Steve Jobs (16 page)

review the current state of the industry (whether it be brows-

ers, operating systems, digital music, or any other facet) and to

set the stage for the next step in his presentation, offering the

solution.

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CREATE THE STORY

The $3,000-a-Minute Pitch

During one week in September, dozens of entrepreneurs

pitch their start-ups to influential groups of media, experts,

and investors at two separate venues—TechCrunch 50 in

San Francisco and DEMO in San Diego. For start-up founders,

these high-stakes presentations mean the difference between

success and obsolescence. TechCrunch organizers believe

that eight minutes is the ideal amount of time in which to

communicate an idea. If you cannot express your idea in eight

minutes, the thinking the goes, you need to refine your idea.

DEMO gives its presenters even less time—six minutes. DEMO

also charges an $18,500 fee to present, or $3,000 per minute. If

you had to pay $3,000 a minute to pitch your idea, how would

you approach it?

The consensus among venture capitalists who attend

the presentations is that most entrepreneurs fail to create

an intriguing story line because they jump right into their

product without explaining the problem. One investor told

me, “You need to create a new space in my brain to hold the

information you’re about to deliver. It turns me off when

entrepreneurs offer a solution without setting up the prob-

lem. They have a pot of coffee—their idea—without a cup

to pour it in.” Your listeners’ brains have only so much room

to absorb new information. It’s as if most presenters try to

squeeze 2 MB of data into a pipe that carries 128 KB. It’s

simply too much.

A company called TravelMuse had one of the most outstand-

ing pitches in DEMO 2008. Founder Kevin Fleiss opened his

pitch this way: “The largest and most mature online retail seg-

ment is travel, totaling more than $90 billion in the United States

alone [establishes category]. We all know how to book a trip

online. But booking is the last 5 percent of the process [begins

to introduce problem]. The 95 percent that comes before book-

ing—deciding where to go, building a plan—is where all the

heavy lifting happens. At TravelMuse we make planning easy by

seamlessly integrating content with trip-planning tools to pro-

vide a complete experience [offers solution].
”9 B
y introducing

INTRODUCE THE ANTAGONIST
71

the category and the problem before introducing the solution,

Fleiss created the cup to pour the coffee into.

Investors are buying a stake in ideas. As such, they want

to know what pervasive problem the company’s product

addresses. A solution in search of a problem carries far less

appeal. Once the problem and solution are established, inves-

tors feel comfortable moving on to questions regarding the

size of the market, the competition, and the business model.

The Ultimate Elevator Pitch

The problem need not take long to establish. Jobs generally

takes just a few minutes to introduce the antagonist. You can

do so in as little as thirty seconds. Simply create a one-sentence

answer for the following four questions: (1) What do you do?

(2) What problem do you solve? (3) How are you different? (4)

Why should I care?

When I worked with executives at LanguageLine, in Monterey,

California, we crafted an elevator pitch based on answers to the

four questions. If we did our job successfully, the following pitch

should tell you a lot about the company: “LanguageLine is the

world’s largest provider of phone interpretation services for com-

panies who want to connect with their non-English-speaking

customers [what it does]. Every twenty-three seconds, someone

who doesn’t speak English enters this country [the problem].

When he or she calls a hospital, a bank, an insurance company, or

911, it’s likely that a LanguageLine interpreter is on the other end

[how it’s different]. We help you talk to your customers, patients,

or sales prospects in 150 languages [why you should care].”

The Antagonist: A Convenient

Storytelling Tool

Steve Jobs and former U.S. vice president turned global warming

expert Al Gore share three things in common: a commitment

72
CREATE THE STORY

to the environment, a love for Apple (Al Gore sits on Apple’s

board), and an engaging presentation style.

Al Gore’s award-winning documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth
,

is a presentation designed with Apple’s storytelling devices in

mind. Gore gives his audience a reason to listen by establishing

a problem everyone can agree on (critics may differ on the solu-

tion, but the problem is generally accepted).

Gore begins his presentation—his story—by setting the stage

for his argument. In a series of colorful images of Earth taken

from various space missions, he not only gets audiences to appre-

ciate the beauty of our planet but also introduces the problem.

Gore opens with a famous photograph called “Earthrise,” the

first look at Earth from the moon’s surface. Then Gore reveals

a series of photographs in later years showing signs of global

warming such as melting ice caps, receding shorelines, and

hurricanes. “The ice has a story to tell us,” he says. Gore then

describes the villain in more explicit terms: the burning of fos-

sil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil has dramatically increased the

amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, causing

global temperatures to rise.

In one of the most memorable scenes of the documentary,

Gore explains the problem by showing two colored lines (red

and blue) representing levels of carbon dioxide and average tem-

peratures going back six hundred thousand years. According to

Gore, “When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets

warmer.” He then reveals a slide that shows the graph climbing

to the highest level of carbon dioxide in our planet’s history—

which represents where the level is today. “Now if you’ll bear

with me, I want to really emphasize this next point,” Gore says

as he climbs onto a mechanical lift. He presses a button, and

the lift carries him what appears to be at least five feet. He is

now parallel with the point on the graph representing current

CO emissions. This elicits a small laugh from his audience. It’s

2

funny but insightful at the same time. “In less than fifty years,”

he goes on to say, “it’s going to continue to go up. When some of

these children who are here are my age, here’s where it’s going

to be.” At this point, Gore presses the button again, and the lift

INTRODUCE THE ANTAGONIST
73

carries him higher for about ten seconds. As he’s tracking the

graph upward, he turns to the audience and says, “You’ve heard

of ‘off the charts’? Well, here’s where we’re going to be in less

than fifty years.
”10
It’s funny, memorable, and powerful at the same time. Gore takes facts, figures, and statistics and brings

them to life.

Gore uses many of the same presentation and rhetorical tech-

niques that we see in a Steve Jobs presentation. Among them

are the introduction of the enemy, or the antagonist. Both men

introduce an antagonist early, rallying the audience around a

common purpose. In a Jobs presentation, once the villain is

clearly established, it’s time to open the curtain to reveal the

character who will save the day . . . the conquering hero.

D IR EC TO R ’ S N OT E S

 Introduce the antagonist early in your presentation.

Always establish the problem before revealing your

solution. You can do so by painting a vivid picture of

your customers’ pain point. Set up the problem by ask-

ing, “Why do we need this?”

 Spend some time describing the problem in detail. Make

it tangible. Build the pain.

 Create an elevator pitch for your product using the four-

step method described in this chapter. Pay particular

attention to question number 2, “What problem do you

solve?” Remember, nobody cares about your product.

People care about solving their problems.

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SCE

SCENNEE 7

7

Reveal the

Conquering Hero

The only problem with Microsoft is they

just have no taste. And I don’t mean that in

a small way. I mean that in a big way.

STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs is a master at creating villains—the more

treacherous, the better. Once Jobs introduces the antago-

nist of the moment (the limitation to current products),

he introduces the hero, revealing the solution that will

make your life easier and more enjoyable. In other words, an

Apple product arrives in time to save the day. IBM played the

antagonist in the 1984 television ad, as discussed in Scene 6.

Jobs revealed the ad for the first time to a group of internal sales-

people at an event in the fall of 1983.

Before showing the ad, Jobs spent several minutes painting

“Big Blue” into a character bent on world domination. (It helped

that IBM was known as Big Blue at the time. The similar ring to

Big Brother was not lost on Jobs.) Jobs made Big Blue look more

menacing than Hannibal Lecter:

It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to a buy a new, fledgling