How To Get Seed Money for Free – Interview with Ramphis Castro
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
Ramphis Castro is the co-founder of ScienceVest and is a Kauffman Fellow, a community of over 400 innovation investors worldwide. He is also the managing director of The Founder Institute, which is one of the world’s largest idea-stage accelerators. Today, Ramphis sits down with John to discuss some of the potential entrepreneurial paths in Cuba and Puerto Rico as well as some of the benefits of being a Kauffman Fellow.
How To Get Seed Money for Free – Interview with Ramphis Castro
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Ramphis Castro, who is the New York City managing director for the Silicon Valley based founder institute, the world’s most successful idea stage accelerator, which helps aspiring founders across the globe build technology companies. Graduates from this program have raised over 500 million in venture funding and they generate 12 billion in investor value. He’s also a Kauffman Fellow, a community of over 500 innovation investors worldwide. From what I’ve read, only 30 people get in a year to do this. That’s incredible. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s also the founding partner of Mindchemy, a full-stack startup ecosystem, acceleration and support organization that helps managers in venture industries. He’s a friend of Judy Robinett. They met judging a pitching contest down in Puerto Rico. Without any further ado, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John.
I don’t even know where to start. Let’s start with how did you get into the startup world? How did you decide this is what you wanted to do with your life?
The story there starts early. My mom used to be our first investor as kids when we wanted to make a trip as a family and make us sell M&Ms. We had to pay her back first and then with the profits, we could buy airline tickets to be able to go to Disney.
Wow, that’s a lot of M&Ms.
It was. Going door-to-door, having her a few blocks away, in the car, just watching us, just going, “Got to get that done.” Definitely got us started early. As my career moved forward, I started computer engineering, I knew after my time in Microsoft that I wasn’t going to be an employee forever, that there was certain ideas that I had been keen on to build. I wanted to get out there and that’s how I got the bug just to, when I came back to Puerto Rico, to really just push those forward. I started my first company. That’s a short version of how that happened.
You were in Puerto Rico. That’s your childhood, then you worked for Microsoft. Where in Microsoft did you work?
Redmond.
Oh, you worked at the corporate headquarters?
I worked at the Office services team, the guys that did the user experience for Office 2007 at the time. A while back.
You started teaching down in Puerto Rico at the university there, I see, in computer science and entrepreneurship.
I made all my mistakes on my first company. That blew up gloriously. The product and the intellectual property was successful, but I made mistakes on the economy and bad partners and it was just a terrible, terrible experience. I got involved into everything else on the ecosystem side to make sure that others didn’t have to go through what I went through then.
That’s part of the story around getting involved in the university and supporting stuff like engineering, how that’s taught more from the entrepreneurship side and the engineering side and then also teaching graduate students on how to use their skills to build mobile companies. A lot of other programs that I’ve been involved with over the years, always trying to fill the gaps of what was needed in the ecosystem and everything I wish somebody would have told me when I was in school and just working on my company.
What are some of the things that you wish somebody had told you that you try to tell people now?
Definitely the biggest lesson learned is the best way to start is just to start. There are all these workshops, all these events, all these articles on the internet. Really, the best way to get the experience to run a company is to actually run a company. You start small. Don’t have this grand idea. Don’t necessarily even call it a company, but really just start with a small testable project. Getting started is key.
[Tweet “Best way to start is to start small.”]
The other is make sure you know who you’re partnering with. This is a long-term endeavor. It will take you a good part of your career, of your life, so make sure that whoever you’re bringing in, you’re able to be fully transparent with them and it’s a long-term relationship that you’re building. You want to want to make sure that you’re honest and open and it’s a collaboration. You watch out for the red flags, dishonesty, bad ethics, those kinds of things, and really reference check people. Make sure that you know who knows them, who’s worked with them. Make sure that you’re having the right people for your team early. Those are two things. There’s a lot obviously, but those are two that I always make sure they’re the first things that I tell new, aspiring entrepreneurs.
You just gave us two tweets right from the episode. “The best way to start is to start small,” and “Reference check your team.” Those are great takeaways. Now, you were judging a pitching contest down in Puerto Rico. You were also a part of Start-Up Chile judge. Tell us what you look for when you’re listening to pitches, either in a contest or as an investor.
[Tweet “How To Get Seed Money: Check your team’s references before you partner.”]
I operate at what is called the pre-seed and seed stage. That is the earliest you can get involved, which is when there might or might not be a team. There might not even be a product, but really something that is the inkling or a start of a great project. In that space, the number one thing I’m focused on is the team. By the team, I mean, why is this the right team to run with this idea? What particularly qualifies them to do it? Why would I think that this is the team to win in this space? The other key piece is, whatever traction they have, and by traction, I mean what have they actually done already? Do they have an early prototype up? Do they have even signups, a landing page where they’ve collected a few hundreds, dozens, thousands of emails, have they followed up with customers. Traction has many forms, but it’s, have they done work and how fast did they do this work and are they moving? Those are the two key pieces I look out for.
I like that. That’s so helpful. What’s interesting about that is you’re not looking for them to give you a 10 minute product demo or a long lengthy explanation of how they came up with this concept, but it’s really about, “Tell me about you and why you’re uniquely qualified. What have you done to show some traction and how fast is that happening?” Which is not normally the focus a lot of people start pitching with. They start talking about, “Oh, this is a great idea and this is going to make millions,” and you’re like, “Tell me what it is you’re talking about and make it easy for me to understand.” I want to dig in to being a Kauffman Fellow. Can you tell us how you got selected, what that process was like and what you do as a Kauffman Fellow?
[Tweet “How To Get Seed Money: What qualifies you to be a founder for this startup?”]
As I mentioned, the Kauffman Fellows is a global network of innovation investors. It’s a two-year fellowship where, as you’re actively engaged in the VC industry with a fund or through other programs related to VC industry, you learn, one-on-one, with a cohort from the best of the best in the industry on how the sausage is made, really, as you gain insights. The process for me is really, I heard of it first through another Kauffman Fellow, Jorge Torres, who’s a venture partner with Silas Capital. They’re a consumer-focused VC firm here in New York. He was seeing my chart records, seeing that I was in the investing world and that was my general direction. That’s really where I’m focused on moving forward. He said, “You should look into the program,” and he introduced me into it.
The process was basically me reaching out to a lot of other fellows, understanding the program and how it matched in my vision and where I wanted to be moving forward. It was just incredible to get to meet the other fellows and what they’ve done and what they represent in their own space in the industry. There’s an application process where there’s two routes. One is an affiliate, so those that are just getting into an industry. They go through an interview process and something called a finalist process. They’re selected by a firm to move forward. There’s the affiliate where there’s an existing relationship with a VC firm or program and would move forward with supporting that candidate through the process. After the application and interviews, you get the call that you’re part of a particular class that starts every year in June in Silicon Valley.
It’s a very select group. It’s almost like getting into Y Combinator or something. Lots of people apply and they only take 30 a year?
Right. We sometimes call it the YC for VC.
Fantastic. What have you learned now that you’re in this prestigious Kauffman Fellowship?
How To Get Seed Money: It really has been around how the global venture industry works.
Definitely, the biggest lessons learned has come from obviously everybody involved and my peers. It really has been around how the global venture industry works. Not just one particular ecosystem, but more globally focused on how innovation happens and is supported by innovation investors and what’s the role in different areas at different stages and what’s our focus and how do we make sure that we support the entrepreneurs, which really are the rock stars here, are the ones that make it happen. How are we really able to focus and help them just achieve what they’re going to achieve, just to help accelerate that and just learn the best practices and everything from how to create new venture firms, new VC funds to running diligence from companies, how to syndicate deals, bringing in other investors, who are the right investors in the right spaces and really engaging the entrepreneurs through the process of really exiting that company or running it forever, if that’s what they want to do.
You also are the founder of the Institute, which is based in Silicon Valley. It’s a stage accelerator program. Can you speak to us about how did that become the world’s largest? What do you do as the managing director?
How To Get Seed Money: A structured curriculum where they are focused on building their company.
The program was founded by Adeo Ressi. Adeo is based on Silicon Valley. He’s the founder of the Founder Institute. The chapters are run worldwide through directors, through regular directors who operate on a part-time basis. Myself, as a managing director of New York, operates on a full-time basis where we have cohorts operating every three and a half months. To take a step back, the Founder Institute is focused on helping entrepreneurs launch their company. It’s focused on essentially employees with generally ten plus years experience that are really focused and committed to launching their company from anywhere in the world, launching a global venture-backable company in whatever ecosystem they operate in. To do that, we have a fourteen week, essentially a three and a half month program where they can participate part-time as considered a full-time job and validate their model. The way that’s supported is through mentors and structured curriculum where they are basically focused on building their company.
There’s nothing academic about it. They are in it, building their mission. They’re revalidating their idea with customers who are figuring out what’s their revenue model, is there a real business around it, understanding the fundraising process. Really on everything that a founder should know about to be successful entrepreneurs. They learn it from other successful entrepreneurs that have been there, have done it and other investors that actively support and invest in companies at their stage and have experience in supporting how that grows.
At the end of that three, three and a half months, do you have a demo day where they get to present and pitch to investors?
Yes. One of the things to keep in mind is these are starting, so they are the earliest you can get. For many of them, a demo days is way too early so they might have, by the end, a fully formed business model validated and a lot of different pieces and a fully vetted due diligence ready company that’s able to accept venture funding with our legal partners that operate in different cities around the world. Here in New York, they support the companies getting launched. There’s basically a first look where we basically bring in the best pre-seed and seed investors in the community here in New York and wherever our chapters are operating to see the companies first. We call it First Look Event. Some of them will be too early. It may require maybe a few, three to six months extra where different investors at that stage will go in. There will be other companies that have either quit their day jobs throughout the process and are moving forward full-time on the business and investors are able to get an early look before the rest of the investor community takes a look at them and wants to come in.
That seems to really be a big differentiator from other accelerators, which most everybody who’s in those programs is doing this full-time. You’re so pre-seed that you let people have a full-time job and do this part-time, is that right?
How To Get Seed Money: It transforms their thinking and they’re able to take the reins.
That’s correct. They operate on a full-time load with their jobs, which could be anywhere, 50, 60, 80 hours a week. On top of that, they do between 20 and 40 hours’ worth of work on top of that. The focus is on getting them to experience working 100, 120 hours plus, what it feels like and feel that pressure over the course of three and a half months. Just gets them into the cadence of running a company, just momentum and keeping up with the tempo and moving forward fast with limited resources, limited time, limited information. They need to keep moving forward. After that time, it really transforms their thinking and they’re able to really just take the reins and just move forward. It’s really amazing to see the transformation.
Do you start working with them that early on who they might be looking at to get on an advisory board?
Yes. The structured curriculum involves ten different topics. Everything from their vision and the idea. Understanding why they want to start that particular company and why them and why now, those kinds of things. Also, the topics around teams and advisers. Who are the right advisers for their company? They’re able to look at our global mentor network of over 5,000 CEOs and investors. Obviously, there’s a lot more in the ecosystem. When they’re operating, they may not be a part of our network, which we can reach through our network as well. They think about that broadly and they really think about how to start engaging and how to start those relationships throughout the course of the program. By the end, they either have them already on board or they know what they need to do in order to get that done.
This seems to me that the skill of pitching is needed not only to pitch investors for funding, but also to pitch potential people to join your advisory board and then pitch potential people to join your team.
That’s exactly right. Everybody thinks that, when I say everybody, I mean generally first time entrepreneurs think that pitching is for investors. Pitching is everybody. You’re pitching your spouse, you’re pitching your team, you’re pitching your parents that you’re not crazy and you’re really pitching everybody on why this is going to work, or even if it’s not, why you have to do it. Money is a part of it, but you’re not in it just for the money, you’re in it because you have to put this out to the world and you’re the right person, you could build the right team to go after it. Pitching is an essential skill because you only have yourself in the beginning.
[Tweet “How To Get Seed Money: Pitch and be clear what problem you want to solve.”]
You only have your dream, your background, your track record, your commitment. With that, you have to pitch somebody to quit their job to come and work with you on something that will most probably fail. Pitching and being clear about what problem you want to solve, why you’re the right person to solve it and what you’ve done to move that forward and what’s unique about your approach, you got to get out there in 15, 30 seconds. Then if you’re graced with more time, then you go 30 seconds more to how you do it, what’s your product. If you get another minute, then you go into how do you make money. It’s really just buying every piece of someone’s attention when they engage with you.
I love that. As part of the program at the Founder Institute, do you have a section where you teach them how to pitch?
Yes. Pitching is an essential component of the program. They pitch in different formats. There’s no right way to pitch so we do everything from 30 seconds, 60 second pitch, 3 minutes with a deck, with no deck, 5 minute with a product demo. They really go through everything and the way it’s done, instruction in the program, is that it builds on previous weeks. In the beginning, they’ll pitch why they want to be an entrepreneur and what are they passionate about or what are they the best at. That’ll evolve into what problem are you solving and differentiating your unique approach in solving that problem. It will continue to grow into the other pieces of your pitch, such as what’s your actual solution? How does it work? How do you make money? How big is the market? And those other pieces of a pitch.
I love how you structured that, that it really starts with you being able to pitch, why you’re uniquely qualified and passionate to do this before you even get into how something works, let alone how it makes money. Let’s also talk about that you’re the cofounder, managing partner of Mindchemy, which is a combination, you told me earlier, of mind and alchemy. Tell me about what you’re doing there.
Mindchemy is a partnership between Marcos Polanco and myself where we’re both Kauffman Fellows and we both met doing ecosystem work in Puerto Rico. We’ve been collaborating and working on different aspects of ecosystem building over the past almost eight years now. Our focus with Mindchemy started with bridging the gaps in the ecosystem. If you go into somewhere where there’s no startup community, probably the first thing is to just say, “I’m starting a startup community,” and that’s essentially what happened in Puerto Rico. When we started our own companies at the time, I started in Puerto Rico and Marcos spent time in Silicon Valley. There was no ecosystem really to speak of and no community. We started with the startup weekends and organizing the pieces that move those communities forward.
How To Get Seed Money: We support programs globally and really support from other ecosystem.
But now, Mindchemy has evolved to more global focus. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate enough to advise governments over the world and ecosystems over the world around really how to really engage and support grassroots leaders, and also now, more recently, engaging with emerging managers. The people that are starting new funds that basically operate like entrepreneurs, but these are VCs that have worked at VC firms, but now are setting off on their own to start their own firm to fill a particular gap in the funding ecosystem. Mindchemy really has evolved into how do we support programs globally and really support from other ecosystem builders that reach out to us where we, from experience, supporting ecosystems in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Columbia, and now more recently, Cuba to really move those communities forward.
Let’s talk about an article you recently wrote about Cuba and comparing it to Vietnam in the early days and all the potential there with the talent and the solutions that are needed.
Thanks for asking that, because one of the key things when people think about Cuba, obviously, it’s 50, 60 years of basically unknowns. It was very difficult for us, for everybody generally from the outside to think about and understand how the culture and the economy and other aspects of it works. When people think about it entirely, they would talk about it from a past tense of things that are not up to date on what they have. People lose sight of the fantastic education system that they have. When you think about the key ingredients for ecosystems and startups, it really starts with talent, number one. That’s something that they’ve invested in for the past half century in more ways than most countries in the western hemisphere.
The World Bank and other organizations have recently recognized Cuba as having the best education system. We’ve had the opportunity and we had the privilege to support some Grassroots organizers that are outside of the politics and really are focused on supporting and growing their communities and their startup ecosystem. In that perspective, people need to think about where we’ve already seen this evolve. People lose sight of the world in their day-to-day, seeing the new cycles and all these things. But really, it’s nothing new. We’ve seen how some of it has played out in the process of Vietnam where it’s still a socialist government and you’re seeing some of the fastest growing companies in Asia coming out of Vietnam now. You have global Fortune 500 companies operating there like Microsoft and Intel. We’ve already seen a piece of that movie. Now, we really get the opportunity to be supportive in whatever the community wants to really grow into and how they want to evolve and what are the ideas that are going to come out of such a high quality talent that is based on the island.
I was reading in your article there about just some basic things like you need your medical things from the pharmacy delivered to you quickly, almost like an Uber version of medical pharmacy delivery. Tourism, of course. There’s lots of different things going on there.
How To Get Seed Money: It’s something that you could easily see scaling through other ecosystems because it’s a real problem.
Because things that we take for granted everywhere it’s something that, when you think about it, there are a lot of communities everywhere, not just in Cuba, that don’t have access to certain commodities. Having somebody, or being able to access your medicine is something that if you go to rural places across LatAm US and LatAm, they might have the same challenges where they might not be able to find what they need. That basically tells you, “Hey, this is where you can find what you need and get it.” It’s something that obviously they’ve experienced over time in Cuba. This are some ideas that came up directly from the community, but it’s something that you could easily see scaling through other ecosystems because it’s a real problem not just there but in a lot of communities around the world.
The internet connection, whether it’s Vietnam or Cuba, is pretty standard now, or is it still evolving?
It is definitely evolving. Obviously, it’s one of the bigger challenges coming in the first time I was there. It was very difficult. It makes you also appreciate the use and optimizing your time. There’s a lot of engaging one-on-one with people and just talking and just really engaging and human contact. The huge advantage that Cuba has is it’s just 90 miles away from one of the largest, most sophisticated Nox fiber optic connections in the world. There’s the Terramac Building is just in Miami. It’s not as if you’re trying to interconnect all of Brazil. If you really just want to increase the bandwidth in Cuba, the government is moving forward with improving their technologies and infrastructure. As the relations with the US continue to improve, you’ll just see fiber deployments.
Maybe Google will come with Project Loons and others that they can initially test. There’s a lot of technology that we have now that can really enable economies like Cuba’s to just quantum leap other economies that have invested in other traditional telecommunications infrastructure over time. That’s a huge advantage that Cuba has over other economies, is that they can take advantage of all the mistakes that everybody else has made in deploying their infrastructure. Now, they can really get it right the first time because we all know how to do it now, how to interconnect the role of fiber and other high-speed solutions. They can learn from other governments like South Korea. The leader in excellence in broadband, South Korea, Singapore, and they can see what works and just really build on top of that.
Tell me about P18. We briefly talked before the show a little bit about that.
The next evolution of Puerto Rico is really break out as essentially the Hong Kong or the Singapore of the Caribbean. If you’re an Asian company, you’re thinking about doing business in China, you could do it in China, but you could build through Hong Kong. There’s very sophisticated business environment that you can take advantage of to really expand and really roll out your Asian strategy. When you think about Puerto Rico, it’s the same way. It’s basically inside the USA, but outside the IRS. That enables companies such as Microsoft to globally really capture and maintain and reinvest their capital abroad in expansion and supporting their operation. That is something that is available for companies. As that evolves, the P18 programs, it’s called Parallel18 after … Puerto Rico is located in the western hemisphere, is a way for companies that are US companies that want to expand to LatAm to take advantage of the same thing Microsoft takes advantage globally, or for Latin American companies that really want to expand into the US really have a softer landing into the US market.
Basically you have a fully Latino culture in Puerto Rico, but it is a US based commercial engagement. You’re able to have companies from all over the world that want to expand into the US really, really have a taste of what being in the US economy can be like and they can take advantage of the fantastic talent that Puerto Rico has to offer that has been a secret for decades now. We have Microsoft, Procter and Gamble, IBM recruiting for the past 30 years, not telling anybody about it. Now, having startups from all over the world come down from the P18 program to come down with a 40K, equity-free and spend five months there, like the Start-Up Chile. If they decide to stay and leave some operations, they could get 75K follow on funding from the Puerto Rico Science and Technology Trust.
What an amazing opportunity for somebody who’s willing to do what it takes and live where it takes, to move to Puerto Rico and get some startup seed money and even more if they stay. It’s great.
It is fantastic. Actually, one of the first ones to buy that pitch is Sebastian Vidal, which he was the former executive director of Start-Up Chile. You have a guy that’s been there, done that, we’ve seen the effects of that in Chile. He believes so strongly in this that he moved his family, has a newborn that is settled in Puerto Rico, doubling down on this. An Inc. article just came out today around how it’s the biggest startup hub you’ve never heard of.
[Tweet “How To Get Seed Money: Puerto Rico is the biggest startup hub you have never heard of.”]
I love that. That’s fantastic. We’ll use that as a definite tweet. “Puerto Rico, the biggest startup hub you’ve never heard of.”
Exactly.
What book would you recommend our listeners to read, either about business, startups or just life in general?
Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
That’s a great, great question. One of the things I definitely love for startup founders to really dig into is a book called Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. They’re the partners out of the Founder Group. Basically, it walks founders through a lot of the thinking that investors go through, from how to start your deal, how to think about investment, how to think about how things are structured and what are the incentives for investors to support your company and really invest and follow on investing. It’s really an opportunity for entrepreneurs to get insight into the minds of VCs and also to know more than your lawyer. It’s very important that your lawyer supports what you’re doing but then you know enough so that you can ask smart questions about your company and the future of finance. I think Venture Deals is definitely one.
Early Exits by Basil Peters
Another great one is Early Exits by Basil Peters. Early Exits is really around, everybody is unicorn hunting nowadays. An 80 million, 100 million dollar exit is a life-changing event for a first time founder. You could go in that direction and then just go again and launch your second company, like Elon Musk did after PayPal, launched Tesla and SpaceX. That book is really about how to engage your advisers and think about an early exit strategy and think about how does that work and how do you position your company for acquisition and really the mindset around how to actually execute on that strategy.
Those are both great, great recommendations. Thank you. How can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter handle, all that good stuff?
I have a big advantage is that my name, Ramphis, is number two on Google. If you search Ramphis. There’s a moth on Wikipedia that’s beating me out. If somebody, someday can do a Wikipedia entry, hopefully I could be at number one. Easy enough to find if you Google. Definitely, Twitter, @jramphis. That’s the easiest way to reach me. Across properties on the internet, AngelList, Twitter, Facebook, you name it, it’s still jramphis.
Great. I can’t thank you enough for being on the show and sharing all your wonderful global insights. It’s very exciting to hear about what’s going on in Puerto Rico and Chile and Cuba and then of course everything you’re doing here in the US with the Founder Institute and the Kauffman Fellowship. Thank you again.
Thank you, John. Really appreciate the opportunity.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Ramphis on Twitter
Venture Deals by Brad Feld
Early Exits by Basil Peters
Crack The Funding Code!
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Well Prepared Pitch Deck – Interview with Jason Shuman
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
Jason Shuman is an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist who has been involved with startups since he was 17 years old, and has always had a deep passion for the industry. He is currently an associate at Corigin Ventures, where he is responsible for sourcing and analyzing deals. Jason discusses the charity foundation he is a part of, why there are so many young VCs these days, branding, and so much more on today’s show.
Well Prepared Pitch Deck – Interview with Jason Shuman
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Jason Shuman, who is a venture capitalist at Corigin Ventures in New York City. Jason has a really interesting background coming from the University of Miami. He has been involved in some startups himself, but he is now a big time VC in New York City. Jason, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, John. How are you?
I’m good. It’s great to have you. We met through Judy Robinett. The two of you were down in Puerto Rico judging a pitching contest.
We were. We got back from sunny Puerto Rico a couple weeks ago. Now, I’m up here in the cold and windy New York weather.
Quite a contrast. I always like to ask my guests, how did they get started? If you would, take us back to the days when you were in college and you were saying, “Hmm, what am I going to do with my life? I’m going to be a VC in New York.” How did that all happen?
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: They were people that gave me a lot of confidence to go out there and follow my passion of entrepreneurship.
I think, to go back even further, I was born and raised right outside of Boston. I really grew up in a family of nothing but entrepreneurs. They were people that gave me a lot of confidence to go out there and follow my passion of entrepreneurship and starting companies. Really, I started getting into startups at around seventeen years old, when I graduated from high school a semester early. I went to work for an identity theft protection company that my aunt and uncle had spun out of a company my grandfather started way back in the day. They did background checks for the US Federal Government and had been really doing well growing the business. I’ll never forget, they told me, “What do you want to go do?” I said, “I’d love to help create the consumer side of the business and really help build that up.”
It was there that I found one of my mentors in Rob Shavell who had come over from SoftBank. I proceeded to shred papers for about two months and shredded some incredible background checks while I was there. As soon as those were done, they let me run free and really put together a plan and help build that side of the business. I decided to go to the University of Miami for college and study entrepreneurship there. Got my real estate license while I was there and started doing that when I was eighteen. I did identity theft protection again and then actually started my first company while I was in college called Category Five.
It was an eCommerce based men’s footwear company where we made boat shoes and driving moccasins. Grew that out for about two years, including for a year after graduation. Before you knew it, I was consulting for startups and got a phone call that ended up leading to an introduction to a VC here in New York because I was making so many introductions between startups in Boston to VCs in New York. Finally, somebody wanted to pay me for all those introductions and that was Corigin Ventures. Here I am today.
What a great story? I like the spirit of giving so much and making introductions. You really are a walking case study of your network is your net worth.
I think that paying it forward is the most important thing here. Ever since I wanted to get into startups, probably around fourteen or fifteen years old, everyone paid it forward. A big piece of that, it also goes back into my background, which is the fact that I was born with something called primary immunodeficiency. It basically means that your production of white blood cells is a little bit lower than the average human being. I would have to get infusions every three weeks. That whole growing up with a health condition like that led me to really be around doctors and donors a lot of the time for a nonprofit that I was heavily involved in. I was always about giving my time and my energy, and continue to do so today, which is one of the things I love about venture capital, is that we can add value to a very wide range of people. Not only the people that we’re invested in, but people that we just meet as well.
Let’s not be shy about the charity that you’re involved with, because we’re going to put that in the show notes. Tell us how people can be aware and contribute to the charity you’re involved with.
It’s called the Jeffrey Modell Foundation. It is a nonprofit that was started by Fred and Vicki Modell in New York City after their son, Jeffrey Modell, had passed away from primary immunodeficiency back in the 80s. Honestly, they’ve been another set of grandparents to me. It’s really helping out with research and trying to come up with a cure for primary immunodeficiency. They do some great things.
That’s now led to your passion for investing in health-related ventures?
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: There’s new types of technologies that are powerful and can really add value to our healthcare systems.
That it has. It’s really interesting. Outside of my own health issues, I’ve had a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, a grandfather that’s had heart issues for a long time. I’ve had mental health issues in my family. I think that in today’s innovation economy, whether it’s the mobile phone or the IoT, there’s all these new different types of technologies that are truly powerful and can really help assist and add value to our healthcare systems and us personally as human beings, as well. I really would tell people out there that the next five to fifteen years, not only do I think that they’re going to be impacted personally, but I think our healthcare system’s going to start to save money because of it. I think that it’s going to improve outcomes and increase access for consumers.
How great? Let’s talk a little bit about Corigin Ventures. To me, it seems a little interesting. They’re a VC firm that does both early stage seed and series A. I usually don’t see that. Usually, it’s just the Angels doing the seed and the ventures doing the series A and B, etc. What is it that makes you guys do both and do you often find that the people you invest in for seed, you become the series A as well?
It’s a great question. Corigin has a unique setup here. Corigin itself actually is a holdings company where, on one side, we’ve got a billion dollar real estate arm. The CEO here is a guy by the name of Ryan Freedman. Truly incredible story, but long story short is that Ryan started to invest in startups about four or five years ago. When he was doing that, he was investing in companies that A, he knew he could add value to and B, that were in verticals that he really understood and had some expertise in. He was being approached by these companies, but he was writing checks between 100k and $1.5 million. With that comes both seed and series A. I think for us, seed in my background, my boss, David Goldberg’s background, we are able to be more hands on and add more value because we’ve been in the trenches before. With series A, we can add value in other ways as well. That includes the check size. We do prefer to follow along with our companies from seed to series A, but you don’t really see us leading too many deals in series A.
Fantastic. Let’s talk about, are you one of the youngest people that has ever been hired by Corigin Ventures?
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: I think you’re going to see a lot more younger VCs getting into the game.
I guess as far as Corigin Ventures is concerned, I am the youngest person that’s ever been hired by Corigin Ventures. I was actually only the second hire here on the venture capital side. As far as New York City is concerned, I have some other young colleagues, whether that’s Heston Berkman over at BoxGroup, Ash Egan over at CommonAngels, Mike Falb at KEC. You have a lot of young people in venture capital now. I think my reasoning or the way I like to put it is that we grew up with technology. For the most part, we understand consumers that are around our age. It’s a target demographic that a lot of companies want to go after because our wallet’s only going to get bigger and bigger. Between those two factors, I think you’re going to see a lot more younger VCs getting into the game and hopefully, getting some good returns for investors as well.
I think I’m going to look back on this day and brag about being the first person to get to interview you on their podcast, because of the branding awareness that you have that’s so smart, where you talk about VCs like Brad Feld, for example, that have branded themselves. What are your plans to brand yourself? How does that help you get good deal flow?
It’s a great question. I think that the Brad Felds, the Mark Susters, the Fred Wilsons of the world, they have an ability to brand themselves because they’ve been around for so long and they’ve seen so much. Therefore, they’re really talking and speaking honestly about their experiences and their opinions, which really do matter because there’s some substance and background behind that because they’ve seen it and they’ve proved that what they’re talking about can be right. With younger VCs, positioning and branding is a very interesting thing. To me, what it means personally is two things.
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: It’s better to put something on paper and look back ten years from now and be right.
One, I like to share my story, my personal story and why I’m interested in certain verticals, how I look at certain verticals, how I try to look at certain companies, so on and so forth. On the other hand, I want to be able to share my story on how I got into venture capital because I think that’s a big thing and a big question that I get a lot as well. If I can, I guess, both A, add value and B, give people my opinion in the same way that the Susters and the Felds and the Wilsons of the world do. Whether it’s right or not, who knows? I’ll tell you what, it’s better to put something on paper and look back ten years from now and be right than not put it on paper at all and everyone just say, “Oh, yeah, I thought that too.”
Absolutely, you have to put it out what you think and feel at that moment. If it changes, that’s fine. You can’t be afraid to know what you stand for because that’s what branding is all about. You’ve shared your story of how you started at such a young age becoming an entrepreneur and leading into that. Is there any other details about how you got the job offer? Was it just strictly making introductions and then getting those connections and then they said, “We want to tap into you because you already have a good network”?
That’s a great question. I was living in Boston. If you ask Sumeet Shah at Brand Foundry, he’ll probably tell you that I was the only free venture capitalist, the only non-paid venture capitalist out there. The reason why is dating back to November of 2014, I started doing a consulting for startups. Prior to that, during what I would call my first failed startup, I had met a lot of venture capitalists. There’s a gap in Boston right now for some seed stage startups. A lot of that gap is in the consumer space. NextView Ventures and Dave Beisel and the guys over at Founder Collective like David Frankel, they do a great job investing in the consumer, but outside of that, there’s not a lot of seed funds that can do it.
I was making those introductions and then at the same time, as far as how I got in, I was adding value before I got in, but I was also maniacally focused about venture capital and startups. I read every single blog post, every single news source I could. I came up with my own opinions. I’ll tell you what, before I went into interviews, which, by the way, the interviews in venture capital are very, very basic conversations with these people. There’s not one size fits all.
Before I went into these interviews, I made spreadsheets on my computer of every single venture capital firm that I was about to go into, every portfolio company of theirs, which partner did it, when they funded them, how much funding they had, the background of the founders. I came up with my own thesis and my own opinion based on what was publicly available about those companies. God blessed me with somewhat of a photographic memory or good memory recall so I was able to pull up some of that in my meetings.
I think that’s one of the things we’re going to tweet out is, “Focus maniacally on what you want because that shows passion.”
[Tweet “Well Prepared Pitch Deck: Focus is the key to getting funded.”]
It does. Have you ever read the book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill?
Yes.
That is one of my favorite books in the world. In November, I was doing a lot of soul searching, candidly. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into venture capital or work for another startup. Once I figured out that I wanted to get into venture capital, I said I was going to get a job by January 15th because I actually had to get a hip surgery later that month and I knew I was going to be out of commission. It’s like, “Look, go to work and say you will get a job in venture capital by January 15th,” and I said it every morning when I woke up and I said it every night when I went to bed. Luckily I did. It was great.
I love that. That’s the same passion and preparation that founders need to do before they go meet with an investor like you. It’s very complimentary and it shows you’ve done your homework, it shows you’re serious. For you, you did that to get a job. If someone’s pitching you to give them money, they need to do the same kind of focus, maniacal, read every blog post you’ve done. Like what I like to do before I get a guest on the show.
[Tweet “Well Prepared Pitch Deck: Read the investors’ blogs.”]
Totally agree.
Speaking of that, one of the things you wrote about is, while there’s long lead times, sometimes, or feedback loops, sometimes it’s a short one. You spend some time with somebody helping them with their pitch and their narrative. Please share with me that story and also what you look for in a pitch.
First off, I got started here at Corigin and it was David Goldberg and myself. One of the big things, like I said, is we like to add value to our companies. One of the ways that we like to add value is we like to help them go out and fundraiser, whether that’s to fill out the remaining part of the current round or to go raise series A. When I first got here, there was a portfolio company of ours, whose name I won’t mention, but they were in the FinTech space. The founders are brilliant. When I say brilliant, that is an understatement. They are two of the smartest people I’ve ever met in the world and their solution is pretty incredible.
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: It’s very difficult to tell the story and the narrative and sell it in the way that is most effective.
One of the things is, and I don’t care if it’s a founder in our portfolio or outside of our portfolio, being in the company day in and day out sometimes blurs your vision. It makes it very difficult to tell the story and the narrative and sell it in the way that is most effective for either A, raising capital or B, selling to a certain type of population. Investors are not the buyers of your traditional product. The way that you need to position your company is a little bit different. With this specific company, they came in my first day, we had gone through their pitch and then we went, “Look, let’s, candidly, we need to blow up this deck and we need to start from scratch.”
It starts, to me, by the way, the pitch deck creation starts with nothing but blank slides. Then you write a narrative across the top of each one of those slides and you work your way through that, talking about the problem, talking about the solution, what’s your unfair advantage, why you guys, how big is the market. You make all these pieces of the puzzle come together to tell one beautiful story and why you guys are going to win. I think that’s what gets people excited. I will tell you, though, I spent more hours probably working on that pitch deck and the storytelling and networking my first two weeks than I did sleeping or hanging out with any of my friends that are living here in New York City.
I think that’s so great for you to show how much preparation goes into a good pitch. The analogy I tell my clients is, “It’s like the Super Bowl of meetings. It’s your Olympic moment. You only have ten minutes but think about how much preparation athletes do before they go to a big game or a big Olympic moment. You need to do that same preparation and focus and honing.” Because people think, “Oh, I’ll just wing it. No practice. I don’t really have an easy to follow story line.” You’re never going to get funded.
Ever. I put it this way, a pitch deck will never get you funded but it will not get you a meeting. Meaning, if you make a terrible pitch deck and you send it to an investor, they’re not going to even have you in their office. If you make a really, really good pitch deck, it’s going to get you in their office, it’s going to help prepare your pitch actually better. For me, my opinion and putting those into blog posts, it helps me flush out my ideas. A pitch deck does that for founders and it does that for their pitch. I think that that’s a very good way of getting the process going in the right direction when meeting with VCs.
[Tweet “Well Prepared Pitch Deck: A bad pitch deck kills your chances of getting funded.”]
Let’s talk about the process. Let’s assume you get a warm introduction, because most of the investors that I’ve talk to, that’s their preferred way of meeting founders. Would that be true for you?
Yes, 100%.
You get a warm introduction, and do you like to see the pitch deck first or do you like to have a chat with the person and then have them present the pitch deck? Do you have a preference?
It depends on where the warm intro comes from. If it’s a very trusted source that knows what types of deals we like here at Corigin Ventures, I’ll take a meeting and I’ll look at things fresh as soon as the person walks in. The reason why I like to do that is we’re trying to analyze things on the spot as well. It brings up some interesting questions. I’ll speak personally, my brain starts to move very, very fast and I start to think about things that if I come up with those before the meeting, it’s a little bit different and it doesn’t flow, the conversation as well. If it’s just some good friends of mine that are introducing me to another friend of theirs, I may just take a look at the deck. If it makes sense, I’ll have a meeting. That’s definitely the first step, is getting that meeting.
How important is it for you that someone you invest in lives in the New York area? Or do you invest in people anywhere?
Not that important. We’re willing to invest in any company that has a presence in the United States. One of the other investments we made is in a company called ClassWallet and they’re down in Miami. We had a company portfolio from a Chicago called Stylisted. We had one in the westcoast called Vintana. To me, especially in this day and age, companies and investments can be anywhere but as long as you’re transparent and have an open-minded communication with them.
Great. The things that you are particularly passionate in is anything related to healthcare. I think Corigin is also interested in the Internet of Things, is that true?
Well Prepared Pitch Deck: The Internet of Things is a very interesting space in a variety of ways.
The Internet of Things is a very interesting space in a variety of ways too. One of the ways is healthcare, like you had mentioned. The Aging in Place Movement is a really interesting one where baby boomers are becoming seniors by the thousands right now on a daily basis, by the way.
I know.
It’s pretty crazy. I think that a lot of them, research shows that a lot of them want to stay at home and not go into assisted living facilities. With that comes a pretty high level of discomfort for the caregivers, meaning their sons and daughters and grandchildren. I think that the IoT is going to play a very major role in how those people remain at their homes and increasing the level of comfort for their caregivers. On another note, I also think that what people currently view as their daily routines or daily activities at their home are going to change completely for the masses because the IoT is really going to take over those daily routines, whether it’s like an Amazon Dash Button or a latch lock. It’s just going to get rid of the inconveniences of your life and just make it so much easier at home.
Nice. Let’s talk about one of your other blogs, which is all about this great word you made up, which is hilarious. Platformation, did I say it right?
Yeah. Was I too young to create a word?
No, why would you ever put that restriction on yourself? I’m sure it’s the first of many you will create. You’ll have your own dictionary, your own book. If I understood it right, it’s basically when you’ve created a platform that’s so successful that it then generates the ability for other people to create platforms, IE, Facebook has generated so many other spinoffs from it. Is that a pretty good definition?
You got it. I think that we’re going through an interesting time. The mobile phone has already received mass adoption. All these other companies and all these other new concepts have been built on top of the mobile phone or the smartphone, specifically, which was built as a platform to begin with. But then there are these other companies out there, like Uber or AirBnB, that were not specifically built as platforms but are now becoming platforms because they have reached such a scale.
For AirBnB, you have Smart Lock companies that are going after those user bases. You have property management companies that are going after only AirBnB owners. You have plenty of companies there. For Uber, you have companies that are trying to put the taxi TVs in the back of Ubers to increase revenue for the drivers. You have a portfolio company of ours called SherpaShare, which is literally just trying to service the drivers and help make them better with managing their finances and keeping track of all their mileage and usage and making themselves more productive and more efficient.
Let me just ask about that. That’s an incredible focus. Talk about a niche. It’s not just financial planning and keeping track of your finances for everybody’s taxes. This is strictly for somebody who is an Uber-like driver, is that accurate?
Yeah. Really, they’re going after 1099 workers as a whole. That is probably the strongest use case that they went after originally. I think that they were maniacally focused at going after those people. I think you get a lot of natural word of mouth marketing that goes around there. They see such a great value proposition that they become more likely to tell friends about it and then to eventually, if the market size gets large enough over time, the spending and the lead generation that may come through a platform like that, the possibilities are really endless for them. They’ve just created such a sticky product that it’s really incredible.
I love what you just said about that. This is what I’m constantly telling the people I work with on their pitch, which is, “Don’t try to cover everything that you could possibly do. Pick your lowest hanging fruit. Show the investor, like Jason, how are you going to make your money with one niche first, get that before you start talking about everybody else.” This applies to everybody who’s 1099, but we’re going to focus on Uber drivers or taxi drivers first, and then we can go into waiters and things like that.
It’s unbelievable. I think I’m a perfect example of somebody who was once a young entrepreneur that failed to focus. Every time I go in and I speak to college students at campuses across the country, the one theme that I actually speak about the most is the idea of being focused. The reason why is you can’t boil the ocean. If you come into our office, one of the biggest mistakes that …
What did you say? You can’t boil the ocean?
You can’t boil the ocean. It’s easier to boil a cup of water than it is to boil the ocean.
That’s such a great imagery. We’re going to tweet that out, “You can’t boil the ocean.” That’s fabulous.
[Tweet “Well Prepared Pitch Deck: You can’t boil the ocean.”]
The reason I say that is that, if you come into our office as a 24, 25 year old or 23 year old first time entrepreneur, there are plenty of advantages. One of the disadvantages that we see though time and time again is a lack of focus. If you come in and say that you want to go after two, three, four different target demographics, you want to be a B2C company and have a B2B side to your business. Our heads start to spin and it’s just a huge red flag for us. It’s a mistake that I think a lot of first time entrepreneurs make and then they realize, and that’s why their second venture is a lot more successful, because they know that they just need to absolutely dominate, saturate one market, take that business model that they’ve realized is A, working but B, scalable and repeatable, and then move out into other cities. I think the more I get to hang around incredible entrepreneurs, like Sam, the founder of Zeal, I get to see that because they expand on a city by city basis. He is very patient to put the pedal on the metal and go into that next city unless he knows he’s ready.
What I like to use the analogy is, people don’t remember this probably, but Amazon used to just sell books.
That is true. That was a long time ago, but that is very true.
Until they figured that out and mastered that, they didn’t start selling anything else. That’s my favorite example of focus. Jason, do you have any other advice you want to leave our listeners with? Any other books you want to mention or anything at all about giving a good pitch?
I’m definitely available for any specific questions that anybody has. Feel free to tweet me. You may put my Twitter out there, it’s @BoatShuman. Happy to answer questions. I really think that fundraising is very difficult. The media in movies like The Social Network and the TV shows like Silicon Valley, they make fundraising and entrepreneurship seem very easy. I think I want to tell people that startups are not easy and they’re not exactly a ton of fun. They’re a lot of hard work and it takes a very special human being to do a startup and it takes a very special human being and a very special type of business model to go get venture funding. Venture funding is not for everybody. I think just make sure you’re going into the fundraising process prepared. Focus on it, make it a full time job and continue to learn throughout the process and make iterations based on feedback. Hopefully, you’ll get there and we’ll see you be successful. Because at the end of the day, even if we pass on the deal, we’re all rooting for you.
That’s so great. I like what you said, “It takes a very special type of human being to be an entrepreneur, as well as an investor.” That’s certainly who you are, Jason. Thank you for being on the show.
Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.
Links Mentioned
JRobinett Website
Selling Secrets For Funding
Corigin Ventures
Jeffrey Modell Foundation
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Platformation Today
Jason Shuman Twitter
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Company Branding and Storytelling – Interview with Eitan Chitayat
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
Eitan Chitayat is a creative director, copywriter, brand-builder, and founder of Natie. Eitan has overseen and played a part in award-winning work on integrated campaigns across all mediums, most notably for Google, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and more. Eitan discusses the power of storytelling and how to hone in on these skills by finding who you are and what your brand represents.
Storytelling and Company Branding – Interview with Eitan Chitayat
Hi, and welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Eitan Chitayat, who is the founder of a brilliant creative agency called Natie.com. He’s worked for amazing companies and has clients that anybody would kill to have, including American Express. He’s going to talk to us about one of his clients, Valtech, that was just recently bought for over $900 million. Clearly, he is an expert in company branding and positioning. Welcome to the show.
Hey, it’s nice to be here. Thank you.
I always like to ask my guests about their background. In other words, what were you like in college? Did you know that you wanted to get in and be in the creative world? Did you want to do something else or was it always about company branding and advertising?
I sat in the computer library for six months and I put pictures with city headlines together and shopped a portfolio around
I was totally confused when I did my first degree. I actually started in political science as a major, and I minored in English lit. Then I flipped it, majoring in English lit and minoring in political science. I just really enjoyed that. Then I moved to Boston to do my master’s degree and that was in integrated communication marketing at Emerson College. I’ve always kind of liked the communications field, but even that degree was more marketing. It was only in my last semester that I actually, totally by accident, did a creative course in advertising. I got the bug.
As all of my friends were leaving college to get these high-paying jobs in marketing, I sat in the computer library for six months and I put pictures with city headlines together and shopped a portfolio around and landed a job in advertising and company branding as a copywriter. It wasn’t the plan but it just happened and it was good that it did.
It’s your own creative process. You’ve worked with some of the major agencies: OgilvyOne, BBDO, TBWA, which used to be Chiat, and even working at Google’s creative lab. What was it like? What’d you learn at Google?
Google was interesting. I was there as a freelancer. They brought me over when I was in Israel and I worked there for a few months. The talent there is extraordinary and the amazing thing about the lab is … I also worked with a creative lab in London, but the amazing thing about the New York lab when I was there was that you have direct access to everything that Google is working on that they want to promote.
Google found a way how to translate over that crazy technical stuff into things that people can actually feel.
They found a way under great creative leadership in the form of Andy Berndt and Robert Wong how to translate over that crazy technical stuff into things that people can actually feel. It really is crazy technical, some of the things that they’re doing there. To be able to translate it so simply in their communications and in their company branding was eye-opening. The teams that we worked with, some of them were really senior and some of them were really young. That mix and just being around it was great. I got to work on some incredible things. I’m just very lucky to have been there.
That’s one of the reasons, there are many, why we’re so excited to have you as a guest on the show. Because most of the listeners are somehow involved in technology and they have to somehow figure out a way to take all that tech speak and turn it into a very simple pitch for investors. That starts with figuring out a good tagline and figuring out a good logo and a good brand, which is what you’re an expert at.
Now, I also want to ask you about what made you decide to say, “I’ve worked for all these big agencies but I’m going to go out on my own now?” I’m always fascinated by that decision and some of the challenges that you’ve faced that you weren’t expecting.
I think that I’ve always been a little bit of a troublemaker even when I was working at the bigger agencies. I’ve always had a pretty strong opinion. Even when I was working for some of the bigger agencies, I always had a little independent something going on the side. When I got back to Israel, I was the executive creative director of TBWA Digital here for around a year. Within that year, I realized this isn’t working for me. I’m not able to do the things that I want to do and to be able to deliver the standard that I’m used to delivering. Not because there was anything wrong with TBWA Digital. They were amazing.
It’s more that I came from a different culture and an international background and it was more for the Israeli local market. I decided to just quit and do my own thing. It wasn’t some type of revolution for me because I’ve always been entrepreneurially inclined. But working on projects that really allowed me to do what I wanted to do and work with the people that I really wanted to work with without all the bureaucracy and ulterior motives, which were very fair and fine, but they weren’t mine.
That is super important when you’re creatively driven, to be able to have the freedom.
My team and the people that I worked with who are in my team now are ultimately people that I just connect with strategically, creatively, and who get what I want to bring out of whoever I work with in the form of a client. That is super important when you’re creatively driven, to be able to have the freedom and to work with the people that you can also give them freedom but they also give you back what would you want as well, and what you need.
Of course, working with the right clients too. The long answer is what I just said. The short answer is I wanted to do what I wanted to do. That little nugget has always gotten me in trouble and now it’s working for me, which is great.
It is. I want you to speak a little bit more if you will, because all of the founders, whether they’re just starting out and they only have a co-founder and maybe two or three people on their team, eventually want to get funded and grow their company. You are an expert in finding the right people that fit your culture and your strategy. Can you speak a little bit about how you find the right people that are going to be a corporate fit for what your culture is?
I can answer that, minus one word, which is corporate, because that’s the least thing I am. I think that you have to find people that you instinctively trust. I think that’s the most important thing. I can tell you that the best relationships I’ve had and the ones that I still have are the ones where you just connect at the gut level. Then, of course, there are the strategic partnerships. The ones where you might not be good at something and the other person fills that gap for you and you do the same thing for them. There’s that yin and yang thing going there.
[Tweet “You have to find people that you instinctively trust.”]
Networking is huge. I think that one of the things that you really need to do, if some of your audience is younger, is to always stay in touch with everyone that you’ve ever met in some way, shape, or form because you never know. There are people that I worked with 15 years ago who I’m still in touch with. You never know where they’re going to be. If you have a relationship with them and the stars align, then magic might happen. I think those type of relationships, just staying in touch is a very, very important thing.
Do you have a process for how you stay in touch with people? Is it through social media or something else?
In the last 3 years, because I was in New York for a while and then when I left to come back to Israel, actually, Facebook allowed me to stay on the map, professionally speaking. You write a status and, “Oh, he’s still around. He’s still on the radar.” That’s not the way that I stay in touch but, in the last few years, it’s definitely helped. I think I’ve always just stayed in touch with people. I think being in communications outside of the profession, I’m just a communicative type of guy. Just stay in touch with people.
[Tweet “Stay in touch for potential magic.”]
It’s part of your tagline for Natie, so that makes complete sense. Since you’ve mentioned Facebook, you’ve actually had Facebook as a client. Can you talk to us about what you learned there, about that culture and company branding?
The stuff that I worked on with Facebook, which was out of the London Office, was more … Facebook has their own clients. They do advertising in-house for banks or food companies or what have you. We basically delivered a couple of ideas for Facebook for some of their clients to try and help them with presenting social media ideas for these clients on Facebook has a platform.
That in itself was interesting because when we did it, which was a couple of years ago, that was new. That’s a new way of thinking. They’ve always said Facebook is not hiring an advertising agency, a corporate advertising agency. We brainstormed for them and we just partnered with them. It wasn’t a huge project, and then we did another thing or two. It’s great to be able to worked with Facebook or Apple or Google, who we’ve worked with extensively as well.
I also want to ask you about one of the things on your website, which is Valtech. What an amazing case study and the story. If you could, tell us about the importance of company branding. I love what you talk about in one of your interviews, is your strategy is only as good as the first step. The strategy that you had with Valtech and what you were able to do them and matching their design of their product to their complete logo is completely fascinating. Of course, what an amazing exit.
They didn’t have much of a story. They had incredible mind-blowing technology and you couldn’t get a sense of that.
Yeah, that’s an amazing company. Valtech, they’re doing some amazing things with heart surgery, basically. When they came to us they had, I think it was around eight or nine months ago, they had a logo and they had a website which was, by their own admission, stuck in the ’80s. That’s why they came to us. They didn’t have much of a story. They had incredible mind-blowing technology and you couldn’t get a sense of that from what you’re looking at in their presentation materials, and their websites, and animations that they’ve done. The first thing that we did was we said, “Let’s find out what your story is.”
We had extensive, strategic, methodological meetings where we uncovered their truth. We found out, basically, what makes them tick and what is the product that they provide to the world, and how they intend to change the world, and who else is out there doing not the same thing, because no one was doing the same thing, but similar things and how they differentiated from them. We’ve uncovered the truth and then we were able to translate that truth into a story that separated them from the rest, was authentic and was relevant to their audience.
[Tweet “Be authentic and relevant.”]
After that strategy, we developed a consumer-facing or B2B facing or, medical industry facing narrative. Different verticals. We didn’t do much with logo, actually. That was the one thing that they kept. We evolved the whole brand visually, from conference materials to brochures to a website.
The funny thing is, it’s a funny story, their exit was done when … We were meant to have a website up for them around 6 weeks later. They called us up and they said “Listen”, without giving us any information, they said, “We can’t tell you why but we need to have this website ready in 10 days,” and it was a pretty big website.
We delivered, and then around a week later, of course, something that we guessed that we hadn’t discussed, of course. They made a phenomenal exit of almost a billion dollars, which is the largest medical exit for an Israeli company ever. We were just really happy to have done everything for them. We’re still working with them on a pretty ongoing basis with all sorts of little things and big things. They’re doing amazing things.
[Tweet “Startups: a lot of them have the potential to change the world.”]
It’s really nice to work with clients or companies that are doing things that really are changing the world. Their non-invasive heart surgery to be able to repair someone’s heart as it’s still beating is just incredible to work on. I get to work on great, great, great stuff and it’s so many different things. If you’re talking about startups, startups basically, everyone has an idea and every one of these ideas has a potential to change … Not everyone, but a lot of them have the potential to change the world. Those are the things that we want to work on.
Things that can inspire you and your creativity but then, you’re focusing on something creatively, that’s helping save lives. In this case, I love the fact you’re talking about Valtech being in heart surgery and that you found the truth of their story and what makes them tick. I don’t know if you consciously did that or not, but I thought, “Oh, what a clever play on words about how our heart makes us tick.” It’s great.
Complete accident.
This whole concept of storytelling is something I’m constantly working with my clients on when they pitch to get funded. In this case, you were able to craft the stories so well that it allowed Valtech to have an amazing exit.
I don’t know about that. I don’t think our story helped them but I think maybe we helped them in some way. It’s not the brand that does it, you know what I mean? It’s the product and it’s the people. The brand can help. I don’t want to take anything away from them. We were just lucky to be there.
When I look at Apple buying Beats, I think a lot of the reason they bought Beats was the brand, what that stood for and how it fit their culture.
Yeah. Yes, it’s true.
What you did for Valtech was you made their brand distinct and you told a story that was authentic and relevant, you said. That, to me, is what makes people want to invest, whether it’s an exit or giving initial funding. That’s what’s so fantastic about what you do. Let’s talk about what you do with Entrepreneur Organization in Israel, EO Israel, since that’s another whole world of startups. You actually helped them with telling stories of, I saw, eight people that you picked out of all their members. That is so important, I think, is when people hear one or two stories that they can relate to, then they can expand it beyond that.
With Entrepreneur’s Organization Israel, I’m actually a founding chapter member and I was the communication chair for the first two years of the organization. I just took it upon myself to do all of the company branding and the website and the video and social media and all that good stuff. I think that it was important to allow our audience, who are other potential entrepreneurs in Israel, to understand that being an entrepreneur, and I’m sure that you guys can relate to this and your audience and I certainly can because I’m an entrepreneur. It’s the loneliest job on the planet.
[Tweet “Being a startup is the loneliest job on the planet.”]
You don’t have that big team. If you’re lucky, you do have someone to talk to. But usually it’s just at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, and then in the middle of the day, it’s just you. The organization allows you to get some support on a professional level, on a personal level sometimes. As an entrepreneur, I’ve been working 14 hour days for 6 weeks now and haven’t seen my kids. That’s not a professional problem. That becomes a personal problem, a family problem. You have people that you can talk to about that. Or, I need to hire someone and I just have been trying for six months and I can’t find the right person.
You can get shared experiences. That’s the whole point. We did the company branding but it came from within because I’m a chapter member. Again, it just was nice to hit on the truth, knowing the truth. The entrepreneurs there are ultimately friends as well. I don’t know if that’s answering your question.
No. It totally is. The fact that you’re a founding member and an entrepreneur and you can relate to it so well allows you to tell stories, again, that are completely authentic. It’s changing the world because as you said, that being an entrepreneur is the loneliest job on the planet. I love that quote. That’s a problem you’re solving with EO, correct?
Entrepreneur Organization Israel, what they’ve done is they put entrepreneurs together to support each other.
Yeah. It’s a global organization of almost, I think it’s around 11,000 members. Again, I’m a member. What they’ve done is they put entrepreneurs together to support each other. It’s not like a support group. You support each other just because you’re like-minded people. I think that’s really important. My agency is a core team of 4 or 5 people, and a couple of remote teams. That’s our structure. If I want to make a big decision for my business, I can find and I know obviously a few people within the Israel chapter alone, who also have small teams but work with very, very, very big businesses.
You can reach out to people in different countries who are part of the organization. When you fly to London, if you want, you can reach out to chapter members there and just say, “Hey, I’m an EO global member. What’s going on in London?” Nine times out of 10, people reach out to you and say, “Hey, come and meet me.” It’s also a networking organization too. They do some great things also. They have big events that people from all around the world go to. Universities, programs, seminars. It’s interesting and it’s all about entrepreneurship.
It almost reminds me of American Express with global offices. You can always have a place, almost like a second embassy, if you’re traveling, and need a soft place to land, as I like to describe it. That’s a soft place to land for entrepreneurs who might be visiting other countries.
I think I’ve heard really nice stories about people who have been there for complete strangers just because of this organization, this connection, this platform, whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day, it’s all about people. Yeah, it’s cool. If we’re talking about entrepreneurs and startups, and you’ve brought up storytelling, I think one of the most important things really is to get your story right.
When it comes to company branding, getting your story right has nothing to do, really, with creativity at its core. It’s about understanding who you are and what you’re doing, and then translating that into a narrative and translating that into visuals and different mediums, like animations and websites and stuff. But, the brand story is uncovering the truth of who you are. It’s really knowing who you are and I like that.
[Tweet “Tell the truth of who you are.”]
I do, too. You’ve gone from using storytelling to help Valtech save lives with heart surgery, to helping EO Israel help entrepreneurs with a place for shared resources, to this amazing viral video that you’ve created to also help not only yourself, but you’re telling a story and it’s certainly timely with all the terrorism going on, which is, I’m sure people have probably seen it, is “I’m that Jew”. Can you talk to us about, by now, how many people have watched this? Everyone’s always looking for, “How do I make something go viral?” I don’t think that was your intent when you started.
Wow. First of all, I’m shocked that you’re asking about it. That’s great. I’m happy to talk about it. “I’m that Jew” I think, right now, with combined YouTube and Facebook and all the different channels, we’re at around the 3 million view marks.
Congrats.
Thanks, man. It’s been out like around 4 or 5 weeks. It’s not the number, it’s the comments that have been the most moving. There’s like tens of thousands of comments and stuff like that. It started off as a blog post that I put out there, as a written narrative. After the Charlie Hebdo Massacres, some terrorists killed some Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket, I wrote this down. In time, I just realized I want to present it as a visual story and it’s meant to be a celebration of who we are.
It was written by me, a Jew, to my Jewish brothers and sisters. But also to anyone who shouldn’t be afraid, whether you’re black, or gay, or a woman, whatever, a man. Be who you are and be proud of it. You should just be able to say it and hope that the people out there who are listening will embrace it. It’s okay to be different. We can embrace our differences. I was saying it directly to the Jewish people for me.
Actually, I was saying it to a woman who was living in France right after the time of those massacres and who was just afraid to say that she was Jewish. She’s a friend of mine. I basically wrote it for her. I produced it with some just really close-knit group of friends and colleagues, put it out there one night. I knew that people would spread it. I didn’t think that it would have this kind of impact. The response has been nothing short of … I’ve cried several times because some of the things that people write is just really moving.
I think it’s totally relevant to what we’re talking about, which is storytelling is understanding the truth of who you are. You were brave enough to put that story out there. You remind me of Liz Gilbert who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. She talks about how she wrote that book for one specific friend of hers who couldn’t travel because she had a husband and children. She filtered everything. You created “I’m that Jew” for your one friend that was afraid to say she was Jewish. From that real specific audience and that intention, I think that is why things are so successful, whether it’s “I’m that Jew” or Eat, Pray, Love.
The other thing that you touched on is really encouraging people not to be afraid. I read that that’s one of your key criterias of who you like to hire creatively, is that they’re not afraid to take chances and risks. I think it’s full circle.
Yeah, that’s funny. Not being afraid gets me into trouble a lot of the time. I’m not talking about like putting stuff like “I’m that Jew” out there. I’m talking about just, you can butt heads with clients and partners and colleagues, but I think you have to be who you are. You have to not be afraid and to have faith in who you are and to trust your instincts and to put yourself out there.
[Tweet “You have to not be afraid and to have faith in who you are.”]
Because the right person who is opposite you, if it is the right person, will somehow be able to embrace that or take what you’re saying or be able to take you in another direction and take on your not being afraid and wrestle with it a bit and bring you over to their side too. I think that it can get you in trouble, but it’s a quality that I look for.
I have a designer that I worked with in Italy. He challenges me all the time. We are constantly butting heads but in the most respectful way. The same thing with writers. My strategist, today, called me up after meeting with the client. We were disagreeing openly, in front of the client, but it was all in the pursuit of what we think the client needs the most. It’s not easy to be honest in this world. Do you know what I mean?
[Tweet “It’s not easy to be honest in this world.”]
Yes, I do.
I hate this politically correct world.
That leads me into my last question for you, which is tell us about this 5 Percent Club.
The 5 Percent Club is an initiative that allows … It’s a platform, a social media platform. It allows people to express what they’re really feeling. 95% of your life is on autopilot. You go to work, you take the kids to school, you go and you have your standard lunch. You catch yourself thinking about something that you really wanted to say, that you really want to do one day, an experience that you went through that you haven’t really maybe talked about before. That’s the 5%. “I’m that Jew”, that’s just one of my many 5%s.
[Tweet “95% of life is on autopilot. Things that affect you and move you is the 5%.”]
Someone recently wrote an article, that we haven’t put out there yet, about finding the time in her life to reminisce on a beautiful year that has gone by with her family. She takes the time, once a year, to go through her photo albums and put together an album. In doing that, she connects with that year that she had. Or someone will write about a custody battle that he had with his ex-wife where the judge stood up in front of him and said, “Because you’re a male, because you’re a father …” he favored the mother and that really pissed the writer off and he wrote about it. He actually won custody.
Things that really affect you and move you, the idea of the 5% Club is to be able to share that and pay that experience forward. It’s a small initiative. It’s a project that I hope will gain traction and we’re trying to gain subscribers and reach new writers. You have to put meaningful shit down.
We’re certainly going to put the 5% Club and all the other things, Natie, in the show notes for people to check out your agency’s great branding site.
Thank you, sir.
“I’m that Jew”, we’ll put the link for that. Certainly The 5 Percent Club, so that people can really get a sense of if they want to contribute and spread the word. I think anytime you encourage people to tap into something that’s meaningful and pay it forward, we’re making the world a better place. We might not be saving lives like Valtech is, but we’re doing it in our own way. Because we want to make our hearts strong physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. You do that 360 better than almost anyone I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking to.
Wow. Thank you. I appreciate it.
It’s been an honor. It’s been great having you on the show. I can’t thank you enough.
Wow. Thank you. Honor’s been mine. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Eitan Chitayat Website
I’m That Jew on YouTube
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Crack The Funding Code!
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