“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”–a Greek quote made famous by Isaiah Berlin I first met Andrus while the two of us were pitching at the Estonian shark tank in 2012. A year later, we got to work on a marketing-related slide deck for…

Pitch Confidential #001: Yrjö Ojasaar of Change Ventures Pitch Confidential is a series of candid conversations on fundraising, sales, leadership, and communication. The show combines street-level insights from practitioners and a quant-like focus on data. Each episode aims to reveal the ‘kitchen-side’ stories from pros who do the legwork. To…

Virtual Demo Day Edition — Picture a parade of a dozen or two founders delivering 2 to 3-minute pitches in front of a packed room of investment firms. The partners at those firms are sitting on folding chairs while rocking their fleece vests or branded T-shirts. They are in charge of deploying capital they raised…

7 data-driven tips for having conversations with investors. — During the past weeks, I’ve done webinars with over 150 founders ranging from Oman to Poland. Just over a month ago I’d be preparing them for high-stakes presentations in front of packed conference halls. Today, the limelight got replaced by desk lamps. The coveted headset stage mics and pics gave…

How to speak to your audience’s sense of logic — Before becoming a go-to stock image for philosophic quotes, Rodin’s “The Thinker” was originally part of another merrily named sculpture — “The Gates of Hell”. Those very same gates that Dante and Virgil pass through to take the scenic route through the nine concentric circles of Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Once…

5 pitching habits to fight the forgetting curve — Here’s the fleece-vest-wearing elephant in the room that founders tend to ignore: the average European conference can have anywhere from 100 to 300 investors in attendance. Major ones like Slush and Web Summit have upwards of 1,100–1,500, with significantly more attending startups than investors by a ratio of 2:1. Around…

How to survive the first 3 minutes of your talk — Former U.S. President Barack Obama (and probable greatest speaker of our time), listened to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” to mentally prepare for his 2016 DNC speech, and the 24.4 million people who would watch it. At 00:53 Eminem spits a visceral set of rhymes on what it’s like to lose it…

A 7-point guide to speaking with meaning at conferences — Conferences are boring. Not the Elon Musk kind of boring. The kind that makes you, the attendee, want to saddle a Falcon 9 rocket home to binge on the latest seasons of American Gods, Billions, and Silicon Valley. All of them in one glorious, dopamine overdose-inducing sitting. That, or you…