Today’s Menu ☕️

• LA Tech Breakfast Club March 19th

• NYC Tech Breakfast Club March 21st

• SXSW Secret Tech Breakfast Club Mar 11th

• Mastering the Art of the Pitch with Robbie Crabtree

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m in Austin next week - if you want to chat about legal stuff (I’m a startup lawyer @ Optimal) or your fundraise let’s get coffee.

Last week I wrote about how to fix the YC safe. I got so many emails from founders and curious VC’s. If you want a copy of the redline let me know (reply to this email). If you want to read the post, click here.

This week, scroll down for an interview with an extraordinary pitch coach, Robbie Crabtree. He has helped startups raise 100’s of millions of dollars.

Also, thank you to Clerky (how the best startups get legal paperwork done) for sponsoring this newsletter.

LOS ANGELES
Venice Tech Breakfast Club - March 19th

Back again but this time with a link that should work for everyone.

I’m hosting the next LA Tech Breakfast Club in Venice. Teaming up with Jacques Sisteron from Upfront. He focuses on early stage hard tech.

Thank you to Ahmed Mirza from LA Techstars and Phil Tassi from JP Morgan for partnering with Tech Breakfast Club.

NYC Tech Breakfast Club March 21st
March NYC Tech Breakfast

If you’re a Founder or VC, come hang with me. Headcount is going to be extremely limited for this one. Just founders and VC’s.

Shoutout to my cohost, Varun Devatha.

This month we’re celebrating Fil Aronshtein, founder of Dirac. I’ve never been so excited about manufacturing - you should check out what they have cooking with BuildOS, the first automated work instruction platform.

Clerky 🤝 Tech Breakfast Club

Whenever a founder comes to me for legal services and I find out that they’ve incorporated with Clerky, I breathe a sigh of relief. I love Clerky and trust their documents. As a lawyer, it saves me a ton of headaches if you just use Clerky and get formation done right the first time.

I’m beyond excited to announce that Clerky and Tech Breakfast Club are partners. When you’re ready to start your company, email me (or reply to any TBC newsletter), and I’ll invite you to a special Clerky portal - as a Tech Breakfast Club member, you’ll save $100 on Clerky’s already reasonable fees.

SXSW Tech Breakfast Club March 12th
Secret SXSW Tech Breakfast

Member Spotlight
Robbie Crabtree

It’s hard to raise money. Especially at the preseed and seed stages, so much is based purely on vibes. If you don’t have a good story, if you can’t convey it, if you can’t get a VC emotionally invested in you and your vision - then good luck.

I love Robbie’s content around crafting an effective pitch so it’s a huge honor to interview him. He does a great job weaving together both the science and art of pitching. You should check him out on LinkedIn.

What’s the backstory for Competitive Storytelling? 
I was a trial lawyer, and I worked as an assistant district attorney right out of law school. I wanted to fight for the right side. Towards the end of my career, I was trying all child abuse cases. I had really great results there, but I faced a kind of an internal dilemma of the work I was doing. I loved the work – it was amazing to go and fight for those victims of abuse – but at the end of the day, even when I'd win those cases, the family and the victims still had lives that have been ruined. It just got to a point where I felt like I'm not solving a problem. 

I decided to leave and go out and do something different. I was great at storytelling and so I started wondering: how can I build a business that will add value to people and also add value to the world, as well as adding value to myself? My favorite speaker of all time was JFK, who delivered the famous I'll put a man on the moon speech. I started thinking about who's taking moonshots today – it’s people in tech. It is business leaders, startup founders, venture capitalists who are pouring money into these ideas. JFK had a guy named Ted Sorensen as his special advisor and counselor, who took JFK from being a very mediocre speaker to one of the greatest of all time. I wanted to do that for business people.

You were a founder yourself, right?
I built  an ed tech company that got acquired at the end of 2020, which was cool, but not life changing. It was nice to see that I could build something and get enough traction where someone else wanted to buy it. And I started building Competitive Storytelling, a service agency which helps founder CEOs stand out and attract capital. It's never the best idea that wins – instead, it's the best communicated idea. I've built this business where we've raised a lot of money with the founders with whom we've worked. It turns out, fundraising is like running a trial. The way that you communicate inside of fundraising looks very similar to how I had to communicate in trial. If I can convince juries to send people to prison for the rest of their lives, we can do the same inside of the technology world with founders. It's worked out pretty well with 700m raised by the founders I’ve worked with. That's what I do today, because I want to build a better future.

The fundraising landscape is challenging - to say the least. What are you telling founders now?
It is tough right now. I think one of the concepts that has become even more important in the current market in storytelling is what I call micro and macro future storytelling. Founders tend to have a tendency to do just one – some on the micro future, some on the macro future. What it really takes in today's market is showing both of those. 

The micro future is how you get from the stage you're at today to the next stage. If you're a seed founder, it's how we get to your Series A, and if you're a Series A founder, how we get to your Series B. There needs to be an execution plan, there needs to be tactics, and you need to be dialed in to the finer details, because investors are far more aware of the metrics and the challenges in the funding environment now. So it's not just like a foregone conclusion that you raise a seed, you're going to be able to raise a Series A, you raise a Series A, you're gonna be able to raise a series B, it's a lot different now. They've got to see that you have a clear plan of how you're going to hit certain milestones that they know are going to be in line with what those stages of investors are looking for. 

So if that’s the micro version, what’s the macro? 
The macro future is the giant vision. How does this become a ten-billion dollar company? The reason this is so challenging for most founders and CEOs is because these are totally different lenses to be seeing the world through. Seeing your next milestone, likely 18 months away, is really different from seeing what is 10 years away. Oftentimes that one person doesn't have the ability to do both, but investors are looking for both. 

How would a founder go about effectively doing both?
I would likely start with the long term to show that you have enough ambition to warrant a venture backable company. And then I would go into the more immediate future to show them you’re not not just a dreamer who is out here saying, hey, we're going to build flying cars. 

I also think there's a misunderstanding of what storytelling is. And it's partly because the word itself is wrong – it should be story sharing, not storytelling. A lot of founders think of storytelling as writing a story and saying the words. That's not what it is. What we're trying to get an investor to feel when we're sharing that story with them is the emotion, conviction and confidence. 

The only way that we can transfer emotions – from the speaker to the listener – is by sharing it. That means you have to be vulnerable. I always say story sharing is an exercise in letting people see how you think with your brain, how you feel about the world with your eyes and why you care about these things with your heart. Story sharing means that when you are telling it, you are seeing it come to life in your own head, you are reliving that moment as you're sharing it with someone. It can be exhausting, because sharing your story takes so much energy. Fundraising is like an 800 meter race – it is a sprint, but you have to be able to hold on for a whole lot longer than 100 meters. And that's what makes it so challenging. 

Any advice for making that grueling race more sustainable? 
You have to prepare ahead of time, ideally over a two to four month time period. That way, you can pace it and get everything in place to test and refine your story. There are so many parallels in legal work. When I was getting ready for a case, I would test my opening statement over and over on all sorts of people to see how it resonated with them. Different audiences would respond differently. 

The biggest thing in the actual fundraise is to make sure your team is ready to run most of the day to day of the business. And then also, if you can, bring on some admin support to help you in the fundraise. That could be an executive assistant, it could just be someone who's managing your inbox, managing to-do lists, keeping track of your CRM, anything to make your life easier. 

One of the ways to make sure you don't burn up in that race is you need a support system. I can't tell you how many times I get calls from founders and my only role is just to listen. They need someone to vent to and they're not going to vent to their co-founder, they're not going to vent to their partner, because they don't want that person taking on the stress. It's their role as the CEO to hold it. And they need a safe source to do that outlet. 

How do you psych up for the actual pitch? 
Fundraising is largely performance, which can sometimes be frustrating to founders. But it’s part of human nature: we're going to judge people based on how they show up, how they dress, how they speak, how they appear. It’s performative in many ways. With that in mind, if you think about the greatest artists or performers, oftentimes they have anchors that put them into that kind of mindset that they need to go into. I always tell anyone I'm working with to find the thing that puts you into the right mood into the right headspace. For some people it might mean doing meditation or breathwork. When I was a trial lawyer, I had a playlist of five songs that were all Rick Ross. 

What are your hottest takes on pitching? You mentioned not sharing the pitch deck until after the meeting? 
I still absolutely believe that the deck should not be shared until after the first meeting. The reason I say you shouldn't send a pitch deck ahead of time is your warm intro should be strong enough that you get a first meeting. Because that warm intro is risking someone’s social capital, whereas the pitch deck frames everything through a business lens that’s very cold. As a result, the investor goes into the meeting with a preconceived notion of what's going on. Fundraising is about worldbuilding – the world that a founder is going to create in the future. So if we're just focused on all the metrics, and all the stuff that we can put in a slide deck, that is not compelling. 

That's why I say a pitch deck is something that comes after a first meeting so that an investor can dig into it, and then come to the second meeting with more questions and pass it around to his colleagues. 

How does a founder get the most out of working with a pitch coach? 
There are different styles – I'm very much into tough love. We're going to do things in a very trial lawyer type of way. My approach is to make a founder world class at storytelling and narrative strategy, narrative design, frame control, and power dynamics. If you want those skills, I can help you a ton. But there's other people who are much more supportive and softer and make it more about the design of the pitch deck. 

So you need to know the style that you want. Second, you need to be highly coachable. Because I've worked with a lot of founders who are very good at fundraising, but you still need to listen to that and take in new information. 

Finally, it’s about obsession. I wake up in the middle of the night over the stories I create and the founders I’m working with. There is no off switch in my brain and you want to find someone who operates the way the best founders do. Find someone who loves what you’re building and believes in you. That’s going to make the relationship work in a beautiful way. 

If people want to learn more about you and potentially work with you, what’s the best way to get up to speed on your vision? Competitivestorytelling.co is my website for my company. I have lots of content on LinkedIn and YouTube, if you're curious to see how I think and operate. You can email me at [email protected] or DM me on LinkedIn.