Life’s a pitch — from Dragon’s Den to RADA to the ‘Crypto Carnival’
Am finally here. Some thirty years later than I’d hoped but nevertheless, it can’t be denied, I’ve finally fulfilled my destiny.
I’ve got into RADA.
Well, perhaps only in the technical sense, as am inside the actual building, lying on the floor of a rehearsal room, arms and legs splayed outwards, staring up at the cracked cornicing.
“Now breathe in…. deep into the lower abdomen….”
Sure, it’s not the coveted three year BA (Hons) in Acting, but rather an expensive two day “Voice of Influence” course to help CEOs be more confident and effective with public speaking.
“And breathe out…. make the mmmmm sound…..”
And why am I dusting up my Turnbull and Asser double-cuffed striped shirt in aid of this briefest of teasers as to an actor’s craft?
Blockchain-fever.
The new paradigm where, on the basis of a hastily cobbled team and a crypto-remixed startup concept, you can, on the strength of a few stand-up pitches and some glossy paperwork, raise millions in minutes.
Or at least that’s how it was in 2017.
But now, coming into Q3 2018, oh no, no, no, no, no.
Now Silicon Valley is playing catch-up and it seems that every VC firm has defectors setting up their own crypto funds. They’ve brought what some might call a dose of healthy sanity to the proceedings.
So, as a minimum, now you need:-
A product that needs to be run on the Blockchain/in a decentralised way.
A great team, with experienced advisors
A sensible, <$50M fundraising target
To be expertly marketed
Well, at least with Catalyst — a decentralised digital content distribution protocol — we definitely do have the first three.
It’s the fourth that has niggled me to the extent that I now find myself on the floor, breathing in and out endlessly.
And now, weeks later, onto Medium to write about it .
And this is the crux of Blockchain ICOs, or to be proper, Crypto Token Generation Events (ours may not even use a Blockchain)— they’re crowdsales, and above all, boy oh boy are they PUBLIC.
To make a success of this new, ‘fast’ access to non equity-dilutive capital you’d better be prepared to stand up and lay bare your soul to the world.
I know a little bit about diluted equity and standing up and baring souls. Back in 2012 my annual ‘out of the comfort zone’ challenge involved taking my second startup, Zapper, up to the then new BBC Salford Studios to see if we could raise some much needed growth capital.
It was a fairly gruelling ‘baptism of fire’, yet if in enduring that level of pressure, I thought anything else would ‘seem easy’, then why was I flat on the floor at RADA doing breathing exercises at £50 an hour? Why was the thought of pitching to a piffling few dozen investors at Blockchain Live causing enough disquiet to propel me to further training? Was it because, when it came down to it, with a cheap M&S suit as armour, when the cameras did finally start rolling — after 12 hours in a green room at 10 minutes notice — that even when I remembered my ‘lines’ and dealt with seventy minutes of brutal attack (edited down to 10 choice minutes) — I struggled to be me.
Maybe it was just a question of not breathing properly - I don’t remember taking many deep breaths — that would have meant breathing in the fiery breath of the Dragons, and trust me, they were alot more vicious during the full 70 minutes, but fortunately for me, most of the surplus invective is on the cutting room floor!
Doing it was genuinely an attempt to bring a credible technology startup to the show, to treat it as an investment vehicle, and to walk away with a decent amount of money — relatively little in terms of a tech startup, but alot in terms of the history of the show — and a great investor as part of the team. Regrettably the deal fell through, due perhaps partly to it being Theo’s final series.
I now rather feel the same way about launching a Blockchain business— with some 95% of ICOs being bogus ‘pump-and-dump’ schemes, or if not entirely dubious, at least with little chance of actually creating product/market fit — for me it’s a similar chance to take a tech startup, this time with a very experienced team, into an intensely public, yet much more global arena.
The tech is there, the team is strong and our ambitions realistic.
Can we sell Catalyst to the market?
That may well just be a question of the right kind of breathing….
