The balance and the pitch

This weeks classes showed me a very different side of entrepreneurship. I will talk about the elevator pitch later but I would like to first focus on the Monday's class which was essentially a talk by StudentIntuition co-founder Mark Heckmann. His talk and the questions he answered portrayed a flip side of being part of a startup that I hadn't entirely thought through. I first met Mark at Startup Weekend and then met him a couple of times at Thrill Mill where I used to go meet my friend Varun who had his own company there called OpenCurriculum which gives free K-12 education online. Mark actually told us the thin line you have to tread on in terms of family life and relationships when you start a venture. Most of these situations arise due to, guess what, money! Many times starting a venture means not paying yourself any money and investing in the business, therefore you need alternate means of financial stability. Mark is in a way, I could say, a bit lucky as his wife has a stable financial position. But that might not be the case for everyone, especially not me. If I go ahead and start a venture and even if I do get investors to pitch in how long will I be able to sustain my living hardly paying anything to myself and making sure the business works. Obviously, friends and family are always there to lend you a helping hand but the question is for how long. Which is why I feel planning a business to the nth detail is very very important. Yes you cant predict the future perfectly but you can predict what options you have to go for in the future which is one more thing that Mark is excellent at. I had asked him what his exit strategy(I wont use these two words together again) was and he gave me about 6 detailed "option strategies". He has sat down and thought about every scenario in the future as to where his company could go which is really important, not just for investors but for yourself. With regards to LuvWater I need to start thinking how will I be able to sustain myself and what options would I see open for me down the line i.e. 3-4 years in the future. 

The next class actually taught us about how to pitch an idea of which Mark was a brilliant example of. His pitch was absolutely amazing. He catered his pitch to the audience he was pitching to on the fly which just shows the number of ties he has done the pitch for people. Knowing your audience is very important otherwise you would give useless information to people who don't need it and don't care for it. I was looking at competitors for LuvWater sometime back and I found a company called charity:water which is doing a phenomenal job of giving clean water to people who need it through donations. They were able to raise about 100mil dollars in their first 2 years which is amazing. I tried to find out how they did this and well, surprise surprise, it was just the amazing pitches by the founder Scott Harrison. The pitches he does makes you cry and want to donate the rest of your life to giving clean water to parts of the world that need it. If you are reading this you should definitely watch it. He is frankly one of the people I look upon to make me a better pitcher.