Getting to WOW - Secrets of Pitching to VCs - with Bill Reichert, Garage Technology Ventures and Pegasus Tech Ventures

**Ray Rike** (0:01)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bill Reichert, partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures, managing director at the Garage Technology Ventures, and author of Getting to Wow, Silicon Valley Pitch Secrets for Entrepreneurs and a Best Seller on Amazon. In today's episode, we will be covering three main topics, the value of clear, credible, and compelling communications and investor pitches, a pitch deck outline in what not to miss, and presenting versus storytelling to investors. What's the difference? Bill, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Bill Reichert** (1:18)
Thank you, Ray, and thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it. In any case, the origin of all this goes back to the time when I was an entrepreneur. When I was an entrepreneur, I was coached that the key to being successful with raising funds was to develop a 56 slide pitch deck with data and evidence and logic and graphics and compelling arguments like a legal brief for a closing argument in a courtroom to drive home to the investors that it was absolutely incontrovertible that you should invest in our company. And then, so I was pretty successful doing that. As it turned out, I started or co-founded or restarted four different startups, two of which wound up going public. And then I wound up becoming a venture capitalist. I got together with Guy Kawasaki and a few other people, and we started Garage Technology Ventures. And the big idea behind Garage was to be the first venture capital firm that was designed for the benefit of entrepreneurs. We thought that was a radical concept. And what that meant was we wanted to share all of our learnings as entrepreneurs, all of our mistakes, all of our successes with entrepreneurs to help them become more successful. So as part of that, you know, I spent a lot of time coaching entrepreneurs on how to be effective in pitching their startups. And what I discovered is that we, as a community, had actually been doing damage to entrepreneurs in the way we were coaching them to pitch to investors.
So I was trying to figure out what is wrong with these standard approaches to coaching entrepreneurs, you know, these template pitch decks and these sort of standard advice. And I discovered that as a community, we misunderstood the whole idea of pitching. So a few things came out of that. One that we'll talk about is that a pitch is not a presentation. You do not have a fixed amount of time with dedicated attention by the other side to listening or even caring about what you're doing. It's very different than that. The other thing I realized is that investors don't invest with their brains. Believe it or not, investors don't invest with their brains. Investors, like all the rest of us, investors invest with their hearts. And so the secret to being successful, reaching out to an investor, is not a logical argument with tons of data and tons of evidence. The secret to getting to an investor is to get them to fall in love, to get them to say, wow, that's amazing. Tell me more. Come into my office. Meet my partners. Wow. Wow is an emotional response, right? Wow is not an intellectual response. Wow is an emotional response. And so you've got to figure out how to get the investors heart beating faster, get their pulse racing, get them excited about what you're doing. And so that's the cornerstone of getting to wow, which is you got to be clear what you're doing. You got to be compelling. You got to get my heart racing and you got to be credible. You got to get me to believe that what you're saying is true.

**Ray Rike** (4:34)
So Bill, let's double click in getting to wow, because over your years of seeing hundreds, if not thousands of entrepreneurs making the pitch, you realize that all the data in the world didn't convince you. They had to get to your heart. They had to have that emotional reaction. What was the catalyst though for you to say instead of telling that to the entrepreneurs I'm coaching, to actually take the time to write a book and help thousands and thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs?