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Eddy Quan retweeted
One of my clients is a general partner at a big VC firm whose picks got him promoted to co-head of venture, and whose voice still left a massive hole every time he had to speak off the cuff.
Here's how I took him from being scared to speak on the spot to nominating himself for network TV, dominating huge conferences, and speaking on podcasts.
@SpencerApplebau :
"The biggest gap I had in my career progression a year ago was, I was promoted to co-head of venture… I think for my sourcing and picking ability, a part of venture is getting out there and just being a public presence and telling the world what your thesis is and why you believe what you believe. Without that, I think you have a massive hole as a venture investor."
When he came to me, he had no confidence in his ability to do public speaking.
That's the gap I close. I help the sound of your voice match the expertise in your head, so the market can actually hear the thesis.
He had the points. What he needed was to get them out of his head and into a room that isn't only technical people.
"I feel like you've given me all of the tools going into certain appearances, whether it's a podcast or an interview or a sit-down with a reporter. You know, I have a lot of points in my head, but you've helped me actually convey them to other people in the most efficient way possible, through my voice, through articulating certain points in a manner that is digestible to a broader audience, other than the super technical people that I usually talk with."
"When you're not confident, you don't project the way that you want to project. And so even if you're making a really great point on something that's extremely technical, if you don't feel like you have the confidence to actually explain that technical concept to someone else, it will not come across, and it'll actually just sound like rambling."
He came for public speaking. He stayed because we built the habits the seat required.
"You've basically become an executive coach… I needed to step up into a leadership role and create a lot of habits, both super simple ones, but also even more leadership-style ones. You helped me figure out what are those habits that I need to build, and then actually held me accountable on executing them."
Where he is now:
"When I came to you originally, I had no confidence in my ability to do public speaking. I'm now signed up for three panels in one day in Singapore. I'm getting interviewed by a reporter at a major financial publication the day before that. And I think I got like four other presentations just in the next six weeks."
His partner watched a few of his recent podcasts and "said it was clear that my confidence and tone in public speaking is markedly different than it was nine or even six months ago."
"And so I feel like anytime I have a public speaking opportunity that's presented to me by our internal comms team, I jump at it. Actually, I even nominated myself to go on TV soon. So hopefully, I'll actually be on CNBC in the next couple of weeks."
From hiding behind the picks to jumping at the mic.
That's the visibility the seat required. Now he has it.
"And so for me to be able to do a lot more public speaking and even get more comfortable writing publicly and reaching out to people, it's made a massive difference in my ability as a VC."
Your voice tells the world who you are. When you speak, you lead.
> Be Canadian
> Finish high school
> omg greatest day of my life I'm an adult now
> get a degree
> yay I can finally make some money I'm tired of being a broke student
> get a full time job
> can't afford to eat
> apply for govt assistance so you don't starve
Story of a Broken Country
“59% of food bank users have a post-secondary education. 50% have full-time employment…
The social contract has been broken.”
Millions of Canadians were lied to.
They went to college, played by the rules, found full-time jobs only to discover that a paycheck no longer guarantees food on the table or a roof over their heads.
A warning here for Americans as well.
What happens to a country when doing everything “right” is no longer enough to build a decent life?
That is a Broken Country...
Broken Country is a new documentary examining how Canada went from one of the safest and most prosperous countries in the world to a nation struggling with an affordability crisis, homelessness, public disorder and a growing loss of faith in its institutions.
Follow @BrokenCountry_
I've heard some serious nightmare Airbnb stories far worse than I've experienced but my personal final straw was the last Airbnb there was a sign stuck to the A/C control which said to be mindful of using the A/C because "electricity is expensive."
Hosts were boomers living in a 5 bedroom house 5 minutes from one of the best beaches in Australia lol
its just bonkers the new policy @airbnb is trying to put in place. Putting the dishes in the dishwasher, taking out the trash, pulling the sheets off the bed....they are just standard things any normal person would do when staying at a house. Why wouldn't a host be allowed to say that?
Real world third world immigration driving up inflation and crime.
Online third world platform immigration driving up content theft and AI slop.
If you're a founder/CEO/Executive who has to public speak on podcasts, at conferences, on stage, on TV etc..
Best thing you can do is DM @MichaelHewitt23
He's an opera singer who's worked with over 400 clients and turn them from nervous speakers to dominating on stage.
This photo with @anitakirkovska feels like 100 years ago. It was March at @vellum_ai HQ in Manhattan. Time flies.
Already an experienced public speaker, she wanted to double down on her strengths while finding and fixing any weak points in her game.
A keen student of growth and personal development, and highly technical A-player in her career, she took to unique flavor of executive voice and public speaking coaching.
We got her Three Resonances (voice, messaging, and identity) ringing clearly and confidently for industry keynotes, customer demos, and key internal conversations.
Is AI flying faster than time? At a prominent angel and VC-backed AI company (@ycombinator @leadersfund @dharmesh @arashf, to name a few), it wasn’t long before she was effectively de-facto C-Suite in addition to her role in the trenches as an operator. Her voice, clarity of thought, and courage to speak mattered more than ever.
When The Three Resonances combine, we hear The Frequency of Truth, bedrock of The Sound of Leadership.
When you speak, you lead. Your voice tells the world who you are. Unleashing it is a matter of unlearning what’s unnatural.
From there, you can go forth, and speak BOLDLY 👊
Broken Country is a fascinating case study at how bad politics can slowly eat away and destroy a country until it's almost too late.
I don't think it's too late for Canada and hope that they turn things around for the better.
American friends —
We made Broken Country to answer one question: what happened to Canada? A country that was the envy of the world is now a shell of itself. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened one bad policy at a time.
Every one of those policies sounded good when it was sold. Mass immigration at a pace our housing, hospitals and wages couldn’t absorb. “Free” health care you wait months to actually use and increasingly are offered death instead of care. More programs, more promises, more government standing between people and their own lives.
The result: separatist movements in three provinces, a generation that can’t afford a home, and a government insisting things have never been better.
When I look south I see a country that isn’t perfect, but is thriving. With your midterms two weeks out, I’d ask you to look hard at three candidates running on the exact promises that took us down:
Texas — James Talarico. On video calling capitalism an “oppressive system” that must be “dismantled.” Now he says he’s a capitalist. Texans should ask which one shows up in the Senate.
Michigan — Abdul El-Sayed. Deleted thousands of posts before running. Told NBC his family had no Muslim Brotherhood ties; his own half-sister’s posts say otherwise. You can delete tweets. You can’t delete a record.
Florida — Angie Nixon. A card-carrying member of the DSA, whose platform calls for defunding police and open borders. She says she disagrees with those parts. Then why join?
We’ve lived where this road goes. If you want to see it for yourself, watch Broken Country at BrokenCountry.com.
Don’t make Canada’s mistakes.
funny thing is your predictoins can be completely wrong but as long as you say them with conviction people will go along with it because people don't know how to think for themselves
One of the most persuasive forms of content:
Predictions.
A lot of people are scared to make bets publicly. But people have always paid attention to people who have an idea about future direction.
It helps to remember the risk isn’t real.
If you are wrong, great—you can explain why. If you are right, great—people think you are the best to listen to in your niche.
Predictions require two things:
1. That you have the finger on the pulse of your market
2. That you understand second and third order consequences (cause and effect)
For example, a hot topic right now is AI (of course).
Now an obvious prediction is that AI is going to make us all more powerful. But that is so boring (being unique means saying something that someone hasn’t heard before).
When we think about second order consequences, the most interesting predictions come from flipping the script. A positive creates a negative etc.
One example is that as the world becomes more artificial, people crave more connection with real people.
And so a good bet is to build your message, and offers, around community.
Answer this question:
Where do you think your niche is heading?
Then, don’t just talk about it. Take action and show people the way.
I have thousands of Kindle highlights I've never looked at. Maybe tens of thousands. I have too much going on in my first brain that I forget to log into my second brain.