25: Share Your Idea Early and Often – Erika Block

My name is Erica Block and I'm a serial entrepreneur. My background is a little bit unusual. I spent the first half of my career making theater and actually my training is as a playwright. That evolved into directing and ultimately producing and I co-founded a theater company and 15 years after I was doing theater, I ended up creating a tech startup called Local Orbit which started as a theater project about food. This is Finding Your Venture Episode 25. Share your ideas early and often. Stories are 22 times more memorable in facts. So telling a good story is essential for attracting customers, investors, co-founders and employees. But what if you're not comfortable telling your story or it's weird or unconventional? Also, what about protecting your idea from competitors? You don't want somebody to steal it, right? Well the potential benefit of talking to people about the problem you're solving and the stuff you're working on is enormous. It dwarfs the risk you take in sharing. Your biggest competitor at the start is the world's indifference. So when you start talking about your company and asking for help, you're activating a support network that can help you. And if you're a halfway decent person, your network's probably a lot bigger and more powerful than you even know. In this episode, you're going to hear from Erica Block, who's a serial entrepreneur who started a theater company, two technology startups and a coaching business. What I hope you'll take away from her story is that even if your story doesn't make sense at first, it can evolve and over time it becomes more and more effective in compelling. Let's start by hearing about Erica's transition from theater to tech. Local orbit was my first technology startup, but it wasn't the first company that I started. I worked for many years as a writer and director, developed a theater space actually in Detroit, worked in the United Kingdom and in South Africa making theater and doing residences at universities. And the way that I worked in theater was to bring people together and ask questions around the topic. Do a lot of research around the topic, give people a common vocabulary and language around different ideas. And I started doing research and talking to people about a project that was called the history of eating, which is basically looking at the history of the world as a history of food, which in fact it is, if you think about it, people discovered and went from continent to continent in search of spices and food initially. Immigration patterns of animals and humans were all about food. So it was a really meaty topic and I decided in addition to looking at the historic ideas around food to interview people who are working in the food system. And this was at the time when local food systems were starting to just peak their head up and people were looking at more sustainable non industrialized food. And as I talked to folks, I thought I recognized that everybody had a really common problem with a small food producer, the restaurant chefs, individual eaters who wanted to be able to get more local food. They weren't able to easily access it because the food system and the food supply chain had been centralized and had gone from the old way of doing things in small local communities to industrialize large organizations who had basically created technology, whether it was transportation technology or information technology or processing technology that pushed all the little guys out of the picture or pushed them at the margins. And I realized that one of the core problems that people were having was centralized tools that enabled people to process transactions, track the delivery of goods, and manage all of the financial and food safety requirements that you needed to in the back end. And as I was debating whether to work on this sort of large scale theater project, I said, you know, maybe I can do something different. And that was the beginning of local orbit, which is a, it actually still is a technology platform that enables groups of farmers and small distributors and artisan food producers to work together and sell to either consumers or to restaurants and institutional food service such as universities. When I started local orbit, you know, I had, I had experienced starting a business because I started a theater company and a nonprofit theater company. I'd raised money. I'd hired people. We had at various times the staff of up to about 22 people working on the theater that I developed. I managed a board dealt with all the typical things that you deal with in running a business. But I really ran into a lot of problems in my journey to raise money and find what I needed to build this technology because people said, how could you, you don't have an experience doing this? And I had to learn how to tell my story in a way that could connect the dots from what I had been doing to what I was starting to do with local orbit. And people sort of say, well, how can you do this? And I said, basically, what I did is a director and a producer and a theater company is exactly what a CEO does. A director's job is to find the best people and create an environment where they can be the most creative and get their best work done. And it's exactly what a CEO does. And I think that that's sort of to resonate with people. That was my first experience having to actually translate how my experience was relevant in going from one field to another. Now we're going to get really in the weeds. Erica's going to talk about exactly in what format she was telling her story and how she evolved it. I went through many, many iterations of the deck and I did all the online research about what you should and shouldn't have in your deck and how it should be this short or this long and all these other things. And I tried a number of the different formats. I have some good visual design skills so I was able to make it nicer and I had lots of beautiful food and farm photographs which really helped kind of have it stand out. So I did many different iterations of a deck. What I learned, this would be like a sort of the most practical thing is that the people that are giving you templates don't really have all the answers. That a template is useful to know that you want to hit the few key points. But every pitch, every company is a little bit different and how you tell that story needs to be outside of a template. Use the templates as a guideline. But this is yours. This is unique. You know, maybe a few of the slides will work but others you might have to look at differently. And so I did a lot of live pitches whether they were in front of groups or whether they were in front of a couple of investors or even one investor. And I learned very quickly you do not want a lot of text on your deck that you're using when you're in front of a live audience. You just want those to be kind of visual touch points because you want them to pay attention to you and listen to what you're saying that get caught up in reading. So I would always try to pay attention or learn who was going to be in the audience. Who was I going to pitch whether that was doing some research on the organization or the people I was pitching to or understanding demographics of the audience and you know what they were looking for. Also pitching that ranged from five minute pitch to a 20-minute pitch to a 20-minute 15-minute pitch plus discussion. So you also have to navigate many different formats. What I spent a lot of time doing is making sure I had a version of the story for different time frames and different kinds of audiences. So when the story clicked into place and people started to actually get it and there started to be some traction, what did it sound like and how did that happen. There are all these cloud-based solutions and these frameworks and we can do this and you know it's going to take this to put the tech together and here's the beginning of the market and this is the research I've done these are the you know if we did some pilots by plugging in existing technology that wasn't the right technology but that allowed us to do some proof of concept. So that was the pitch and I came up against two questions. Well you've just made theater. What do you know? You don't have any experience in food or in tech. So we talked about how I sort of worked on overcoming that and then the second was no. It's too hippie granola. There's not enough of a market for that and there are two people who were for different reasons kind of were my breakthrough people. So the first was Mahendra Ram Sengani who was the first managing director of InvestiTrite, Swami Pitch and he connected and followed up. He said let's talk and I spent a good month or so talking to him working with him and you know moving towards getting some of the first InvestiTrite investment and then the second person I was introduced to and I cannot remember how how I was introduced to him, but he is. very involved in the Michigan Angels font now, Thomas Loser is his name. He saw me pitch and he had just read a book called The Amnivores Delema by Michael Pollen, which is sort of one of the seminal sort of journalistic kind of books about how fucked up our food system is and he was really starting to think about it. So he was in the early days of his angel investing and he read this book that validated essentially what what I was saying. And so those were the two relationships and those were just all of us just a question of persistence and being you know it's a mix of having the right story eventually and being in the right place at the right time. I'm not an expert in fundraising. I've only done it a handful of times but I think Erica's story here is a great illustration of the two types of people that are going to get excited about your story early on. One are going to be the people that just think you're cool and interesting and the second are the people who love the problem that you're trying to solve. If you show passion around who you are as a person and the problem that you're trying to solve, I think you're more likely to get people excited and interested in what you're doing versus trying to say that you have the ultimate solution already figured out because everybody knows the solution that you have in mind is probably going to have to evolve and that's why this concept of persistence and motivation is so important. I know that my story fell flat to a lot of people whether it's because they didn't understand what this local food thing was about or because they looked at a woman and be a person who'd never worked in tech or business and I put that in quotes in the traditional sense that they had and they couldn't understand or take a leap to see that I could possibly have the perspective and the experience to be able to pull something like this off. So you know you just you tweak it, you find somebody who gets it, who gives you some feedback or jumps on board and supports you whether it's introducing you to other people whether it's saying yeah I'm going to give you your first investment. I don't know that I've met any founder or CEO early on that isn't sort of full of insecurities and doesn't bring whether it's full-blown imposter syndrome but a fear of not being able to do something, a fear of not being good enough. Not everybody acknowledges it but you can see it play out and I think the people who can acknowledge what they don't know and say hey this is new especially when you're working you know with what people consider to be innovation or new approaches, new products, new services. Nobody's done it. Nobody's done it. There you go. If I had to have a single tag line for the message behind every episode of Finding Adventure that's probably it. Nobody's done it so you may as well give it a shot. Okay but what about somebody stealing your idea? I have a lot of people ask me should I talk about what I'm working on because I'm worried somebody's going to take my idea and I have a really strong opinion about this. I think the chances that that happens is so small especially if you talk more about the problem that you're solving and why you're a great person to solve it and focus a little bit less on the solution. But I asked Eric to kind of weigh in on this point too. The chances of somebody stealing an idea are slim to begin with because somebody's probably had a variation of the idea but also the idea while it's important and the vision and the mission is important. That's such a small part of what it takes to build a company and your idea is a starting point. You don't often end up where you started but again your vision which nobody can steal is what's going to keep you driving in the direction people talk about the cliche like what's your North Star. That's your impact. That's your why and your why is more important than your idea because what you want to accomplish can be done in many different ways using many different ideas. Chances are. Erica thanks for taking the time to talk about why it's so important to share your story early and often. This is the second to last episode of the second season of Finding Your Venture. We're gonna bring it home with Doug Song in episode 26. Thanks for listening. [Music]