Mistakes That Make Investors Nervous, According to a PhD in Pitching

0:00Isabelle Johannesen: Hey builders, this week we're doing things a little differently. Instead of sitting down with one founder or one investor, I brought together two people who know a lot about what it takes to deliver a great startup pitch. Dr. Ike Gerhardt has spent nearly a decade studying the science of startup pitching. He literally did his PhD on the subject, researching how founders persuade investors, what actually makes a pitch work, and how everything from tone to body language can influence the outcome. He's also been on both sides of the table as a former VC and now founder who has raised millions himself.

0:37Isabelle Johannesen: And joining him is Dimitri Maxim, co-founder and CEO of Nephrogen, who knows exactly what it's like to deliver a high-stakes pitch, because last year, Dimitri took the stage at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield and came in second place with his pitch for his biotech company. So, for this episode, we decided to do something we haven't done before on Build Mode, but break down a real Battlefield pitch. Ike walks us through what Dimitri got right, what he could improve, and what the research actually tells us about how investors respond to a pitch. I'm Isabel Johannesson. This is Build Mode. Let's get into it.

1:12Isabelle Johannesen: Hi, guys. How's it going? Pretty good. Good. Thanks so much for joining us. So to set the stage for our listeners and for you two as well. So today we have Ike, who is a PhD in pitching. When you told me that initially, I was, you know, mind blown. I didn't realize that was even a thing. So can you tell us a little bit about what is a PhD in pitching? What does it actually entail? Yeah, I did actually a decade of research on started pitching and also the future of pitching, meaning that I analyzed data-driven VC on the receiving end of a pitch and also how entrepreneurs like yourself can actually use AI in their persuasion process.

1:52And I was just deeply fascinated by how entrepreneurs all over the globe are convincing any kind of stakeholder basically we sees the crowd business angels there's like so much nuance to pitching and i was like deeply fascinated by it and i feel like pitching is kind of like my life's mission i did this research um did my phd in it i was on the receiving end because i was a bc in germany and now i'm here in the u.s co-founded an ai research lab out of with the sciences, raised millions of dollars myself. So I kind of like love pitching, saw it from every angle possible. And yeah, just super excited to hear your pitch.

2:34Isabelle Johannesen: That's awesome. I think, you know, most founders wouldn't say they love pitching, but Dimitri. So we also have here today, Dimitri Maxim, who is the founder of Nephrogen, a biotech startup developing AI-enabled gene therapies for kidney diseases. And Dimitri, you did start a battlefield last year, technically now, it doesn't feel all that long ago. So tell Tell us about Nephrogen. Nephrogen is a company that, as you said, focuses on kidney disease. I think we have an interest in sort of expanding far beyond that. I think that's our longer term vision. But I think the reason we started with kidney and why it's kind of been our sort of beachhead case is that I think there's just a lot.

3:11There's 15 different cell types. It's one of the hardest organs to get to in the body. And so the thesis comes down, if you can crack the kidney, you can crack basically anything. And so a lot of other companies are starting with the stuff that's relatively easier, you know, to take this transformative gene therapy technology to these other tissues. But the kidney is sort of we're like, OK, let's go for the hard stuff and then we can kind of, you know, move from there. I personally have been affected by kidney disease. You know, my family's had it for a while. So I've been kind of researching for a while.

3:37But I think as a company, you have to really, you know, develop a story that's, you know, more than just the science. And I think that's been the hardest part. And I think Battlefield was amazingly helpful for that. You know, going through the top 200, the top 20 and all these different rounds and getting feedback throughout was, you know, a critical part of kind of getting us, you know, fundable in a lot of ways.

3:57Isabelle Johannesen: Yeah. And I mean, I've gathered you here today to discuss pitching. Right. And I think the reason we picked this concoction of folks, Dimitri, when you started about sort of battlefield from your initial pitch, we could tell you were brilliant. We could tell that the technology was there, but your pitch was a little rough around the edges, my friend. But we did work together for a while. And the real pivotal moment for me in your pitch journey was when you got your slides redesigned. When you came back that next meeting, it was like all the things had clicked into place and suddenly your pitch was amazing and you ended up winning second place in the whole competition out of thousands of startups.

4:32Isabelle Johannesen: Isabel from the future here. We're about to play you Dimitri's 2025 startup battlefield pitch. If you're just listening to this episode, this could be a good one to check out on TechCrunch's YouTube channel to get the full effect. Okay, now back to the episode. Take it away, Dimitri.

4:50I'm Dimitri, the founder and CEO of Nephrogen. And we're using AI and high throughput screening to develop safer, more efficient gene delivery vehicles to to cure diseases that are currently untreatable. Gene therapy, or gene editing, are completely new categories of medicine that have already cured several patients. Gene editing, in particular, won the Nobel Prize just five years ago. In a lot of ways, we're currently living the gene therapy revolution. But even though there are hundreds of gene therapies currently in clinical testing, and several have already been used to cure patients, there are zero that target the kidney.

5:30There's really two reasons for this. One, the kidney has 15 different cell types that are all organized in this really intricate manner. And importantly, 15 is the most of any organ in the body. And two, the kidney by nature is a filtering organ. It's designed to keep most things out based on size and charge, including existing FDA-approved delivery vehicles. Why does this matter? Why should we care? It really gets down to the problem that kidney is just impossible to deliver to, right? And more importantly, if we can deliver to the kidney, we can possibly deliver these curative medicines anywhere.

6:08And that's what I've spent my whole career working on. My family's had kidney disease for four generations, and I started working on this kidney delivery problem when I was 14 years old in George Church's lab at Harvard Medical School and continued as both an undergraduate and graduate student at Stanford University. Kidney disease also affects a huge number of people. It's about 10 % of the total global population has some form of kidney disease, and approximately 100 ,000 people in the US die each year from kidney-related causes. The US government or Medicare also spends$86 billion to treat kidney disease annually.

6:48A lot of you may have kidney disease, you might be part of this 10%, or you might have family members who have suffered from it and seen how horrible of a disease is at its source. but I bet a lot of you haven't seen a real-life kidney before. So for our demo, which we'll switch to now, I'm going to show you some. So since 2021, based on a Nature Genetics publication in mice from Yale University, we now know that kidney disease is reversible, specifically this patient's kidney disease. The problem is, like I mentioned earlier, without a way to deliver this potentially curative therapy to the kidney, a cure will never functionally be realized.

7:25And that's where my company, Nephrogen, comes in. We've developed two key technologies to solve the kidney delivery problem and to make curative therapy a reality. The reason why we need delivery vehicles, which are our NeoCap system, is because gene therapy, if you just inject it into the bloodstream, it just rapidly disintegrates. So you need like a delivery vector, which you can think of it like a fancy FedEx truck for getting to the diseased cells in the body. And the way we find these FedEx trucks that are specific for kidney is using both high throughput screening in a laboratory and now AI, like probably a lot of companies in this room.

8:05On the experimental side, you can think of it as like we take an existing FDA-approved vector that doesn't reach the kidney at all, and we create billions and billions of variants of this vector. And then if each of those is a dart, our screening process is throwing those darts at a dartboard to try and hit the bullseye which is the kidney. The difference is that we can throw 10 million more darts than our competitors due to innovations that our team has made in the experimental screening process. And then when you add an AI you can drastically reduce the number of darts that you even need to throw to find that needle in a haystack vector that can target the kidney cells.

8:41Using our lead vectors in our neo cap portfolio we've shown delivery in mice and for the first time ever this week at TechCrunch which we unveiled on Monday in human kidney tissue so this is in a human kidney that's been kept alive outside of the body through a pumping mechanism to show transduction in a human system we this the these all these results are currently going through peer review which is the standard you know scientific process for publication in a major journal but we wanted to release the preprint to you today so that you could have a chance to read our work before it comes out in an official journal.

9:14We have a two-tier business model at Nephrogen. Our initial focus is to license the delivery vehicles for getting to kidney and possibly other organs to pharmaceutical companies. We've already closed sponsorship funding from six major pharma companies totaling over$600 ,000 in value, including from Merck CGAA and Bristol Myers Squibb. And although our short-term goal is to license the delivery vectors to enable pharma companies to make these curative medicines. Our longer term goal is to make our own therapies ourselves to cure kidney disease and other deadly diseases around the body. I want to wrap up by just acknowledging my team of field leaders in kidney disease and gene therapy from Stanford and Harvard Medical School, including my co-founder, Vivek Bala, who's a kidney doctor from Stanford, and also my chief business officer, Chang Hong, who's a serial entrepreneur and has had several exits in the biotech space.

10:05We're raising our seed round with our existing syndicate of investors, looking for more to add to that, and we'll be happy to share more at our booth or during the Q &A. Thank you.

10:16Isabelle Johannesen: Great. So we did just watch Dimitri's pitch, and I'm curious, well, first of all, Dimitri, what do you think? Was there any part of your pitch that you found particularly challenging to simplify? I think the hardest slide is like the what you do, because I think it's easy to say we deliver to the kidney as what we do, but then or the how you do it is what I really am trying to get at. Like how you do something is the hardest to explain in deep tech in general, I think. And so I think in the first draft, I didn't even have that at all. I was like, oh, we just delivered the kidney. And it's like, well, like, you know, you could be making that up.

10:46Like, how do you do it? Right. And so like, I think that was the hardest part of like the AI piece. But like, we're not just using software, right? We're also actually in a lab or like a proper biotech in that sense. But like, so how do you explain the business model? Yeah, but I think business model and then specifically the how of how your product works in deep tech are sort of more difficult in the pharma space. Maybe like in other deep techs, like how you sell is a little more straightforward. Like, oh, we make rockets. We sell them to the government. We sell them to whoever. But I think with health care, it's just a little bit more nuanced.

11:15Isabelle Johannesen: Yeah. I do love how you used like business terminology and you're like, you know, pilot customers or whatever you said in your pitch that was really Silicon Valley tech speak. But you grew up here, right? So you speak the language. You understand what your audience was kind of needing to hear from you that maybe aren't biotech people. Yeah, like, I mean, the official name of like the, you know, prizes that we get from these pharma companies is like a golden ticket. Or in one case, it's a research sponsorship deal. But like, nobody knows what that means. The average, you know, TechCrunch audience.

11:44So then I remember that in one of our sessions, you were like, is that a pilot? I was like, yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's like, you know, and then so then the paid pilot analogy, like, everyone just understood that you just say that people know what it means. And so you wouldn't think about these things as a deep tech founder on your own.

11:57Isabelle Johannesen: And like you were saying before we even started recording, like the founders who are, you know, pitching that are technical, the more technical they get in their pitch, the more credibility the VCs have or they think they have. What is sort of your take on how deep into the how founders should get in a five minute pitch? I would say in a five minute pitch, not really at all. I think especially when it comes to these first couple of minutes, it is actually about clarity. is about like the other person like you actually said like understanding what you do because i feel like that will come inevitably in the q a you every receiver especially in biotech which is super scary for most investors right uh giving the timelines and the and the money requirements will ask about your business model will ask especially when you're targeting biotech investors who are hopefully you know somehow familiar with what you're doing uh will ask about that so i would say in the first couple of minutes really about just establishing any any sort of credibility so i mean there's this this term called for startups liability of newness which means like the earlier you are as a startup the less signals you obviously have right that add to your credibility and you ace that when you said like i don't know in the very beginning you basically associated yourself with the nobel prize right then you talked about george church which you know who is an entity in this whole in this whole space then you again with the with the lab coat you had like all the logos of the existing investors of like pharma companies pilots so you did a lot of signaling probably on purpose but like that's what it's all about it is just if you're going in these conversations there's a lot of uncertainty because the investor has no idea no clue who you are maybe this person has a blurb or maybe this person has a pitch deck that they skim through like a couple of minutes at most.

13:53So it is about getting them for one excited, getting them to understand and getting them to, I would say, get as many signals out there to them as possible. And that is something you did really well. And that is something that every deep tech founder should keep in mind. Did you think about that

14:14Isabelle Johannesen: or do it consciously in your pitch? I mean, for example, the Nobel Prize, when you mentioned it in the beginning. Yeah, like five years ago, the CRISPR technology won the Nobel Prize. And I think, I mean, one thing I was going to say is for the disease stuff, right? Like, that's sort of distinct from the underlying technology. So there's like two ways you can tell the story. Like you start with kidney disease, and this is how we're addressing it. Or you can start with like, here's the big like problem, and then be more narrow. So I like intentionally, like, I tried it the other way. And I didn't like the story as much.

14:42Whereas now, like, I start a little bit. And so one of the things in my pitch is it does take me a little bit to get to what we do. but I think like I try to set it up in a way that it's like you see where it's going sort of a little bit like you can kind of predict like okay now they're gonna they talk about everything then it starts to narrow and then it narrows to what they do and then this is the business model and then but like in some investors they want to know like you know they tell you to put your best slides first no matter what they are like you have pilots put that as your first slide so like I've seen it go different ways and we I think played with those three ones that like starting broad and then narrowing.

15:14And then in terms of the signaling, I think, yeah, you have to use the logos to your advantage. And, you know, I think when we have like, like part of pitching is, is showing your best stuff. And then I think the Q and A is where you bring out the realities, at least that's how we, you know, because there's always nuance, it's never going to be this, like, you know, rosy, you know, perfect thing on a platter that you're serving. But it taught me a lot of like how to do that. Well, because like, obviously, if you do like a really good pitch, and then like, there's no substance, then the Q &A is going to come and like, as these people are being persuaded, they're not going to be persuaded, right?

15:46You have to have both, but it's, and then, but you also don't want to come on too strong in the pitch because then they're like, oh, this person doesn't know what they're doing and they lose credibility also. So I think it's a fine line of like, okay, here are the logos, here's like the, you know, names behind it. But then like me at the end of the day, like I have credibility because this company works for this, this, and this reason. And these are kind of maybe some of the, you know, mitigations and risks to hint at. Like, I think that's sort of how I think about it. I think also the complexity in this setting that you are at TechCrunch Battlefield is that there are so many people, right?

16:18Like you have investors on stage. You do have people in the crowd who could be potential customers, who could be potential employees. And the thing in pitching is there's like so much nuance to every pitch. Like you have to really figure out like who is this pitch for? and that gets harder and harder the more people and the more diverse the crowd is so you definitely want to find like these common denominators that are like part of every pitch like this this is my vision this is the problem this is what i'm solving and then actually personalize it as much as you can if there's like only a specific group of people that you that you want to win over so i would even say considering like how how we met for example there's like always i just call them like sleeper agent words like things that people are just super passionate about and how you can grab their attention and this is again something where i feel like ai helps a lot because you can just in like a matter of seconds or like sometimes minutes find out like what is this person really about and then in our case for example it was obviously like tech crunch battlefield i told you about the study that was made on there on this data and then you obviously like with investors some like proprietary data some like are really into what you are doing with kidneys in particular and you have to really find those people, have to find those sleeper agent words and then per slide as much as you can.

17:38And if that means like shuffling your slides around, then that's the case. But in a setting like TechCrunch, you obviously can't do that and you have to find like the one pitch that works for all basically.

17:52Isabelle Johannesen: That sleeper agent word concept is interesting. If you like uncover that your investor loves hot dogs, sneak the word hot dogs into your pitch. That's the tip. But let's circle back to that really quick because I do want to talk about that for a second. So we met at a dinner and you mentioned that there was a study that someone had done where they analyzed hundreds of pitches from TechCrunch startup battlefield. Tell me a little bit about the study and what did they find based on all of our alumni babies pitching? It's actually one of my favorite studies because I feel like so many studies just outline a problem and then that stops there, right?

18:24Or like find something that is somehow trivial. and in this case that was a study by uh cancer and colleagues from 2018 it was like promotion and prevention questions meaning that they are were specifically focused on gender biases and they looked at pitches from i think 2010 to 2016 and they actually just focus on the q a which is kind of rare in this whole academia bubble where it goes over pitching because it's normally just the actual pitch, but never the Q &A, although this is like a super important part of the pitch and you have to come prepared and there's like so much you can do there.

19:01But they actually found out that both like male and female judges actually asked the female entrepreneurs on stage, like prevention questions, which is kind of like, how does your retention look like? Versus like male entrepreneurs, they asked the promotion questions, like how do you achieve more growth? And in 85 % of the cases, they actually answered like from when you get like a promotion question, you give like a promotion answer. Yeah, like this is how I really grow. And if you get like a prevention question, you give a prevention answer. Like, yeah, this is like how I not use any clients.

19:37And that obviously in the study affected the funding significantly. And then there was this little trick where you actually switch. Like when you get this kind of prevention question, hey, how do you actually like work on your retention? How do you not lose customers? And then when you switch that as a female entrepreneur and be like, no, it's not about losing customers, it's about growing. We want to grow 10x. Then it actually had no influence at all. And I found that super interesting. For one, just seeing that there is actually this gender bias. And for two, just that they also, in the basically follow-up study, gave a tip on how to change that.

20:14And yeah, one of my favorite studies.

20:15Isabelle Johannesen: Wow. Fascinating. didn't you say there was also a more recent study from like the last year couple years of started battlefield because i'm i bring this up because our friend dimitri here may very well be part of that study and i'm curious if uh if that resulted in any findings uh i do think unfortunately you're not in it i think because it was from 2000 and 2018 it was like they analyzed over over 500 pictures also from battlefield and they found out something quite interesting that is like normally you always get the tip like kind of like i said right make it clear and they actually said yeah but don't oversimplify it.

20:47So there has to be some kind of nuance and elaborate language in it. You have to say like, however, might just not, you know, totally black and white. And it's also interesting because it like, there are not too many studies out there that are actually analyzing like the linguistics or the micro parts of the pitch. And I found this was quite intriguing that especially, I think that was one of the other findings, especially well-educated entrepreneurs that are pitching can profit from that kind of behavior. So if they are not oversimplifying things, but because it actually adds to their credibility.

21:21So when you are a Stanford trained scientist and you just oversimplify it, somehow people don't buy that. Yeah, it is not authentic, right? And in that case, like probably it also helped people. Although you use these examples like FedEx truck, you also use like, I don't know, words like throughput or like something that is the lingerer of your field, right? So, yeah. Yeah, I think I noticed that a lot at TechCrunch. That's what made TechCrunch especially hard to prepare for, which is probably why this study was helpful, because TechCrunch, it's a really wide audience. You do have biotech investors there.

21:56You do have healthcare people who are less specialized. And then you have generalists and you have pure AI people that don't necessarily do healthcare, but they might, right? And then you have students. So it's a really wide spectrum. I think the hardest thing was when you say something, you don't want it to be too simple because then you lose the people that are specialists, but you don't want it to be too complex. And so like that was the hardest part of the pitch is like just finding like this middle ground that showed credibility and hit the words that like the, you know, you know, specialists would need while also making it attainable for the generalist crowd.

22:26Isabelle Johannesen: Sure, I think that is a challenge for a lot of people. And then you have the other challenge if you're pitching, you know, a B2B SaaS company, there's probably a lot of customers in the audience you have to appeal to versus, you know, if you're in biotech, a little bit less so, or, you know, so keeping all of those players in mind is no easy feat. I want to go back to talking about Dimitri's pitch. You wrote down some notes, Ike, about different strengths and weaknesses of our friend's pitch here. Tell us what you thought. So, I mean, I am a mentor for accelerated programs, especially for deep tech and teacher at the university.

23:02So, I do see a lot of deep tech founders. And, I mean, you deserve second place. If not first, right? because I do feel like, like I said in the beginning, you did so many things really, really well. I do think there's, in general, just a problem with the industry. It always really breaks my heart that not too much capital is invested in biotech, especially in the early stages. There's a lot of money being spent when it's less critical, right? But in the early stages, especially comparing to AI, it's not a lot of money that investors do spend. So I do think when it comes to actually simplifying your pitch and getting those signals out there and talking about these pilots and talking about all these kind of proof points that you already have and talking about the market size.

23:51I mean, you said like 10 % of all people and I think like over 80 billion that's already spent on kidney diseases, right? Like those are all these kind of sleeper age words where you feel like, okay, well, it's a big market. Oh, wow. You already have proof points. Oh, wow. And I think like the strongest piece that you had in comparison to other biotechs is that you already took out a little bit of the risk, right? Because like the risk with any biotech startup in general is, you know, how many of the substances in like the phase one actually get approved, like 8 to 12 % or something, right? And then like how much does it actually take in terms of capital until you come to a clinical stage, like 20, 30 millions, it's like massive, right?

24:36And you, as an investor, right, it's really hard to tell will you succeed or not. And what you actually did was kind of preempt that by saying, hey, we already have something that we can license while we do, while we shoot for the moon and just do something big and work like on our own therapies. But while we're doing this, we actually use the profits that we're getting from the license fees and the royalties maybe or something to actually fund that, which is obviously when it comes to risk assessment, something that investors would be looking for. Because, I mean, sure, if it's only the licensing deals, it's just not big enough for the venture capital game.

25:17But if it actually is, you know, some kind of protection for the long run that you can actually fund it basically yourself, then this is like quite intriguing.

25:28Isabelle Johannesen: If I may, if I recall, Dimitri, that that was one of the parts of your pitch that was hard to explain and hard to kind of simplify and visualize. Yeah, that's spot on. I think it's easy to pitch a drug story, actually, like in terms of just helping people understand, like you have this thing that goes into the kidney, it treats a disease, and then you make money on that, right? And they sell it in clinical trials. But I think like, that's, even though that's easy to explain, that's like not the right business strategy. So like, we talked about business model, like that slide with the three to the two tiered business model, like, I think it was important.

25:58And the designer helped a lot with this is to like differentiate between the two models and make it really clear. We're doing this, then we're doing this, we're still doing that, which is kind of why I think it was good to put in it, you know, like our, when we meet with investors in pitch meetings, like most of the talk is like, how are we going to get licensing deals closed? Like, that's what they want to focus on now, because that's the next, you know, two, three years. But we still have this kind of other story of like, you know, eventually, we want to make our own drugs. But I think like, you don't want to like lose that complexity again, like by just drastically simplifying it.

26:24But at the same time, like, you still want to, you know, make it understandable. So it's good to hear that you sort of got that part. But I think the other thing I'll say is that, you know, the really sophisticated investors, like hardcore biotech VCs who only invest in therapeutics, they actually don't like the platform stories as much because I think it can be distracting because you're spending money and time and energy to get these licensing deals through. And they may not actually be the direction that they want to fund. So there's different models and different investors. So it's just really hard, I think, to get the story right for everyone.

26:56But you just have to kind of pick one and sort of refine it as you learn from there. But I think Battlefield is a really good place to start because like everybody's there. And so you learn a ton about like what works and what doesn't. And then you sort of, you know, can improve it from there. I mean, that's like one of the most important parts that I try to hammer into the head of every, every entrepreneur I ever worked with. Like there is no perfect pitch. Like so many people ask me like, what are the three things I can do? And there's like a million things that you can do, but there's never like a perfect pitch.

27:26You always have to tailor it to the person you want to pursue it. And yeah, sure. You can't like make it work for everyone and i always say when you are actually out there fundraising it is a market of of one you actually need to find that one person first and you shouldn't be like too distracted by all the other people that say no because you you really need to be resilient i think that's one of the of the biggest uh tips that i can give like obviously at some point iterate when you feel like something is not working but you have to be resilient and you have to be mentally prepared that so many people will say no or like say they come back or whatever which they never will so i think that is that's just something to keep in mind i realized when i was doing when i was making that pitch that like a lot of people don't care like someone was like well why does it matter that there's 15 cell types and what like and then i had to say oh well there's the most of any in the body exactly about that part that sounds risky right because that sounds risky because if it's like the most of any part in the body and you don't really know like hey can we actually target other cells is that good or bad thing like that is in terms of risk assessment that sounds risky because which like to a scientist it's like very important to know that there's 15 cell types but like from an investor like they actually like as long as that you can get to a cell type or certain cell types then they want to know how you can make money in those cell types right i think that was another thing that i learned through battlefield of like how to make the pitch better yeah maybe if you hook them or maybe if they are already excited then you can just massage that in but at the very beginning everything that sounds super risky like I mean, that came to mind with the 15 different cell types and we don't know yet.

28:56And it's like one of the hardest things in the body to actually develop drug for. That sounded for me like, hey, maybe you shouldn't say that in the first couple of sentences. Although as a scientist, super important. Yeah, no, that's really good feedback because like it doesn't move. I think what the intention was to like move the story forward, but it actually didn't, right? And so in a pitch, right? If it doesn't move the story forward, it's probably not worth like... Also one thing to mention, like what you really did well is just a personal story. Like get that out, like with a picture of your mother.

29:29Like it matters a lot, right? Like for you personally, but also for all the people who are suffering, which is why I love what you're doing. Like it matters a lot. But I mean, you just also have to play by the rules. And if investors and LPs are really focused on AI right now, then you have to somehow see how you can incorporate that to your pitch that you also are kind of like an AI company, which I think you also did, right? Explaining the role that AI plays and that you're not just purely a biotech. But this is like just the reality. And I think it's really sad that it is that way. But the thing with the AI in the story is like, if you're not using AI, I think you have to own that you're not.

30:10But I think nowadays, like you kind of can't not use it. Like it's just helpful, right? And right. So I think that's like the realization we came to like in 2023 ish, like we're like, oh, it's not quite there yet, but like, it's definitely going to be very helpful in what we're doing. And I think we just got to the point where like, we have these big data sets. Anytime you have big data sets, you can train models on them. So that's going to be the future. And like, we either have to adapt or not. And like, I think when people ask like, oh, you know, are you an AI company? Like, it's a really tough question because the honest answer is like, well, we're a biotech company, but like we use AI.

30:41But like, because I think when I think of an AI company, I think like you have like, like, you know, AI engineers that are like, you know, running new architecture, which is not what we do, right? We take data sets that we use and we train models on them. But I think like vertical AI is like the sort of subset of that that we're in. And basically, like, if kidney is like, if you can apply AI to kidney, we want to be the best winner in that you can apply to pancreas. That's another area that we're focused on. Like, we want to be the winners in vertical AI in very specific areas. And I think that's how most companies are doing well right now.

31:10But like, I think that revenue is always in competition with the big language models. So it's a tough story to tell, I guess what I'm saying. Just saying you're doing AI isn't enough. And then I think when you get into it, a lot of times what I tell people is AI is basically just probability, right? At the end of the day, it's just very sophisticated probability. And it's like, we have a data set and then we're using it to predict things.

31:33Isabelle Johannesen: The real pivotal moment for me in your pitch journey was when you got your slides redesigned. What do you think that unlocked for you? Yeah, I mean, I'll just start by talking about the design. I think the design was like actually a big unlock because I think you don't, you don't, it's hard to notice that as a weakness. But as a like scientist, you're not a designer. You're just not. You don't know how stuff's supposed to look good. And I think just being able to like get that fixed, just I think one gave me a lot more confidence because I was like, oh, now I know it sort of looks good and other people will be able to interpret it.

32:04So it like just gave me a little bit more ability to sort of stress the stuff that was important. Yeah. Did you by the time know about the expectations that VCs or business angels have? I think I knew like, I think the Q &A was always something that I sort of like focused on like, oh, I'll just like present and then like you gauge their interest. But what I didn't realize is that like people, if you lose them in the pitch, the Q &A doesn't matter, right? If they don't know what you're doing and they can't ask questions, it doesn't matter. So I think that was the biggest lesson from that is the design sort of gets you to the Q &A and that's where they then dive in all the details and get into the science and it gets more and more, you know, elaborate and interesting.

32:42And it's kind of the questions I more excel at, but like you have to get the first part right in the pitch to get to that point. How do you actually like the follow-up questions in the Q &A? I like the follow-up questions a lot. I think it showed me though, the gaps in my pitch somewhat, because I think some of the questions they asked were like, like someone asked about a medical device and like we don't use medical devices.

33:01Isabelle Johannesen: Is there an approval process for the medical device portion of what you're doing, the delivery system? Yeah, so it's actually just a chemical composition. We use FDA approved to actually administer the therapies. The devices are all FDA approved. So it's really just the vector chemical composition. You give a license to a pharma to then use that sequence. They're allowed to use it for X diseases, and you negotiate the rights and the milestone payments. They'll pay you when they get to phase one, phase two, and then the royalties. Obviously, more upfront would be less on the back end. I didn't like I missed the part that like there's a chemical comp like the delivery vehicle, the FedEx truck is like not a physical thing.

33:43It's like literally like a molecule. Right. And I think that part was clearly lost. Right. So I think that also helped me like, oh, these are the things that we missed. But again, what's the person I don't remember was the person who asked that like actually one of the people you would want to have as a lead investor, for example, like, no, that's a generalist fund. Right. Like not like probably a great investor made a lot of really successful investments, but like they're not a biotech person, but like you still want to like not like, I don't want to have no generalist investors invest because of that, you know?

34:11So there's like a fine line of like, you know, and when you build an investment syndicate, it's nice to have a little bit of everyone. Like that's what we did for our seed round is like, we have like a deep tech, you know, VC, we have a biotech fund. And then we have like a more traditional, like, you know, tech, like they do tech crossover bio, but like, and I think that really helps because then when you have investor meetings and, you know, you know, updates and all that, you're getting feedback from different corners. I think especially this is why I'm asking this when it comes to journalists as like a biotech or biotech adjacent because you have this AI component in it right then I would say like it doesn't even like make so much sense to target them before you actually have a lead investor that actually adds value and understands your story and then use that leverage and lose that credibility to actually tell the other investor who doesn't understand what you're talking about hey this is legit so you should take a deeper look at that but yeah sure again And like, this is a special setting because in a, in a, like the actual pitch on stage is a lot different compared to, to any other pitch that you are making out there in the real world.

35:11Right. I mean, it's way more showmanship. I think in one of your episodes, you said like someone brought a pregnant woman to the stage or like, you know, that's not something you can do in every, every pitch meeting. Right.

35:23Isabelle Johannesen: No, I mean, we love stuff like that. Dimitri bought a human kidney. So anything. alive. No, I'm just kidding. So Demetria, what was the hardest question that the judges asked you on stage? Was there anything that you wish you could have prepared more for it? That's a good question. I think it was in the first group because I remember we changed some slides because of it or tweaks. I think the big question was the use of proceeds because we don't have like a pie chart on any of our slides. It's like this is what we're going to use the money for. Someone asked like, OK, you're going to raise, you know, four million seed.

35:54What is that going to go towards. And I think it's like, I mean, it actually made me now we have like a literal breakdown of like, you know, this is the employee, this is when we're going to hire this person, this is like what their burn is like a month by month thing. And then we roll it up to like by quarter or whatever that they want to see. But I think it's like a it's like a thought exercise, like, are those numbers going to be accurate? Like, everybody knows no. But like, the more specific you can be a lot of the time, the more realistic it becomes, there's like some psychology side of that.

36:22And I think when that question came up, I realized, oh, for the next round, if that's going to come up again, I have to have a little more granular. Even if it's just in my head, the way you answer it again is more confident because you know exactly what it's going to go towards. So I think these were sort of financial questions as a deep tech founder, you don't think about. And that's what the investors, especially the generalist funds, want to know. And I think it just made me have to tighten up the fundamentals, so to say.

36:46Isabelle Johannesen: But it's true that for the battlefield pitch, I think we'd advise them not to get too nitty gritty with that because it's on a big stage in front of a lot of people. But I think if you're actually fundraising and talking to investors, then yes, absolutely have those things in your deck. I want to ask, what are some of your best tips for Q &A? Because I think most founders, that is the scariest part of the pitch because you can prepare all you want for the main pitch. A lot of founders memorize their script, which I've heard is not good advice. But the Q &A, there's only so much preparing you can really do.

37:14Isabelle Johannesen: You don't know what you'll be asked. That's exactly the part why you need to prepare a lot i think there is no other advice you can actually give because it is scary uh i would even say uh when it comes to pitch decks for example because you touched base on that like i would actually try to not give any investor like other than obviously on stage right but to give an investor a pitch deck beforehand because it takes so many advantages away because i would always say like optimize for any kind of face-to-face pitch because like in you are way more can be way more persuasive right and with like a pitch deck uh probably they're not gonna really read it but then even if they have follow-up because you feel like oh no that that sounds wrong even though it's not uh yeah there's no chance for you to actually respond to that versus like when we are sitting next to each other and they feel like well what's going on here and you can just explain it to me right so i would say the exactly the same thing for q a q a is always a chance to basically pitch again uh this is why like when it comes to actually academia and like pitching studies like most is focused on this elevator pitch or like six minute pitch or whatever but like mostly not on the q a and i think like the beautiful if you want to flip that thing about q a is that you get like so many opportunities to actually pitch in regards to what the investors really care about because in the pitch they have no real chance to say anything right because it's monologue but in like the q a they will only ask the parts of the uh regarding this part of the pitch that they're actually interested in so it is great opportunity for you to answer on that actually like one of the studies that inspired me uh even to go in this in this direction right like you can have an ai do any kind of pitch for you you can tell it to go into the truth of any kind of investor and like really challenge you and i think the one thing that you should really do is i don't know ask any kind of model of your choice hey look at the 10 most common questions that judging from tech crunch data like judges ask and this is here my full transcript of my pitch like ask me grill me roast me and then you know try to to answer that film yourself again which just something most people don't do but it helps a lot to not only respond in your head but actually stand there and like do what you have to do on stage like use your whole body to give like a proper response try to be as credible authentic as possible obviously competent but I feel like most people are experts in their topic so it is not about that you would struggle with any of those questions but the hard part is actually like something that you're not familiar with right Like if people ask you what burn and you never like thought about it because it was never your job before.

40:06So and those kind of questions, it's really hard for you to anticipate, especially if you're a first-hand founder. But it's like one of the most common questions that any investor would ever ask. And those models have that training data. So you will like most likely get that question and then just stand there and try to answer and see like where the gaps are and work on them. And not to go back to AI again, but I had an investor who just screened me to have a meeting. I had to send my deck into his AI model and it would give it a score. And then if the score was high enough, then he would meet with me.

40:36If not, he wouldn't. I was like, he better. But one thing you could do actually for these AI investors, which I find quite interesting, like one of my, I would say, idols is Robert Cialdini, who wrote the famous book Influence. And I think 2014 or something, he wrote another book called Persuasion, which is everything that happens before the actual persuasion part. And I feel like right now you can, as like a lot of people are lazy and just ask any model like hey tell me about this company and tell me like how it is different compared to others and do you think like there's a high likelihood of them succeeding like you can actually put so much like content or whatever you want to do on like websites or the internet or your linkedin or whatever that would actually be grabbed as a source and like play in your favor so i would always like recommend any any founder to preempt that and just like get stuff out there that you know will probably some LLM pick up and be advantageous for you and your pitch.

41:36Isabelle Johannesen: And also to double down on what you were saying, Dimitri, I think one of the other strategies is to really know your own strengths and weaknesses. And you can be strategic in your Q &A about leaving certain things out of your pitch intentionally, knowing that the VCs will ask you about it, right? So if it's a five-minute pitch and you don't have time to touch on competition, that's very likely going to come up in Q &A then and you just have an answer for that. And if you know that, you know, some of your weaker points or stronger points, you can kind of play that in what you do say and don't say in your pitch.

42:04Isabelle Johannesen: VCs tend to ask similar questions. So that's another tip I've seen. But the element of showmanship is definitely something I want to touch on because we were talking earlier about the element of confidence, right, that you said came from having a pitch designer come in. But the showmanship, the confidence, I want to ask you, I, so, you know, body language, how you physically show up on stage, wearing a doctor's coat, all of these things already immediately give signal before you even open your mouth. What else can founders think about when they're kind of preparing for a stage pitch or a VC pitch in a closed door room, whatever it may be that like immediately physically signals they know what they're talking about?

42:42There's actually a lot of studies out there. So I think some of the really early studies about pitching um from 2003 and i think clark in 2008 were like actually saying hey like body language matters a lot there was a somehow some recent one from clark in 2019 who said like you have a 12 better chance of actually getting any funding when you use your your hands and your gestures to actually explain like what you're doing because like subconsciously it somehow makes sense what you're talking about right so that that is important part of it again obviously like no founder like normally stands on a big stage so there's also stage fright and that is scary all in all i would say like value language is important but again as in every pitch it totally depends on on the setting like there's actually one really cool study that i that i liked from 2019 by young that that analyzed crowdfunding pitches and said hey if you do you know smile within the first three seconds then there's like that significantly affects your funding but everything more than that is not authentic anymore so it's actually this introvert u-curve where then like actually the the likelihood decreases so there's again like i said so much nuance to it there's uh or like when you ask for love before i call it there's a fine line between happy and

44:03Isabelle Johannesen: creepy. I don't know.

44:07Isabelle Johannesen: Dimitri, how did, did you feel nervous backstage? Is there anything you did to kind of compose yourself? Cause you didn't seem nervous in your pitch. You handled it very well. Yeah, no, I was going to say for me, like the way to know you're ready. And I know this like takes a long time is to watch yourself on video because when you can watch yourself on video and not cringe, which I still do now. Like, I think that's a really good sign that you're in the right direction because I think you're like, we're just more critical of ourselves. So I think that was a big thing for me is like I did that a couple times or in a mirror even and you can see yourself and you're like oh like what am I doing my hands like am I like one thing for the first time I pitched on stage was the clicker I didn't realize that like I watched it afterwards like every time I clicked I looked down and I don't know why like that's something I did so then I tried to work on that so like but it's hard to like deliver a pitch memorize it and you know and bring all that in at once so I think the main thing the main way I got through is just practice but I do think the thing about the excitement.

45:01Like I was a, before I, you know, did science, I were kind of at the same time in college, I was a competitive skier and you had to do the same thing. Like when you at the start of a race, like you have to just kind of get yourself like, instead of really scared of like, if it's like a downhill race and it's like a super steep drop, like you have to somehow tell yourself it's a good idea. Right. And like every time you do it ends up being way better than you expected. So I think it's like your brain is like doing what it's supposed to is like protecting you. I think it's the same thing on stage.

45:27I don't know if it's the same biology. and again i i just want to say authenticity is really key uh i mean there's so much stuff that is just over polished and just doesn't feel really like it's authentic and especially when it comes to pitches i would say like one of the studied fields is what part does emotional appeal play like pathos like what is actually happening there and i want to say yeah sure for any kind of pitch competition it does matter right because you have limited time and people don't get like too many information but when it comes to actually like pitch meetings with venture capitalists it doesn't really matter like every study basically chose that since 2009 that like the most important thing is actually preparedness that you can really answer properly on any kind of questions that are thrown your way and i think this is just something to to keep in mind that everything you do on stage is a lot different compared to because like think about any any kind of pitch that you probably had afterwards right you can or should even like at some point flip the script and like let the investor pitch right and like try to make them sell to you because i always say like pitching is somehow like in in dating you don't want to like be too needy in a sense right and if you are just trying to persuade and convince and convince and convince like no one is actually super interested but on in this particular setting you can do that right because you do the pitch you get questions and then you go off stage so it is it is somehow different and yeah you should definitely prepare for this setting in particular but not over generalize on every i'll be able to pitch you have afterwards yeah i mean i'll just be honest like i feel like in in startups like then i mean just because they have money right when investors evaluating you like they're here and you're pretty much here.

47:17You have to kind of find a way to like sort of level it as much as you can. I think the ways you do that is like by the credibility. But like, I think at the end of the day, like anything you can do to kind of put them out of that standard zone, like flip it on them, ask them questions. Like, I mean, I, and I didn't realize, I think there's actually reasons why you ask questions. Like, it's not like you're just trying to flip the script. Like as a founder, right. If you're, it has come back to confidence, right. If you're really confident in what you're doing, like if this investor, for example, we've had meetings that really bothered me where the investor actually doesn't have money to deploy at that time.

47:48They're raising a fund, but they don't tell you that. But you also didn't ask, right? Like early on, I would just go straight into pitch. I was super nervous. And I was like, I should probably ask these questions, right? Like, and sometimes like I've now have pitches where like, I asked a question, they're like, oh, like, we're not gonna be ready to deploy until June. And then I'll be like, okay, well, then like, if this is in January, like, we probably shouldn't talk because the round might be closed by then, right? And if it's not, like, maybe you have a conversation. But I just think it's just like you were upfront with them.

48:11I think it goes authenticity goes both ways. And I think when I started learning that, it made it much more of a conversation in the pitches. It wasn't so performative. And I think that's how you get them to kind of see you more as a partner, which is really what investment is about. You're cap table forever. It's a long-term thing. And you want to basically have that be the conversation, not just a performance. I would also say the one hard part and the challenge about leveling the playing field is especially the sector that you're in. because I feel like especially in this really fast moving AI space, like the way how to mitigate that risk is just, I mean, I use Mimcal for our fundraiser, like really fill up your calendar, slot after slot after slot, like get this momentum out and try to close as fast as possible and really like evoke fear of missing out on the investor, which is like what moves the process forward and just basically ask in the very first pitch, like, okay, so what else do you need to make a decision?

49:05We are closing out around fast, right? Especially in the sector where you're in, like people don't respond to FOMO as much right like as biotech or adjacent like it's somehow impossible to close a round in two weeks right so uh I mean yeah that definitely can make you feel like there's uh definitely yeah and like that's where credibility like you can if you have a really strong team that's like how those rounds are happening but like it's it's not that simple because like in biotech you still need to have something behind it no definitely and people don't realize in biotech when these mega rounds are announced that company's been like in an academic McLev or like the amount of data they have at the time that they raise these mega rounds is often like pretty far along.

49:43You just don't see that. You just see the headline. Oh, they raised a hundred million. They have, you know, famous person on the board and that's that. Right. But it's, it's not quite that it doesn't actually work that way in reality.

49:52Isabelle Johannesen: We're running out of time guys. So to wrap up, I would love Ike, if you can give us a couple of your top mistakes that founders make in pitching just to, you know, word to the wise for those listening what should people be looking out for i think especially in deep tech the number one thing you should really prepare for is like who is on the other side like is it an analyst like i would not advise to pitch the analyst because they can only say no but like with analysts like part of their role is to just really focus on the numbers on the content and like everything right versus like a partner can do basically a gut-filled decision right because they have so much more experience they have the power to make that decision so that is a totally different pitch i would say because this is about pitching like if you're going for the crowd or for clients or for anyone else like understand the nuances understand it's called elaboration likelihood model like you are perceiving the pitch in different way like depending on how much involvement you have.

50:58If you are a lead investor, you want to know everything because you put your name out there. You are deeply associated with the company, whereas it's just a follow-on that sometimes it's just enough to say, hey, I don't know, A6NZ invested. You want in. So it's also a completely different pitch. So you really need to understand the nuances. And then I would say, especially for deep tech founders, do something like TechCrunch Battlefield because I feel like with any kind of pitch competition incubator accelerator like you get so much valuable feedback um that you never like even thought about and because there's like as i probably showed you guys with like all the studies there's like so much that you can actually do to increase the likelihood and i think it's just brutal out there like it has never been easier to start a company but also because of that the competition has never been harder there's a lot of things that you that you need to consider because you can be as brilliant as you want you probably know like a lot of brilliant people so do i who could never raise venture because they can't just get their point across so getting that feedback is super important and especially like i said like trying to pitch that to people who are not from your field to really get a get a new kind of feeling about like what do people actually know and what they don't because one thing i see over and over again especially i feel like it has been super annoying in anything that has to do with crypto like so many approvations like so many things that people will not understand if they are not actually from the industry and obviously like science is all about terminology right so there's like so many approvations so many things that you could say that no journalist investor would ever understand so really know your crowd is i would say the uh the number one advice i could give to to every deep tech founder and yeah if they have any follow-up questions obviously contact me because i i think there are like so many brilliant minds and ideas out there especially in the biotech space and I want them to see succeed.

52:55So I'm happy to help everyone.

52:57Isabelle Johannesen: Awesome. Dimitri, any last advice for founders who might be pitching on a big stage in the next couple months by chance? I think the biggest one, I mean, I don't know if this is cliche, but I think just try to have fun with it. I think like it's maybe easy to say for me because we did well in the competition, but I think just like being there and like getting to go on stage at TechCrunch is like literally like what you dream about when you're you know a founder like at least at stanford like i remember my freshman year we were watching silicon valley in the dorm like everyone put it on the thing and that was the competition so it's just like a really cool experience to have that um regardless and then i think the booth stuff is also like sort of underrated maybe um just being able to be in the 200 to get there like yeah i don't know i think just figure out how you can you know get people to come to you like whether that's i don't know like everyone uses candy now but they're just like creative ways to like you know get people over to the booth um it's hard and i think we got a lot of really good follow-ups from tech crunch and like we hadn't been before and so i think it's something that now we like look at as like oh tech crunch is like a big event for us and the last thing i'll just say is self-awareness i think in anything is really important um it's something that i've worked on myself a lot of like being self-aware but i think the watching yourself comes with that because like you're not going to be self-aware and you watch it, at least now you have to be right.

54:14And so whether it's practicing your pitch or, you know, running stuff by yourself, just being honest about where your company is and where it needs to go. Cause like every, every company has problems. Every company has positives. Right. And so like the pitch is about the positives and then just like the Q and A is kind of the negatives in my opinion. So like, that's sort of how I would just be aware of what those are. And I think if you are like, you set yourself up in a great place for tech crunch or, you know, pitches in Silicon Valley or wherever else you're going to be telling your story.

54:41Isabelle Johannesen: I love that. Thank you both for sharing all of the advice and your experience and your expertise. It was a pleasure chatting with you guys. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you as well.

55:11Isabelle Johannesen: We'll see you back here next time.