Sanjeev Jain

2x Entrepreneur, Working on Next startup, Angel Investor, @MITSloan MBA!

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@rishibagree Laptop did not exist back then.

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@ValueWithPrem That is because Marwari were always rich, even during Mughal era. And that is how they stayed under the radar. In those days and even after that there were no security guard rails for non-violent community. It was Bhamashah, who funded Rana Pratap’s full army.

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@c_aashish Without network effects, it will die Signal way (or worst koo way). If Govt can and top businesses move their official communications to it, it would certainly make a huge dent. Otherwise Initially euphoria usually due in absence of network effects & it sits as unused app

[Bhavye Khetan @bhavye_khetan]

I made a fake founder persona. No product. No pitch. No deck.

Just:
- Stanford CS
- Ex-Palantir
- Used the word “AI” 3 times

Sent cold emails to 34 VCs.
27 replied. 4 asked for a call.

This game is rigged in ways most people don’t understand.

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"If you can’t be happy with a coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht."

@naval

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body & too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Time spent undistracted & alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.
@naval

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

Fun story – at a recent coding hackathon, the winner was a marketer. Not a coder, but a marketer. Previously it was the best coder who won, less dependent on idea and more on execution and ability to jerry rig a solution. Now it’s the best idea that wins since we’ve democratized what it means to program and barriers to entry are much lower (i.e. natural language!)

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

How to present

In 2006, I helped @ericschmidt create a deck outlining Google’s strategy, for a presentation Eric was delivering to the company. It taught me a profound lesson on how to present.

When I showed up to my first meeting with Eric, he asked me to visit with every product team at Google, chat with them to figure out what they were working on, and then summarize it on one slide (for each team).

Easy enough, I thought. I would use 3-5 bullet points per slide. Piece of cake. I started mentally mapping things out and got ready to leave.

“But”, Eric said, “I want no words on any slide”.

My well-laid plans disintegrated in an instant. How was I supposed to convey the key messages from each team, without WORDS?

Eric must have seen the panic on my face, and kindly gave me a hint. “Put the text in speaker notes”.

“But what goes on the slides, Eric?” I continued panicking.

That classic, gentle “Eric smile” fluttered on his face. “Why, images, of course!”

“You mean, you want each slide to just be comprised of images?”

“You got it. And use the title wisely. 7-8 words max. Let’s meet in a week to review progress.”

As I left the meeting, little was I to know that this conversation would fundamentally change my view on how to deliver effective presentations.

17 years later, I still cling tightly to the following principles:

1. The larger the audience, the fewer the words on the slide. In Eric’s case, the audience was thousands of employees, so we had 0 words per slide.

2. The title does most of the heavy lifting, which means it cannot be passive. It must be action oriented. Eg: not “Subscriber retention” but “Subscribers continue to be retained strongly” or even better “Net revenue retention continues to be > 100%”.

3. Use memorable images that substantiate and give credence to the words of the title. This image is what will occupy most of the slide area, so you need to spend much of your time thinking about what picture will best get the point (made by the title) across. In some cases, it might be a customer image or logo. in other cases, a graph. In yet other cases, it could be something else entirely. For the Google presentation, one of the images that gave me the most trouble was a slide on Google Search Appliance and other Enterprise products. The title stated that these products were increasingly being used by larger customers. The team didn’t want to share customer logos broadly since some were confidential, so logos were not an option. I decided to go with a trend line on the % of searches from enterprise customers, but the person who was supposed to pull this data for me, flaked at the last minute and I had to scramble. I ended up scrambling to create a mosaic of a bunch of consumer product logos with some kind of icon that denoted large enterprises. Not my finest moment but it got the point across.

4. Use speaker notes. Like Eric said, speaker notes should contain most of the details. It puts a lot of burden on the speaker since they cannot just read off the slides. But this doesn’t deter good speakers, since they prepare dozens of times, and then again.

So there you have it: my 4 principles for delivering compelling presentations to live audiences.

(CAVEAT: If the presentation has to be emailed to an audience who will consume it asynchronously, that’s completely different and has different rules).

How did the 2006 Google strategy presentation turn out, you ask? It went quite well, and later I got a nice thank you note from Eric. I didn’t realize at the time that I should have been the one thanking him for the once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity.

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@GerberKawasaki No luxury car company sells 2mm car/year....
Besides, high margins are one time event...software's incremental cost is zero....FSD will general recurring revenue (SaaS style) - a disruption that auto sector has never witnessed....
I do agree that Tesla needs to advertise

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@GerberKawasaki not losing market share is more important for long term well being of stockholders than one off high margin...

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@GerberKawasaki FSD is recurring revenue with well over 80% margin...Gillette model. Car is your cartridge, FSD is your blade. you can get one time high margin vs monthly recurring revenue

[Sanjeev Jain @sanjeevjain]

@GerberKawasaki this is the first year they will sell 2mm cars. I am sure this is what Elon has in mind when he is reducing prices..

[Anurag Mairal @mairal]

Cancer-detecting wearable may offer better way to monitor tumors - Scope https://t.co/LlN7ykOYD9

[Adémọ́lá. @OgbeniDemola]

On Tuesday In 1958 Belgian government captured families from Congo and displayed them in human Zoos in Brussels during Brussels World Fair.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The first test of a startup pitch or homepage is whether you can understand what the company even does.

[Aaron Blake @AaronBlake]

This is quite the graphic

https://t.co/ffcpRd10FR

[Kyung Lah @KyungLahCNN]

Asian Americans to Democrats: "we want safe streets, good schools and less progressive ideology." That's the message and 2024 warning from San Francisco. Footnote about our unfortunate experience at the end. @OutFrontCNN story features @JoelEngardio. Producer: @jasonkCNN

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

Matt Welsh @mdwelsh is founder of @fixieai Berkeley PhD, Harvard prof and Google sw engr. His awesome presentation on the future of programming states that in ~3 yrs, an AI robot engr will cost < $10 / month and will do everything an engineer can today. https://t.co/uSokH7YwtI

[Jackson Greathouse Fall @jacksonfall]

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.

I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.

Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?

Follow along 👀