Margarita Quihuis's blog

In my work on Indigo and now m-Via (more on that in another post), I often run into the received wisdom that Hispanics don't trust banks. It has become the catch-all reason to explain product failures in financial services. Why did Bank of America withdraw their SafeSend product? Well, you know, Hispanics just don't trust banks. The other assumption is that, 'well, Hispanic immigrants aren't very financially literate.' If they were smarter, it would be obvious to use banks. And while there is an element of truth to both assumptions, it doesn't tell the whole story and it may cause you to give up too soon. After all, it's much easier to blame the customer than to acknowledge that your product design or market strategy was in error.

So here you are, a for-profit / non-profit / social entrepreneur, your business plan is done, your powerpoint is ready and you're meeting with a potential funder. You've got a crisp elevator speech, you present your pitch and then the funder says, "this is a very interesting idea but why don't you come back once you're up and running."  (See http://www.xigi.net/2006/05/28/mamamikes-response.html)

A pitch is a performance, an oral presentation. But too often, entrepreneurs think they're doing the audio version of their business plan. (Think Books on Tape) instead of doing the movie version (or better yet - the movie preview) of their book. (Think more action and highlights, less exposition)

Steve Ketchpel (RDVP Fellow 2005) was kind enough to remind me of the fantastic Technology Formation course offered in the school of engineering. MS&E 273 (aka IE273) has a very nice webpage of resources, including a section on venture pitches.

In my roles as executive director of the Women's Technology Cluster, VC and social entrepreneur I have heard ALOT of pitches. Here are my thoughts (not terribly original, by the way) on how to improve your game.

In preparation for next week's Mock Pitch Workshop, I offer a few links on how to give a venture pitch. Read and review!

Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

Recently a friend shared a recent banking experience. My friend, Clara, is an undocumented worker who makes her living cleaning houses. Her current employer is a wealthy woman with an 8 bedroom mansion in an exclusive suburb in Silicon Valley.

Periodically, I need to go and feed my inner techie. This week I spent some time playing with the www.bubbler.net Instant Publisher tool. Similar to Typepad and Blogger, Bubbler lets you quickly create professional looking websites with blogging capability.  The advantage of Bubbler vs TypePad is that you can create a traditionally looking website AND have blogging capability whereas the other sites tend to be, well, bloggy.

When I was a venture capitalist, I was often asked what it would take to create a venture capital industry in Mexico or Indonesia or just about anywhere outside of Silicon Valley. There were often many very good reasons why it couldn't or hadn't happen - deal flow, amount of money that needed to be invested, cost of managing a fund, a service provider ecosystem, etc.

In the article "What Works: Lo Pequeño Es Hermoso (Small is Beautiful) - Banks in Mexico say that microloans are helping the poor while boosting their profits"

“Access to capital in developing countries is a vexing problem,”