Presentations Posts

Naval and Mark Suster recently gave the keynotes at the 7th Founder Showcase. Andrew Chen did a better job of describing Naval’s keynote than I ever will:

“People spend a surprising amount of time on things that will contribute little or no value to getting them to a seed round, and this talk is the best I’ve seen in terms of presenting the issues in its entirety.

“Naval broke down the 5 main qualities of an ‘exceptional startup,’ in the following order:

1. Traction
2. Team
3. Product
4. Social Proof
5. Pitch/Presentation

“And while all these qualities are important, Naval explained, the most important thing is to understand that: ‘Investors are trying to find the exceptional outcomes, so they are looking for something exceptional about the company. Instead of trying to do everything well (traction, team, product, social proof, pitch, etc.), do one thing exceptionally. As a startup you have to be exceptional in at least one regard.’”

Here are the video and slides:

Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:

“If you can’t generate traction, do you really want to raise money?”

“If you need money to recruit the best, you’re not ready.”

“It’s easier to pitch a new investor than to convert one.”

“Capital is mobile, but capitalists are lazy.”

This is an awesome talk by Naval on what to do before you raise money. I know I say this all the time, but this may be his best talk yet.

Video: Before You Raise Money

This talk is part of a course on Udemy, which lets people “take and build online courses on any subject.” They asked Naval to teach part of a paid course called Raising Capital for Startups. We agreed, as long as they let us give away the part we taught for free.

You can buy the full course from Udemy for $29 here. Use promo code VentureHacks to get $10 off.

This is Naval’s keynote from Capital Factory‘s demo day. It’s called The Rise of the Angels, but it should be called The Rise of the Entrepreneur. It’s excellent.

Video: The rise of the angels

Here are the slides. Make sure you check out Slide 8 for a draft Entrepreneur’s Bill of Rights. And Slide 20 for Naval’s prediction that spectacular fraud will occur in angel investing.

Slides: The rise of the angels

Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:

The venture industry has already changed.

Venture capital is a business and is open to attack by startups with disruptive new business models and technologies.

Less meeting; more tweeting.

Thanks to Joshua Baer for inviting us to give the keynote.

“Lean startups are built from the ground up for learning about customers.”

Eric Ries

I recently sat in on Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups at Berkeley. The slides and audio are below. The presentation is about one hour long and it is gold.

Audio: The Lean Startup (mp3)

Slides: The Lean Startup (pdf)

The audience consisted of students from Steve Blank’s course on customer development. So you will hear an occasional remark from Steve or his students. When Eric refers to a “case”, he is talking about this Stanford GSB case about his company, IMVU, and his previous company, there.com.

Built to learn

Many founders believe that early stage startups are endeavors of execution. The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act.

Eric takes a different approach. He believes that many early stage startups are labors of learning. The customer is unknown, the product is unknown, and startups must be built to learn.

IMVU learned its way to product/market fit. They threw away their first product (40,000 lines of code that implemented an IM add-on) as they learned customers didn’t want it. They used customer development and agile software development to eventually discover customers who would pay for 3D animated chat software ($10M in revenue in 2007). IMVU learned to test their assumptions instead of executing them as if they were passed down from God.

Learning to learn

This is the scientific way of building startups. It requires a commitment to learning and thoughtfulness. It is being documented in books like Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany and blogs like Eric Ries’ Startup Lessons Learned. It represents the triumph of learning, over the naive startup creation myths we read about in the media. 

IMVU learned to learn. This process can be replicated at your company. Please do try this at home.

Update: Eric writes a follow-up to this post on his blog.

We’ve updated the presentation in A quick and dirty guide to starting up. The new presentation includes the notes that accompany each slide.

I’ve also included the new presentation below. Watch it in full screen mode for maximum pleasure. The full screen button is at the bottom right of the embed and it looks like this: .

(Slides: A Quick And Dirty Guide To Starting Up (pdf))

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:

“We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.” – Pogo

The most important thing: idea intelligence connections experience determination.

Ideas, and therefore NDAs, are worthless.

“… as in all matters of the heart, don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs, on picking co-founders

Co-founders are the biggest failure mode for startups.

“If you are facing in the right direction, keep walking.” – Buddha, on focusing your time in a startup

Markets are relatively efficient, so your first product is probably wrong.

We’ve updated the presentation in Our top 10 term sheet hacks. The new presentation includes the notes that accompany each slide.

I’ve also included the new presentation below. Watch it in full screen mode for maximum pleasure. The full screen button is at the bottom right of the embed and it looks like this: .

(Slides: Top 10 Term Sheet Hacks (pdf))

“In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”

Steve Blank

Summary: In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank lays out a customer development process that complements a startup’s product development process. This post includes video and slides where Steve explains the ideas in his book.

About a year and a half ago, Marc Andreessen described The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank as the “best book for tech entrepreneurs this year.” Marc wrote:

“Steve Blank is a super-experienced Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur… a dude with serious street cred…

“In a nutshell, Steve proposes that companies need a Customer Development process that complements their Product Development Process. And he lays out exactly what he thinks that Customer Development process should be. This goes directly to the theory of Product/Market Fit that I have discussed on this blog before—in this book, Steve provides a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit.

“Buy it, read it, keep it under your pillow and absorb it via osmosis.”

I bought it, read it, couldn’t absorb it, put it on the shelf, and ignored it.

Fortunately, I’ve recently found a great talk and slides from Steve Blank that provide a more gentle introduction to customer development. Be gentle Steve

The talk

How Alan Michaels took Convergent Technologies from zero sales to a $400M exit in four years by discovering his customers:

Why most startups don’t need VPs:


Why most startups fail:


(Videos: Acting on Customer Discovery, No VP’s in a Start-up, Assessing Customer and Market Risks)

Go to Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner to see the rest of the videos from Steve’s talk. Or listen to audio of the talk, which includes segments you won’t see in the videos.

The Slides

Here are the slides from another talk by Steve. They roughly complement the videos above.

(Slides: The Customer Development Methodology (pdf))

Back to the book

I’m going to take another stab at reading The Four Steps to the Epiphany and I hope you join me. I’ll let you know how it goes—please do likewise!

Update: Also read Eric Ries’ excellent What is customer development?.

Naval recently presented A Quick and Dirty Guide to Starting Up to Girls In Tech:

(Slides: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Starting Up (pdf))

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:

“We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.” – Pogo

The most important thing: idea intelligence connections experience determination.

Ideas, and therefore NDAs, are worthless.

“… as in all matters of the heart, don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs, on picking co-founders

Co-founders are the biggest failure mode for startups.

“If you are facing in the right direction, keep walking.” – Buddha, on focusing your time in a startup

Markets are relatively efficient, so your first product is probably wrong.

If there’s demand, we’ll turn this into a slidecast.

Venture Hacker Naval Ravikant recently presented our top 10 term sheet hacks at Startup2Startup:


(Slides: Top 10 Term Sheet Hacks (pdf))

Naval’s slides are a must-read—and a great summary of our detailed hacks.

Slideshare has a transcript of the slides on a single page if you don’t want to flip through the presentation (scroll to the bottom of the page). Mike Speiser has put up his notes from the presentation. And finally, here’s a video of Naval describing his investment criteria:

(Video: Interview with Naval Ravikant.)