Pitchcraft is on for tomorrow, and I’m really excited for all the learning we’ll be doing! Last day to register! (You can also register during the event as well) Attendance is at around 70 people now. See you tomorrow!
Category: ANNOUNCEMENTS
Universities Represent!
I had an absolute blast early today with 6 awesome student leaders (sorry Angeli, you don’t count anymore) talk about ideas on how to propagate the startup movement in campuses.
Basically, the group introduced themselves to one another, ate doughnuts, and then the awesome brainstorming happened.
There is one big plan the group is concocting (to be revealed soon). The next step is to get more universities represented in the next meeting, when more concrete details, will be decided on.
The next meeting will be next Thursday (May 23) at 3:00pm (venue still to be decided on). If you are an entrepreneurial student who wants to help out in spreading the startup movement in your school, do send me a message at peter@juangreatleap.com to get a reservation for this next meeting, along with an explanation as to why one of the seats needs to have your name on it!
Take the leap! Represent!
Last Two Days for Early Bird Rates for Pitchcraft!
Hey people! At midnight tomorrow, May 15, the early bird rate for Pitchcraft: How To Develop a Killer Pitch for Raising Capital and Recruiting will expire.
For the content it provides (great speakers, killer panel, chance for real pitches in front of institutional investors), I think this is a great deal, so you might want to grab tickets now.
You can do so here.
Juan Great Leap Calls on 5 More Student Leaders!
I’ll be meeting around 5 student leaders next Wednesday, 4pm, at the STORM conference room, at Unit 602, Centerpoint Building, along Julia Vargas. The main agenda will be: 1) How to push entrepreneurship and the startup movement in universities 2) How to help student entrepreneurs (Map here) Our conference room seats around 10 people, so there are 5 seats still free. I wanted to open it up to interested parties.
Do you want to join this conversation?
If you are an incoming undergraduate student, interested in entrepreneurship, and you’re the type of person who gets things done, then you might want to join us.
If you are interested, please do send me an email at peter@juangreatleap.com, along with an explanation on why you’d be a good choice.
(know anyone who might be interested in this? forward and share!)
May Open Coffee Is Now Brewing! Sign up now!
WHAT: MAY OPEN COFFEE
WHEN: 930am-12:00 noon, Saturday, May 18, 2013
WHERE: 47 East Co-working Compound (47 Esteban Abada, Loyola Heights, QC)
Inviting ALL entrepreneurial-minded people: young or old, newbie or veteran to join this month’s edition of OPEN COFFEE.
This event has been outdoing itself every month we have it, so I’m pretty excited to see what this month’s version will offer.
Don’t you miss it! Sign up here now!
Here’s how the last one went…
What is PITCHCRAFT and why you NEED to attend it
In my 10 years of HR work prior to becoming a full-fledged entrepreneur, I did an awful lot of presentations and gave a ton of job offers. I thought I was pretty good doing these things, so when I made my leap into entrepreneurship, I thought to myself:
“Hey whatever ‘selling’ I would need to do for my startup I can probably do preeetty well!”
Well, I was in for a rude awakening.
Pitching is Everything in Entrepreneurship
It turns out, selling (or pitching in startup parlance) is absolutely critical in startup development. ALL the major activities in doing a startup involved pitching:
Finding Co-founders:
Yep, you have to present something very convincing to get them to say yes. I had to go through dozens of rejections before I was able to perfect my pitch and talk my first partner into investing their time and money in me.
Recruiting Employees:
As a veteran recruiter coming into startup life, I thought this would be chicken feed.
Then I realized just how much help a brand name like “Chikka” helped me in recruiting when I was in corporate. Or how an actual office helped (and how a pseudo-office-home arrangement doesn’t help). Or how a recruitment budget helped.
I had to learn to use other strategies to help me.
Raising Money:
If my 2013 self saw my 2006 self doing the investment pitches I did before, this is how my 2013 self would react:
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Sales:
The lifeblood of any business. When my co-founder and I decided to split responsibilities for STORM during its first year, I took on the responsibility of being the “pitchman.”
After 7 years of selling for my startup, its really been only in the last few years (and I’m a pretty confident guy) that I can say to myself “I CAN DO SALES WELL.”
Prior to that, I was grasping at straws. I didn’t know what worked and what didn’t. I really learned about selling through trial and error. (I am hopeful you won’t need 7 years to get a knack for this.)
The Pitching Gap is Real and Needs to be Addressed
I’ve now heard literally hundreds of startup pitches, if you combine the pitches I’ve heard facilitating Open Coffee, hearing individuals out during Startup Saturdays, observing in Startup Weekend, and attending other startup-related events.
Here’s an observation:
Often, the best idea doesn’t get the best opportunities.
If you go to the next Startup Weekend for example, this is something you can quickly observe if you listen to the pitches: if you just rely on the idea’s merit and block out the pitch (you can do this by writing down all the ideas as they are pitched, try not to judge, and then when the pitching stops, you can go back to your list and then judge), you’d see a discrepancy between the ideas you find interesting and the ideas that actually get chosen by the participants.
So much depends on the pitchman and how he pitches.
And you know what? Collectively, I think we need a lot of work on our pitches.
(I just remembered someone I was talking to about this who was saying: “it gets worse when they think they’re awesome…and they’re really not.” This is partly why I keep saying self-awareness and humility are two very important traits to develop as a founder)
Post Startups Unplugged
After conversing in Startups Unplugged, Maoi Arroyo (no relation to the former president) and I agreed that our interests dovetailed and we needed to work together on…something.
During a recent meeting at the Hybridgm office in AIM, Maoi mentioned, “Maybe we could do an event on how to do the right pitch, targeting entrep…”
Ittookmeabouttwomilliseconds to say yes, realizing how critical addressing this gap was.
PitchCraft: How To Develop a Killer Pitch for Raising Capital and Recruiting
On May 25, 2013, we’re doing a seminar designed to teach participants what exactly the formula is on executing the right pitch, specifically for raising money and finding partners/recruitment.
It shall be held at the Fuller Hall of the Asian Institute of Management in Makati, from 1pm to 5pm.
This will be a paid event. Early bird rates (valid only up to May 15) are at P1000 for professionals and P500 for students (with valid ID).
Regular rates are at P1500 for professionals and P1000 for students (with a valid ID).
Here’s how the event will go:
1. Introductions
2. Keynote
3. Panel Discussion
4. Q&A
5. Post-Event: Real Pitching to Real Investors (Around a week after the Pitchcraft event, all interested participants shall be invited to do their pitches in front of real investors. This is the real thing!)
The keynote speaker for the event shall be Maoi herself. We’ll be announcing who the panelists will be soon enough.
I think Maoi’s the perfect choice for giving this seminar (I actually can’t wait to attend this myself). Her firm, Hybridigm, is a startup incubator specializing in biotech. She’s been helping startup founders hone their pitches for more than a decade now. (And if you’ve ever met her, you’d know it’s going to be FUN).
I find that one of the VERY interesting inclusions here is the Post-Event. We figured, the best learning happens during ACTUAL pitches right? So what did we arrange? A real pitching event with real investors. You can get to apply everything you will learn form the Pitchcraft proper onto an ACTUAL pitching process. (If you think about it…this is AWESOME)
How to Register
1. Send payment to:
BPI Account No: 0321-0230-61
Account Name: Hybridigm Consulting Inc.
2. Send a photo/scanned copy of the deposit slip to Angeli at angeli@juangreatleap.com
3. Angeli will send you an email confirmation (and an ultra-quick survey) to confirm your slot
OR
You could pay online:
1. Purchase the tickets online by clicking one of the buttons below:
RATE FOR PROFESSIONALS – P1500
RATE FOR STUDENTS (Students) – P1000
2. Send a copy of the Paypal receipt to Angeli at angeli@juangreatleap.com
3. Angeli will send you an email confirmation (and an ultra-quick survey) to confirm your slot
Register NOW!
If you are an aspiring/current entrepreneur from ANY field, I suggest you register as fast as possible to reserve your slot (150 slots only).
Let’s make our pitches count, eh?
Pitchcraft: How To Develop a Killer Pitch for Raising Capital and Recruiting is being brought to you by
and
with the help of our sponsors:
Open Coffee Postscript
I had another awesome time last Saturday morning at the April Edition of Open Coffee. Here are some of my thoughts and observations on now holding four of these formatted mixers.
1) The Sharing Continues to Amaze Me
My colleague AR told me that she plans to write a thesis about how the growing Filipino entrepreneurial community is debunking the notion of Filipino crab mentality. You can see this is in action in Open Coffee. In the pitches, you will see people will share business plans, ideas, and plans to people they do not know. (and unlike in “formal” pitching venues, there is no “prize” save for the learning. What’s magical is that the audience reciprocates – sharing their own insight, personal experience, and contacts to the one pitching. (You gotta see it if you haven’t yet.)
2) Get Ready for Sheer Variety
I think this is what makes the Juan Great Leap audience a bit different from other startup communities. Just on this version of Open Coffee alone, we had pitches for: a customer service consulting firm for front-liners, an essential oil which increases productivity, a crowdfunding site for volunteers, a published book targeting young entrepreneurs, a lactation consulting play on social media, a do-it-yourself online explainer video maker, a bazaar a unique social interaction app, and a consulting firm for boutique hotels. For someone with my need for different stimulus, this is like a kid in a Toys R’ Us.
Long story short, it’s also tremendous learning.
3) For the Most Part, the Pitching Needs Work
The 2-minute limit presents a nice quandary for presenters:
How do I get my point across effectively in two minutes?
Theoretically, pitchers are then forced to be ultra-EFFICIENT, cutting less-important details for the MOST important details.
I’m not so sure this is what happens though, as most people prematurely wrap up their pitch when the two minutes are up.
I think there can be VAST improvement over how most of us present their pitches. Pitching is a crucial part of the startup life. Entrepreneurs need to be effective pitchmen for so many different, crucial things – recruitment, raising money, sales, marketing, partnerships,etc…
This is something we need to improve. (more on this soon)
4) The Platform Needs To Be a “Safe Place”
In the March 47 East Open Coffee, student Christian Go hitched with me going home. He told me he almost didn’t pitch, because he thought the first pitcher was sort of attacked. (basically people said the idea wasn’t too good)
Remembering what Christian shared, I started this Open Coffee by underlining two things. I told people that: a) they have to be extra-conscious of HOW they give their comments, and b) that ALL comments have to have some semblance of being CONSTRUCTIVE.
The resulting pitch rounds and feedback-giving were super. I think people took the two things to heart.
I do realize that there are some people who prefer the Western-style “tell it as it is in my face” method. But this is the Philippines after all, a reminder makes all the difference.
5) Bigger and Bigger
I commented on the JGL FB page that OPEN COFFEE getting too big for the venue. The March Open Coffee had 40+ participants. This April version had 50+.
From an idea I wasn’t sure would pan out,
(would people share? what if no one wants to be the first to pitch? would people give useful feedback)
I think it’s safe to call Open Coffee a success after 4 iterations.
Onwards to bigger and better versions. Thank you so much to everyone who keep on making it so!
More pics here!
(For those who are new to Open Coffee, it happens MONTHLY, with the next one coming out mid-to-late May. Stay tuned!)
30 SLOTS LEFT FOR OPEN COFFEE. GRAB EM NOW!
Typically, most of the slots for open coffee get scooped up 2-3 days prior to the event. This time, half of the slots are already filled, with a full 10 days before the event. So if you want to attend, don’t walk, RUN to fill this form up. Remember, the April OPEN COFFEE event will happen at Bo’s Coffee at Bonifacio High Street at 9:30 am on the 27th. See you there!
APRIL OPEN COFFEE NOW BREWING – TO BE SERVED ON THE 27th!
WHAT: APRIL OPEN COFFEE
WHEN: Saturday, April 27, 930 AM
WHERE: Bo’s Coffee, Bonifacio High Street
HOW MUCH: Just buy a cup of coffee as a form of thanks to Bo’s for hosting us
For those who missed the last Open Coffee (which included this part), you just HAVE to join us for the next one! As usual, the level of generosity, idea-sharing, energy, learning and overall do-goodery are expected to be at awesome levels.
For the reservations for this one, I’m going back to Googledocs, as it seems to have a lower flaker rate and we can ask for more information from you (to help us improve JGL content).
Do reserve a seat NOW by clicking HERE. Limited seats.
JOIN A STARTUP! – I’ve recently updated our jobs page
Updated job openings!
Please do find our updated list of job openings in our startup network!
You can click on the link at the menu above or just click here.
You can contact either me (at peter@juangreatleap.com) or Angeli (angeli@stormrewards.ph) for queries or to send your resume.
JUAN GREAT LEAP 