I remember meeting Ginika E. Egwuonwu over coffee in Joburg earlier in the year. The passion, professionalism and articulation with which she shared her vision was remarkable and compelling. I was won over before actually seeing what she was building.
I've never really liked demo day pitches or pitch deck presentations for two key reasons.
- Demo days are like auctions and decisions can easily be driven by all kinds of cognitive biases and
- Pitch decks can be lazy. They are structured to cater to the time/attention span of the investor rather than the depth of the company - this can also be affected by conclusion biases if the decks are not exactly skewed towards to the expected format of the investor.
I believe companies are heterogeneous in nature and their evaluation thereof should be approached with a certain kind of scientific and philosophical diligence and not a sales-sy 5 min look-see of a deck or demo day pitch.
The time of the entrepreneur is as equally valuable as the time of the investor and there is a need for equal mutual respect from both parties. It is a kind of marriage after all. Some investors might counter argue with the mimetic logic of "If you can't summarise it in 10 slides or 5 mins then it's not simple enough".Okay. Reduce the entire universe into an atom first then we can talk.So, my personal rant aside, Ginika won me over with her passion and depth of vision that can never be contained in a deck. Her showing me a fully built prototype that was beautifully designed created the FOMO in me which made me realise that Joining The Closed Circuit Group vision would be a privilege for not just the company but for me as well.
The rest, as they say, is history.
