invest more.

John:

Love it. That’s so valuable because it’s almost counterintuitive to think, “Well, how can I ask somebody I don’t know a favor, but you’ve really explained it well.” Well, before I let you go, I want to dive into this last topic, because it’s so fascinating for everybody, which is, “Routine is the enemy of excitement.”

Jon:

So, I’m a huge fan of routines for productivity. I get up, I do my first most important thing every morning, I knock it out, and then I have routines for everything from fitness to communication habits. But routine, fundamentally, is not an exciting experience, because the more we’re exposed to something, the less novel it will be. So, if you want to lead an exciting life, you have to be willing to go outside of your routine. You have to go explore things that are novel and different from what you’ve already experienced.

John:

That’s great. Well, the other thing that’s a big takeaway from your book, and I highly recommend everybody get a copy instantly is you don’t have fun. You create fun, and the moment you stop creating it, it will disappear. I think that totally shifts everyone’s perspective, right? Like, if you go to Disneyland if you’re in Disneyland — you go, “I’ve had fun here before,” or I hear it’s a fun place. They brand it as the most magical place on Earth, I better have a lot of fun. Guess what? You could be miserable at Disneyland. You have to bring the fun, right?

Jon:

Yeah, it’s a mental state, it’s an attitude, and it’s something that requires practice. People often are surprised by the amount of effort I put into insuring my own happiness, but it is a lot of work. Our natural state isn’t happiness. We have to work at that the way that we work on our relationships, the way that we have a fitness routine for our health and wellness. Everything is a practice that’s deserving of its time and attention.

John:

And the benefits are so worth it, like you said. If you want to have a small life, stay in your comfort zone. If you want to have a big life, constantly push yourself. I can’t thank you enough, Jon. The book is the 2 AM Principle on Amazon, and wherever books are sold. Your Twitter is @JonLevyTLB for the Lost Boys, and how else can people follow you and keep track of your adventures?

Jon:

On Snapchat, Instagram, you’ll see completely insane photos, sometimes of my great friends that I met through the dinners, traveling around the world, and you can also find me on my website, jonlevytlb.com. J-O-N-L-E-V-Y T like Thomas, L like Lion, B like Boy.

John:

Love it. Thanks so much.

Jon:

Thank you.

John:

Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch Podcast. If you liked the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out.

You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So, how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a riverbank and you have to cross the river, and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

So, first, you make up your idea and then you make it real and then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s and you don’t know why. So, if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.

TSP083 | Robert Friedman – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Robert Friedman who is the creator of Fearless Branding. He said a lot of people are afraid to be fearless and when you are fearless you stand out, you are more precise, you have more differentiation, and he’s all about helping people define and limit your brand. He said when you close many doors you can keep the right doors open. He has five questions that you need to be able to really focus on your branding with. It starts off with who are you, what do you do, what do you do for other people and what do they need. And the fifth question, I’m going to let you listen to the episode to find out what that is because it is the most important one ever. He said he’s got great books to recommend like Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. You’re going to get so much information out of Robert and how to be fearless in your branding to attract the right investors.

The interview begins in 45 seconds right after this information on how you can get funded fast.

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your startup funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in Crack the Funding Code. Join host, John Livesay, and Judy Robinett, bestselling author of How to Be a Power Connector and board member of Illuminate Ventures, on their free Crack the Funding Code webinar. Simply go to judyrobinett.com – that’s J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com – and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into their network of investors from around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.
John: Hello and welcome to the successful pitch, I’m thrilled to have today’s guest Robert Friedman who has a background as a brand manager of big names like Kraft and Nestle and worked at big New York agencies before starting Fearless Branding Manifesto almost 15 years ago. Robert welcome to the show!

Robert:

Thank you John! How are you?

John:

I’m great, I’m really excited to have you here because one of the things that’s so important for the listeners to understand is whether you’re pitching yourself to get funded, pitching to get customers, or pitching people to others to join your team. Branding is everything. You must have a brand that creates a culture that attracts the right investors and attracts the right people on your team, so you are the ideal guest to have on today. Let’s dive into how did you come up with the name Fearless Branding? I love that!

Robert:

Thanks! Well as you mentioned, for the early part of my career I was a brand manager for some big food companies. In my last assignment, I was working at Nestle, I was working on Coffeemate. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and one Saturday afternoon I was taking a hike and looking at the Pacific Ocean and saying just “I don’t want to do this anymore because Coffeemate is just artificial powder and that is not a good use of my life, it’s not a good of my talent so what am I going to do?” When I thought about it carefully I was thinking, do I need to become a therapist or a history teacher or something that had more meaning. Do I need to get out of marketing? I started looking around at other businesses and I thought you know, I may be working on Coffeemate but somebody else is working at Apple. The guy down the hall may be working on Carnation Instant Breakfast, but somebody else is working at Nike and there’s other ways to do marketing. It sparked an idea that was based on this insight that consumers love brands that fearlessly express their unique essence. That they are not just there to sell stuff, that they’re there to sell really great stuff and deliver a meaningful experience. I found that their not — But one of the key elements of this insight was that these great brands, what I ultimately started calling fearless brands weren’t trying to be all things to all people so if you were not in that segment of the audience that appreciated that meaning that’s okay, but if you are then you’re going to have deep resonance. So to answer your question after I did some deep thinking about what I really believed worked in the world of marketing and in the world of brands, I wrote that sentence. I had a naming session with a bunch of friends and colleagues. One of the guys said “What was that sentence,” I said “Consumer love brands that fearlessly express their unique essence. He said, “That’s it, Fearless Branding.” Everybody said yes, that’s right and I walked out the door and it was done!

John:

Nice.

Robert:

At first, it was just a name and over the past 15 years it’s become something that I’ve grown into and everything that I do in my work is built on that fundamental idea about what does it really mean to be fearless when you are building and developing a brand. What it really means is more precise, more differentiated, narrower, rather than broader. So Linda Galindo who was my client and was on your show a little while ago said “You know, the things that you taught me to do are define and limit.” Whether you’re an entrepreneur or whether you’re trying to build and establish business, one of the things that is most challenging for leaders to do is to limit. In other words, to close doors. Usually when you’re running a business, you want more sales so you’re saying all of those people out there, they can be my customers, they can be my investors. In fact, what I find when you do that, is that you become more generic, you become less relevant to anyone, but when you’re willing to close many doors so that the exact right doors remain open and you know, like that’s my door, that’s my path, that’s my strategy, when you’re willing to do that and it takes courage to close all those doors, all those opportunities — you say that’s not what I’m going to pursue, but when you focus on that right one, then that’s when you can create the greatest success. But —

John:

I love that, it’s so helpful.

Robert:

It takes fearlessness.

John:

Fearlessness, yes! Because when you said, “Close many doors so you can keep right doors open,” we’re going to tweet that out, that’s great. That really is a visual, you’re painting a picture for people that who you say no to is just as important as who you say yes to.

Robert:

Yes, that’s exactly right. You know what’s interesting though, you know a lot of times clients say — they ask me that question. Do I have to say no? Right. If somebody comes along and they’re not exactly in my ideal target market or the work is not precisely what I’ll say is my absolute best work, do I have to say no? The answer to that question is actually no you don’t have to say no. You can make a tactical decision based on that particular situation, but what’s most important is when you are projecting your message out to the world, to the audience, that’s when you say no and you are really clear. Whenever I’m telling you, here’s who my ideal client is, here’s what I do, I’m very precise. If somebody else says wow that sounds great but I’m not exactly like that, could you possibly help me? Then you can make a decision, it’s up to you to say yes or no at that moment. I find actually that the clearer you are the more people resonate, but I think, certainly for me, my kind of client, they’re going to resonate with wow you have the courage to put your stake in the ground and tell me who you are.

John:

Well let’s give listeners an example of that because I couldn’t agree with you more, Robert. For me, I really focus on — I help tech CEO’s craft a compelling pitch to make them irresistible to investors. Now if someone comes to me and says “I’m not a tech CEO but I really need help with my pitch and I want to get my start-up funded, can you help me?” I will make a decision about whether I think that person is coachable and fundable and if the business is scalable and I can say yes or no, but my real focus is tech CEO’s. Then other people sometimes will be attracted to that and commit, right. Is that what you’re talking about?

Robert:

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Then, each one of us has to make the decision on where we draw the line. For me, the heart of my business is working with service firms so those are high level firms that need to go out and get clients that they’re providing some intellectually based service and what I do is I help them really define what that service is, where the value is, and who it’s for.

In my case, that definition of target market works. I decided not to focus only on lawyers or only on management consultants. It really is — branding is — there is something else you can tweet out. Branding is a tool that supports your business objectives. There’s many different ways to slice it, it can be based on geography, it can be based on psychographics or what that person believes and their world view, it can be based on vertical type. There’s all sorts of different way you can slice your market so that you’re talking to an audience that is big enough to support your business objectives whatever they may be and yet narrow enough that when you’re speaking to them they really resonate. If you have a national brand, you’re going to need a much wider slice of an audience than if your consultant like your name.

John:

Well for the start-ups the more specific they are of who they’re helping and what problem they’re solving and the type of investor they want to join their team, then the investor feels like oh you don’t just want anybody’s money, you want my money because i’m the perfect fit for your company and that makes all the difference.

Robert:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. You just articulated two very important strategic decisions and it’s easy to say it but it’s hard to make those decisions like who is my market, who am I really serving, how do I define that? That’s an important decision. What kind of investor? That’s an important decision. That’s why on the manifesto that I showed to you, that’s why I call it making the tough decisions.

John:

The other thing you have in your manifesto which we’re certainly going to provide a link in the show notes is this moment of truth. Now the moment of truth applies to the start-ups in who do I hire, which investor do I decide to work with, so expand on us how you help people prepare to triumph in that moment of truth and how they have to position themselves.

Robert:

Right. Right. Well, I think you — you were really nailing it earlier. The moment of truth is that moment when you’re sitting down and you’re pitching a client or you’re pitching an investor and we have to figure out: are we a fit or are we just gonna kind of part as friends and go our own ways?

The way that I do that is through a brand strategy process that focuses on five key questions. Those questions are: Who are you? What do you do? Who do you do it for? What do they need? Then, what do they get? The first two questions are about you, who are you, and what do you do, your brand your business. The second two questions are about your audience. Who are they and what do they need. Then, the last one what do they get is where the connection gets made and that’s basically your benefit.

What I have found over many years of doing this is that most businesses, as simple as those questions are, most businesses answer those questions too generically. You have to put up a filter around what category are you playing in, and then who else can answer those questions in the same way or who else is answering those questions in the same way.

One of the exercises that I do when I’m teaching a branding class is I’ll put up an ad, often I use the brand Tiffany, and I’ll put my hand over the logo and say “Can anybody — You have no idea what’s under my hand. You don’t know the name of this business, can you figure it out?” When you use a brand like Tiffany everybody can figure it out.

John:

That blue, right?

Robert:

Exactly. Well, it’s that blue but it’s also they’re very specific with their imagery. So that’s one aspect of branding which is aesthetic differentiation but there’s other aspects of branding which are functional differentiation. So you actually have to do something different or make something different that is recognizable. Then, the last aspect of differentiation is emotional differentiation or meaning – based differentiation. All three of those things need to play together.

To get back to that story I was telling you, if you were working with a client and they’re a tech start-up and you say “What we need to do is just take the name of your business out of this. Now we’re going to look at your nearest competitors and we’re going to substitute their name in that same pitch and we’re going to mock trial it to that investor. Make it work. Would that investor say ‘No, no, no that’s totally wrong. That doesn’t make sense.” It’s only you that can say that or they are just going to nod their heads when you stick your competitor’s name into your pitch?” A lot of times, what I find is that pitches, whether you are trying sell a service or pitch to an investor, they all sound the same. It’s the same buzz words they use. It’s the same phrases. There’s so much generic stuff. It’s challenging to, as we said before, to narrow, define, limit, so that you really become the only one who’s telling that story to your specific target market.

John:

I know exactly what you’re talking about, Robert, because when I worked at Conde Nast, Conde Nast has multiple fashion magazines. It was so important that people would understand the difference between let’s say Vogue and W. Then, you couldn’t just substitute the images, or you couldn’t just substitute the pitch of “we both cover fashion.” You need to be so specific that only W would cover fashion from an artistic, edgy kind of point of view and Vogue would not do that because they have a more broader, mass appeal audience so it was very specific as to — It’s all fashion, but if you’re talking about your nearest competitor, I love that exercise. Let’s go back and talk about the five questions because they’re so valuable for the listeners to really grasp. I think the Tiffany example would be great to do if you don’t mind. So who are you? Well, how would you answer that for Tiffany? I mean I could do it, but I would love to hear you say it.

Robert:

I would answer that by “I am love” or “I am the lover.”

John:

Nice.

Robert:

One of the main concepts that informs my work is the concept of archetype. Archetype is the concept that was developed by Carl Jung, he was one of the foundational psychologists along with Sigmund Freud. He had this idea that there are energies out there that don’t need to be explained to people because we just get them, just because we’re human. The warrior, the scholar, the caregiver – none of those things are confusing, they’re very, very clear, we just have a picture right away when we see a picture or hear those words. When you can be that precise at an emotional level it’s about who you are, it’s not what you do —

John:

Yes, I love that distinction, yeah because you, you did not answer “Yeah okay Tiffany who are you, we make jewelry.” That was not your answer at all which is great, I think it really showed an example of oh this is something unique to tiffany. I am love, right. That’s great.

Robert:

Yes. That’s right.

John:

So then you go into what do you do? Well then you might say we make engagement rings, would that be the appropriate place to answer that way?

Robert:

Yes, absolutely. We make jewelry, in particular engagement rings. Then, so Tiffany’s a great example, engagement rings is a great example because did you know that Tiffany’s invented the concept of a diamond solitaire engagement ring?

John:

Nice. Yeah, yeah I did.

Robert:

Further, they developed this “tiffany setting” that lifts the diamond up instead of putting it deeper into the setting of the ring so that everyone can see the beauty of the diamond and they were the ones that created this. That’s what I mean by functional differentiation, is that you do something that your competitors are not doing.

John:

Nice. Now the third and fourth question you said was all focused on the audience, right? The third question is something along the lines of who do you help? Was that the question?

Robert:

Right, exactly. Who do you do it for? And the who do you help is a totally good substitute. So who do you do it for and what do they need. When you look at that question who do you do it for, there’s two ways to answer that. One is demographically – so those are all of the factors that you can actually see and touch. Somebody who makes a certain amount of money, has a certain level of education, lives in a certain zip code, those are all demographic ways to describe an audience.

Psychographic is somebody’s world view, what do they believe, what do they value? For example, we all know that Tiffany is a brand, it’s very successful brand. They built their business based on the strength and uniqueness of their brand. One of the great things from the brand’s perspective that that enables them to do is to charge a premium, a highly profitable business. One of the key takeaways is that when you have a brand that’s meaningful, that has both functional and emotional advantages, your ideal customer will pay more for that, right. So you’re getting that premium price and that translates into profitability.

If you look at the Tiffany customer, their customer — So you know, it’s a mass affluent brand. They’re not sheiks and princesses of the world but it’s lawyers and doctors, you know Top 5% people in the united States so that’s demographically who their audience is likely to be, but more important than that — When I teach a class and I use Tiffany as an example, and we say “How did you know it’s Tiffany?” A lot of people say “Oh, it’s that box”. Somebody in the audience will always tell a story “I gave my wife that present and she just went oh!” It takes your breath away because you’re getting that cool present in that blue box.

John:

Right. Even before they open the box they’re happy, right.

Robert:

Exactly, right. Now, think about that, right. That box maybe is worth, you know, whatever, fifty cents or a dollar? So it’s not the box, but they have viewed that box with meaning and so that meaning, as we were talking about, is love. Like this represents the fact that the person who is giving me this gift really loves me, they bought it at Tiffany.

John:

Yup, they went the extra mile. Nothing’s better then nothing’s higher, as far an expression of love so therefore if you spent anything, it doesn’t have to be a diamond ring but anything from tiffany at all, a key chain, whatever, I still feel the love, right. That extends to all price points within a premium price product.

Robert:

That’s exactly right, but if we look at the heart of what they’re doing which as we were talking about is something like an engagement ring and what I mean by segmentation and being willing to limit and define, there are going to be some givers and some receivers who buy into that story. That woman is going to say “Wow, he really loves me, because he gave me that present from Tiffany, that means something.” That giver is going to say I made the right decision even though maybe I spent 25% more or 50% more or whatever the number is, right. There will be other people, whether it be the giver or the receiver who would say “I don’t buy that crap. You know what? They have really good stuff at Costco. We’re going to get something really good. We’re going to be so smart because we’re only going to spend half of what we would spend at Tiffany and we can spend that extra money on a lawn mower or whatever.”

The point is that — To answer those two questions of who are they and what do they need, that Tiffany customer is somebody who really believes that a certain kind of gift can be a symbol of love and what they need or what they really want at a primal level is more love. They want that connection and they want it in that way. If you are not psychologically wired for that, you’re not going to be in their target market, right. I think if they’re smart enough to be able to be fearless to say that’s okay, because we’re not for everyone!

John:

Exactly. Then, it goes to the last question: what’s the big benefit, what do they get from buying the ring at Tiffany is they get validation that the person feels it’s way beyond the value of the ring, you can’t put a price on it, right. When someone feels that you love them that much.

Robert:

That’s right. You’re absolutely right and one simple way to answer that is what do they get? They get love. So it brings it back full circle.

John:

To who you are. Love it. Let’s connect the dots even one step further for the founders out there who are negotiating valuation. I love what you said Robert, about when you connect the functional with the emotional, which is what I’m constantly teaching people the importance of emotional story-telling when you’re pitching, that that commands a premium price like it does for Tiffany’s. When you’re negotiating with your investor on what the valuation of your company should be, when you say hey I need a million dollars for x percent equity, then that translates into well then you’re saying your company is worth more than it looks like on paper. But if you’ve shown to the investor that you have a functional difference from your competitor and an emotional meaning, and sometimes that emotional meaning can just be there’s other investors who are interested in this and willing to pay this so there’s a fear of missing out if you don’t jump in on this, that’s how you increase the valuation of your company from this branding strategy you have for us, right?

Robert:

Yes. I am so glad you brought that up. The best example of this is Apple. If you think about Apple and you think about the fact that it’s not just an apple, it’s an apple with a bite taken out of it, so that is a very specific apple. It’s from the Bible, it’s from the book of Genesis. Genesis is our creation myth. So if Tiffany is love, Apple is creation or creativity. If you think about the story of the Apple brand, they have their own Genesis story. Steve Jobs created it but then he went into exile, just like Moses had to go into the desert, right, they kicked him out. Then they were almost about to go bankrupt and have to shut the whole thing down and they didn’t want to do it but they brought Steve Jobs back because they had to. They had no other choice, they explored every other strategy and that was the only one left. So he comes back and there’s a video of this on youtube that you can see it’s fascinating. The first thing that he does is he focuses on the brand and he hire CHIAT\DAY and they developed a campaign and it’s the “think different” campaign. It’s this campaign that shows Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Maria Khalis, and Einstein, and all of these people are the most creative thinkers of their time and they’re all creating something out of nothing. They’re creating things that have never been seen or heard before so that becomes what the whole brand is about. He leveraged that idea, that emotional connection, to take a company that was basically about to close and being bankrupt, to the company that became the most valuable business from a market cap perspective on the planet. He did it in 25 years.

John:

I love this story so much Robert because when you say it’s not just an apple, it’s an apple with the bite which takes us to the creation myth but also for me part of that whole story of the creation myth was you were kind of breaking the rules in the Garden of Eden when you bite that apple. Not only does it take it into the Apple branding of creativity but also we’re going to break the rules and that’s why that initial Superbowl commercial against IBM and even this campaign line that you mentioned “think different” got a lot of feedback because people said “That’s not even grammatically correct, it should be think differently” and then they were like “We don’t care! We’re breaking the rules again! Think different!” It’s all so full circle that you say when a really good brand is in place, there’s so many layers, right. That’s the big takeaway.

Robert:

As you said, it’s breaking the rules. What is that? It’s differentiation. I mean it’s being willing, so if you think about most people, most people are not fearless, most people do not want to stand out, it makes them profoundly uncomfortable, right. Because when you’re right and you’re already successful then it’s easy but in those initial stages when you have to take that first step and you have to say “Look at all those people!” Whoever they are, whatever your category, so if it’s Steve Jobs, look IBM, look at Dell, look at Microsoft, they’re all wrong, right. You’re talking to Wall Street, the financial community and you’re basically saying all these companies that are so much bigger than you, they’re all wrong, right. We have another way to do it. It takes so much courage in the beginning. Now you look at it like of course, he was right. But then you apply that to a start-up entrepreneur and they need to have the same level of courage and the same level of conviction.

John:

Yes, absolutely, Uber, we can do this. Taxi’s have been run a certain way for years and we got a whole new idea. When people started pitching AirBnb a lot of investors said “You’re crazy, no one’s going to rent out a room in their home or apartment to a stranger.” It’s all so valuable, I love everything you’ve said so much, I could talk about branding all day long and you’re the expert. Is there a book that you want to recommend about branding or being fearless to the listeners?

Robert:

Yes, if you’ll indulge me I’ll recommend two.

John:

Sure!

Robert:

One is called The Hero and the Outlaw. It’s about using archetype to build a strong brand. It’s by Carol Pierson and Margaret Mark. That’s a really good primer for starting to think about it. Another one that I love, I have, whenever I start an engagement there’s two things that I focus on. One is meeting which we’ve talking about and the other is money. It’s all about connecting the two in my opinion. If we have something that’s meaningful but it’s not grounded in your financials then your success is really going to be limited. I always start my engagements by getting my clients – it’s the same thing, it’s define and limit. If you have a particular revenue objective, you need to get really granular and dig into the details and figure out how is that really going to happen, let’s build that, perform a client by client, engagement by engagement and see what it looks like. The other book that I would recommend is a book called Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa. It’s about selling and it’s about really being up front, talking about money, putting your cards on the table. It’s a great book because a lot of people are afraid to do it.

John:

I’ve never heard of that one. That’s a great, great title – Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. It applies to business. It applies to dating, It applies to lot of things. It’s great.

Robert:

Yeah, that’s right.

John:

Robert, how can people best follow you?

Robert:

If you go to my website which is fearlessbranding.com. A couple of suggestions – you can download the Fearless Branding manifesto, it’s there on the homepage of my website, you can download that and then I will follow up with periodic updates. You can find me at Robert Friedman on Linkedin. There’s one other thing I’d like to tell you about. I’m giving a webinar in about a month. It’s sponsored by a company called Breakaway Funding and the webinar is called How to Build a Fearless Brand. It’s on May 26th at 11am and if you go to breakawayfunding.com/events what I will be doing is making a presentation with some visuals and it will be a deeper dive into many of the ideas that we talked about this afternoon.

John:

Great, How to Build a Fearless Brand is the name of the webinar is that right?

Robert:

That’s right.

John:

If people can’t make that one, will you be doing others in the future?

Robert:

I will.

John:

Cool.

Robert:

Yeah. I can let you know when they’re scheduled.

John:

Perfect. Well, I can’t thank you enough Robert for doing the show and showing us how to be fearless and how to make our brand stand out by defining and limiting who we want to reach because that’s everything to be successful.

Robert:

Thank you, John. it was great to talk to you, I really appreciate it.

John:

My pleasure.

Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch Podcast. If you liked the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out.

You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So, how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a riverbank and you have to cross the river, and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

So, first, you make up your idea and then you make it real and then you make it re-occur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get the funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s and you don’t know why. So, if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.

TSP082 | Charlie O’Donnell – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Today’s guest in The Successful Pitch is Charlie O’Donnell who has incredible information about how to get your startup funded fast. He loves to invest in startups who are based in New York, and he loves to be one of the first investors. Everything from tech to retail. He said knowing who to pitch is half the battle. Getting in front of the right investors is all about being authentic and having empathy. One of his other big takeaways is language has immeasurable impacts so be careful of the words you choose to use when you email someone or talk to them. And creativity is more important than compromise. Finally, treat people like you believe they can be better than they are. For more nuggets of wisdom, be sure to listen to this episode.

The interview begins in 45 seconds right after this information on how you can get funded fast.

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your startup funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in Crack the Funding Code. Join host, John Livesay, and Judy Robinett, bestselling author of How to Be a Power Connector and board member of Illuminate Ventures, on their free Crack the Funding Code webinar. Simply go to judyrobinett.com – that’s J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com – and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into their network of investors from around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.

Hi, and welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Charlie O’Donnell who is the sole partner and founder at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the fun make seed and pre – seed investments and was the first venture firm located in Brooklyn where Charlie was born and raised. I love the fact that Charlie says he never spends more than three consecutive weeks outside of any of the boroughs in New York City. He is a hard fast New Yorker who has done Ford triathlons, but what’s even more impressive is his reputation for being able to spot important companies early in the process. In fact, he’s been identified as an early Twitter investor.

Charlie:

Well, I nudge the early Twitter investor part.

John:

You nudged it.

Charlie:

I was never at the top but…

John:

Okay, but you were able to capture that. Yes. Since you were working in venture capital since 2001, you have apprenticed your way through the asset class with roles on the Union Square venture team, and you were involved with General Motors pension fund. What’s impressive to me Charlie is you are only one of the dozen people to be named Business Insider’s 100 Most Influential People in New York tech five times or more and you’ve served on the board of the New York Tech meetup and you write a great blog called This is Going To Be Big, and you’ve spoken at all kinds of great places. So without any more intro welcome, welcome.

Charlie:

Thank you thanks for having me. I’m beginning to think that maybe I need to — that my bios are a little over the top. It feels a little overwhelming.

John:

Nah! Well, when you’ve accomplished that many things people love to know what that is. I mean everybody wants to be an influencer and everybody wants to know what it takes to get their pitch funded but before we get into all of the experience you’ve had, obviously growing up in Brooklyn, can you take us back to when did you decide you wanted to get involved in tech startups?

Charlie:

Sure. Well, you know Brooklyn is not exactly, or at least when I was growing up, not exactly a Silicon Valley East, but there are pieces of what I do and how I do it that showed up early on. So you know we were pretty early to having a computer in the house. My dad came home with an IBM PS2 in 1987 when I was eight. I don’t think we’re totally sure what we are going to use that computer for but I think my parents just felt like we should be a house that has a computer in it. So, I took to it early and got very comfortable with it. I think on the investing side you know when you grew up in New York Wall Street looms large. Both of my brothers were in the brokerage industry, my godfather bought me some IBM stock when I was born and so I knew what stocks were from a very early age, I used to track them. I mean the nice thing about even in pre – internet days having a couple of shares of IBM is that every night on the local news they would tell you what IBM did because that was one of the biggest companies out there that people were following.

John:

Sure.

Charlie:

The other thing was being very community oriented. I grew up in a great neighborhood. I grew up in Bensonhurst, which at the time the largest Italian section in the five boroughs. It was a place where you knew your neighbors and you knew your friend’s grandparents because they live on the same block or next door to you, your neighbors are called aunt and uncle. And so, there was this community feel that I always looked for and then I didn’t find it strove to create it and so when I joined the tech community very early in some of the early days of the neuro tech community where I couldn’t find that I try to always put people together because I was used to kind of knowing the people around me by name and knowing who they were connected to. All of those things go hand and hand with sort of how I do my job. I’m into tech and on the investing side of tech but the knowing that venture capital really existed and how it worked, actually I got lucky with a high school internship.

John:

Wow!

Charlie:

My high school, Ridge High School in New York is a really fantastic school. They knew better than to keep a bunch of seniors around in the third semester after we applied to our schools and so they basically kicked us out. They said “Well okay, either do a community service project or do an internship but don’t hang around and interrupt everybody else’s learning.” And so I wound up at the General Motors pension fund from February until June on my senior year of High school doing some pretty interesting projects largely because I knew how to use spreadsheets because we have had a computer in the house for ten years.

John:

Wow.

Charlie:

And so because I went to school locally at Fordham I bounced back and forth during the school year, was able to intern there throughout the summer, part time during the year so I stayed there at that internship for four years and venture capital happened to be the asset class that had an opening when I graduated so I could have just as easily wound up in real estate or fixed income or anything but the venture capital and private equity group had the opening and GM had been invested institutionally in a lot of the top tier funds that you know, the excels and Cline’s and batteries and in ’88, since like the late 70s. No one ever thinks a VC is having to pitch for their money but that’s what they did with us in that group. I mean all those funds came to pitch the group I was working in.

John:

That’s interesting. No one has ever brought that up quite before. I’ll like to hear a little bit more about that. Obviously, investors like you gets lots of pitches but I’m sure you have a lot of expertise in what makes a good pitch from having to pitch yourself. Can you explain when you were pitching for getting the money for your fund what you learned and how that’s helped you evaluate?

Charlie:

Sure. Well, first of all, knowing who to pitch is half the battle, right. Because when you have the right person sitting across from you it makes things so much easier. One thing I learned early on in my fund raising is figuring out who a small venture partnership that was doing very early stage seed investments was right for because most of my network was institutional investors like CalPERS or you know the Canadian pension plans or people who are way too big for the size fund that I have. And then other VCs don’t usually invest in each other’s funds. I had to build up that limited partner network, that high net worth network from scratch because that’s one thing I didn’t have in Brooklyn.

My dad was a fireman and my mom worked in the school system and so we didn’t really have that kind of a network. I didn’t go to an Ivy league school. It was all about leveraging my existing network and leveraging my brand to actually a major driver for getting in front of the right people to pitch was actually PR, was having relationships with media. I got a really fantastic article in Crain’s that announced the launch of Brooklyn bridge ventures which was sufficiently vague, as to not worry the SCC. I got a random inbound from person who was at a pool of partners’ capital form a hedge fund and they said to me “We’re looking to diversify our assets. This seems like a strategic fit. It’s in our backyard.” And so it wasn’t pitching them from zero, it was making sure the other person on the table was sort of halfway there. Then figuring out what is it that this other person is wanting. A lot of it is being empathetic which I think that a lot of people pitch. Sometimes I’m on the receiving end of pitches where it literally feels like someone has pointed a fire hose at me and just let it go full blast and as not ask any questions about what I’m into or what my concerns are or whatever and crafted the pitch accordingly.

That’s so important. I think that’s where I have excelled, and where my fundraising success came from because I’ve identified the right type of individual that my fund was a fit for and I was very authentic about it. I really believe it is, and I can list a bunch of reasons why and have a really good conversation around that. It comes from a really authentic place.

John:

There’s so many great takeaways there Charlie. We’re going to tweet out “knowing who to pitch is half the battle”, that’s a great line. And this whole concept of “when you know who you are and you are authentic about your brand, that gets you in front of the right people” so that’s a great combination of that.

Let me ask you to expand a little bit on this authenticity because people hear that a lot and I’m not sure everybody gets what that really means. The thing that makes me so happy to have you on the podcast today is this blog you wrote about the things you believe, to me that is a great example of authentic branding. There are so many of them. I’m just going to read off two or three and ask you to expand upon where did you get that belief and maybe tell us a story.

Charlie:

Sure.

John:

I believe that if you aim for compromise you will be less successful than if you aim for creativity. Ooh, that’s good. Let’s talk about that one.

Charlie:

Sure. I think compromise is one of those words that people say “well you know you’re always going to have to compromise.” On one side, can ring as two people meeting in the middle which I was better than them fighting it out forever or never coming to agreement but it always struck me as kind of each person getting half. I was never really been comfortable with that, right. You want one thing; I want the other. We’re both going to have to settle. What if there was some third thing that we could come up with? Maybe going into this conversation neither one of us had expected or wanted or whatever but it could make us both feel fulfilled and that’s really what I seek is — Let’s satisfy everybody but let’s keep an open mind that the answer to satisfying everyone may not be something that either one of us are thinking that we want. Sometimes that involves really going in understanding the other person. I see you have — don’t want to take x amount of dilution and I really want to put this much money into the company. Let me ask you, why are you concerned about dilution? Oh well, I’m concerned about dilution because I don’t want to lose control of the company. Ah okay. Well we can accomplish that using the board. The ownership doesn’t necessarily mean control so maybe you just didn’t realize that and I thought it was a push and pull over price but it’s not really about price. It’s this other thing that we didn’t go in and talk about so try to be — come up with creatives solutions, I think is something that I think is a better thing than always settling and compromising. I mean I don’t want to say that I think people should just dig their hills in and fight it out forever but I think creativity can solve a lot of problems.

John:

Well it ties right back to what you said earlier about the importance of empathy and asking questions like what is your concern here and getting clarification on that. Well, let’s dive into one of the other things you talked about since you said clarifying on a word. I believe that actions speak louder than words but that language has immeasurable impact. Insurance around that have been example of language having immeasurable impact.

Charlie:

Absolutely. This is a more recent lesson that I’ve learned. A lot of it has to do with ideas of empathy. You know for example there’s a lot of conversation about diversity in the tech community right now. There has been a sort of a growing volume of conversation around it over the last couple of years. When you asked people how different things make them feel and you explore that and you accept without judgement, your mind’s opened up to a lot of things about language. For example, somebody was asking me about how do we get more female founders to come and pitch at our venture? I think they call it battlefield. I just thought there for a second, I was like I think I know the problem.

John:

The word battlefield, right?

Charlie:

Yeah. The fact that you’re acquainting pitching your company with a fight. I mean to totally generalize this, right. The level of aggression embedded in that language is going to skew more male or with people who identify as male, right. And you just never won’t think about that until you talk to somebody who had been identified as male and voice their concern about that. I kind of get that I never really thought about that because as a white guy there is a lot of things I don’t really think about. I try and be a little more conscious of that type of things. So language means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and so what words you use is very important. It’s important in things like titles in organizations, it’s important in how you approach people. Some people cannot even identify the word that makes them feel not right but they just get an email and they just say “I don’t know if this is the type of person I want to work with.” There is just something in there about word choice or whatever that really makes a difference.

John:

Wow! That’s great. Well, I’m sure you have a big philosophy around the importance of a team when you are listening to a pitch and you have this quote here “I believe that if you treat people like you believe they could be better than they are, they will be.” which I think is a perfect platform to jump off about that quote and just your whole philosophy of how important the team is when you invest.

Charlie:

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think you should have high expectations of people. I think you should do everything that you can to get them there. I think sometimes we are very supportive of founders and new ideas and all that sort of stuff but we say that we’re supportive and we think about it as like a pat on the back. Sometimes, we don’t deserve a pat on our back because we didn’t do our best or we didn’t meet our potential. You can applaud the effort but sometimes you need a little bit dose of reality to say “Hey, you know what? That pitch wasn’t very good actually. It wasn’t very convincing.” Let me tell you that. I’m not telling you that to put you down. I’m telling you that because I’m thinking you’re capable of more. If I didn’t think you were capable of more, I wouldn’t bother giving you any criticism over it because what would be the point? I would just be wasting my breath.

John:

There you go. Nice. Nicely said because the intention behind the feedback makes all the difference in the world doesn’t it.

Charlie:

Ah-huh. Ah-huh.

John:

Let me ask you Charlie about what is it in your gut instincts that made you say “Hmm. Twitter and Foursquare are going to be good investments?

Charlie:

Well, to put it in a context, I am a portfolio thinker I am not a deal guy. I got trained as an institutional investor that had fiduciary responsibility over a task at General Motors pension fund where I kind of grew up as an investor, is big into asset allocation and portfolio risk, these concepts that don’t usually sort of pop up in venture capital. When I think about an individual deal or an individual company, I think about it in the case of this deal is the right amount of risk I should be taking, has the right amount of upside, and has the potential to get there but I don’t convince myself that I know that this company versus that company is going to be a winner. You don’t know. There is a heck of a lot of things that could go wrong from Point A to Point B, but I think when I look out and say “Okay, this is the type of deal or if I did this kind of deal 30 times over in a portfolio we’d be doing fine.” And so that, I sort of differentiate between good decisions and good outcomes. There are lots of instances where I think people have invested in companies that shouldn’t have had a good risk profile and kind of made it work anyway. It feels a little bit lucky but I’m pretty sure if they did that 30 times in a portfolio it wouldn’t work out. When I looked at — when I saw Twitter, and I guess the total reference comes from there is a small mention in Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter about how as a former Union Square analyst who still had a connection to Fred Wilson, I was at South by Southwest in 2007 which was the kind of Twitter year and the thing that sort of kicked of South by as the place to find the next big thing. That’s when Twitter kind of really took off. It took off because nearly 80% of the people who were on Twitter were at South by. You got this really funny sort of glimpse into the future of like “Oh, this is what it would be like if everyone was on Twitter.”

To me if you were at South by, it is really obvious, so I don’t think of myself as being special. I would have been really special had I noticed that before I saw that critical mass because my tenth Tweet that February was “Hmm. No one seems to be on Twitter. Am I bored of this already?” Then so, once I got to South by, I was like “Oh I kind of get this.” What’s fascinating is the parts of it I found interesting, the idea that you could text somebody without giving them your phone number. This layer of identity on top of the phone but not tied to your number was really interesting to me, intellectually interesting but not too far after that we went to mostly app driven world that had nothing to do with text. So that wasn’t the thing that drove Twitter.

I also thought that it was a great way to pull a community together because there was a nice balance of the number of people at South by, the number of text that came in and all that sort of stuff. But really, once Twitter got on the scale, it got much more of a broadcast mechanism than anything. I mean they largely turned off some of their kind of community features. You can’t see when someone @messages someone else unless you are following that person too. You know that sort of reply thing and you know — so some of those early features weren’t necessarily ultimately made it scalable but it was certainly to me an interesting enough experiment and certainly an interesting team and a growing mobile market. It was like “No. That’s the kind of thing that if you were a high risk – high return kind of player, you should probably be around that. I can’t say it was any kind of Nostradamus like “Well, we’ll all be tweeting in the future, right.” But there is this thing like you should be doing this kind of thing, right. That’s the way I look at that.

John:

I love what you described as Twitter pivoting within what originally started off as and what it actually has it become because I think so many people forget that, right. They forget that even the best team and the best idea still makes minor pivots along the way until they really hone in on what people want and how to use it.

Charlie:

I mean could you imagine at South by Southwest, that there used to be a feature called Track that you could pick a phrase like SXSW and have it texted to you every single time anyone mentioned that. I mean that seems like a nightmare today.

John:

Yes. Right.

Charlie:

But at the time, there was like not that many people on Twitter and not that many people at South by but it was actually sort of a nice pace and so product decisions that were made then are completely different than the kind of product decisions that we need to get made now. I think that’s a struggle for a lot of companies especially a lot of consumer companies where your initial user base may not be the masses, may not be where it scales, maybe your initial trendsetters and early leaders you might have to abandon a little bit to take it to the rest of the community which is hard for a lot of companies.

John:

Yes. Is there any type of tech startup now that you specifically are looking to fund or something that you’re working at now that you want to talk about?

Charlie:

That’s early. That’s basically the category. What I look for is — My rules are very basic I focus on New York companies. If the company has already raised $750,000 in a previous round, then it is too late for me. I want to be part of your first million dollar spent. I want to be there from the beginning helping to put in best practices, helping to figure out what the goal should be with the seed round, work through those early hiring decisions which you can make a huge impact on. Other than that, I could not have a more diverse portfolio. I mean I invested in everything from — I love the investment in a consumer electronics company called Canary which is doing extremely well and can be purchased at your local BestBuy and Amazon and all sorts of other places, to I’m in a Brick and Mortar ice cream shop, the number one rated ice cream shop in the country Ample Hills which opens up in Disney in May and is absolutely the happiest place on earth per square foot.

John:

And so it doesn’t have to be tech. It sounds like it’s an ice cream shop, right.

Charlie:

No it doesn’t. To me, it’s more about the aim of the amount of enterprise value you’re trying to grow in this company. Usually you get up to a certain size and it is mostly tech businesses but if you go back, call it 25 years ago in venture capital, a good chunk of the venture capital world thirty years ago was retail rollouts, Staples, P.F. Chang, Dick’s sporting goods were venture backed companies.

That was a way to get growth. You figure out a store model and second store model, and a third store model and you just keep building stores and you grew some pretty large companies that way. I mean who wouldn’t have wanted to be an angel investor in Shake Shack or SoulCycle or any of these types of retail businesses. But in the late 90’s, when all of this sort of e-commerce, e-dot coms took off, most of those retail investors shifted over to the internet. And so retail investors if you weren’t doing this dot coms and IPO nine months after you invested in them, you kind of missed out and so people shifted their focus and they didn’t go back and so there hasn’t been a ton of retail investing. It’s actually come back into favor a little bit now because some of the VCs started doing it as angels, their favorite restaurants, their favorite coffee shop. It’s a fun new set of challenges. It’s interesting. It’s all about place making. And so there is that but there is also the realization that just because you don’t have a roof over your head doesn’t mean you have very different economics. The Blue Aprons of the world still spend a lot of money on customer acquisition whereas Ample Hills don’t have a marketing budget for customer acquisition. We make stores and we put an ice cream shop in the line forms and people pass by it because they like ice cream. We don’t need to spend dollars to acquire customers, we just need to spend dollars on rent.

John:

Interesting. Well, you said some really great things here about what makes a good pitch. Don’t make the investor feel like they got a fire hose coming at them, be authentic, be empathetic. Is there anything else you want to add to that great advice before I let you go? So what makes a good pitch for you?

Charlie:

Sure. I think one thing that I think is important is to listen specifically to what the objections are and make sure your answers really specifically address the objections. If I tell you well, you know I’m just not sure that this is a venture sized opportunity that can create 250 million dollars of enterprise value to respond with this is a really big opportunity because a lot of people have this problem. Well, that doesn’t really address the problem on two levels. One is how big is big, right? Because there could be a big problem that has a 30-million-dollar exit as its natural life which should be plenty great if you could bulletproof strap it. It will be pretty good if you could angel invest but probably not good enough for a venture firm.

Just saying that something is a big problem doesn’t mean there’s a lot of value to be extracted from solving it for customers. There might be unwillingness to pay or whatever so I think just making sure you get investors over each of those hurdle very specifically to be able to say “Well, each one of my customer is worth x and you know I have pipeline for Y and if I have this much growth or every salesperson can generate this many dollars and look I’m already doing it with two sales people. It only takes five million dollars to ramp it up to 30.” Then here’s what exit multiples are for this business granted we know that this is not the way it’s going to pan out but at least you’re giving me back what I was asking about.

John:

Yes, right.

Charlie:

Versus this vague big and important. I don’t know what that means from a sizing perspective.

John:

Language has immeasurable impact like this quote you said earlier.

Charlie:

Yeah.

John:

Final question, what kind of book would you recommend listeners to read either about investing or entrepreneurship or life in general?

Charlie:

I think I will go with the life in general category. I am a big fan of taking thought models from completely other random places and reapplying those because I think it’s a great training for how to approach new problems. If you can for example take — there is a book called The 48 Laws of Power, and it was a very popular management book but the author of The 48 Laws of Power collaborated with 50 Cent, the rapper to write this book called The 50^th Power. It was all about 50 Cent’s career both legal and illegal and the principles of management that you could distil out from his success.

Now, I’m not saying that you should go out and be a drug dealer and then try and turn out into a rapper but the idea that you can pattern match across such diverse situations, I think is just really good brain training so go pick some completely other hobby, beekeeping or whatever it is. I think you will find many different facets of the world operate a lot more similar than you think. It’s kind of part of the story behind where good ideas come from, Steven Johnson’s book where it’s all about cross pollination. No pun intended with the bees but to take ideas from one place, turn on slightly a couple of degrees on one direction, bring it to something else like that’s where creativity comes from because if all you’re doing is reading startup book after startup book you’re just going to be thinking the same as everybody else versus somebody who comes up things from a new angle.

John:

I love that. We’ll make sure to put both of those books in the show notes. I’m sure you are able to take a lot of athletic endeavors that you do and transfer that to being an entrepreneur as far as stamina and tenacity and all that good stuff too.

Charlie:

I do a lot of thinking on my bike.

John:

Yes. People can follow you at Twitter and you have one of the most unique Twitter handlers I’ve ever seen. In fact, when I saw it I thought how was that not taken but I’m guessing because you were an early Twitter user, is that right?

Charlie:

Well, CEO is actually my initials.

John:

Yes. Okay.

Charlie:

Yeah. So Charles Erik O’Donnell, the CEO is always sort of kind of a thing even before I wound up in venture and it doesn’t really have that much to do with starting companies or being in charge of stuff. CEO NYC was just kind of — that’s who I was. I am CEO and I live here in NYC and so nobody else took that.

John:

The double meaning is fantastic you have to admit, right.

Charlie:

No, absolutely. I have — I will admit to people tweeting at me telling me that they have seen my car parked on the street because I am one of those people that has a custom plate and so it’s very easy to spot my car.

John:

Nice. Well, you have consistency in your branding that’s why you’re so successful.

Charlie:

There you go.

John:

Charlie, it’s been such a pleasure. We’re going to have people follow you @ceonyc and of course I want to give a shout out to your incredible blog, tell people how they can find that. This is going to be big is the name of it.

Charlie:

True. thisisgoingtobebig.com or they can google my name. I’m usually the first brand person either that or the wheel of fortune announcer, but I’m not that.

John:

Fantastic. Thanks again.

Charlie:

No problem.

Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch Podcast. If you liked the show, please go to iTunes and write a review, and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out.

You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So, how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a riverbank and you have to cross the river, and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

So, first, you make up your idea and then you make it real and then you make it re-occur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s and you don’t know why. So, if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.