I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Blurry values
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This is what you think you see This is what you actually see Our high-resolution vision is limited to a small central area of our visual field (~26 degrees), yet we don’t notice it. Why? That bias occurs in our thinking as well Because we are able to think rationally in the areas we chose to focus lots of our attention, we don't notice that our mental representation of the world is extremely blurry. Here’s the problem for innovators You’ve spent years in R&D, testing, and perfecting your technology, so within that domain, YOUR world is incredibly high-resolution. But prospects don’t see what you see. They don’t have your context, your depth, your resolution. Subconsciously, presenters try to compensate for that, by cramming every detail into their pitch. but Instead of clarity, it creates confusion. Here’s the thing.. A meeting room is not an R&D lab. It's a place of blurry values - literally. Embrace and adjust. Your goal is not to pull prospects into your high-resolution world but to help them see just enough value to move forward, even if the details remain out of focus. Yours, |
Creativity in Deep-Tech
I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Startups move forward as investors, champions, and talent choose to commit to their mission. But they struggle to accept the conditions under which that commitment must be earned. Startups waste resources trying to turn evidence into certainty, as if enough of it will eventually add up to proof. It won’t. For instance, there is no way to know in advance that an investor’s money will be better spent on your startup than on any of the other 99 startups they meet. This is baked into the startup...
Ask a founder why their solution is valuable, and the conversation often drifts toward money. I get it. Unlike value, money is objective, tangible, and measurable. But notice the circularity hidden in that reasoning. Why is my solution valuable? Because it will make money. Why will it make money? Because it does something valuable. That confusion is why so much investor communication feels like noise with little signal. Here's the thing.. Value and money are not the same thing. Value is the...
There are certain words that, as soon as you utter them, investor attention spikes. These words are not what you’d expect. They’re not buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” or “cybersecurity.” Nor are they money words - ARR, traction, or revenue to date. The magic words are: “Imagine you are…” Founders think they need a big story so they build their pitches almost entirely from abstractions and generalizations: The Problem, The market, the unmet need, the solution - trying to extract value...