kushal chakrabarti | blog

Over at TED University, David S. Rose gives a great, semi-impromptu talk about how to pitch. Impromptu: Don’t knock the man’s hair like the first commenter.

You might be a social entrepreneur, working not for yourself but for the people.  You might be in it for the good and not the money.  You might not even be pitching a VC or raising money.  At some point though, for whatever reason, you’re going to have to convince a group of people why they should care about what you’re doing.  Working for the good and not the money is no excuse.  You need to know how to pitch — how to get your point across efficiently, interestingly, meaningfully.

What’s the single most important thing you have to convey?  Integrity.  Because that’s the key thing.  I would much rather invest in somebody — take a chance on somebody who I know is straight than someone where there is any possible question of, you know, who are they looking out for and what’s going on.

What’s the second most important thing after integrity?  Passion.  Entrepreneurs are, by definition, people who are leaving something else, starting a new world over here, creating and putting their lifeblood into this thing.  You have to convey passion.

Favorite comment?  From a David Shark, presumably a military man:

This should be mandatory viewing for military officers. PowerPoint has infiltrated every level and every service of the military, and 99% of briefers break all five of the “top five tips” for a successful presentation. 99% break ALL FIVE.

A great resource on pitching well — on presenting well, really — is Presentation Zen, a blog (and now a book too).  I’ve been a devoted reader for a long time.  If you haven’t ever been, go now.

Sir Ken Robinson at TED. One of the best talks — funny, powerful, informative — I have ever seen:

Kids will take a chance.  If they don’t know, they’ll have a go.  Am I right?  They’re not frightened of being wrong.  Now, I’m not saying being wrong is the same thing as being creative.  But, what we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. […] By the time they are adults, they have lost that capacity.  They are frightened of being wrong. […] We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.  Every one of them, doesn’t matter where you go, you think it’d be otherwise, but it isn’t.  At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.  Everywhere on Earth. […] Truthfully what happens is that as children grow older, we progressively start to educate them from the waist up.  And then we focus on their heads.  And slightly to one side.

If you think about it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university education.  And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing that they were good at at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.  And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.  In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than the beginning of history.

I can’t possibly compete with Sir Ken Robinson or his British accent.  Just go watch his talk.  It’s one of the top 5 talks you’ll ever see.  And, again, if you aren’t hooked by the 3:30-minute mark, I’ll eat my pants.