I'm speaking at the Momentum Summit

When I started the Startup Swami blog, one of my goals was to be more visible in the start-up scene in Boston. It's easy to go weeks (months) heads down working on Punchbowl without spending any time attending or speaking at any industry events.

A few weeks ago my colleague Scott Kirsner (who writes the Innovation Economy blog at Boston.com) asked me if I would be willing to lead a session at the upcoming Momentum Summit at MIT on June 23rd. After a few email exchanges, we developed a topic: "Start-up Deals that build Momentum."

I'm honored to be included with such a distinguished group of speakers which includes Paul Sagan (Akamai), Gail Goodman (Constant Contact), and Steve Kaufer (TripAdvisor). The lunch sessions (which include my discussion) has a dynamite list of topics:

- Mike Feinstein, VP of Sales & Marketing / Digital Lumens: "Scaling Up the Sales Effort: Liars, Damn Liars, and Salespeople"

- Jana Eggers, CEO / Spreadshirt: "Strategy: When to Stick With It, When to Change It, How to Communicate It"

- Matt Douglas, CEO / MyPunchbowl: "Start-Up Deals That Build Momentum"

- Peter Levine, General Manager of the Datacenter and the Cloud Division / Citrix: "Setting the Right Goals, and Managing to Achieve Them"

- Michael Grandinetti, Serial Entrepreneur & Sloan School lecturer: "Global Expansion"

- Antonio Rodriguez, General Partner / Matrix Partners: "Finding VC Funding and Using It Wisely"

- Mark Roberge, VP of Sales / HubSpot: "Generating Leads & Sales Through Inbound Marketing"

- James Reinhart, Founder and Chief KnitWit / thredUP: "Revving the Customer Acquisition Engine"

- Sean Lindsay, CTO / Viximo: "Creating a Great Early-Stage Technical Team"

- Eric Enge, Founder / Stone Temple Consulting: "Secrets of Getting New Customers from Search Engines"

- David Cancel, CEO / Performable: "What You Need to Know About A/B Testing"

If you haven't registered for this event yet, you can still get the standard rate (only $115 for the day). Given the list of sessions and speakers, it will definitely be worth your while to attend the Momentum Summit.

Why are we here?

I've done countless presentations in my career of all different types. For years, I taught classes on 3-D graphics and animation, later I presented regularly to the executive management at Adobe Systems and Bose Corporation, and more recently I've pitched investors and partners on why they should invest or partner with Punchbowl. After all of these presentations, you would think that I would have it down. Well, far from it. I still have much to learn.

I was reminded of how much I have to learn a few weeks ago when I was down in NYC meeting with a bunch of media companies. I was fortunate enough to have a friend of the company (David) traveling with me for these meetings. David is someone whom I respect a lot -- and he is arguably one of the smartest business strategists that I know.

After the first day of meetings, David had some feedback on my presentation. Much of his feedback was specific to the pitch, but one piece of feedback was more basic than that. David simply pointed out to me that it took several slides until I finally told the audience why we were meeting. Here's how my presentation was ordered for day 1 of my meetings:

1. Background on the company (team, vision, etc)
2. Business opportunity 
3. Key metrics (user engagement, traffic etc)
4. Proposal

After David's feedback, here is how my presentation was ordered for day 2:

1. Why are we here?
2. Proposal
3. Key Metrics
4. Background on the company

This may seem like a trivial change, but the second day's meetings were much more successful than the first day. For my new presentation, I literally had a slide called "Why are we here?" and I answered the question. Straight, to the point, and no fluffy business BS.

Based on my initial success that day, I'm committed to this technique in future presentations. From now on, I'm going to tell the audience why we are meeting up front, and build the presentation from that foundation. I'd encourage you to try this: for your next meeting or presentation, make it very clear why you are meeting. Answer the question "Why are we here?" and you'll find a clarity that didn't exist before.