As you work through a funding process, you’ll eventually hear the words ‘due diligence’. Due diligence is the work that an investor does to verify that your company actually can work, and that everything you’ve said makes sense. Nobody really invests just on the basis of a pitch. When there’s real money involved, you need
There are no two ways about it: giving a speech on a controversial topic is a daunting task. One thing that can help is to focus on why you’re giving the speech. Maybe you’re spreading the word for an organization you care about, or maybe you’re emotionally connected to the topic. Either way, you have
We’re in the middle of raising our seed round, and that means I get to explain our company and its strategy to lots of different investors. Since this is one of those things you have to do anyway, it’s best to lean into it and take advantage of all that free advice – experienced business
When it comes to plagiarism, Mark Woods sums things up nicely in the title of his blog post “don’t do it!” The thing is, of course, that avoiding plagiarism is much harder than it might seem. As Mark points out, there are actually three kinds of plagiarism; wholesale copying of entire works is only the
Last week in this diary I discussed our remote-working strategy. By adopting a company culture of remote and flexible work, we gain access to much larger pool of global talent. The trade-off is that you have to work harder to ensure team cohesion. Making this work is not just about fancy tools like Slack, it’s
After you’ve been giving tech talks for a while, you can think about doing a Grey Young and give a talk without slides. Until then, you have slides to worry about. Here are three classic mistakes of tech talk slides: Code. First, don’t use it. Second, if you must use it, keep it to a
As a startup, one early decision was to adopt remote-working as a fundamental structure. How has this worked out after one year of execution? Let’s look at the reasons for that decision first, and the desired outcomes. We can then match this up with reality to see the quality of the decision. Starting voxgig in
It’s possibly the most common nightmare in the public speaker community: speaking without slides. I’ve always regarded it as something of a personal holy grail—something to aspire to. Years ago, I came across The Memory Book by Tony Buzan. This book taught me the ‘memory palace’ technique, which has helped me more than I
Once you have users for your online product, how do you sell to them? This an important question. I often speak to aspiring founders about their ideas and the first question I always end up asking is: “Who will give you money and why?” The need to ask this question is a remarkably frequent occurrence.
This week we’ve struck gold with a guest article by none other than Simon Gibson, founder of World Speech Day. I’ve known Simon for some time now, I am the Irish ambassador for World Speech Day and can confidently say he is one of the most inspiring, driven people I’ve met. His dedication to and advocacy
