Starting is Momentum
Hello dear reader,
Visiting thoughts from an earlier time that felt similar to now in a business aspect. However similar, the learnings in this past year are knitted into my actions.
Observing the changes in the growth.
Lately, pitching has become a focus again.
A pitch is a pitch, whether going after VC funds or grant funds or just for the sheer masochistic delight of it. Every pitch is an opportunity to gain clarity and focus.
Something has been missing from my story, and I have been looking in the wrong direction for that missing piece.
I suspected my lack of essential sales knowledge was holding me back from clarity in my pitch delivery. After all these years in tech, on the dork side of the road (happily), I have yet to fill my cup with sales and outbound marketing knowledge.
Sales is a money minting skillset in the right hands; the clever seller deftly crafts enticing narratives around anything that needs selling. A lack of swarthy sales maneuvering however, is not the missing component causing me to confuse rather than entrance the listener when I am in the pitch hot-seat.
Interlude: AI has become an exploration tool for my creative process. This is the latest in a series I am working on about geometric forms and expanding our thinking.
Stay tuned for my AI-imagined interpretation of the beautiful libraries of the world!
…continuing.
The latest pitch day was crafted by an incredible leader, who has been a beacon through the quagmire of tech layoffs of 2023 (Wendy, you are incredible). This remarkable leader, a dynamic woman with an impressive C.V. created a startup group for ex-techs who are ready to leave the corporate bonds for good, or at least entrepreneurially-curious.
The mega-Slack channel for laid-off tech expats has been a lifeline for myself and many in my world who were made "redundant." What an awful thing to say about a human in the midst of losing their livelihood.