No, it’s not Dave McClure’s customary firehose of expletives that make this video Not Safe For Work. It’s you. You’re Not Safe For Work in a startup, as far as he’s concerned
Angry? You should be. If the problem your startup’s trying to solve doesn’t make you angry, you won’t have enough passion to get through the startup nightmare. Not angry enough? Don’t give up the day job. Quit the startup.
Dave seems to be pretty angry. He’s probably angry about ‘startup-unsuitable’ types wasting his time by pitching to him. He’s even more likely to be angry about those people unnecessarily destroying their lives and those of their families, by throwing all their money and time into a doomed venture at the expense of their relationships, career and creditworthiness.
Rather than cover his whole talk, I think that the most valuable contribution that I can make would be to develop one of the points that he makes.
You need to be able to start your pitch by talking about a profound problem. A problem that that grips the listener with a visceral, involuntary reaction, evidenced by squirming, shuddering, grimacing or cringing.
You need to be able to generate that reaction in anyone that you need to pitch to. If you can do that, they may be ready to invest in you before you even start talking about your solution!
So, ‘angry’ fits a sense that Dave seems to be asking you to look for, as you stare into darkest recesses of your soul, trying to find a problem you care about enough to motivate you to go through with this whole startup ordeal.
The anger in question is a sense that ‘there ought to be a solution to that problem’. Why doesn’t the solution exist? Putting up with this problem is unacceptable! Not having a solution is intolerable! (notice how, if you were really angry, those phrases might be expressed somewhat less formally and would possibly be peppered with expletives).
The person listening to your pitch has to be able to feel the pain that the problem produces. Even if that pain is not something they have personally experienced.
This requirement for the pitch to overcome this potential ‘second handedness’ of the problem and the pain that it causes is a factor which is often overlooked when considering how to communicate problems and their resulting pain when pitching. You are not just pitching a problem that the person you are pitching to needs to ‘intellectually appreciate’.
Prospective investors have to ‘consume the problem’ in a peculiar way. They have to ‘resonate with the problem’, not just as their own problem, not even necessarily as even ‘the prospective user’s problem’, but in many cases as ‘the solution vendor’s customer’s problem’ (unless you are proposing to exclusively ‘offer your solution direct to the end user’) and this ‘multi-level conception of the problem’ can push your demands upon their imagination to the limit.
That’s why the problem needs to be communicated ‘viscerally’. Your pitch has to cut through the ‘layers of remoteness’ of the investor from the end-user experience. Blithely assuming that an investor will ‘just get it’ without you ensuring that the pain is ‘communicated at a gut level’ is enough to make an investor like Dave say things to you which are NSFW.