Ep 68 – Pitch Perfect: Using Fluid Thinking for Dynamic Decks

47 min read

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About Patricia Liu

Patricia Liu teaches courses on startup pitch decks and presentations at Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford Health Care, startup accelerators, and VCs. Her pitch deck and presentation clients include early-stage startups to Fortune 100 companies. She advises startups through Harvard Business School’s StartUp Partners, Stanford Angels, and Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center.

Patricia is an angel investor and serves on the MIT NorCal Angels selection committee. She spent 10 years at Accenture, consulting Fortune 500 clients, before pursuing an interest in the culinary profession that led her to the test kitchen at the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. Patricia received SB and MEng degrees in computer science from MIT.

Episode Highlights

  1. How to set up your pitch so investors pay attention from the first slide
  2. How to make your pitch unforgettable to investors
  3. What the best pitches have in common, even when they describe complex technologies 
  4. The overlooked activity that can make or break your funding chances
  5. How to build trust and keep investors hooked with this simple hack
  6. How to really demonstrate a big and credible competitive edge
  7. The one thing that can kill your pitch—and how to avoid it
  8. Simple tools that can  turn complex ideas into instant investor buy-in
  9. The simple activity anyone can do to expose the weak spots you never noticed
  10. How to make your deck stand out in a sea of forgettable pitches

Links and resources

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Hello Patricia. Welcome to Invisible Ink. We’re so excited to have you here.

Patricia Liu: Hi Shubha. So glad to be here.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So we’ve talked a few times before this and I’ve seen your bio and you’ve got a very interesting professional journey. You started off with computer science at MIT and now you’re teaching pitching at Stanford. Walk me through that journey.

Patricia Liu: Yes. So, I graduated from MIT with my bachelor’s, a master’s in computer science and I went somewhat of a typical route. I went to work at Accenture in consulting. I was at Accenture for 10 years so consulting to Fortune 500 companies, managing, and delivering multi million dollar projects for them. When it came time to think about my next step to senior executive, I thought, well, let me take some time off and make sure this is what I want to do.

And I’ve always loved cooking, so I thought, let me go to culinary school. During culinary school, I thought I would just get sick of cooking if I were cooking every single day and I didn’t. The first kitchen I got into out of culinary school was a place called The French Laundry in Napa, and I really enjoyed my time there. I went on to cook at several other Michelin-star restaurants before returning to work for Chef Thomas Keller. It was a wonderful time. I loved it.

A few years ago, I became an angel investor and am still on the selection committee for MIT Angels. At one of the meetings, someone mentioned that out of all the other angel investors talking about the companies, I was the only one talking about their pitch decks. That got me thinking about this whole topic of pitch decks.

Then I had an opportunity to teach at Stanford on pitch decks. I was introduced to them by someone I had mentioned to that I love to teach about pitch decks, and that really started my journey into this whole topic of what makes successful pitching, pitch decks, and the whole fundraising journey.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: That’s fascinating. You know you’ve had all of these roles, and I really could not have picked more different roles for each of those chapters in your professional journey. Has there been one thing that has popped out or a theme or a learning—anything that has been kind of consistent through all of that?

Patricia Liu: Yeah, I think it wasn’t until this third career that I’m on right now that I realized that through these three different careers—Accenture, then cooking, and now teaching and working with early-stage companies on their pitch decks—I’m really using a lot of the same fundamental skills.

It’s about thinking and considering—whether it’s considering the client if I’m consulting, considering the guest if I’m a cook in hospitality, or considering the audience or the investor for people who are fundraising and pitching. From that perspective, it’s all the same skills, the same fundamental thinking—really thinking in principles, not tools, being intentional, paying attention to detail, that awareness in all of those. It’s all the same fundamental skills.

And this is why I think that if we apply those in that way, then we’re able to do so much better. Through everything we’re doing, if we really dig deep, we recognize the skills we’ve picked up over the years through our different experiences

Principles of Effective Pitching

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: As you were talking, I could almost imagine—building a pitch deck is kind of like cooking a fancy dinner because you pick the ingredients you want, figure out who’s going to eat it, and how best to put them together. I’d never thought about it that way.

So you talked about these fundamental principles. I’ll be honest it sounds a little abstract. Like here I am. I’m a founder. I’m trying to put a pitch deck together and you’re telling me all these, you know they sound great right but I have to create a pitch deck. So can you talk about what does it means from a concrete perspective? What does it mean when you talk about foundational principles and applying foundational principles when you’re doing something as concrete as pitching in a high stress situation?

Patricia Liu: Yeah, so it’s very interesting that I meet with a lot of founders, especially for early-stage startups. I often start the conversation by asking them: Do you know the difference between a loan and an investment? And it’s surprising that most of them do not. This is the key to why you’re pitching in the first place, why you’re creating a pitch deck, and how you’re approaching investors, right?

Because someone who loans you money is expecting that money back, and there is a contract stating that they’ll receive that money back, plus maybe some interest, in a certain amount of time. With investments, there is a certain amount of risk for a much larger return. That return is, on the conservative side, 10 times in a handful of years—5 to 10. Every company, every investor is different.

But it’s really keeping that in mind—how do you demonstrate the potential of you, your team, and your venture in a way that shows it’s very clear there is the potential for that amount of return on that investment?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So that is a really good example. You know I’m a finance person at heart, so you had me at loan and risk, right? You talked about being on the investment committee for MIT Angels and seeing all these pitches come through. Does any story kind of pop in your mind in terms of somebody who did it really well and somebody who was completely clueless, had a great product, great idea but were completely clueless about what exactly you were looking for in terms of that?

Patricia Liu: Yeah, I mean, I could talk all day about common mistakes I see, right, or things that people could do better. So MIT Angels, we primarily invest in deep science and deep tech. We have about 500 angel investors, and we do due diligence together, though we make our own individual investments. And it’s a great group because there’s always at least a couple of people in the group who have the expertise in that company’s field, so they can give us some guidance about how to perform due diligence, how to look at it.

But one of the common things I see with a lot of the pitches, especially the deep science and deep tech ones, is it becomes a research paper, or for a lot of the other startups, it becomes a sales deck or a sales pitch. And it’s not this. Yes, your research and your product are part of your company, but investors are investing in your whole company.

And that means, yes, your solution, yes, your research, but also your team. For early-stage startups, over 50 percent of the consideration is about the team because there will be some kind of pivots as you go on that journey. And investors are looking at whether the team has the skills and experience and kind of just the grit to navigate all of those pivots and those challenges.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you kind of brought up a few really important themes, right? There was one theme around, hey, I’m not a scientist here, I’m a business person, therefore I need to be putting on a different lens when I’m talking to you, my potential investor. I heard a second theme around, I’m not selling a product, but I’m still selling something, i.e., the prospects in my company.

And then I heard a third theme around. Okay, there are a lot of intangibles here. You know, it’s hard to put a number on it. That may be hard for like a deep science or a deep tech person to put their heads around. So it’s hard to kind of bring all of these together in a cohesive, cogent format. You talked earlier about like some kind of foundation, is there like a thread through all of this that helps you anchor?

Patricia Liu: Let me make it very clear. Okay. So earlier I talked about what makes an investment a worthwhile investment— that amount of return in a certain amount of time, right? And I often tell my students and clients that I consider myself the intelligent but ignorant investor. What does that mean? It means that I’m intelligent enough to figure things out and to invest, but I’m most likely ignorant, which literally means without knowledge about your particular industry because most times it’s deep science and deep tech.

So I think that for a startup to get the buy-in, to get that investment, one thing really needs to happen— the investor needs to completely understand the company at a high level, so much so that they can comfortably and confidently explain it to someone else. Because if you look at when you pitch to VCs, you’re pitching to maybe one or a couple of partners, right? But they’re going to have to then get other partners on board to make the investment, to make that final decision, right?

So when they’re explaining it, they need to get to that level of being completely comfortable and confidently selling your company, right? So that’s one. And also, I think that investors— people in general— until they fully understand something, and when I say fully, I don’t mean that they know all the details, but they can know it at a certain high level and very comfortably and confidently explain it, until they get to that point, they’re not able to get to the excitement, right? Would you ever get excited about something like a technology or even a concept that you really didn’t understand?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: No. Unless I know what it did for me and why I should care, it’ll be just a bunch of mumbo jumbo no matter how exciting it was to you as a technologist.

Patricia Liu: Right, exactly. And so I think back on my own personal investments, I needed to understand it to a level where I could easily explain it to someone else. There’s often the advice that if you need to understand something, you need to get to a level where you can teach it.

So same concept here. At that point, then you can figure out whether you’re actually excited about it. But that level of comprehension needs to happen. And I see that when I hear pitches—the ones that are successful—they’re able to explain their company and their product and all of that, what they’re trying to do in plain language, in a way that the audience easily, quickly understands.

Tailoring Your Pitch to the Audience

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so I’m sold. I’m excited. I want to do this. I want to learn this. I’m a founder. How do I start? Like, what is the foundational set of skills I need? Walk me through that.

Patricia Liu: There’s so many. My number one principle is: consider the audience. So my definition of considering the audience is tailoring your behaviors, actions, and deliverables based on understanding the audience—who they are, what they know, and what drives them.

Okay, so let’s talk about the audience perspective. So there’s a whole spectrum of investors. There’s one end of the spectrum—you’ve got the beginner investor who’s doing it as a hobby, maybe they’re an angel investor. Versus the other end where, you know, it’s a VC, right?

So you need to understand who is in your audience and then what do they know? So today, if you’re pitching at a Good Food conference, you know they’re going to have some level of food knowledge. If you have a food startup, you don’t need to lay as much groundwork right on that. But then, if you’re pitching your food company to a more general audience, you need to give a little bit more background.

And then, your deliverables. So, for example, for that group of audience, what kind of things would they find helpful?

For example, recently, I was part of a pitch, and it was to a committee that was going to make a final decision in a couple—well, in that kind of scenario, I would have prepared a one-page executive summary with the main points, right, that gave them a very quick reminder of what the company is about.

So that’s not something I usually recommend for companies, but in this situation, I think it would have been a good reminder when it came to making that decision a couple weeks later. So it’s really thinking through that. Or even things like—if you’re pitching to a mostly non-native English-speaking audience, speaking slower or even having a little bit more check-ins to make sure that everybody’s on board. That kind of thing.

I’m not saying to have a proliferation of versions of your deck because that would be a nightmare in terms of maintenance, but you want to speak to the appropriate person. If you’re speaking to a business audience, you’re not going to do a deep dive into technical details and then tailoring your behaviors, actions, and deliverables based on understanding the audience.

Behavior is more about your attitude. Are you more friendly and casual, or are you strictly formal professional? It’s based on what is the premise of that audience and what do they feel comfortable with. For me, it’s delivering the five-star, say, a five-star hotel experience where everything that the guest might want or need, you’ve already thought of. You’re mimicking the way that the audience is thinking. You’re taking care of all the questions that they might have. That just shows so much forethought for me that the audience then just develops that confidence in you, in your company.

Key Elements of a Successful Pitch

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So all of what you’re saying makes sense, right? Essentially, put yourself in the shoes of the audience that you’re catering to, right? And then go from there. But let me push back a little bit and probe you on that. Most of the time, at least the founders that I work with—I don’t know what your experience is—they’re first-time founders, don’t have a lot of understanding of, for example, what’s the difference between a VC and an angel, right?

A VC has fiduciary duty. They have to go pitch to their investment committee, whereas an angel might be here out of the goodness of the heart. Yeah, they want a return, but it’s not all about the return, right? So what have you seen working well to do that and do that efficiently because I also have to run a business and build my business?

Patricia Liu: So we talked a lot about principles. Let me get down to the nitty-gritty here. Kind of going back to what we talked about—what makes a good investment? How do you prove they’re a good investment? Well, you’re going to need to prove that your solution or product is a good one. And then you need to prove how you’re going to make money so that the investors can make their money back. And then third would be the team. And then your traction. I would say those four are key.

So one thing I see—a lot of people usually start with a problem statement. That’s understandable because a lot of people don’t know what the problem is that they’re trying to solve, right? But they spend so much time on the problem. No, the problem is only a stepping stone to the main act, which is your solution or your product. That’s what you need to be focusing on. The first few slides of your presentation are so critical that you need to focus on what’s important because people remember so much more from the beginning of a presentation than the middle or the end.

So some recent decks—I heard one person, they received a seven-figure investment from a major, major, one of the top two AI companies. I’ll leave it at that. Another one had 8 million downloads already, and this is for an early-stage startup. Another one had, I think, about 10 Fortune 500 companies as clients. Another one has a fortune 10 company co-founder as an advisor. Another one actually made 14 million revenue last year.

So these are five examples. And what did these five have in common? They used the template that you see everywhere online, and then they have all of these facts towards the end of their presentation because they were following that formula. Can you imagine how much they would have gotten the audience’s attention if they started off with these key facts?

So it’s really thinking about this. So I talked about the four pieces of information that you need to cover. Make sure it’s very clear—solution or product, your business model, how you’re going to make money, what are you selling to whom and how, right? That’s around the business model, and then with your team and traction.

I’m not saying in a particular order, but these four things, plus what’s impressive about your company. So then you think about what’s a logical way to lay this out. I don’t want to use the word story but it’s a logical narrative that explains your company in that way.

A couple of things, right? So I like to tell founders, go to pitch events and listen to other people’s pitches. And then afterwards, test yourself—what was that company’s problem, solution, business model? And what was the one impressive thing about them? And then you’ll immediately see whether they succeed or not.

And then what founders need to do with their own decks is to give their decks to someone else who’s never seen their deck before, and then have them read it for three to five minutes, take it away, and test them on that. What was it—the problem, solution, business model? And what was the one impressive thing about the deck? These are such quick activities, but they tell you immediately what really came across. Then you need to validate—is that in line with what you wanted to come across?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, a couple of questions here, right? One is, you have to actually understand what is impressive about your company, which means that you have to have a sense. Sometimes it’s obvious, right? It’s like big revenue numbers, having the marquee clients or funders, and all of that stuff.

Maybe that’s easy. Are there areas where maybe you’ve seen founders missing the obvious? Not just putting them at the back because the template said so, right? The template told me to, so I did it is not what I’m looking for. But something where they truly missed the significance of what they’ve accomplished.

Are there examples that come to mind and other ways that the method of first-principles thinking that you’re advocating would help to unearth those?

Patricia Liu: One example is a company—I had heard them pitch twice. The first time, they had mentioned the founder has over half of the patents in their space. That’s very impressive because that means you definitely have a great moat, and the barrier to entry is all set, right? But then the second time that they pitched, they forgot to say that, and they didn’t have it on their deck.

That was a big miss because that’s a very impressive thing that would really make someone feel very comfortable investing in that company versus another company or make that company stand out.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So we talked about the business model. We talked about the solution, the team, and the traction as being pretty critical. I want to round out some of the points on the pitch deck that also come into play.

The first question I want to ask is—understanding that you have to tailor it to the audience and their expectations and needs. Are there things that you see that are definitely not the right way to do it or clear errors that you see founders making on these four pages? And then I’ll come to the next.

Patricia Liu: Yes, in general, people put in too much content. 90 percent of the time, they put in too much detail. People get really overwhelmed by long and dense slides, just like if you received a really long and dense email. Before you even read it, you’re just like, oh, you just kind of seize up, right?

And so that’s what happens with pitch decks as well. You just see so much detail, and then you retain and understand even less than you would have if there was less information. The other thing is, I talked about how even the four pieces of information, or if you’re testing yourself, what was a problem solution business model for a company? Even after a 10-minute pitch, most investors can’t say it and don’t know it. I felt the presenter in that situation because they did not say it so clearly and so simply that people got it.

That’s the big mistake— not using really simple words, because most pitch decks like to use really long words to sound more intelligent and advanced. But what’s happening is most of us in the audience have to translate these long words into their simple words just to even understand what they’re trying to say. By that time, we’re already kind of delayed in terms of trying to catch up with what the presenter is saying.

So that’s one thing, and then two, just saying things very simply. For example, the business model is this— like, I see often just really too complicated, or you have to kind of piece it together really simply. What are you selling, to whom, and how? In terms of, are you selling an app? Are you selling a device? Just say it. Don’t say things like platform. Platform means a lot of things in a lot of different applications. So say exactly what you’re doing, to whom— your ideal customer profile— and then how is more like, is it a subscription? Is it a one-time fee? What is it in the order of magnitude? And then you can start giving more descriptions.

What I see most pitch decks have is they have this big header— problem, solution, whatever— but no other information. And then they’re going to just jump into details, and then the audience has no foundation for any of this. People are not able to understand what the company is about.

So that is, I think, the major thing about these pitch decks— they’re not presenting their pitch deck in a way that’s easy to understand by the audience, where the audience can really just have the basics of what that company is about.

So think about that. You’re pitching for five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour. And then really, people were just asking for three pieces of information for them to get to that level of excitement, comprehension, right? To think about, okay, do we continue on to due diligence? That’s a huge discrepancy, right? You could have gotten away with saying so much less.

Simplifying Complex Concepts

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I’m going to probe a little bit on that because we have a lot of deep tech and STEM life sciences-type founders. So first of all, you’re dealing with very dense matter, right? Like some fancy technical process. Then it has multiple applications. In many of these cases, you could take a technology and apply it to 10 different use cases.

What have you seen working well in terms of simplifying it to such a level that kind of hits me in the face as the audience enough to know that not only do you do this, but you’re different from everybody else who’s claiming to do the same thing. Because every startup I see is claiming to change the world.

Patricia Liu:  Yeah, so the startups I think that have done it well in terms of their pitching is, regardless of whether they’re deep tech, the couple of ones I’m thinking about were deep science. They were able to explain it in very simple terms and very matter-of-fact, just super simple to the point that pretty much anyone can understand it.

And they were able to adapt their pitch deck in a way to really hit on the main points of what’s impressive about them. One of them, I remember I saw a pitch at the Startup World Cup, and they had some kind of body monitoring kind of test that was many times faster than the traditional route.

And then they just showed a video, like a time-lapse of what theirs looks like and then what the traditional way is. And that by the time they finished the traditional route, they were still just starting the test because they had such a long setup, right?

But that is understanding— what is so unique, impressive about your company and then doing something to really showcase that, right? They’re able to really think about how they explain their company in a way, again, simply and tied to something that people already understand in the world and deal with in the world, right? And then going from there.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So that tie could be a tie to a problem, meaning that hey, do you know that in heart surgeries 30 percent of the time there are blood clots and we reduce it to like 1%, like that. Are there other ties to things that would make it immediately relatable that you’ve seen work well?

Patricia Liu:  I think back on my own investments in companies that I’ve been interested in. It’s either that it ties to something I know or they explained the problem and then show me something that is just so amazing that I am blown away.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. And I do understand the challenge I guess is what the startup founders’ challenge is. Each case is so unique that you have to kind of walk through it one step at a time for your own self and then figure out what is the right way to do it.

Patricia Liu: So one thing I do want to say is I do find that engineers and scientists struggle with this more so because they’re the whole disciplines of science and engineering you’re trained to be comprehensive about everything that you’re presenting right or you’re saying or it needs to be exact and accurate

I think this is a challenge for them to really abstract out so much and that this is the part where it’s so important to either give your pitch deck to someone else to read or pitch it to someone who is not in your field and have them repeat it back to you. It’s you. You can very quickly see how much of it they actually understood. And it’s not just about what they say. It’s about their demeanor. Do they sound really shaky on the details or what they’re trying to explain?

Because once the companies have pitched successfully, after one time of hearing, you’re pretty confident. You’re like 80%. They’re like okay, I got it. I understand the importance of the significance of this. Even for deep science and deep tech companies, you understand. Oh, okay, I totally get it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it sounds like a binary yes or no, right? I mean, no matter what the application, no matter how deep the technology, you have to pass a threshold where somebody appreciates the magnitude of the problem, what’s so unique about your solution and the kind of the crux of your solution enough to say this is different enough and it’s attacking a problem that’s big enough that I want to hear more. I mean, that’s all you want to get them. So it sounds like you strip away everything else that’s not serving that one purpose. Is that a fair characterization?

Patricia Liu: Yes, it really is. This is why I love the pitch deck because it is like writing poetry you are distilling down to the core to the essentials of your company. This is why I don’t create decks for people because you learn a lot about your company in the process of doing this. You learn about what is really at the core of what you’re trying to solve and what you’re trying to do and what are your customers etc.

The Competitive Landscape and Market Size

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Great. And then I want one other question on the pitch deck which is four elements you mentioned absolutely critical. But then there’s also other things like okay you have to talk about competition and you have to talk about whatever else, right? Are there other things that pop into your mind that you see frequent errors?

Patricia Liu: Yeah, so this competition and market size are good examples of fluid thinking and how to think a little bit more critically because always ask my students okay how many pitch decks have you seen where the company didn’t say they were the best or they said that oh we’re second best. No one. So then what is the point of the competition and everybody is saying that they’re the best, right? Because if the competitors that you’re showing are still in business, you’re a true competitor. They got to be good at something that you’re not telling me about. Right. So there’s a very healthy dose of doubt in that, right?

So with competition slide, the more interesting problem that the founders don’t have an answer to is a barrier to entering your moat. And it’s not about what the competition looks like today but it’s about what is preventing another competitor, a bigger one, from throwing money at it and developing something better in a shorter amount of time.

Right? So it’s the competitive landscape. It’s not rethinking how you have that conversation. How do you demonstrate that you have that moat you are bringing something unique there is a barrier to entry to what you’re doing with market size. All of them. Whoever has a market size slide. It’s just those three numbers right? TAM SAM SOM.

And I laugh too because so when you’re going through the interview process for say McKinsey they’ll do the case interview questions and they’ll say how many food delivery drivers are there in New York City? And it’s funny because I go through this first initial part with founders a lot of times.

And I ask why do you think they ask that question? Their response is oh because they want to know about the market segment. No, they ask that interview question because they want to know how you think and how you map out the solution. And the market size slide is the same thing.

It’s like VCs who invest in that startup space already know the numbers. They’re only looking at that slide to see whether you know the numbers as a founder. I look at that slide to see whether the founders are eye in the sky dreamers or they’re realistic. And yes I’m an optimist because I think one day there will be a company that has a market size slide that actually goes through the analysis of how they’re thinking about the numbers to show the way they’re thinking. And but I haven’t seen one yet.

This is why I talk about the fluid thinking, analytical thinking and critical thinking from the audience perspective right? Because when you put together those numbers it is an equivalent of saying we’re going to be the next unicorn and not providing any real analysis or logic behind that right? It’s saying okay these are three numbers believe me. Okay why?

Crafting a Logical Narrative

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Going to get there, right? Totally with you. Awesome, I love that. So I want to round out the pitch deck section, and then I want to go into this fluid thinking, because you’ve talked about that quite a bit. So, are there, like, big errors that you see in people, in addition to whatever you’ve said now, are there like, high level, themes, patterns of things that typically people get wrong?

Patricia Liu: Yeah, so I talked about having too much content. The other is not considering the audience. The other big one is not having an overall logical narrative.

So when I work with people and companies, the first thing I’ll tell them to do is show me the slide sorter view of their presentation so that it lays out all of the slides on one screen. I see at a very high level because a lot of them will start off with problem, solution, and a business model, and then two slides in, back to solution. It’s like all over the place. They don’t even realize that, but ultimately, you need to lay out your whole narrative in a way that’s a logical flow so people can actually follow and understand what you’re saying.

Sometimes they have 20 slides, 30 slides, and then their business model is not there, or their traction is not there, or they will have competition as slide number three, but then the solution is much later—that kind of thing. So it’s that overall narrative and making sure that you’re laying it out in a logical manner.

And yes, what I talked about before—your impressive information first, the critical information early on, so that even if some people get interested, they understand.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So, if I’m starting from scratch, what have you seen work well in terms of? How do I approach putting together a pitch deck that can be a good skeleton for all these different audiences?

Patricia Liu: There’s a few things. So I talked about the solution, business model, traction, and your team, right? And also your ask. Ask always comes at the end because investors kind of tune out after that. So I say ask should always be at the end.

And then okay, you start brainstorming. What do I want to say in each of those topics? Then I would think about okay, looking at what I would do a brainstorm on, let’s see, all the impressive things about my company, and then choosing which one to you I think would get the audience’s attention.

Kind of starting with that. And then with the solution. Some people say oh, you have to have a problem slide. Well, but I say if you have, say, a window cleaning robot, do you really need a problem slide? No, people get it, right? It’s a very relatable type of solution. So think about what kind of company do you have?

Is it something relatable that everybody already knows in which case you can build in the problem into your solutions. Like we’re doing this to solve this. You don’t have to put a lot of background on that. But then if you have a company that is less relatable, then you need a problem slide, but keeping that so short it is only the problem you’re solving, not your laundry list of all the problems in the world, right?

Then storyboarding out that narrative means talking through like okay, thinking about how you’re going to transition from one topic to the next and then rearranging it so that you know that story flows very well logically and is captivating.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I’m almost seeing as you were talking I could almost see kind of picking up a bunch of index cards and laying them out on the table and saying my first just writing out the headline of each slide and saying this is the one sentence that captures the heart of that slide. So when you read it literally you’ve got the story that you’re going to tell and it sounds like that would be a good way to just test it and say, hey does this make sense.

Patricia Liu: Yes. So when I teach about storyboard, the narrative,talk about using post it notes, but same concept or PowerPoint text boxes to lay things out, right? And then to take that one step further, if you use the McKinsey model of having really, descriptive titles and subtitles, which I’m a big proponent of, then you lay out your entire narrative.

It’s like the whole storyline of your entire presentation, right? Now, let’s say that your title, subtitle need to be really short like, fit on one line comfortably at a larger font. Because what happens is, the average amount of time that VCs spend on a deck. This was came out, this stat came out in 2024, is 2 minutes 18 seconds.

It is always funny to me because I’ll ask the question in class, how long is the average amount of time that ABC spent on a deck? And then some people tell me 30 seconds and then they have a 20 page deck. If you think it’s 30 seconds, how did that align with your deck? So, it is two minutes, 80 seconds, and I’ll say personally, because I do review a lot of decks. I usually know what’s going on by slide two or three. What was your question?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Like, what gives you, what does that trigger to?

Patricia Liu: It’s all of the hidden clues, right? It’s about how they lay out information, whether there is a sense of logic in how you explain something, how much information you have. Even fonts tell me a lot about, that company and how they’re laying out what are they saying, how are they saying if they’re using a lot of buzzwords, like, if they even have a tagline that says we are AI powered, then it’s like they missed the point.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I’m just curious. Why?

Patricia Liu: Because everything is AI nowadays, so when people have that kind of deck, I will often ask, oh, do you use computers too?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. I have a “web enabled” business.

Patricia Liu: It is to that point now. Unless you are a true AI at your core, developing something particular for AI, you should not lead with that. It is the exact problem or your solution that you have. The AI part should not be the main thing that you start off with anymore.

These are all the hidden clues into where that founder’s minds are at. How do they have that sense of logic? Are they able to speak in a way that follows kind of business etiquette in being professional? Can they explain something without just doing a deep dive into details?

Can they consider the audience? Right? Because if they’re doing that deep dive or they’re not laying it out, that’s easy to read, then it is also not considering the audience. I think considering the audience—why is that so important? Well, one is so that you’re presenting things in a way that the investors understand.

But more so than that, it tells me that they’re able to consider the other party. So considering the audience means that they can consider the customer, which is critical for that company’s success.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I love it. I never thought of it. What you’re saying makes total sense, but I didn’t put those two together until just now, which is that this is the fastest, probably most reliable single data read you can get into a founder’s thinking through the pitch deck, which I hadn’t captured. I hadn’t quite put those two together but now I did.

Fluid Thinking in Business

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I want to kind of shift gears slightly and talk about fluid thinking, right? You’ve talked a lot about fluid thinking. It sounds too abstract to me. So can you help us understand what you mean by fluid thinking and how I can become more proficient at fluid thinking?

Patricia Liu: Fluid thinking is about adapting to new situations and solving complex problems, thinking fluidly without exact prior knowledge or experience, or using your previous understanding and knowledge towards the new thing.

So whether it’s your pitch deck, your company, or even a new career, it’s all of that, right? It’s really about adapting to new situations and solving complex problems, thinking flexibly, things like that.

So when I started cooking, I learned how to make pizza, and I remember someone who developed pizza recipes for a wood oven company said, always use both hands to put the toppings on. Because you’re using both of your hands, you’re fully utilized. And I thought, that makes so much sense. Right.

So then I thought back to my Accenture days. Yeah, as a manager or senior manager, I always made sure my entire team was fully utilized before I worked on my own work, right? Because then we’re all fully utilized. And then when you’re doing pitch decks, it’s the same way. How do you make sure you’re fully utilized, or how do you make the most out of the situation?

Or even the cooking, you put something on the stove to cook while you’re doing other things. So that’s just an example of using your previous knowledge towards new things and adapting it, and how much you adapt it.

So a lot of this also is coming from—so I mentioned I studied computer science at MIT. I was there for five years for my bachelor’s and master’s. During that entire time, I was never taught a single programming language. The professors taught concepts, and problem sets were due the following week. It was up to us to learn the programming language.

They taught us to think of concepts, and that these programming languages are just tools. It doesn’t matter which tool you’re using because you understand the concept of how you’re getting there. Are you the architect, or are you the handyman kind of thing, right?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Yeah, am I understanding you correctly? So if I kind of interpret what you’re saying, what it sounds to me like is you go through life, you have a certain—usually you have some professional training, right? Which comes with some core concepts, whether it’s computer science in your case or accounting in my case. There are some core concepts that have worked well for several decades, if not centuries, that you can then start with.

So you start with those and then you start kind of boiling it down to not the rules of life but rules of how things work, right? Is that what you mean by fluid thinking and fluid principles?

Patricia Liu: It is thinking in principle. So it’s how deep can you get to that level, right? I talked about when people remark on my three diverse careers. My response is always they require the same fundamental skills. It’s about how deep can you go. Now I’m not a philosopher, so I’m not going to be talking about the meaning of life and blah blah blah, but it’s really can you apply how successful you can be in your new endeavors is how much you can really leverage the principles and what you’ve learned in your previous experiences towards this new thing because then you can really leapfrog to early successes in that new endeavor.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So here’s a challenge, right? So a lot of times, especially for mid-career entrepreneurs, I know so much that I don’t know what I know. Meaning it’s become so ingrained in how I think. And now I’m starting on this new career, similar to kind of like how you were starting as the cook and you thought you didn’t know anything, but you actually did.

How do I start to surface and make transparent? And how do I start building a base of what these principles are? Like, where do—I’m trying to make this concrete. Like I’m starting today. I want to be a fluid thinker. Where do I start? What do I do?

Practical Tips for Entrepreneurs

Patricia Liu: I think it involves bypassing your brain in a way. Because I’ll tell you why. There’s an exercise I do with my class where it’s a pitch deck class, and yeah, none of them are investors. But I do an exercise where I give them three pitch decks in 15 minutes to read through all three pitch decks—so five minutes per deck—and then decide if they’re going to invest and how much with play money. They all do really well.

The reason I do this exercise is to teach the concept of thinking, because we all have that skill, but we don’t realize we already know how to think from an investor perspective. But it is only when we are under that time crunch, where we’re not really thinking and overanalyzing but just using what we already have to get through this activity, that we realize we already have the skills we need to think from the investor’s perspective, to make investments.

To do that—whatever you do to help you overcome the barriers for your brainstorming—is the same thing, the same skills, or the same framework that you would use toward this new thing. Because somehow, you need to bypass the overanalytical part of your brain toward this new thing. Because then, you will truly discover what you inherently already know. Does that make sense?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: It makes total sense. So in some, I know you didn’t say you’re, you said you’re not going to talk philosophy. It sounds very Zen to me but that’s a good thing. Right? So you want to bypass the ego. I get that. I’m all about that. So one way that typically people do, and we people, especially in Zen philosophy, they talk a lot about archery and how at the moment of releasing the arrow, you kind of, obviously one way is practice. So the archer has done it so many times that at that moment he or she just lets go of the brain and practice takes over. So one way is practice. What are some other ways when I can leverage and tap into this intelligence I already have but I don’t know?

Patricia Liu: One of the things I’ve always depended on is working on something every single day. So if I were doing a pitch deck, I work on it every single day, even if some days only have five or ten minutes. The reason being that it’s in the back of my mind—I’m constantly thinking about it.

So as I go through the day, I’m looking at new things. I am processing it also for this thing that I’m kind of just thinking about, right? The pitch deck. So this is why I tell people you have to work on it every single day because only then can you get the most out of your results. You’re just constantly thinking about it, working on it, even when you’re not actively working on it—you’re passively thinking about it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Any other practices or habits or behaviors that you think will help to bypass the brain?

Patricia Liu: Either time crunch or time, I don’t procrastinate. I really try not to procrastinate, but I do work on it every day. And then sometimes, when I find that I’m being over-analytical, I’ll put on some music or something. I know it’s not my perfect work, but at least I’ll get some stuff down on paper that I can then go on to kind of cull and revise later on.

So it’s different for everybody. I would say people know themselves best. They’ve been through situations where they had writer’s block or something. Whatever it is that you need to do, and it is not procrastinating because you’re not going to have your best ideas then, it is. But you’re putting yourself in that time crunch or whatever you need to get to that point where you’re just putting stuff on paper. Who cares? You’re not thinking, no lens, no filter, just putting it down and then kind of going through that.

Key Takeaways and Final Thoughts

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if I had to take a big step back, what I’m taking away from this entire conversation—I know this is not about recipes, I know it’s not about cookie-cutter, but it’s also about giving me something to start with. What I’m taking away from this conversation is, first, understand that what you’re giving is a narrative, and it has to be a very tight narrative. You’re going to hit on a few key points that, no matter what, you want them to walk away with in a way that sets you apart from everybody else.That’s kind of like the first big takeaway that I took from this conversation.

The second big takeaway was the purpose of those three points—whatever they are—is very specific. You’re asking a certain person to make an investment in you, which means they understand what’s unique about you, they understand what your risks are, but they also are excited enough to say, I want to take that. And you give them the tools and whatever ammunition they need to get them past that bridge and say, Yes, I’m going to make that investment. That’s kind of like the second big point.

The third big point I took away is that doing that is not a one-time event, but it’s learning to train yourself in a method of thinking where you bring your whole self and everything you’ve done in the past, trusting that you have a lot of what it takes—even though you might not have everything that it takes—but enough to get you started and build some momentum.

And lastly, train yourself to—how can I put this—train yourself to keep building it one step at a time so that the effort compounds, the returns compound, and your thinking compounds, so you get the best result.

The last takeaway is that it’s not just a pitch deck. It is actually the one insight they have, the one data point that they’re going to get. It’s kind of the thin-slice theory—people make judgments based on thin slices of data, and this is a thin slice on which they’re going to make a call on you. So don’t ignore it, and don’t just think, Oh, it’s just the pitch deck, I can convince them. It’s actually the one sample they have of everything behind it. It has many layers behind it.

Patricia Liu: It is a really good summary, and I would say I often compare pitch decks with resumes in job search, right? Where is your resume, how much time do you spend on a one-page or a couple-page resume? A lot of time. How much time did you spend on your LinkedIn? Hopefully quite a bit. But it is kind of the barrier for you to get to that next step—to invitation to an interview or the invitation to pitch for a pitch deck, right?

And one thing I wanted to add, one of the things I was thinking about is with the fluid thinking—it’s when I had the opportunity to develop culinary classes for Thomas Keller, and I said, let’s teach techniques, not recipes. Let’s teach people how to think about cooking, right? So they can cook anything. And so that’s what we did, because if you just teach recipes—which templates are—you can only do that one thing. But if you teach about techniques, to how to think, then you can do anything so much more.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. So we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything that you wish I had asked you, but I didn’t?

Patricia Liu: No, I mean, it is a great conversation.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And to conclude, let’s say I’m inspired. I have a pitch coming up in a month. I’m now introduced to this method. What takeaway would you give me tomorrow morning? What do I start one concrete thing to do, to move towards this goal?

Patricia Liu: I would say give the deck to someone. If you have a deck, give it immediately. Give it to someone—a colleague, friend, or whoever and do that test of what they actually understood and retained of those four questions. The basic questions really are: problem, solution, what’s my problem-solution, business model. That’s basic. Just ask them, you know, would you invest? Why or why not?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you don’t even go to the team interaction. It’s just, do you understand the essence of what I’m trying.

Patricia Liu: Yes, because that will tell you immediately where you’re lacking, and then that’s where you start.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome. And because if you don’t cross that barrier, there’s no further conversation. They don’t care about a team because whatever you’re doing isn’t important enough. This has been an amazing conversation, Patricia. I really appreciate the time you took to walk us through it, and I’m sure all our founders will be super interested and will also benefit a lot from it. Thank you so much.

Patricia Liu: Thank you. 

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