Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Pitching to Investors & Customers

#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.

Joining us today is Guy Kawasaki. We asked him his 3 best tips for startups on pitching to investors and customers on how to raise capital.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online, graphics-design service, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and executive fellow at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is the author of The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and ten other books.

Transcript of the Video

The big picture is that people should figure that pitching, if you were to use an online dating analogy, there’s Harmony where you fill out all this information and then you try to find your soulmate, and then there’s Tinder, where you swipe right, swipe left. Pitching is like Tinder where people make an instant decision.

So, when they’re making an instant decision, it’s very important that you get off to a very fast start. You should think of yourself as a fighter jet taking off from an aircraft carrier, not 747 taking off from SFO.

Number 2, I have this 10/20/30 rule of powerpoint, which is 10 slides which you can give in 20 minutes, smallest font is 30 points. If people just did this 10/20/30 rule, they would be better than 95% of the people giving pitches, right there.

And the last tip I offer is that you should make your background black. I really believe that black background slides that have white text or light text is much more readable and much more serious looking than black text on a white background.