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.
What lies beneath
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A startup pitch is a unique situation. Investors walk into the room expecting, in just one hour, to recognize an opportunity that stretches years into the future and demands a massive commitment. They can only see the tip of the iceberg, expecting to be able to grasp what lies beneath. You might think your goal is to make it easy for them: mold your pitch to meet their expectation and fit neatly into their evaluation framework. But it's not 👇 👇 👇 Your goal is to defy expectations.Here's the thing Meeting expectation is a losing strategy in a competitive landscape. Human minds are optimized to tune out what they expect. (Ever driven home on autopilot, only to realize you don’t recall a single thing you passed?) Especially in a deep tech, where genuine scientific breakthroughs are unfolding, your pitch is an opportunity to craft a truly novel investor experience. All it takes is the courage to lean into your passion instead of hiding in the safety of hypothetical investor expectations. Your pitch isn’t a summary of your company; it’s an invitation to explore the unknown. 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...