Sarah Beattie

Here's a fun story about mermaids, manatees, and a VERY bad VC pitch. I left Google after 13 years to start silvr, and my first in-person VC meeting was an abject disaster. As soon as we arrived, the first words out of the Director's mouth were: “I don’t have a lot of time, so we’ll have to make this quick.” I made it as far as saying my name before the following exchange: Him: My associate said you worked at Google. Me: Yup! I left after thirteen years to start this company. Him: Do you know John on the YouTube side? Me: Hmmm…did John work in the LA office? Him: No. He worked in San Francisco. I just assumed you two would know each other. Let’s move on. Pitching a VC can often feel like convincing Jack Sparrow that he’s looking at a manatee. I’ll explain. Sailors have reported sightings of mermaids across centuries (Columbus claimed he saw three in 1493). The truth is that a lack of knowledge and poor lighting had sailors swearing they saw mermaids rather than what they were actually seeing—manatees. But tell that to a sailor…or in this case, a VC without a lot of time. Back to the disaster. We pivoted from introductions to talking about their company and ours, the problem we’re solving, why we’re the ones to solve it, etc., but we didn’t make much progress. We were met with a barrage of non sequitur questions or dismissals of our idea, our statistics, and our solution. He saw us as a mermaid. He had seen them before. He wasn’t interested. I offered to share our demo. He said he didn’t need to see a demo. He knew what he was looking at. His questions continued. I tried explaining in the simplest of terms, but he was convinced he knew more than I did. I offered to show him the demo again. He said no, again. He finally stood up to leave and I took one last shot. He begrudgingly relented (without sitting back down), and watched the demo. When he saw it, his face entirely changed. Him: I think I misunderstood your product. This is different from the other companies I’ve seen do this. Me: No problem. He left the room shortly after. We never reached out again after that meeting (would you?!), but it was a lesson that has reared its head many times on my founder journey: sometimes a VC will see a mermaid, and it’s your job to get them to see that it was a manatee all along. Our fire-tested deck, statistics, traction, and LOI’s didn’t do it, but our demo did. You can have everything in the world, but sometimes the key to convincing a sailor that they’re looking at a manatee is to let your demo do the talking. To the fellow founders: did you find your demos to sometimes be a silver bullet? To the VC’s: How important is a product demo to you? #vc #startup #venture #pitch #fashion #founder

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"I have too many meetings disrupting my ability to do deep focused work." I'm sure you've said that or people on your team have. What's the solution? Two approaches to this: 1.) Fewer meetings and disruptions 2.) A System for Deep Work in Shallow Containers Most people focus on #1. I'm a big believer in this, in fact Carbon Voice users reports a 60% reduction in the hours in meetings. That said, #1 can be impractical in many situations. So the best system is creating an efficient system assuming you have the constraint of smaller blocks of time (#2) and then use #1 to amplify the impact. What is the key to #2? I created (Thanks Google NotebookLM) a quick podcast style explanation of how to achieve that here: https://lnkd.in/ggvR8Cn5 Three basic concepts: - The need for long blocks of time (Deep Containers) is result of heavy ramp time. Solve this. - Break things into smaller chunks of execution - Use the smaller segments of time to plan or setup for faster execution of the container A key in all of this is to have quick ways to capture breadcrumbs and consume breadcrumbs to re-ramp. This is a great use of voice, where it's 4x faster to dump out. You can dump ideas while on a walk. You can listen to context while brushing your teeth in the morning to re-ramp. How do you manage the time slicing that life and work inevitably hand us?

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Grateful to Eric Schwartzman for sharing his perspective with the CommPRO community. In part one of his two-part series, Eric digs into how #pressreleases are evolving to serve not just #journalists and search engines, but large language models too and why communicators need to rethink how they write so clarity, attribution, and authority hold up even when context is stripped away and reshaped by #AI. A timely and thoughtful contribution that gives #communicators a lot to think about as the rules of visibility continue to change.

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