VC Rick says, “You must have a competitor because if you are smart, someone else is doing it. Why are you better and who can kill your business?” Better fi nd out about other guys and don’t name Google or Microsoft . If you dwell on the eighthundredpound gorilla who could take you out, you give VC Rick the exit strategy he needs. Look at it this way, Van Gogh studied the Dutch masters and Japanese art and he copied their techniques before he broke through with his own brilliance. If you want to be a great painter, you do need to see what has been determined as great across the ages to bring depth to your own art. In the same way, seeing Microsoft ’s business plan will guide you to create your own technology fi rm. If you are going for private money, no matter what size of revenues and clients, you need to instil a sense of confi dence with investors. Aft er all, you can cook the books so that an 206 CHAPTER 10 Content Purpose Industry analysis of the risks and how you plan to get over them. Your competitive advantage and why you are diffi cult to copy. Are you savvy enough to know the problems and do you have specifi c strategy to face these, or does the fund manager have to raise them? Figure 10.13: Slide 9 Anderson auditor would not catch the deceit. To get peace of mind, investors need to set up a series of steps for you to follow. If you have done some market research to see the size of your potential market, some of this will have rubbed off on you, so that you now have an opinion of whether the research is right or not. Otherwise, you will lack depth in your own business thinking. Barriers or Risks How unique is your company? What makes you or your company so special? What’s your brainy formula, magic, fairy dust, secret recipe, XMen qualities? See Figure 10.13 for some advice. Th e technology or product, which in earlystage investing is the keystone to the business, is understandably of prime concern. Is the technology incremental or transformational? In other words, is it just a better staircase or is it an elevator-a totally diff erent technology that takes away from the current market leaders? How will you entice customers to switch from their habitual technology? When there is status quo competition, customers have to heave themselves off their current habit over to your elevator-changing loyalties takes work. Is this technology coming out of left fi eld? Can it be disintermediated? Th at is, can something come between it and the market and replace the technology? Can it be scaled? Can it be transferred out of the lab and commercialized? How easy is it to copy? Are there patents? Can the company protect their patents? VC Rick likes signifi cant intellectual property. He likes patents rather than knowhow embedded in your three engineers’ brains. He wants to know if someone in your company The Smart Presentation: Raising Capital Face to Face 207 made a speech and disclosed patents, do you have the resources to defend your patents.