Presentations

Here is a selection of presentations I’ve given, along with pointers to the relevant posts. I try to keep my Slideshare profile updated, as best I can, with alternate versions of these decks.

Finding Product / Market Fit

Originally I put this framework together to provide a “meta” framework for understanding what tool / methodology was right for your given situation, in order to achieve product / market fit. There are so many posts / tweets / pundits online, but knowing which techniques to employ at which time is what this “Product Market Matrix is used for (see the blog post here. I’ve given this talk quite a lot, so there are many different variants of this deck floating around the interwebs.

Designing and Building Startup Culture

This is a topic I’m particularly passionate about, in that a company’s culture has dramatic impact on the people it attracts, its structure, and how it goes about developing products. Startups have the unique blessing of starting from “zero”, but the challenge of dealing with many external and internal factors that other companies don’t need to deal with. I propose a simple framework founders can use for managing these issues in this post , with another post that dives deeper into some academic underpinnings of that model. Again, there are a few variations of this presentation out there which are tuned to startup and non-startup audiences.

The Next Chapter in Online Advertising: Word-of-mouth-at-scale (WOMAS)

I gave this talk to a group of MBA students at Cornell University’s Johnson School in a class called “Current Topics in Marketing”. This walks through the evolution of online advertising and how we got to the new chapter, brought about due to the rise of Facebook: “word of mouth at-scale”. We then explore what that means, how it works, and leave with a couple of examples. Special thanks to the folks at Nanigans for all the slides.

Fundamentals of Consumer Marketplace Businesses – 10 factors to consider

The marketplace business model is one of the most dominant business models underlying the consumer internet. This slide deck is from a talk I gave at The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, as well as another version to CustomMade.com (where I’m an advisor). This presentation details 10 major factors in selecting an industry and designing the service, so as to increase your likelihood of success with this model. The original blog post can be found here.

Lean Startup applied to “maker” companies: case study of Lime Tree Cove

This talk was delivered to an undergraduate entrepreneurship class at Olin College, and focused on how the “lean startup” model can be applied to non-high tech startups. This deck discusses the journey my company Lime Design followed in developing our flagship product for our Lime Tree Cove brand, called The Barmaid.

“Connection-based selling” framework

Slides from my workshop delivered in Moscow to Skolkovo Super League companies, as part of the MassChallenge entrepreneurship “bootcamp”. “Connection-based selling” is a framework to think through the sales process, that hinges upon the notion of making emotional connections to the buyer, prior to rational arguments for your product.