Stick Pins In It

The Pitch Deck is the Easy Part

There’s a lot of misconception about the startup world and about being an entrepreneur. One of the very worst pieces of advice is “do what you love!”

This sounds marvelous. Do what you love and life will give you a gold star and perhaps even some glitter-glue as well.

Except of course it’s complete nonsense.

The problem with reality is that it doesn’t adjust itself to sound-bites and simple-minded nostrums. Reality is a hard, stubborn, intractable beast that reliably ignores human beliefs and human follies.

There are still people out there who strap feather wings onto their arms and try to fly and guess what? Reality doesn’t care about their crackpot ideas of why this really should work. Reality ensures these folk fail every single time and always will. Birds fly because they have massive pectoral muscles anchored to a massive backbone. They have hollow bones to reduce their mass. They have a whole host of other flight-related adaptations. Humans have none of these things and even if strapping feathered wings to your arms is what you love most, you’re still going to fail.

I’m what people used to call a serial entrepreneur. I’ve started five venture-backed companies over the years, raising capital on the back of solid business plans that clearly showed how to exploit certain market opportunities and get from loss…