People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
Interpretation
Focus on creating value rather than preparing endless presentations.
Scott Cook's quote emphasizes the importance of genuine action over superficial presentations. He suggests that customers are more interested in the tangible benefits of a product rather than how it's presented, advocating for a shift towards action and results in business interactions.
In practice
In a startup pitch meeting, I would use this quote to encourage participants to focus on product development.
In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.
I'm a believer that you accomplish much, much more with direct relationships than by using an intermediary. And that cash you keep in the bank can be the difference between staying alive as a small business, or not.
If you want to invest in us, we believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine. If they regret, they can sell us.
In business, if you realize you've made a bad decision, you change it.
The concept of disruption is about competitive response; it is not a theory of growth. It's adjacent to growth. But it's not about growth.
Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life.
Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.
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