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.
Hard facts or big dreams?
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Crafting the right balance for your pitch can be challenging. One extreme is pure facts People on this extreme pitch like they're in court, trying to make their argument watertight, fearing any gap will damage their credibility. The downside? This approach demands a lot from the listener, who must catch up with all the details. More importantly, it overlooks the core issue: value. Value isn’t directly inferred from facts. I could give you thousands of facts about a chair, and you still might not see its value to you. The other extreme is selling a dream Focusing entirely on value, often at the cost of accuracy. This approach comes off as 'salesy' and lacks credibility because you can't know everyone's dream. Furthermore, value is not communicated directly; it is inferred. If a random caller said they had the product of your dreams, you'd hang up. So, is there a middle ground? Think of your pitch as sharing your vision— I mean that technically. Communicate the future AS YOU SEE IT, with both clear and uncertain aspects. This vision, however incomplete, is what drives YOU to keep investing your finite time and energy. It’s the purest source of truth for whatever value is worth communicating. Compared to that, anything else is guesswork. Yours, Sagi |
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...