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.
Three magic words
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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 from such descriptions is hard work. A specific scenario immediately cuts through the complexity. Investors wake up because they subconsciously realize that, for the next few seconds, they will not have to think. They can relax and imagine instead - which is far less effortful. They instinctively know that the value of your solution (or the lack of it) is finally about to become apparent. Walking the walk, here’s an example: Imagine you’re an investor being pitched to. The founder has been banging on about “healthcare system regulation” and “next-generation decentralized security architecture” for 8 slides and 15 minutes until they finally say: “Imagine you’re the head of IT at a major hospital. It’s 2AM. Notice how it feels. Only now can you feel the value firsthand. An example is not decoration It’s a test. In a pitch, the founder’s job is not to explain the product. It’s to help the investor experience the value from the perspective of the person who would actually care enough to pay for it. Founders who genuinely understand the buyer’s world can generate concrete scenarios effortlessly. They know what keeps that person awake at night. What they fear. What would make them pull out a credit card or sign a purchase order? When they don’t, the pitch usually collapses into abstractions - revealing that the value is still abstract in the founder’s own mind. Best, 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.
In the previous newsletter, I shared a talk I gave at Nest Catalyst about investor pitching. That first talk focused on the mindset behind pitching complex ideas. This second talk is more practical. It focuses on how to approach shaping your pitch - through principles and examples. The last five minutes are especially practical: an easy framework to help you craft your narrative. This was quite challenging. After years of doing this work, a lot of it has become intuitive. Breaking it down to...
If you've ever struggled to move people toward a complex new idea, or if you just want to finally understand what it is that I do (like my parents), Or you just feel like watching something interesting … I finally had the opportunity to record a talk I’ve been piecing together for years. I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of scientist-entrepreneurs at Nest Catalyst - a Bay Area program supporting life science founders building companies in the biotech ecosystem. The talk is visual,...
There's a way to improve your startup by orders of magnitude in 10 seconds.Here’s what you do:Go to your email signature and add this to your title: CVO, Chief Visionary Officer. (You can keep your CEO title or replace it — I don’t mind.)Boom! You just made your startup more effective and drastically increased your chances of building a great product.By assuming the CVO title, you made something explicit that most startups leave vague: that there is a single source of intent in the system....