Investors say no to most pitch decks for four fixable reasons: 1) the deck tries to say everything and buries the point, 2) there’s no clear hook on page one, 3) the “why now” argument is missing, and 4) the whole thing runs on logic without making anyone feel anything.
Meet Carl Fudge
Carl Fudge is the Founder and CEO of Presentation Mode, a narrative strategy and design firm that helps founders own the room in high-stakes moments. His background is unusually well-suited to the work. He trained as a psychologist, with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in organizational psychology, then moved into strategy as a business analyst at McKinsey.
After business school he spent eight years at IDEO, the Silicon Valley firm known for design thinking, where he learned to build and incubate new businesses. He caught the startup bug, joined a company in the 2021 boom, and was laid off in the 2022 bust. That pushed him to build his own thing.
Today he blends all three threads, strategy, design, and startup experience, into one narrow craft: helping founders raise capital. He’s run the process around 100 times and helped companies raise more than $1 billion. As he puts it, he’s “a mile deep and an inch wide.”
Why Do Investors Lose Interest in a Pitch Deck?
The most common mistake, Carl says, is throwing everything in the kitchen sink. Decks get dense, technical, and overloaded, with no clear throughline and no logic connecting one slide to the next. When a founder tells him the story finally “feels logical,” that’s the win: the pieces go together and one point leads to the next.
The second mistake is burying the lead. Founders save the most exciting thing for slide 10 or 12, on the assumption that investors will read that far. They usually will not. If slides one through nine are not compelling, no one reaches the payoff.
Carl frames it in terms every founder already understands as a consumer. It’s the Netflix problem. If the first couple of minutes of a show aren’t interesting, you move on to the next one. A deck works the same way, so page one needs a hook that earns the next nine pages.
“A common mistake is to bury the lead, and to say the really, really cool thing on slide 10 or 12. But you just don’t know that someone’s even going to get there, and probably they won’t if slides one through nine weren’t that interesting.”
~Carl Fudge
What Is the “Why Now” Argument, and Why Do Founders Forget It?
Every strong story has urgency. Carl calls the “why now” the piece most decks are missing, and its absence quietly kills deals.
The argument has two halves. First, why now is the moment for this business: maybe it wasn’t possible until recently, or the window is closing and someone else will move if you don’t. Second, why the investor has to act now rather than wait. Without that urgency, an investor has an easy exit: “That’s interesting, why don’t we stay in touch.” Most of the time, Carl notes, there’s no follow-up three months later. It’s a polite no.
Plenty of good companies fail because they were the right idea at the wrong time, too early to matter. Making the temporal case, not too early, not too late, is how a founder turns a maybe into momentum.
Why Logic Alone Won’t Get You Funded
Here’s the insight Carl keeps coming back to, and it’s where his psychology background shows: investors need to feel something. Founders tend to build their pitch as a stack of logical arguments. A $300 billion market. A feature matrix where they do A through E and competitors only do A and B. All true, all logical, and none of it makes anyone feel anything.
The problem is that plenty of good businesses have good plans. Logic gets you to credible. It does not get you to funded. Carl points to the old “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads: one side listed megabytes of RAM, the other showed how the product could change your life. Same category, radically different feeling, and eventually a radically different market outcome.
If a founder cannot get an investor excited, that investor will not be excited to carry the deck to their investment committee, and the deal loses momentum before it starts.
“You have to make an investor feel something, maybe that’s excitement or urgency or pressure or FOMO or belief. Humans are wired to make decisions not just based on what the brain is telling them, but what the heart is telling them too.”
~Carl Fudge
How Much Should You Put on a Pitch Deck Slide?
On the tactical question founders ask most, long detailed sentences or spare talking points, Carl is direct: less is more.
The deck is the appetizer, not the main meal. Its job is to pique curiosity, not to answer every question. Two things happen when you overload a slide. First, information density backfires. Drinking from a fire hose means you take in less, not more. Second, you give away the reason to keep talking to you.
Carl even holds certain details back on purpose, so an investor has to ask. That flips the dynamic from a founder trying to tell an investor everything into an investor leaning in and asking to learn more. It also moves the meeting from a performance into a conversation, which is where rapport gets built and where a founder can start evaluating whether this investor is someone they want in board meetings for the next decade. Fundraising, done well, is a mutual exploration, not a hot seat.
“The deck is the appetizer and not the main meal. It’s hopefully the reason why you get to speak to an investor, and it’s not everything you have to say to them.”
~Carl Fudge
How Should AI Startups Fundraise Differently?
Carl splits his advice between AI-native startups and everyone else.
AI companies are in hotter demand, but they compete in a sea of noise. For every “AI for X,” investors want to know why it matters and, more pointedly, why a big model provider like Anthropic or OpenAI could not roll out the same feature and erase the business overnight. So the emphasis is on a sharp value proposition, a defensible niche, and something ownable.
Non-AI startups face a different challenge, especially in hard tech or physical tech. Some categories are simply cold right now, ag tech and clean tech among them, and companies get penalized for the label alone. The move is to reframe the category and back it with evidence. Carl gives the example of a company built on biology that positions itself as an asset-light, high-margin, scalable technology company, then proves it with margins rather than claims. The work is anticipating an investor’s objections about capex and time-to-return, then getting ahead of them.
Storytelling Is a Core Founder Skill
Carl’s closing advice reframes fundraising itself. It’s not the thing you get through so you can go back to building. It’s part of building. Some companies succeed or fail purely on their ability to raise, and history is full of great companies no one ever heard of because they couldn’t get the dollars in the door.
Storytelling pays off well beyond the raise. The same clarity that convinces an investor also recruits senior talent and lands the enterprise logos on your website. For technical founders who would rather be in the product, that’s uncomfortable, but Carl believes the skill can be learned and practiced, and that it compounds.
The proof is in his proudest projects, where founders tell him they barely use the deck at all.
“The founder says, ‘I don’t even really use the presentation, because I’ve got the story so clear in my head that we don’t really even need to go to the slides.’ That clarity of thought and clarity of message is what gives people long-term value.”
~Carl Fudge
Learn More
Thank you to Carl Fudge for joining Startup Success. Across the conversation he covered why investors lose interest, the “why now” argument founders overlook, why emotion drives funding decisions, how much belongs on a slide, and how AI is reshaping the fundraising playbook.
To learn more about Carl and his work, visit presentationmode.co or find him on LinkedIn.
For more stories from founders in the trenches, subscribe to the Startup Success podcast in your favorite player, and find more tools and resources for your startup at burklandassociates.com.
Intro 00:00
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Kate 00:18
Welcome to Startup Success. In this episode I sit down with Carl Fudge, founder and CEO of Presentation Mode. Presentation Mode is a deck design agency that builds world-class fundraising presentations for VC-backed tech startups. We explore why investors lose interest during pitches, how founders can make their investment thesis obvious from the start, and the storytelling mistakes that create confusion in fundraising. Carl also shares how strategy, narrative, and presentation design work together to build credibility, and why clarity is becoming an even bigger competitive advantage in today’s AI-driven startup landscape. Thanks again, Carl, for being here.
Carl Fudge 01:08
Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to getting into it.
Kate 01:10
Yes, I am too. This is such an important topic. I think it would be helpful, before you get into Presentation Mode, if you wouldn’t mind kind of sharing with us your background and what led to founding it, because it’s pretty unique.
Carl Fudge 01:26
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a psychologist by training, so undergrad in psychology, and then grad in organizational psychology, and so I’ve always been very interested in the psychology of humans in the workplace, right? Like, we spend the majority of our waking life at work, you might as well design that organization to be as healthy and as functional as possible. That was kind of where I got my start. That led me to getting interested in strategy. So I went to McKinsey as a business analyst. And after business school, I landed at a company called IDEO, which many people know about. Many people have never heard of it, but it’s a design firm based in Silicon Valley that’s famous for design thinking, which is the whole process of really deeply understanding human and user needs before designing solutions and products or those actual needs. And so I was there for eight years, and it was probably the most formative part of my career, and that was where I learned how to think creatively, and how I learned how to build and incubate new businesses. And so that got me to catch the startup bug. I went to a startup, was hired in the boom of ‘21 and laid off in the bust of ‘22 and after that I said, you know what, I think I’m, I think I’m ready to do my own thing, I think I’m ready to build my own business, and kind of take a crack at doing things my way. And you know, I got pulled into Presentation Mode by a little bit of a happy accident, but I can get more into that. But that was really, you know, how I built my journey, is like the strategic side, the design side, and the startup side, and now I bring all those three things together in the work I do every day with founders at Presentation Mode.
Kate 02:47
What a perfect mixture of your background. I mean it’s perfect everything from even from the psychology part of it.
Carl Fudge 02:55
Absolutely.
Kate 02:57
Plays a bit role in this. So then tell us about Presentation Mode, just because I think it would help the audience to understand you really are an expert in this.
Carl Fudge 03:06
Yeah, I mean, I’m a mile deep and an inch wide in terms of my expertise, and a lot of people, you know, frown at me and say that’s a kind of a niche business, isn’t it? Like, is that really a thing? Is that something which is valuable? But essentially, what Presentation Mode is, is we’re a boutique firm, we call ourselves a narrative strategy and design firm, and the work that we mostly do day to day is with founders to help them craft compelling pitches for when they go out to raise capital from VCs. As you know, fundraising is fundamental to startups. You know, fundraising is almost like the oxygen – if you don’t have it, then you can’t go and build your company, and so it’s existential for these founders to go and raise capital, and it’s a difficult thing. They don’t necessarily enjoy it. It can be seen as a distraction from their day-to-day work. And so, what we do is we help empower them by building a really killer story, an argument, because it really is an argument. You know, you’re telling an investor why they should allocate their capital to you and not somebody else’s company, right? So you have to really make that argument. You have to make it in a very compelling and very convincing way. And so we help to position the companies effectively to VCs. We help write their story, put in the right words and the right messaging and the right order together, so that the story is fluent and compelling. And then we bring it to life visually with amazing designers who design, yes, great presentations that are visually attractive, but also ones that are very clear and easy to actually read and digest, so you can take that information, and you know, as you probably know, investors look at these pictures for a very minimal amount of time, like less than two minutes, and so you have to get everything about your company into an extremely concise and very clear, very simple package, and that’s quite a difficult thing for most people to do when it’s their own stories, and so that’s why we’re here to help founders navigate that process and ultimately build their confidence, because it’s a, it’s a difficult journey, founders get more no’s than yes. Many, many, many more no’s than yeses, and we just want to give them the best possible chance, the best possible shot to try and make the most of those conversations they do have with investors, so that they can try and convert as many as possible to further conversations and ultimately term sheets as well. So that’s the work that we do mostly day to day, and it’s the work that I’ve enjoyed doing and practiced a lot. I think I’ve done about 100 times now, and help companies raise over a billion dollars, and so you know I am an expert in something very, very specific and very niche, but you know, I think it’s very important in the VC world.
Kate 05:31
Well, congratulations. Those are impressive stats. And then I love how you, you know, referred to it as an argument, because I’ve heard so many VCs on this show say, you know, make me have to invest in you, right? Like, make it so compelling. And then I think what we see a lot of when we interview founders, they’re passionate, they know everything about what they’re building, but the ability to translate that and explain it to somebody else, and fundraise is so difficult.
Carl Fudge 06:05
Absolutely.
Kate 06:06
It’s not the same skill set. So, how do you work with the founder or founding team? Like, what’s the process?
Carl Fudge 06:14
Yeah, so I mean, it’s a super, it’s a super collaborative process. I like to think of myself as an editor. I know you come from the journalism world, and as you know, an editor and a writer, they go hand in hand. You know, the thing which comes out of the writer’s pen isn’t ready to be published in a newspaper or a book or on stage or in a movie. You know, it’s the same process. And so I’m really here to be a true thought partner and strategic thought partner to the founder, going through a series of steps. The first being a workshop where I asked them a bunch of questions, which, if you’ve ever done therapy, is a similar process to therapy, where I am creating a safe space and asking open questions that allow a founder to really explore the topic of their business and how they should think about positioning it, and that tends to lead to quite a few little sparks and brain waves and aha moments where people leave kind of the first session and say oh like this is great like I feel like we’ve made a lot of progress and so we actually haven’t really done anything I’ve just asked you some questions but they so rarely get that time to be able to think and talk things through with it with a true thought partner, and like really verbalize and put some words to their thoughts, and so the first step is conversational-based workshopping. And then the second step is we take all this information, their past decks, what they’ve told us, and our own insight and intuition too, and craft an outline of a narrative, putting words to paper in sentence format. So here’s the problem statement. Here’s how we articulate the value prop. Here’s how we articulate the traction, the future potential, the market size, the business model. So we put words to all these key points, and then we visualize it in a deck, and then we help them practice. We have a trained actor who comes in to help the founders, actually, because it is a performance, right? Like it’s almost like being on stage, like, I like, I like Broadway, right, and I always think about how the 500th performance of Hamilton is nearly indistinguishable from the first performance, right? Like, it’s just they got it down to a fine art. And it doesn’t seem mechanical or robotic, but it’s perfect, right? Like, they hit the marks, they deliver it with the right intonation, the right emphasis, the right cadence, and so we help them with the verbal piece as well, and then we stick around for a couple more weeks to help them navigate the process of feedback from VCs. VCs are very opinionated, and they, and they have to take on all these different messages, and we help them sort through, Okay, are there any common patterns and themes emerging here. What feedback do we really want to listen to? What feedback is maybe a distraction, just one person’s opinion that we should sort of throw out. And so, as you know, my background is, you know, psychology and design, so we’re here to really be very smart and attentive to what the investors are saying. And so then we can make tweaks and changes based on that feedback. So that’s really the end-to-end process from almost like a therapy session at the start all the way through to practice and rehearsal and navigating the feedback process at the end.
Kate 09:09
What a great process. First of all, so helpful to have a third party, like you said, to talk it through, ask probing questions, help organize. But you said something that I wasn’t expecting you to say, and that was the practice part, and the actor, because we, one of our most popular shows to date, it was a couple years ago, and people still listen to it, was somebody who came on and talked about actually presenting your deck, making eye contact, how to phrase things, go through the slides, so many people are terrible at public speaking. They’re super smart, know their information, but can’t handle that part of it. I love that you include that as well.
Carl Fudge 09:54
Well, I mean, we just want to be as helpful as possible to our founders, you know. One thing as well, which is relevant, is that our business model, you know, we typically will ask for a success fee in our projects, both because we want to really align ourselves with our founders and say, Hey, you know, we’re not here to rack up hours, we’re not here to maximize fees, we’re here to help you achieve your goal, and so we’ll always put quite a bit of our fee on the line, depending on the clients actually succeeding and achieving their goals, because otherwise, what’s our incentive, right? We want our incentive to be aligned with our founders. And so we have every reason possible to make them as successful as we can, and so really it comes from that. It’s like, what are the things that we can do to help these guys, so that when they leave our little process, they’re almost like ready to go into battle, you know. They feel like they’re prepared, like they’re hardened, so they feel good, they feel primed, like they’ve got the talking points down, like they feel confident in what they’re about to go and say. And I know one of my phrases, too, is that there’s no perfect story, but there’s the perfect story for you. And if they can find the one that feels authentic to you, that you feel like you can deliver, then you’re going to go into more confidence as well. So, we’ve just really been, and it’s obviously been kind of over time, you know, it wasn’t like we had all of this on day one, but over time doing this work, we’ve just tried to really find some logical pieces that we can add to the equation that are additive and that give those founders more confidence and higher chances of being successful. So yeah, that’s kind of where that comes from, but it makes complete sense, and in some ways is the most valuable hour of the whole of the whole six week process, in many ways.
Kate 11:31
Well, it sounds like you all are a true partner. Let’s talk about the deck for a bit, because that is where so many founders struggle. Are there certain components that you feel every deck must have, or is it specific, you know, to that story, that startup?
Carl Fudge 11:51
Absolutely, and I’ll touch on a couple of them. And by the way, the deck is vital. The feedback from most VCs is Okay, cool, but can you send me your deck? That’s what they will use to determine most of the time if it’s worth actually taking a meeting with you, because their time is extremely precious. And so if that is your billboard, if that is your right to play, then you might as well try and make that deck as good as it possibly can be. And the mistakes that most people make are trying to throw everything in the kitchen sink in there, and just information overload to super, super dense, super technical, without a clear throughline, without clear logic. That’s something which we hear a lot from our founder clients, like they’ll say, Oh, this story feels logical. It’s like, yes, that’s exactly right, there’s a throughline, there’s a logic. These pieces go together. And so I think every story must have logic. Every story must have a clear hook at the start, a clear reason why on page one you should keep on reading through 23456789, and 10. A common mistake is to bury the lead, right, and to say the really, really cool thing on slide 10 or 12. And it’s like, yeah, but you just don’t know that someone’s even going to get there, and probably they won’t if slides one through nine weren’t that interesting. And so every story has to have some, and that’s true in every form of storytelling, you know. It’s true in every movie, you know, think about this Netflix world that we’re in, where you start to watch a show, and if the first couple of minutes aren’t interesting, you’re like, Nah, next, you know what else is there? And so it’s just.. it’s not.. it’s not really rocket science, because we’re all consumers of content all the time, and we all do the same exact thing. And so it’s just the same thing with pictures. It has to have some compelling opener, some compelling hook. And then the last thing I’ll say is every story must have urgency. There has to be a clear reason why now is the time, now is the moment. Why this is the time for this business, maybe because it couldn’t have been possible until right now, or if it’s not done right now, then the situation will change, and it won’t be the right time anymore. But also why the investor has to invest right now as well. And so that is the mistake, or the missing piece that is often not in many decks and many stories, and that gives an investor the excuse or the reason to say that’s interesting, but why don’t we stay in touch, let’s check in in a couple of months time. And that’s a sort of polite way of just saying no, because most of the time there isn’t follow up three months down the line. And so I think every story has to really have that really strong ‘why now’ argument. And many companies miss the mark and fail because they were the right idea but too early, and so that temporal piece of really making the argument as to why right now is the moment, not too early, not too late, and if we miss this opportunity, someone else is going to go and do it, and so we have to take advantage of this moment. I think that’s really, really important.
Kate 14:54
Wow, I think you just hit on something that I’ve heard so many VCs say. They say I want to feel like if I don’t invest I’m going to miss out. And you’re right, I don’t think a lot of founders think to include that in their pitch deck. They think just why they’re doing it, and TAM, and you know, the cool product features is enough. But not the why now, the urgency that today they don’t think about the competitive pressures that this VC sees, you know, 20 decks a week.
Carl Fudge 15:28
Or a day. Yeah, and I want to touch on something you said, because you said investors want to feel. And I just want to pause on that word, because I think that that is such a key, a key insight, because I don’t think people think about that. I think we think about this in such a logical way, even the things that you just started listing, TAM, that’s a logical argument, right? Hey, there’s this big $300 billion market, or product features that, hey, look, we can do A, B, C, D, and E, and the competitors can only do A and B. Again, like another logical argument, but these kinds of logical arguments don’t make you really feel something. And yes, there is a piece of your argument that has to be logical, right? Like, we are building a business, we have to have a good plan, like absolutely. But there’s a lot of good businesses out there with good plans, and so why should yours be picked? You have to make an investor feel something, maybe that’s excitement or urgency or pressure or FOMO or belief or something, right? Like, I think that humans are wired to make decisions not just based on what the brain is telling, but also what the heart is telling them too, and, and how they feel, that level of energy, you know? If you can’t get an investor excited, then they’re not going to be excited to go and tell their investment committee, and then you’re just not going to get any momentum. And so I think that feel word is so overlooked, but also so important. And I don’t think many investors admit that they need to feel something, but I think they absolutely have to, they absolutely have to.
Kate 16:58
Yes, you are spot on. That’s what gets that deck forwarded. That’s what gets it presented to the investing committee. That’s what moves it along. Yeah, that’s where your psychology background really helps in this. You get understand the psychology of this whole interaction.
Carl Fudge 17:15
Absolutely. Well, it’s a sales exercise at the end of the day, you know, you are selling a piece of your company to an investor, right? So you are, you are trying to make a case as to why they should purchase, you know, obviously with an investment in terms of shares, but why they should purchase a piece of your company. And so sales is deeply, deeply psychological, you know. It’s really not about why these features make for a better, I mean, I always think about the…do you remember those ads? I used to love these ads, the I’m a Mac and I’m a PC. (Yes.) Remember those ones? It was a ludicrous illustration of the totally different ways that PCs and Macs were selling and marketing themselves, right? One is talking about features: we’ve got this many megabytes of RAM. And the other one is talking about how it can improve your life. Like, we don’t get viruses. You can be creative with a Mac, you can make a video, right? And so you do sort of have an equivalent product, but you’ve made a consumer feel a certain level of excitement and desire for the Apple, whereas you just haven’t been able to make them feel anything with the PC. And that was a total, you know, I think a crystal clear illustration of how important biopsychology is, and how essentially the same products can be framed and communicated so differently to achieve such radically different results. And I mean, at that time, I think PC was the clear market leader, and I think now, I mean, aren’t we all Mac people now? We’ve all got iPhones, yeah, massively. That’s a big reason why, you know, it’s a big reason why,
Kate 18:49
Yeah, you know what, you’re the second person to bring that up on this show about that.
Carl Fudge 18:55
The ad? That particular ad, or that concept?
Kate 18:57
Just the Mac PC, but how they did so well on the psychology of it all, and making people feel. And you’re absolutely right, I don’t think founders see it that way. They see it as I’ve got to present all the facts, like you were saying, the logic. So that alone, you’ve just shared something so helpful with founders. One thing we get, and I have to ask you this – this is very tactical – founders always struggle with, do I put long, long sentences, all the details on my slides, or do I keep it more big picture, talking points? How do I use visuals? Any advice you can give around that? We see that question over and over again.
Carl Fudge 19:41
Well, definitely less is more.
Kate 19:45
You feel that way?
Carl Fudge 19:46
100, 100% I think very much that the deck is the appetizer and not the main meal. It’s the introduction. And it’s not the full story. It’s hopefully the reason why you get to speak to an investor, and it’s not everything you have to say to them. So I absolutely think that less is more, and I think that that’s for a couple of reasons. I think one is because of just the pure idea of information density, and the more you throw at somebody, the less they actually can absorb. I mean, it’s like that drinking out of a fire hose analogy. They don’t actually get to drink more water that way. In fact, they get to drink less because it’s overwhelming, right? So, there’s the idea of just giving somebody the right amount of information they can take on, but there’s also the idea of giving something to somebody that piques their interest and makes them want to learn more, and that’s where you really want to get to, is where an investor is curious, like you’ve piqued their curiosity, and then they want to talk to you. And then through the conversation, then you can typically build much more engagement, much more rapport, much more interest. And so in some, in some, and I don’t want to make this sound deceitful or mischievous, but in some ways we actually like to hold certain pieces of information back, either so it can be discovered or so that it can be asked about. Because I think if you can do that, then you totally shift the conversation from one where I am trying to tell you everything about why you should listen versus an investor being like I’m pretty curious about this, so actually I’d love to know a bit more about your business model, and a bit more about how you go to market. And I think that you shift the power dynamic much more that way, and I think and founders too, I think they prefer answering questions or being in a dialog than they like to present. And so I think the quicker you can get this into a real conversation and less of a performance the better. And that’s a great way too, I mean everyone thinks about, oh man, I’ve got to get this capital from an investor, right? Like, they have this power imbalance, like I have to suck up to them. But you’re also looking for somebody who can be a real partner to you as a founder, too. Like, you’re looking for a really smart, kind, collaborative person who can help you on your journey. And so the better you can get into a conversation, or the quicker you get into a conversation, the more you can approximate Hey, is it good to work with each other? Do we have a good vibe and rapport? Is this somebody I want to be in my board meetings for the next 10 years, right? So, I think it’s a bit like an interview versus an internship. I’d rather see what it’s like to work together versus just to be in the hot seat, asking and answering a bunch of questions.
Kate 22:16
Excellent points. Really good things for founders to remember in that, because you’re right, you do want more of a partnership. You should be looking to, as a founder, of what this VC is like.
Carl Fudge 22:28
Yeah, if they’re just evaluating you, I don’t think that they’re going to be the right fit. It should be a mutual exploration of could we be great partners to each other. Because guess what, funds can’t achieve their goals without startups, so it’s a symbiotic relationship, right? We need each other, and I think it should be approached that way.
Kate 22:48
That’s a good point. What about this market? This is a really unusual market with AI, you know, taking off. What do you.. what’s your advice for founders in this particular market? Because it’s unusual.
Carl Fudge 23:05
It is. I mean, I think that the advice is probably bifurcated between your AI startups, your AI native startups, and your non-AI native startups.
Kate 23:15
Okay.
Carl Fudge 23:16
And with the AI startups, it’s a little bit different, and so they’re obviously more hotly in demand. However, as a sector, however, there’s so much noise around them, there’s just so many AI for X, and I always find that interesting too, because we sort of talk about the process not so much more about the outcome, like not AI for X, that does what you know, AI for X, like, okay, well, AI for accounting, but why does that help me? How does that change my life? AI for tax, AI for anyway, and so I think with AI startups, I think the emphasis is on clarification of your value proposition, and how do you carve out your niche. How do you make it clear that you’re differentiated? How do you make it clear that you have something ownable? Because the big elephant in the room with everything AI is Okay, but couldn’t Anthropic or Open AI just basically roll out, roll out an app or a feature that could just kill your whole business. And so making that case that A, you’re differentiated in this noisy sea of AI startups, and B, you’ve got a defensibility story, is really, really, really important. So, for the AI companies, that’s where the conversation is. For non-AI companies, I mean, it’s difficult. Especially if you’re into something which is more like hard tech or physical tech. I think for those companies, it’s about trying to nail the category story. What category are you in? There are just certain categories that are just pretty cold right now. Ag Tech, for example, Clean Tech, for example. And some of these companies are struggling to raise because they’re perceived as being in those categories, and for those companies it’s about trying to shift the narrative to make your case that you are deep tech or tech bio. One of these companies, one of these sectors that is a bit more in demand, and obviously not just making that claim and being like great, but actually proving that and showing the evidence, whether that be in terms of the margins that you can attract, or you know, the big concern is always are you going to be heavy on capex. It is going to be 10 years until you make a return. And so trying to understand what are some of those objections that an investor might have, and then really getting ahead of them, saying, yeah, we are going to be an asset light, high margin, scalable technology company. Now we happen to have biology as our core technology, but if you put that to one side, like this is a great high-margin SaaS company, when you look at the economics of it. And so I think for those companies it’s about positioning and trying to shift the emphasis of the narrative, so that you can position yourself as a company that really fits their investment goals and fits their return profile.
Kate 25:52
Incredibly helpful. It’s apparent, you really know what you’re talking about here. I think I could pick your brain for hours for our listeners, but we’ve come – we’re coming up on time, so I have to ask. We always wrap up the show. Just some general advice you can leave for the startup founders listening.
Carl Fudge 26:09
Well, obviously, I’m quite biased in terms of the work that I do, but I would say one piece of advice is that fundraising versus company building, you know, this is not an either or, it’s and. I think fundraising is a part of being a founder and a company builder. Some people say, Oh, thank God fundraising is over. I can go back to actually building a company. And I’m like, No, this is part of building the company. Some companies succeed and fail purely based on their ability to raise capital or not, you know. There’s companies that we have never heard of that would have been amazing, just couldn’t get the dollars in the door, and there’s companies that were like only okay, but just managed to out fundraise everybody, and then were able to overtake them. And so I think A, it’s something which you should always be thinking about, but also B, think storytelling is a core skill for every founder, and it’s not just for fundraising. It’s important for your customers. It’s also important for your employees, right. So, this idea of communicating what you’re doing, why that’s exciting, why people should come on and get on board and join the journey and help you, that’s always going to be important. And so I know for many founders that are technical, they love to be in product world, they love to be coding and engineering. I know that, and like, I love that, and like, thank God for those people, but for those people to achieve their dreams, they have to be able to find a way to communicate and package that into a way that’s exciting for the outside world to engage with, even though that’s not people’s comfort zone. I just think that learning that skill, and I believe it can be learned and practiced, think will pay dividends for those people in their, in their founder journeys.
Kate 27:45
That is fabulous advice, because we see that all the time. They’re so caught up in the tech, like you said, the coding, the product, but it’s the storytelling. You’re right, not just for the fundraising, but to get those big logos on your website as customers, to attract the senior talent that you need to execute on your vision. You’ve got to be able to sell more than just VCs on what you’re doing. You’re absolutely right. That’s why working with you all, if you can solidify some messaging and some storytelling early on. You can use that, I’m sure, as you’re attracting talent, as you’re talking to those companies you want to bring on as enterprise clients, right?
Carl Fudge 28:27
100%. You know, it’s quite funny because when we first started, we – our tagline was Pitch Perfect Presentations, right? So we were so focused on the actual slides, but the projects that I’m most proud of are the ones where the founder says, you know, I don’t even really use the presentation, you know, and I’m like, what do you mean? They’re like, well, because I’ve got the story so clear in my head that we don’t really even need to go to the slides that much, I can just say it, and people are, Oh, okay, I get it. And maybe you send the slides afterwards as a lead behind or a follow up, but the work and developing that clarity of thought and clarity of message, that’s what really gives people a lot of long term value. And it’s like same thing with media, talking to media, talking at conferences, if you got that in your head, you’ve got these talking points ready to go, then it can be kind of rinse and repeat, you know, you can keep on using those same talking points again and again and again. And you trust them, you know that they work, you know that they get the right response, and then you can really generate some great momentum that way.
Kate 29:20
Absolutely, and every then everyone’s walking towards the same goal, all your employees, everyone. Very cool. So, tell us, where can we go to find out more information about Presentation Mode? What a cool company.
Carl Fudge 29:33
Thank you. Well, we just relaunched our website yesterday, actually, Presentation Mode.co with our new positioning of “Own the Room,” because really we’re here to empower founders and investors to be able to make the most of these key moments in life, where a yes or a no can change the trajectory of your company and your life, and so we want to help you own those moments and own those rooms with the great storytelling, the great materials, and the great practice. And so, yeah, check out our website, presentationmode.co or find me on LinkedIn, Carl Fudge. I have a relatively unique name, so pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn as well.
Kate 30:09
Thank you so much for being here, Carl. We learned a lot.
Carl Fudge 30:11
Thank you, Kate. It was an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the time.
Outro 30:15
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