How to ask for investment in your pitch

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This piece is derived from David S. Rose speech at this TED Talk. David Rose a serial entrepreneur turned serial investor is also the CEO of Gust.

Then comes the ask. This is where you tell me how much you actually want to get. You're looking for 5 million -- at what kind of valuation? Two million at 100,000. What's the money in so far? Who invested?I hope you invested personally. Because I'm following on. If you can't invest in your own thing, why should I invest in it?

So I like to know if you have friends and family, or angel investors in there, or you've had more VCs before. What's the capital structure up until this point? And then finally, having done all that, you've now told me the whole thing, so now you've got to bring it back to that conclusion. This is that rocket going up. So hopefully everything has been positive, positive, positive, more positive. And everything, everything you say clicks with me, and it all makes sense. And I'm thinking, "This is really, really great."

And then you take me back to your logo. Just your logo on the screen. And I look at the logo -- okay, good. Now I come back to you. Nothing else to look at, right? And now, you've got to wrap it up and tie it up here. You've got to give me the final, you know -- boom! -- the final pitch that's going to send me into space. Now, in the process of doing this over here, how do you remember the sequences and doers?You've noticed here that I'm not looking at the screen, right? The screen is, actually, in this room, is set up so it's in front of me. So, I couldn't even see if I wanted to. So now, how do I know what's going on here? Well, I've got a laptop in front of me, but you're looking at me. And you're looking at this. What do you think I'm looking at? You think that I'm looking at that? No, I'm looking actually at a special version of PowerPoint over here, which shows me the slides ahead, the slides behind, my notes from here, so I can see what's going on. PowerPoint has this built into every copy of PowerPoint that's shipped. If you use Apple's Keynote, it's got an even better version in Keynote. And then there's another program, called Ovation, you can get from Adobe, that they just bought last summer. Which actually helps you run the whole timers, and it lets you figure out what's going on.

So, here's my wrap up to take you to the moon, right? David's -- I usually do a top 10, we don't have time for top 10s. So David's top five presentation tips. Number one: always use presenter mode, or Ovation, or presenter tools, because it lets you know exactly where you're going. It helps you pace yourself, it gives you a timer so we end on time and the whole bit. Number four: always use remote control. Have you seen me touch the computer? No, you haven't. Why not? Because I'm using remote control over here. Always use remote control. Number three: the handouts you give are not your presentation. If you follow my suggestions, you're going to have a very spare, very Zen-like presentation, which is great for conveying who you are and getting people emotionally involved. But it's not really good as a handout. You want to have a handout that gives a lot more information, because the handout has to stand without you over here. Number three: don't read your speech. Can you imagine? "Well, you should invest in my company because it's really good." It doesn't work, right? Don't read your speech. And the number one presentation tip: never, ever look at the screen. You're making a connection with your audience over here, and you always want to do a one-on-one connection. The screen should come up visually behind you, and supplement what you're doing instead of replace you. And that is how to pitch to a VC.

Startup Turkey also hosted David S. Rose and below is his talk at the conference.

https://vimeo.com/121111560

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