Awakening Your Inner Guru with Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
What we energize, we magnetize. That is what Doctor of Divinity and thought leader Dr. Erin Fall Haskell always tell people during her speaking engagements and when she’s broadcasting her podcast, Good Morning Lala Land. Erin is a self-made millionaire and an active philanthropist. Growing up, she always believed that finding the right relationship, getting the right job, and marrying the right person would make her whole life work out. A personal tragedy sent her on what’s been now a 24-year track of seeking her own healing and self-discovery. Her book, Awakening: A 30-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Guru, is a collection of fun stories that takes you through your health, your wealth, and your creative expression and bring it to life to not only know the truth but live the truth as well. Erin shares her journey of becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30.
—
My guest is Dr. Erin Fall Haskell. She said, “Complaining is praying for crap.” She said, “What we energize, we magnetize.” She tells this amazing story becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30 and how she likes to invest in green tech and real estate. She is the CEO and co-host of a live streaming show called Good Morning Lala Land and the author of a book Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams where you unleash your inner guru. She said, “Success doesn’t taste good unless you have the barriers to overcome to get there.” She describes what it takes to be a good guest on her show or any show. I think you’ll enjoy this episode on entrepreneurial mindset.
Listen To The Episode Here
Awakening Your Inner Guru with Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
I’m honored to have my dear friend of many years, Dr. Erin Fall Haskell, who’s a Doctor of Divinity, a new thought leader, a transformational author and speaker. She’s a global peace leader, award winner, a mother lover of life. She is the CEO and co-host of a wonderful show called Good Morning Lala Land. Erin has quite a journey that she’s going to share with us of becoming a self-made millionaire by the time she was 30 in real estate. She invests in green tech and real estate while she’s writing this book called Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. Erin, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, John. I just adore you and I’m so honored because I love your podcast. What a brilliant idea to bring storytelling and the heart to the finances that we all must claim is our birthright.
Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams!
I always ask my guests to tell their own story of origin and you can decide how far back you want to take us. You can take us back to your childhood. You can take us back to when you made the decision that you were not going to work for someone else and become an entrepreneur wherever you want to start.
All day long, I listen to other people’s stories these days, so it’s always fun when we get to get back into our remembrance of the whole thing for us. I grew up in a hippie commune, basically on the hilltop of Santa Barbara. It’s like the residual leftover of the ’60s when it was super cool and quite dysfunctional at the same time. My parents got divorced when I was two years old. My dad went and had another family and I was confused and sad and all the above thinking that families had to be a particular way when the reality is that they are all unique and expressions. Anyways, I grew up in the mountains of Santa Barbara and I basically didn’t have any rules or regulation, no religion.
In fact, my mom was anti all that. I came to high school and everyone started trying some drugs and alcohol and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought, “If I just found the right relationship, got the right job and marry the right person, my whole life would work out.” Lo and behold, I got married for all the wrong reasons, basically just because it was a thing to do. I found myself pregnant at the age of 21 and I had a stillborn son at the age of 22. I was nine months pregnant and I was in nursing school and I realized that my baby had stopped moving inside of me. I went down to the doctor right about 5:00 PM and the doctor was gone. A nurse lubed up my belly. We took a look and saw there was no heartbeat. We rushed over to the hospital and realized that my baby had died inside of me and I had to give birth to my baby, which was a bizarre twist at that point in my life.
It was one of those moments, John. It was actually the next day after I’d given birth to his body and bathe your baby, take pictures with your baby and go home with your dead baby. Next day I was a little at coo-coo and I thought I didn’t get the right pictures with my baby. I went down to the mortician’s house alone. I don’t know where my parents were, I don’t know where my husband was but I went alone and it was literally a scene out of the movie. The mortician was like, “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Your baby’s been in formaldehyde for 24 hours and you’ve got the room all prepared.”
It got me down. I just had one of those moments. It was a moment with God and my higher-self saying, “How could you be so cruel?” It was one of those moments just looking down at my baby’s body, realizing he was gone but he was here. I realized he’s not his body and I’m not this body and what the hell are we doing here? It sent me on what’s been now 24-year track of seeking my own healing, seeking my own discovery. I had bulimia when I was in high school. I had been date-raped in high school. I got divorced and all that typical human beingness. I finally have arrived at an amazing, extraordinary life beyond my wildest dreams.
Just to give a little bit of coda to the story. You do have a very healthy son now.
Thank you for saying that because I always forget to say that and some people are like, “It’s so sad.” I got pregnant a month after my stillborn. He’s watched me bloom going through my own healing and consciousness and becoming an author and practitioner and doctor and all those things and watching the show bloom. It’s super cool for any of those parents out there who are young parents, it’s cool to have your children witness you grow up. You can see the woman that I am now, that I always want to be, which is super cool.
Your Inner Guru: The cool thing about entrepreneurship is the more you work, the more you have residual income, the more your workload goes down and you have more freedom.
You’ve painted a picture, you’re a single mom in your early twenties and that’s usually very difficult to figure out a way to pay the bills, let alone become a self-made millionaire. How did you go from those circumstances to saying, “I’m not going to go back to nursing school, I’m going to dabble in real estate or become an expert in real estate?” Was it commercial? Is it residential? How did that happen?
I actually dropped out of nursing school when I had my son because I left him one day at the nanny would have been caught and it just broke my heart. I couldn’t do it. I just thought I have to figure out something as a mom to make money and be able to do both. I immediately went into real estate school and which was for any people out there want to get into real estate, one of the hardest industries to do traditional real estate. I found a way of buying and fixing up homes and that was a modality for me. I was doing my spiritual work, part of the day and then I do my real estate.
It was literally reading the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad and things like that. Realizing how to build assets and how to leverage and all those basic 101 things that everybody needs to know. I should become financially literate. I highly recommend Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The book I highly recommend some of the basic books that are just simple distinctions that make you realize when you’re buying a liability, when you’re buying an asset, how to leverage things like that. I started buying and fixing up homes. I was so broke on literally I could not. I can barely put much more than pasta on the table. It was not a fun track. I saved every penny I could ever make.
I never touched a principal. One of the secrets to growing wealth in my opinion is to never touch a principal. Have income come in but don’t touch your principal. If you have an asset like a home or business, let that business grow and don’t touch into tapping all your money there. Then what happened is I began to have more residual income from real estate, I was able to have more time, not only to spend time with my son, but also to develop my spiritual work. Because I’ve been doing it and doing all my healing work, it became my obsession. I became so involved and just obsessed with the work. I loved it so much and I became so fulfilled. That’s a cool thing about entrepreneurship is the more you work, the more you have residual income, the more your workload goes down and you have more freedom, more passive income or things like that. What I did in real estate was I bought and fix up homes and I had rentals so I wasn’t doing traditional agency work.
Let’s go to the birth of your book, Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. This is the part I love, unleashing your inner guru. A lot of people think, “I’ve got to find a guru and follow their steps to success.” You’ve flipped that on its head, which is about, “No, wake up and find your inner guru.” Can you share something with us about how you came up with that concept?
Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams. What happened was I didn’t plan on writing a book. In fact, English was my worst subject in school. I didn’t ever understand what was so hard for me. What happened was, as I began to do my subconscious work, as I began to meditate for 22 years, I go in my closet for three hours a day at times when my son was at school late at night. Of course, you see through the veil. Over time things happened in there that people will think you’re crazy. For me, deities came, all kinds of things happen. You’ve tracked through your whole DNA if you want to go there, let’s go there. What happened was, I can’t just take notes for myself. I had said that was such a blissful in how I needed to write them down. I began to keep my online journal around things. Of course, one day I had this stupid idea of writing a book. I thought, “I got to put all this stuff into a book.”
It was a disaster, quite frankly. I rearranged the book five times. I had to get two different editors. It not easy. What happened was as I was getting my doctorate also all the wisdom, all the truth, I thought, “How do I organize this into a book where I’ve taken the epiphanies that I’ve had and the distinctions from the great minds like Emerson, Troward, Louise Hay, Ernest Holmes. All these people that have come and taught us such great wisdom. How do I put it into what I would say is that into a book that it has fun stories that also takes you through your health, your wealth, your creative expression, relationships, all of the above into those four legs of life?” I just basically put it into a 42-guide because I like little chunks. I don’t think we learn in huge chunks. I want to take a book and break it down into 40 days so people could take little chunks, bring it into the life and actually not know the truth but live the truth.
[Tweet “Complaining is pretty much like praying for crap because we know how the universal law works.”]
How great not just knowing it but live it. One of the things you talk about the book is complaining. What are your insights on complaining?
I think the complaining is pretty much like praying for crap because we know how the universal law works. That’s pretty much what it is. I’m spiritual, I’m not religious I like to say I think that there’s great of truth and all of the great teachings. “Fear thy Lord.” is what it says and what the Lord refers to the law of the universe, the universal law of cause and effect. What that means is we should be afraid because every word we speak, every thought we think, every action we take is heard in profound ways for the universe and reflects back to us in ways that we could never even imagine. If we complain, literally think about what you’re doing. If I complain I am speaking all negative things into my mind, into my subconscious, into the world, and what we energize magnifies. If I complain, I’m literally saying to the universe, please give me more of what I don’t want.
Those are two great tweets right there. Complaining is praying for crap and what we energize, we magnetize because I talk about the power of a good story, become magnetic and pull people in. Let’s double click on another focus that you have on one of these 40 things, which is the scarcity mentality. So many entrepreneurs think there’s never enough time, there’s never enough funding, there’s never enough clients, there’s never enough of team to do everything enough hours in the day. I hear a lot of scarcity mentality and mindset of a lot of entrepreneurs, even at advanced stages. You think it’s just that initial bootstrapping startup where there’s scarcity. If you have that at the beginning, you’re going to continue to have it, even if you become a hugely successful company. What are your insights and thoughts on that?
I still struggle with this myself. I’m not going to lie. I think it’s between allowing managers flow and building because we’re caught up in building wealth and building assets. It’s a really fine dance in my opinion. One of the things I’ve noticed for people that are truly expressed because I think when we shift our mind think our business is not about growing, like collecting things. It’s about developing ourselves. That’s the whole point in why we do our business is to have a full life with people we love and develop ourselves, our consciousness, our spiritual selves. When I think about that, when I think about people that I admire, there was a common denominator and it is people spend money to make money. If you witness people who are successful, they generally spend a lot of money to make money.
Oftentimes people who are very wealthy are very miserable, it’s not always the case, but I would say there are definitely some huge leaders in the world that have abundance of money that are very fulfilled. If you look at the stats, there are more people that are not, that are not that happy. They have a lot of wealth in their assets, a lot of money in the bank, a lot of investments. They can’t figure out why they’re still not fulfilled. I think it’s a real fine dance to have a flow. I think that abundance mentality comes down to one thing and it is a flow knowing that what we put out has to come back, abundantly and multiplied as we know.
I love that concept of a lot of people I know who have substantial amount of money that may or may not be happy at certain points. The part of what I’m seeing and hearing from them was they had the illusion that as soon as I have this much money in the bank, as soon as I have these many homes, as soon as I have this many private jets or whatever it is, I’ll be happy. Then when you get those things and you’re still not happy, that’s even more depressing than not having them. Because on the goal to achieving them, you have some hope that you’re going to be happy at XYZ achievement, and then you read the illusion completely burst when you realize it wasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I like money, I like abundance. Somewhere I think it’s around $250,000 beyond that, your lifestyle doesn’t change that much. Then you’re just stacking money, like let’s just get into flow abundant. I think there’s a way of doing both for sure.
Your Inner Guru: We do our business to have a full life with people we love and develop ourselves, our consciousness, our spiritual selves.
The other thing you talk about is this concept of perfectionism and I’m always fascinated by that. It’s one of my challenges is to let go of having everything to be perfect. Especially in the startup world, it’s sometimes challenging for founders to let go of trying to control every little thing a. Obviously if you’re going to be pitching and having slides and your website and your branding, all that needs to be as perfect and have as many people check it as possible. The concept of perfectionism that I want to ask you about is I see sometimes people hitting these milestones that are quite significant and not even taking a minute to celebrate them. They’re onto the next thing because there are ten other things that still needed to be done and are perfect. Do you see that? Do you have any thoughts on that?
I’m still guilty of that. I had an eating disorder when I was seventeen to twenty. I was a total perfectionist. In this world with the filters, we see highly; highly produced things, whether it be an online or in the movies or in magazine. We see such highly produced things that it’s hard to not compare ourselves. The reality is this is that the perfection, a good example is doing lives online. I remember doing live streams and when I first started was it was like a joke. I was a disaster, not going to lie and I’d have people come in and they put comments and I get all sidetrack. I couldn’t remember what I was talking about. The only way that I broke through is to just keep doing it. It’s not like you’re not going to come online in your business or in your product or in no matter if you’re an author or a writer or you’re starting to pod cast or whatever. There’s no way you can be the top of the top. You didn’t know it started at the top there. You have to be somewhere and I think that the mistake is not just doing it.
In this world, we live in the most abundant. Going back to money, I just want to stay because I never was able to say this. Scarcity mentality versus abundant mentality comes down to one thing. You’re either giving yourself to life or you’re taking from life. The extent to which we assign money more powerful than ourselves is the extent to which we will feel dis-empowered when it comes to money. Having a scarcity mentality is you’re, again, you are informing law and informing life that you are their scarcity, there’s not abundance and you literally are that powerful and the moment you even consider yourself to not have all abundance, you literally informed instantaneously the universe to deliver and so it is.
What I hear is you’re saying it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy one way or the other.
100% you can use it either way. Works the same regardless of what directions of perfection. It’s like you’ve got to love yourself or someone else to love you. It’s the same thing. Got to love yourself.
Let’s talk about how you went from doing live feeds from your home to being on a live network streaming five days a week called Good Morning Lala Land. How did that come about?
It’s so funny how the universe delivers stuff to us. You can never plan it out and then we know this that we can’t outline. We call it outlining when you try and figure out and plan out exactly how something’s going to manifest. It happened with a complete twist. What happened was I was doing lives and I was committed to delivering truth. I didn’t know where, when, how, I just thought I’m just going to do it. Whether it be live streams on Facebook, Periscope, wherever I’m going to be with clients. I’m going to do one on ones. Whatever is I’m going to give, give, give, and I’m going to develop myself because that’s what we know. This work is not about what comes of it, it’s who we become out of it. I just kept doing it. Lo and behold, you put yourself out there, you develop yourself and you embody the wisdom human body being the expert in whatever your field is, it doesn’t matter what your field is. Soon enough as they say, you can’t get lucky unless you’re in the game.
[Tweet “What we energize, we magnetize.”]
I actually had a girlfriend asked me, she wanted to interview me on her show. I went into the studio and we did an interview and at the end I said, “Spirit just keeps saying that I need to have a show. There’s something that bringing this consciousness. Mainstreaming is what feels like my calling.” She said, “We’ll talk to the producer.” Sure enough, right after the show, I gathered the producer for a while and he’s like, “Just come on and start shooting your show.” I went in, I started shooting some one on one interviews and I just thought, what’s being inspired is a morning show. I felt this for a long time. I felt there should be multiple hosts. I feel like this is something that is all about good news, positivity and inspiration. Within a month time we found two other hosts and I had no idea how it was going to go. I just structured it, I thought of the name, I thought of the different segments. Lo and behold, we now have like two to five guests a day. We’ve had almost 250 guests. We are being looked at by so many huge producers and we’ve got a few studios that are looking to take us on. Also, if we want to move up in our production and we’ve got a whole platform.
I was fortunate enough to be a guest on your show. It’s so well-organized and you created a space where all the guests feel instantly welcomed and relaxed. It’s very clear this energy between you and your two co-hosts. I’m interested to hear that process because The Successful Pitch includes everything from pitching your idea to get funded to pitching your idea, to get on the air too. What were you looking for when you were interviewing co-host? What was it that they said or did in their pitch to you? Why they should be your co-host that you said, “These are my people.”
Rob Mack, I’d known him for twelve years. It goes to show you that the relationships that you have in your life, how we treat people every day, how we show up every day. You have no idea, you may already have the person that’s going to fund your project in your life. In fact, you most likely do. When I have a new project coming up, for instance, I’m having a multiple women events for entrepreneur, empowering that bringing spirituality, who do you call, who do you look to? The people that you already know. The people that you’ve already been watching doing their show online or they already have books already have up because you’ve been watching them.
The same person that when you do real estate, all of a sudden, you’ve known somebody, you’ve witnessed them doing real estate for years because they’re showing consistent marketing; who they are. When you happen to go, “It’s time to move, honey. Let’s sell this house and buy another one.” You just call them up. It’s not like you go searching out there. You already know somebody. When you go to angel funding or you go to any of the startups, they want you to actually have raised some capital from your friends and family because they know. If your friends and family have not been watching you and they don’t believe in you, then the likelihood is that you need an expert or somebody to step into that field.
You’ve had so many guests who typically have three guests per show per day, five days a week. What is it that makes a good guest? Because the guest coming on, whether it’s a podcast or a television show or anything to give good content versus somebody trying to get people to buy their book or buy their program or whatever it might be.
It’s all about the story. I think it’s like a good movie. or whatever you want either. The ideal thing is to have somebody that has a story that people cry, laugh or inspire all the above. We want to touch on people’s emotions. I think that’s the point of it is that we are human beings. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience. We’re here because we want to experience the happiness, the sadness, the joy, the hardship. Success doesn’t taste good unless you’ve experienced barriers and blocks. That’s life. The best guest is somebody that just become so vulnerable tells their deepest, darkest trials and tribulations and has an inspiration outcome.
Your Inner Guru: Success doesn’t taste good unless you’ve experienced barriers and blocks.
The concept of a good story is that it does take us on emotions like a good movie does or a good book. I think that’s what people forget when they’re co-telling their story, whether it’s about themselves or about what their product does or how it’s inspiring people to, to make a difference. I think that all comes down to telling people something that’s unexpected. For example, you had Rob Kessler and his wife, Linda, on your show and they happen to have a product called Million Dollar Collar. On the surface you might think, “Is that a TV segment? What is that? How is that interesting to the viewers?” Yet through the lens of this company, this is a love story. You take people on the picture of the wedding, pictures of the beach that didn’t come up because the collar was sloppy.
That gave him the idea to create a way to make the collars constantly look sharp and how they’ve to risk their whole future and quit their safe jobs to move to LA to live their vision and their dream and all the obstacles they’ve had to overcome and. Suddenly, it’s a couple whose love for each other and trust and belief in each other and the outcome is just this company’s product. That’s not the story on the show. The story is this love story. I think giving people a specific example on this episode of what makes a good guest and so if you ever want to get publicity for your startup or your company or yourself as a brand, keeping those elements of good story in mind. Even if you have what it might be perceived as the most mundane product in the world. Not what the Million Dollar Collar is but no matter what it is, a good story can make almost anything compelling.
On the show, we had these three gentlemen that came on and it was about a clothing line. I thought, “We just make the best. That’s my commitment every day. No matter what we’re going to find a story out of it.” After the interview with these three gentlemen, they talked about their struggles, they talked about their friendship and how having a business together has made them commit to communication, how to commit to finding their own strengths and weaknesses and all that kind of stuff. They talked about how they ride motorcycles together and how this is a bonding thing and how the clothing line was a part of them having their own expression and how they didn’t want to buy things from China anymore. How they wanted to support the people in the community.
Authenticity, you’re so authentic. Your story is authentic, your show’s authentic. Everything you touch and do is authentic and you just described a company of two guys that are literally on the road riding motorcycles and out of that a fashion brand evolves because it’s authentic and people can feel it and see it and hear it. You’ve had to launch your own brand and not only as an expert one-on-one, a person who works with people’s subconscious, but you’re also running a mastermind where people, you help people build a brand. Tell us your thoughts on the importance of authenticity and how to get it.
It’s easy to go, “Just be authentic or just be yourself or whatever.” Most people don’t even know who they are. That’s the reality that I think this is my authentic self. They don’t even know what their authentic self is like. That’s cool. It’s like a hip thing to say right now, but I don’t think most people even have gotten in touch with their authentic self. I’m a true believer, I help people want working with finding their purpose and calling which authentically is finding their authentic self. Their authentic and their unique swing in life. It always comes down to say in formula every time. Maybe someone has a different formula. I’m more open to it, but finding someone’s trials and tribulations, what they had to have triumph over their passions and their skills equals their purpose and calling. I truly think that being authentic is a great concept. It’s almost like the human factor, until you’ve gone through some hard stuff, you may not even know what is authentic for yourself. That’s the beauty of it.
Let’s just recap what you just said so that everybody can digest it. Write it down, look at it. When you get in touch with your authentic self, you’re taking down the mask, the veil, you’re expressing your own vulnerabilities, have some challenge you had to overcome that was difficult. You add that to your passion and skills, voila you’ve now got your purpose. I so relate to this because as I was working on my TEDx Talk, that was exactly the formula that I needed to use in order to even get a yes to get on that stage. For me it was overcoming being laid off after fifteen years of working and feeling like I’d lost my identity because I had somehow allowed it to get so connected to where I was working and what was my identity. I felt scared and sad and nervous about the future and remembering that losing my job doesn’t mean I’m losing my identity.
[Tweet “It’s going to sell as the story. People want to invest in personalities.”]
When I realized that my passion is about helping as many people on the planet as possible become storytellers so that that will then allow me to live my purpose, which is to help as many people as possible. Get off the self-esteem rollercoaster of only feeling good when things are going well in bad, when they’re not, or however many views or clicks or whatever your measurement is. That once you get off of that self-esteem roller coaster, you’re truly free to be the best version of yourself. I think hearing that formula and then giving the listeners the example of how I follow that formula to get my TEDx Talk should inspire everyone to want to track you down to hire you for one on one or the book or be part of your mastermind.
I just want to say that what you’re doing is so important because helping people find an entrepreneurial movement like a lot of the world is moving towards entrepreneurship. You’re helping people find their story because I’m telling you, people out there, you’ve got whatever your product is, it’s never going to sell, you’re never going to raise money if you don’t get your story together because people don’t care. They don’t care about the product. Do you know any people I see they’re bringing that are creating the next facial products like come on? What is important is the story behind it. Of course, the product has to be excellent because we’ve got so much competition in today’s marketplace.
Beyond it being a good product, it’s going to sell as the story. People want to invest in personalities. People will watch shows, but if there’s not a person that they connect with and that presented, they will not. They won’t do it. I work with people. I love to do subconscious work with people. It’s one of the most rewarding. It’s not easy to do one on ones anymore because I’m very busy, but it’s so rewarding to watch people when their chains of their past and their limiting beliefs come. They get out of their own shackles and there’s nothing more rewarding than that. Masterminds are so rewarding as you are doing a twelve-week mastermind with people and watching their lives transform in all areas is so incredibly rewarding.
The thing I want to leave people with is how people can find you. If people want to join your mastermind, where can people find Good Morning Lala Land?
Good Morning Lala Land is GoodMorningLalaLand.com. They can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, all under Good Morning Lala Land. Good Morning Lala Land, John, was helping us work on our branding. It’s a state of mind. It’s a world movement around people doing good, about dreamers and people up to incredible things in. You can find me at DrErin.tv. On there you can download my free app. You can get my podcast that actually has a show on my app also, which is all free, 30 guided meditations all on there for you. I have a mastermind. I have a 30-day prosperity course and I do one-on-one, so all the above. You can just reach out and email me and I’ll talk to anybody anytime.
We’re so gracious of you. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom, your passion and your purpose. Inspiring us to live our purpose.
I just want to say thank you. Anyone out there, please share this podcast. I do believe in raising capital and getting people interested, whether it be they’re being your partner, whether they are one of voluntary. You’d be surprised when you just ask for advice about your pitch, I think it’s the best advice ever. Go to them just asking for their advice. Everybody wants to give advice and when you do that people want to get involved. Whether it is that they just want to watch you succeed, they want to volunteer, they want to give you money, whatever that is. You want to just have a community and the communities and most important thing.
Thanks, Erin.
Thanks so much, John. I love you so much.
Links Mentioned
- Dr. Erin Fall Haskell
- Good Morning Lala Land
- Awakening: A 40-Day Guide to Unleashing Your Spiritual Powers, Life’s Purpose and Manifesting Your Dreams
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad
- show – John Livesay on Good Morning Lala Land
- Rob Mack
- Rob Kessler on Good Morning Lala Land
- GoodMorningLalaLand.com
- Instagram – Good Morning Lala Land
- Facebook – Good Morning Lala Land
- YouTube – Good Morning Lala Land
- DrErin.tv
- Good Morning Lala Land’s email
- www.erinfallhaskell.com
- https://vimeo.com/271354054
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at FeedYourBrand You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Let’s say you’re a brilliant founder of a startup company, looking to make a difference in technology with all the plans and blueprints for success laid out – except for an investor. You’ve met with dozens of angel investors but none of your pitches have impressed them. How do you get investors to say yes when you pitch for funding? Jim Brandt, who has raised funds for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and who has invested in hundreds of companies including Slack and Skopenow, opens the secret world of angel investors. Learn more about the exact factors they’re going to look for in a potential investment.
Listen To The Episode Here
Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Our guest is Jim Brandt, who is involved with the Tech Coast Angels both as an investor and sitting on their executive committee. He has invested on over a hundred companies, including Slack. He goes into the details on what he looks for when he has a pitch, why the team is just as important as location is to real estate, how to stand out and be extraordinary when you pitch or meet investors like Jim. He is really all about showing you’re smart, you’re passionate, and you have people skills. That winning combination is what gets you a yes when you pitch for funding. Jim, welcome to the show. I always like to ask my guest to take us back to the story of origin of when you decided along your career you wanted to be an angel investor.
Back in 2007, I got involved in the then Senator Obama’s campaign for president. In connection with the fundraising for President Obama, I met a boutique venture capitalist focused on healthcare and environment in an event called Opportunity Green at UCLA. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event. It was full of startup entrepreneurs and angel investors and I had no idea that that world existed. By Saturday, I knew I was hooked.
What has been one of the best pitches you’ve ever heard and what made it so great?
Let me start with the second question first. What I look at primarily is the quality of the team. It’s like real estate. The three most important things are location, location, location. As far as I’m concerned, the three most important things with the angel investing is the team. The person who pitched me was absolutely exceptional. He was actually a serial entrepreneur. It wasn’t his first startup and he seemed to have all of the right qualities. He was clearly very bright. He had a very interesting idea and obvious people skills. That’s very important to me as well because the majority of startups fail for any number of reasons, but the leading cause is that the team implodes, which means that the founders got to have very strong people skills. This particular founder did indeed impress with that.
What is the mistake when you say the team or the founders implode? I’ve heard lots of stories. Is there one or two things that you see happening over and over again? Is it a fighting over equity? Is it disagreeing on the vision? What is it that causes founders to implode?
There are so many different challenges that founding teams face when they launch a startup. I would liken it to getting married. You really in for the long haul with a lot of very, very substantial challenges. The relationships are profoundly stressed again and again. It’s really is a matter of how well the founders can handle those stresses. It’s also interesting because many founders understandably found with family or friends is statistically the least stable startup team. The most stable startup teams are the ones that have worked together in the past. In between is a team made up of a relatively recent and acquaintances.
When you hear a serial entrepreneur pitch, obviously they’ve got confidence and experience under their belt and that comes through in the pitch, I’m assuming. Yes?
Yes, absolutely.
They’ve been able to express a vision, I would imagine, that caused them to assemble a great team. Ideally what I’ve heard a lot, and I’d love your opinion on this, is you give bonus points in your head going, “This team has actually worked together before on another company or another startup.”
Yes. The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Angel Investor: The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Yes. Let’s talk about one of your more famous companies. You’re an investor in Slack. How did you come to hear about them and what was that pitch like?
I think everybody has heard about them.
At one time, everyone’s invisible. You’re a seed investor, so I’m guessing you got in before it was a household name or did you come in after?
It actually is an outlier in my portfolio of Angel investments. Typically, I invested in the Angel level and I didn’t really invest in Slack up until recently. I got in at a Unicorn valuation. The reason I decided to get was is the team is extremely impressive and I’m confident. I think the set of collaboration tools are exceptional, the team leading the company is exceptional, and even though it’s already valued now at about $5 billion, I’m confident that there’s a lot of room for growth and that’s why I made that investment.
What Jim means by exceptional, because that word means a lot of different things to other people, exceptional means you’ve worked well together before. Maybe you’ve had other successful exits and you can handle high stress things happening multiple times. Is there anything else you can give us more specifically about what makes the Slack team so exceptional, so that someone listening could say, “That’s what I need to do to become exceptional?”
That’s a great question. I think the fact that they’ve grown it as quickly and as large as they have really speaks for itself.
The ability to show fast traction. Can you tell from looking at the team what is it in their skillset that allows them to grow that fast? Is it good marketing? Is it some kind of tech advantage? Is it creating brand ambassadors? Anything you can share that you think is the key to their success that made you want to invest in them would be helpful.
I think they really got all those skills across the board. How many companies launch and within a matter of few years after launch becomes so large? Statistically, it’s an exceptional success. It’s breathtaking and it’s rare that you’ll find a team. Even a team with a great business model and a great vision, execution is really everything. It’s clear that the Slack team excels in all the necessary ways.
Is barrier to entry for a competitor one of the key criteria that you look for whether someone like Slack that’s at the Unicorn level or a seed investor?
Yes. A sustainable competitive advantage is really important. Back in the 1990s when the Internet was just beginning to warm up, being first to market was a great advantage. It’s very difficult to come up with a truly original, creative idea that will afford a company a sustainable competitive advantage and a meaningful barrier to entry, the larger, much better capitalized companies. Yes, to the extent that you can identify a startup at angel investment opportunity that comes with a competitive advantage, that’s really desirable.
Can you give us an example, either from Slack or one of your other investments, that had a competitive advantage so the listeners could have an example in their head to go, “Now I see what that is?”
The first company that comes to mind is a company by the name of Neural Analytics. They’re developing software and hardware that will revolutionize brain health. They’re working in the space of stroke, concussion, and Alzheimer’s. They develop cutting edge or leading edge hardware and software. There’s a lot of intellectual property. They’ve got some very meaningful patents. There’s also a substantial amount of trade secrets that they’ve got so it’s enjoying a fair amount of success and it’s looking very promising. They’ve been doing it for quite a while. I would think that any large pharmaceutical company, if they like what this company is doing, I don’t think it would be a question because Neural Analytics is such a meaningful barrier to entry that it really would leave any potential acquirer to just buy it. It’s would be just a question of how much are they willing to pay for it.
Let’s talk about one of your many seed investors. What made you decide to say yes to them at the startup phase?
Usually, when someone comes to me with an idea, it’s pre-mature. I like to see something much further developed in an idea. Ideally, I’d like to see some traction which implies product market fit. I’ll go back to the company that I was talking about earlier or rather, the entrepreneur. His name is Eric Futoran and he founded a company called Embrace.io. He had been a founding partner of Scopely, which just raised a six figure round and the valuation is close to a billion dollars at this point. Eric is a very dynamic guy. I think what happened was after being at Scopely for five or six years, he saw that there was a good place when it comes to mobile user experience. I’m sure you experienced it from time to time, an app that freezes or abruptly closes or slow to navigate or of course, the dreaded endless spinner.
Yes, you have to shut down your whole computer and you can’t even figure out how to do that because everything is spinning.
It’s very frustrating. I’ve gotten to know Eric while he was still at Scopely and I was so impressed with him that I said to him, “If you ever decided to leave Scopely and start your own company, please let me know. I’d love an opportunity to consider investing.”
That does not happen very often. If it does, know that you’re doing something right. I’m just going to take a guess, Jim, that of all the founders you meet and all the pitches you hear, maybe you say that to less than five percent or even smaller people. Would that be accurate?
I would say a smaller percentage of founders. I don’t work a lot. I’m out probably at least two nights a week in West LA at different events, meeting entrepreneurs. Once in a while, I’ll meet an entrepreneur that is so impressive that I will invite him or her to reach out to me if and when they’re ready.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the audience, Jim, and they want to be in that one percent of people that you’re so impressed with. Anything you can do to describe what those characteristics are, either as a business person or a characteristic of that person as a person that makes you sit up and take notice and want to work with them would be so helpful.
Again, I would liken it to getting married, because when you invest in a startup, there’s no liquidity and it’s really a long-term relationship. I guess chemistry plays a part in it. You meet somebody and as you speak with him or her, you get a sense of how intelligent, how driven, how committed they are, and also how strong their people skills are. Of course, if they’ve got a vision, how compelling that vision is. I would say most often, I’ve only said that to a handful of people in the last ten years. Each of the person I was talking to is a serial entrepreneur, someone had proven his or her ability in the past. It’s very rare.
[Tweet “Passion, vision and people skills are key”]
You come across smart, you come across passionate, and you come across as someone who’s got great people skills. That’s where the unique magic is from my observations of all the people I’ve met, is if someone’s really technical, smart, and maybe even can articulate a vision, then nine times out of ten they don’t have really great people skills and vice versa. You can have really charismatic people that have this great vision, but they don’t have the technical expertise or don’t have people on their team to execute it. When you have that combination in one person, it’s almost left brain, right brain combo. That’s what people are attracted to. I think so many people, when they pitch an Angel investor like you, get confused and think, “I’m going to wow him with my demo,” and don’t even think about the people skills aspect of it. “I just want to have them hear it from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak, you, that the people skills are just as important if not more important than whatever your product demo is.
The bottom line is not one thing is more important than another. It’s that it’s so difficult to birth a company, nurture it, grow it, build it large enough and make it interesting enough to be acquired or to go public that really you need it all, and that’s rare.
The majority of exits seem to be getting bought versus IPO. Is that still the case today for you that you see?
I think it’s the case not only for me but generally. When I was growing up, it was like the go go 1960s, where all you needed was an idea to go public. Today things have changed dramatically. In fact, a really diligent angel investor will be just as focused on what’s the potential exit and who would buy this company as he would or she would be with the other considerations because the odds of a company of this startup going public are extremely remote. Of course, the odds are most startups are going to fail and the startups that succeed hopefully will fly. You want to know who are the natural acquirers and why would they acquire your company instead of some other company.
I don’t want to discourage your listeners who are aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it’s really exceptional for anybody to be an aspiring entrepreneur and make the leap and make the commitment to launch a company, but you really need a lot going for you in order for it to succeed. Not the least of which is good luck and absence of bad luck. We’ve all seen enough startups and enough really gigantic startups grow into something very dramatic and world-changing, and so that brass ring is worth reaching for.
It’s also the awareness that when you’re pitching someone like you, it’s really important if someone can put their empathy head on and realize that what’s important to someone like you is that you’re going to get your money back. There’s going to be a good chance of some kind of strategy for an ROI, that you’ve done some thinking on who could possibly buy your company that would make your initial seed round worthwhile.
Private startup companies, there’s no liquidity and the only reason that an investor invests is in the hopes of getting a return on investment. Although I will say that I made investment where the likelihood of return is less than I would generally make and that’s in the area of environmental, because I care about those things. I want to tolerate more risk, the biggest of which is I won’t get a return or if I do get a return, it will be more modest than what I’m generally looking for.
When you’re looking at your overall portfolio, do you allocate a certain percentage? Do you say to yourself, “10%, 20%, I’ll have some social impact influence in my yes or no decision?”
You would think I would do that, but I don’t. The reason I don’t is that it’s very difficult to identify a startup that I think is investment worthy. I only consider the issue when I get very excited about a company and I decide with each possible opportunity, “is this is one that I want to write a check for?”
A lot of research says that angel investors like you tend to invest within 50 miles or less of where you’re based. But when I look at your portfolio, I see LA and New York. Is that fair or is the majority here in LA?
Angel Investor: When a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts.
The vast majority are, almost the lion’s share. Virtually all of them are in LA and there’s a reason for that. Number one, when a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts. You can spend more time with the team, you can meet customers. Then once you write a check, these startups run into trouble for one reason or another. As I said earlier, there really are so many existential threats along the journey. When the company is in your backyard, it’s a lot easier and you can be more effective in terms of helping your portfolio company to overcome whatever challenges. When your’re distant, we do live in an information age so it’s not impossible but it’s not as efficient or effective when companies are in your backyard.
Jim, how important is a warm introduction? I know you’re out two nights a week to different events, but if you don’t come across somebody at that point and they’re just submitting and going through the Tech Coast Angel’s applications standpoint versus someone you know a little bit or trust a little bit or have some kind of relationship where they could say, “I think you might want to meet this person or at least take a look at their pitch deck.” How much does that weigh in for you?
A lot. At this point I’ve been Angel investing for about a decade. I have at least a hundred portfolio of companies. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on AngelList. There’s a reasonable amount of awareness about me as an Angel investor. As a result, I get countless inbound solicitations and candidly, I just don’t have enough time to seriously consider each and every one of them on its merits, so a warm introduction from one of my Tech Coast Angel’s colleagues or someone who’s not a member but a colleague of mine who I respect then makes a big difference, then I will have a very close look at a company.
If you could give the listeners one big piece of advice when they pitch. It could be, “Don’t have too many words on your slide, don’t talk too fast, be sure you know your numbers, have a good story,” those are just some things I’ve heard in the past. If you have one piece of advice for people in order to get a yes when they hear a pitch, what would that be?
The first thing that investors typically see is a deck. I would make sure that if I’m going to be doing it, that my deck would be a very compelling presentation. Because investors like myself and other active investors, we get so many inbound decks that the deck has to be really, really well put together. The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team. It’s funny because in terms of frustrations with the deck, sometimes there’s too much information on a slide. Sometimes there’s too little information. I think in an entrepreneurial zeal to communicate how fabulous their vision is, they use fonts that’s so small that you really can’t read it. When I come to a slide where I see a couple of pictures, not sure exactly, there’s always an iPhone display and then they’ve got font that’s so small, I can’t read it.
[Tweet “The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team.”]
I just go to the next slide and then what I find is there’s not usually enough information about the team. There have probably sixteen members on a single slide. They’ll say college and the most recent company, but it really doesn’t give a lot of information. It doesn’t say what their position was at the prior company or prior companies. I think I’m not alone when I talk about how important the team is. If you’ve got five people on your team, make two slides so that you can have enough text under each picture, so the person looking at the deck and the slide can get a real sense of who the team members are and what they’ve done.
That’s great advice. Do you like certain areas, artificial intelligence, mobile, virtual reality, that you like to invest in, so the people know that, “What I’m doing isn’t the kind of thing he typically invests in,” or “I’m a good fit, I should figure out how to get in front of him.”
That’s a great question. Let me talk a little bit about Tech Coast Angels. We’re really vertical agnostic. We’re one of the largest and most active angel investment organizations in the country. We’ve got over 300 members across five regional networks. We invest in internet, software, life sciences, consumer products, hardware, really across the board. We don’t invest in movies, but we’re pretty diversified in the nature of our investments. We don’t just write checks, we bring experience mentoring, operational assistance. We bring valuable connections, and many of our portfolio companies have gone on to raise lots of money. Collectively, our portfolio has raised at least a couple of billion dollars in funding.
Jim, how can people follow you on social media? What’s the best way to keep in touch with what you’re doing and what your Angel Group is doing.
Look at my LinkedIn profile, my AngelList profile. Candidly, I’m not that active on social media. I think I’m a little bit older to navigate on social media on a daily basis.
We’ll definitely look at your LinkedIn profile and see what your next big unicorn might be that you’re going to be part of, because that’s certainly an indication for people that you’ve done your due diligence on them. Jim, thanks again for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your insights and wisdom.
Thank you, John for having me. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to share my experiences and my thoughts.
Links Mentioned
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
When it comes to successfully making a pitch, you need to establish your own success mindset – and that involves not letting rejection affect you more than it should. Learn how to spot the characteristics of a founder: grit, tenacity, and of course the ability to tell a good story, which is what the successful pitch is all about. Joanne Chen, a venture capitalist at foundation capital in Silicon Valley, talks about this in a discussion of her journey, and how her company is transitioning from being one of Netflix’s early investors to getting a head start in the future of artificial technology.
Joanne Chen’s passion for technology developed very early. Her parents taught her how to program: her dad, who was a mathematician, and her mom who specialized in computer science. By the time Joanne was nine, she turned that into a business, making her first webpage for a client. This glimmer of entrepreneurial ability soon sparked as she began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later at a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working at Wall Street at Jefferies & Co. She had also been an angel investor for two years, and now works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to disrupt businesses by leveraging data assets.
—
Our guest is Joanne Chen who’s a venture capitalist at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. I had the pleasure of being on the Coca-Cola CMO Summit panel with her and she is smart and fun. She will talk about the mindset you need to have when you pitch which all boils down to not taking rejection personally. She looks for two characteristics in a founder: grit and tenacity, and the ability to tell a good story which is what The Successful Pitch is all about. Enjoy Joanne’s journey and how she and her company were one of the early investors in Netflix and what they’re doing in artificial intelligence.
Listen To The Episode Here
What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
I’m thrilled to have Joanne Chen who is at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. She and I met at a Coca-Cola CMO Summit and I instantly knew I wanted to have her as a friend, as a guest on this podcast, and let you hear what she is doing with her life and in the tech startup world. She has a passion for technology that she developed very early when her dad, who is a mathematician, and her mom, who is in computer science, taught her how to program. By the time she was nine, she turned that into a business and made her first webpage for a client. That entrepreneur blood was in her from the beginning.
She began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later co-founded a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working on Wall Street at Jefferies & Company in which she helped tech companies go through the IPO and the M&A process. She has been an Angel investor previously to joining Foundation and she works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to leverage data assets to disrupt businesses. She knows what she’s doing and she’s worked a lot with people in SAS, drone tech, and virtual reality. In fact, some of the other companies that she’s worked with include Zen Gaming and something we’re going to ask her about called Mya. Joanne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Can we start by taking us back to those early days of your childhood when you were nine years old and watching your parents as you say, “I’m going to learn how to code and start a business?”
Thanks for bringing that up. It’s always a fun story. My father left China to pursue his PhD at the University of Montreal. He was initially supposed to be in Montreal for just a year to do a study abroad. Then what happened was the whole Tiananmen Square incident happen and then he decided to stay. Eventually, my mother and I was able to join him in Montreal and we lived the life of an aspiring PhD student. We were in this one-room apartment in Montreal in this terrible neighborhood and that’s how they started their careers in tech. My father was initially a professor; my mother was a programmer. Both of them eventually moved into the industry. At a very young age, I was influenced by both their passion and their tenacity in the space as well as content-wise. I was very influenced by computer science and tech.
When the first version of the internet was available, we got this clunky and slow computer and we got online. My mother taught me how to use file systems, access DOS, and play very simple games. Eventually, when webpage making became a little bit simpler, she taught me how to use HTML. At the same time, I was working part time at Pennysaver. That was the only job that you could get as a nine-year old, delivering newspapers down the street. As part of the reward for delivering newspapers, they let me post one ad of my choice for free and so I thought about that.
The other experience and realization I had at the time was I created this terribly ugly website that I brought to my second or third grade classroom. I showed this to my classmates and teachers and not a single one of them knew what it was. That sparked an idea in my mind which is, “We’re early in this evolution. I’m sure there’s probably a lot of people don’t know what this is, or if they do, they don’t know how to make it.” I decided to post the ad offering my services around website development. A week later, I got my first client.
You then went on to get your BS at the University of California in Berkeley and then went to get your MBA at the University of Chicago School of Business. I’m from Chicago and I know the contrast of the weather from Berkeley to Chicago. That must’ve been a shock to your system.
It was certainly very cold. I remember there were two days during the year where the school advised us not to go outside because more than two minutes outside would have given us frostbite.
When you were getting your MBA, did you know then that you wanted to become a venture capitalist?
Success Mindset: Never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business.
Yes, the reason why I went to business school was to think about that career transition. I had always known that I wanted to be in tech. I studied Computer Science at Berkeley and Electrical Engineering. The first exposure to venture capitalists was at Berkeley, not University of Chicago where I had no idea what venture capitalists did. Berkeley had this competition called The Venture Capital Case Competition. As part of that, we had to submit a company that we were excited about, I was maybe nineteen or twenty years old at the time, and present to a panel of VCs who will judge how we did as VCs. Three friends and I got together; all three of them eventually became entrepreneurs. We knew one of the early people at Mint.com which was one of the first, modern-day fintech companies and proposed that Mint as an investment candidate.
The funny thing was I believe Mint was in stealth mode at the time. It wasn’t a company that most people knew about, but a few of the VCs were looking at Mint as a potential investment opportunity in real life. They were impressed with how we found this company. We eventually won the competition. That stuck in my mind. I enjoyed the process. I thought it was very easy to get to that point. A couple of years later, Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170 million, which was at the time a huge acquisition in this space. At the back of my mind, I had always thought about venture capital ever since that experience. After working at Cisco as an engineer, working on Wall Street advising tech executives, starting my own mobile gaming company, I thought about the combination of my experiences, what I really loved, and decided that I wanted to give it a try at investing.
Fintech was your first expertise level and public still continues today and the kinds of companies you invest in?
My firm, Foundation Capital, is a very strong investor in fintech companies. We have lending club, lending home, and financial engines back in the day in our portfolios. We’ve been very lucky in the sector. For me personally, I focus primarily on B2B enterprise companies that leverage data and machine learning to create hopefully self-driving software that sells into different functional units or different verticals. I focus on that world.
What lessons did you learn about what a good pitch was when you were first being exposed to that because you’ve been on both sides of the table, it sounds like?
It’s very enlightening to get the investor side, especially when I first started as an Angel investor in 2012. Lessons learned? Let’s see.
What makes a good pitch?
You’re the expert on this topic, but for me personally, a couple things that I look for in a 45-minute to a 60-minute meeting for an entrepreneur, one is that he or she has a very interesting problem statement that they are communicating and that this problem is either large today or going to be large very soon in the near to mid-future. This is a problem in market size description that’s compelling. The second piece of it is a reason why this person or this team of people are the right folks to solve this problem, some secret sauce or insight that they have.
Perhaps it’s them as individuals or as the team, perhaps it’s their experience and therefore relationships and networks in the particular domain, or perhaps it’s because they’re amazing technologists who are just better than everyone else in the world. Some secret about them that lets them solve this problem. Third, it’s their ability to tell the story in a compelling way. We are story-driven creatures and they have to be able to tell the story to me, to potential customers, to potential people they hire in a compelling way, especially when data is not there in the very beginning. Those are the three things I look for in a 45 to 60-minute meeting.
That storytelling element is everything. Most people think, “Let me just show you how this app works,” and they’re not telling you a story as it relates to what problem they’re solving for people. It’s like, “Isn’t it cool that this would work?” You’re like, “Yes, but would anybody want to use it and why? What problem is it solving?” If you haven’t thought that through, then the technology works without understanding what’s important to someone like you, which is how am I going to get my money back? Is this market big enough to scale, is someone going to buy you, or are you going to go public, or whatever the issue is? That’s important. Is there one mistake that you typically see when people pitch that you could share with us to make sure the listeners avoid doing it?
I don’t think this is necessarily a mistake, but more a frame of mind that people, in my opinion, don’t consider as much. I believe investing and picking both entrepreneurs and investors is like a dating exercise. The reality is there is a big percentage of it in investor’s decision that’s rational and there’s a significant percentage of the decision making that is not rational. It’s based on chemistry or emotions or something else, just like dating. That part of it is hard to predict, hard to control, hard to necessarily filter for. As an entrepreneur, I would not take rejection as necessary correlated with the business entirely. It could just be because of the personality fit or a lack of chemistry or something. That is an important element that entrepreneurs don’t think about as much.
[Tweet “Don’t take rejection personally.”]
I talk about this a lot. Don’t take rejection personally, whether it’s a date or a no from an investor. It doesn’t mean you need to start rejecting yourself or your business model or your idea, it just means it’s not a fit. If you’re going to get up and start talking to someone else at a dating situation or as a potential other investor, you have to hit the reset button every time. It’s almost like, if you go on a date with somebody who just broke up or got divorced and all they talk about is their ex, that’s a horrible date. You have to clear your mindset that that wasn’t a fit onward and start remembering the times when you did get a yes.
I love that you brought that up because it hits my sweet spot of what I like to do when I give keynote talks to companies, especially when I talk to people in sales. It’s the same thing. You cannot take rejection personally. For me, the big lesson is never reject yourself just because someone has said no to you. We tend to do that. Even if people say, “It’s hard not to take rejection personally.” I tell people, “What’s the cost of taking it personally?” You’re depressed and you’re down for however long it takes you to shake that off, so it’s important to develop some skills. Let’s dive into some of the companies you said yes to, starting with one that I’m particularly intrigued about called Mya.
Mya is a company that is in the recruiting space. What they offer is an AI-driven conversational solution to help recruiters become more efficient. They are a recruiting assistant, if you will. If you think about the problems in recruiting, especially around hiring high turnover, high volume jobs, like staffing Amazon fulfillment centers or Nike hiring retail store associates, they can’t hire more than 10,000 retail store associates per year, for example. It’s a massive problem because there aren’t enough recruiters and recruiter time to go through these candidates in a timely fashion. At the same time, there isn’t a shortage of candidates that are interested in these jobs. Mya is able to source, screen, and place these candidates into an in-person interview, eliminating 75% of the grunt work that recruiters typically have to do. In addition, it delivers a better experience to these candidates because it’s able to tell candidates, yes or no, this or that, right away.
If you’ve ever applied for a job online and not heard back, it’s frustrating. You just assume it’s a no. It’s like dating again. There’s no response. It’s killer.
Mya is able to make judgments within milliseconds of having these conversations.
Does it apply for bigger companies that maybe have to hire some quality, high-skilled labors as well?
It certainly applies to the high-skill labor market as well. The challenge in the high-skill labor market is a little bit different from the high frequency, high turnover talent pool. In the high frequency, high turnover talent pool, there isn’t a shortage of supply. In the high-skill labor market, there’s a huge shortage of supply. The matchmaking there is much more difficult because you had taken fit and personality and social data and a bunch of other things which makes someone a good candidate. The focus areas are different, but Mya is totally applicable to both. They started off at the high frequency, high turnover market and they’re going to be expanding more and more into the high-skill labor market.
What was their pitch like? Do you remember anything that made it stand out that you went, “This is for us?”
I met Eyal the CEO in early 2007. He is one of the most articulate, crisp presenters of this problem statement and what he’s envisioning. I liked his storytelling capabilities. The second thing that I was very impressed by is Eyal grew up in the recruiting world. His parents ran agencies that did exactly that, and as a kid, he followed them and shadowed them. He helped them source and screen candidates. Even though he’s only 30 years old, he’s intimately familiar and had over a decade of experience in this particular space.
The domain knowledge was incredibly attractive. The third part that I was very impressed by is Eyal started a company called FirstJob before he created Mya. With FirstJob, he ran the company for a number of years and grew it to quite a nice size but realized that the bigger opportunity lied in Mya. He made the hard decision to pivot despite growing FirstJob to a sizable company. The tenacity, that desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have and that he exhibited.
Success Mindset: The tenacity and desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have.
It sounds like, in addition to being a great storyteller and having tenacity, he also was able to zoom out and see the big picture and not get caught in the weeds that he didn’t see the need to pivot. Tell me a little bit about Tubi TV.
Tubi TV is an interesting one. They are a company that has a long history with us. What they offer is, think of Netflix, they offer a free Netflix, ad-supported TV network, the replacement for cable, if you will. For the consumer, it’s free. For advertisers, they can advertise on Tubi TV. For content providers, like MGM and Paramount, this is how they view as next generation cable television. If you think about the trends that have been happening at the macro level, it’s fascinating because on the consumer side, I know that I prefer streaming and on-demand and a place where I can watch where I want to watch and when I want to watch it and control what I want to watch. Tubi is on IOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon, Roku, pretty much everywhere where you want to consume content. It’s an experience dictated by the consumer. Consumers are more and more interested in that and less and less interested in subscribing to cable. Cable is dying. Linear TV is dying. On-demand streaming is on the rise.
From the content providers’ side, it’s an interesting opportunity because if you think about where studios and these content providers monetize, most of their revenues came from movies and cable television, historically. Now that cable is dying, they have fewer opportunities to monetize. Netflix, which was one of our earlier investments and very successful, invented the new business model which is that they unbundled all these different shows and created this subscription service for consumers. In the early days, these studios would be able to sell their content to Netflix, and Netflix will use that and offer it as a subscription. What has happened is Netflix is becoming more like a studio, like a content provider, as they’re making their own original programming, etc. For these traditional studios, like MGM, they’re thinking, “I have fewer opportunities to monetize via Netflix as well or the likes of Netflix.” Now they look at Tubi TV and they think, “This is the next generation cable television that I can partner with and monetize my content under.” That’s attractive from a content provider perspective as well.
Tubi TV is never going to be competing for an Emmy like Netflix or Amazon, correct?
That’s correct. They don’t have any original programming. Think of them as the replacement for shows that you will see on afternoon cable television.
Anything about that particular pitch or the founder that stood out that made everybody go, “This the right team.”
Farhad who’s the CEO of Tubi TV is incredibly gritty. The context there is interesting because Tubi TV was spun out of a different company called adRise which was selling software to studios and content providers. This was in the 2010 or 2011 so quite a while ago. In 2014, Farhad decide to pivot the company from a B2B company into a consumer offering, realizing the big opportunity behind creating Tubi. He’s been doing this for quite some time. It’s been seven years that he’s been working on this and he hasn’t given up. After the pivot, we looked at his performance and what he’s been able to achieve with this new product and decided to double down and co-lead this $20 million round along with Jump Capital earlier this year. His tenacity from a pitch perspective stood out.
[Tweet “Tenacity and grit are the keys to success.”]
It’s a combination of tenacity and grit. That’s a similar theme coming across here. The last one I want to ask you about is Localytics, the mobile app marketing engagement that’s so popular right now. I would love to hear what is it about that platform that made you and your team decide that that was a winner?
Localytics is a company that I work with, along with my partner, Ashu, who’s a board member there. Localytics is a mobile analytics engagement platform based in Boston. If you think about consumers, we spend a lot of time engaging with our apps. The app provides a better experience because it’s able to personalize and send push notifications to us and do a bunch of things that are interesting to the individual user. Localytics enables brands to be able to do this at scale, both sending the messages to consumers as well as personalizing that experience and then serving analytics to these brands to help them understand how their consumers are behaving.
Are there any final tips that you have for people who are saying, “Is this the right time to be pitching?” Are there any suggestions you have for them on trying to figure out timing? I know that’s very important.
Timing is a difficult question. The most important part is to understand yourself and your business first and foremost. Understand what it is that you need from a cash perspective and then give yourself a 50% buffer because something’s going to go wrong. Let that dictate when you fundraise and how much you want to raise. You want to plan for 18to 24 months. That’s a time period in terms of cash needs for every single route. Be sure to be internally-driven, first and foremost, versus externally-driven. That’s the first thing. The second thing is fundraising is going to be one of the most difficult processes that an entrepreneur will go through. I rarely hear that people love pitching for a fundraising. At the same time, it’s a very good experience in terms of reflecting what investors think about and what are some of the business fundamentals and perhaps even longer term vision of a business.
[Tweet “Tell a compelling story of why you and why now.”]
The second most important tip is never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business. I still vividly remember this one entrepreneur who did not have a network in Silicon Valley who wanted to get a meeting with me and with my partners. As a way to get noticed, he sent us this envelope that he created out of a Lumascape, which was a landscape of different companies in a particular space. It was marketing tech. He wrote a letter with this envelope telling us why he deserved fifteen minutes of our time. I remember that very clearly even though I didn’t think his business was the right fit. I called him and gave him advice on what he should do in the future with investors. Eventually, he raised money even though his starting point was perhaps more challenging than other folks. Never give up. Always have the tenacity and then things have a way of working out.
And being creative, it sounds like, a little bit. What you touched on about being internally-focused versus externally-focused, if we’re externally-focused on feeling good about ourselves, that’s when we take the rejection personally. If we know who we are, we’re internally-focused and our mission and our why can keep us on track. Joanne, thank you so much for being generous with your insights, your stories, and your passion for making the world better through technology and getting entrepreneurs to make their dreams become a reality.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Foundation Capital
- Joanne Chen
- Zen Gaming
- Mya
- Mint.com
- Eyal
- FirstJob
- Tubi TV
- Farhad
- adRise
- Jump Capital
- Ashu
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’