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[Perspective Series] Storytelling Secrets to Winning Pitches With Ben Wiener

Ben Weiner

Ben Wiener is the Managing Partner at Jumpspeed Ventures, a venture-capital firm focusing on early-stage, Jerusalem-founded tech startups. Since founding the firm in 2014, he has served as the lead investor in dozens of startups and often provided their very first capital. Before his VC work, Ben co-founded his first startup in 1999 and gained experience as both a corporate lawyer and clerk at Israel’s Supreme Court. He is also the author of Fever Pitch and holds a BA in economics from Yeshiva University and a JD with honours from Columbia Law School.


Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:


  • [2:26] Ben Wiener discusses how he uses writing to share lessons from startups and entrepreneurship

  • [5:43] Storytelling as a tool for teaching business and leadership

  • [8:48] Books that inspired Ben’s writing style, including The Goal by Eli Goldratt

  • [10:52] How Ben got Guy Kawasaki to write the foreword for his novel Fever Pitch

  • [13:38] The power of truth in storytelling and authenticity in pitching

  • [16:36] Making your product — not yourself — the hero of your startup story

  • [19:35] Introducing the HEART framework for crafting the perfect pitch

  • [25:19] Why most startup pitches fail to hit emotional and logical pressure points

  • [26:16] Turning sales into storytelling and sharing your product as a treasure

  • [28:47] Ben’s thoughts on AI-generated pitches and why founders should write their own

In this episode…


Communicating the true value of an idea is a common hurdle for entrepreneurs — investor interest often fades not from weak concepts but from unclear or uninspired pitches. Even the most innovative founders can stumble when translating passion into persuasion. How can startups tell their story in a way that connects deeply with investors and customers alike?


Venture capitalist and author Ben Wiener shares how storytelling can transform the way founders present their businesses. Drawing from his experience and his book Fever Pitch, he introduces the HEART framework — a five-part structure that helps entrepreneurs communicate their purpose, stakes, alternatives, differentiation, and team strengths. He emphasizes truth over performance, encouraging founders to make their product — not themselves — the hero of the story. By focusing on clarity, authenticity, and emotional connection, Ben’s approach helps entrepreneurs pitch with confidence and integrity.


In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Ben Wiener, Managing Partner at Jumpspeed Ventures, about the art of storytelling for entrepreneurs. Ben discusses his HEART framework for crafting compelling startup pitches, why truthfulness matters more than flash, and how to shift the focus from the founder to the product. He also shares insights on the role of AI in storytelling and lessons from his own entrepreneurial journey.


Resources Mentioned in this episode



Quotable Moments:


  • “I'm really advocating storytelling in a truthful sense, like storytelling as a structure, not manipulation.”

  • “The hero of your story is not you. The hero of the story is your product.”

  • “It's not about manipulation. It's not about being an incredible orator or a manipulative, you know, dynamic speaker.”

  • “If your content is structured right, it has the potential to strike into the heart.”

  • “If you have a treasure that you've built or you are building, you have this amazing product.”


Action Steps:


  1. Make your product the hero of your pitch: Shifting focus from yourself to your product helps investors connect with the value you’re bringing to the world and highlights the problem-solving power of your solution.

  2. Structure your story with the HEART framework: Using Hypothesis, Enormous stakes, Alternatives, Radical solution, and Traits ensures your pitch covers key emotional and logical triggers and increases your chances of winning investor interest.

  3. Start every pitch with your “why”: Leading with purpose immediately captures attention and creates emotional resonance because people invest in belief and vision before they buy into details or data.

  4. Be radically truthful in your storytelling: Honesty builds credibility and differentiates you from founders who exaggerate claims, attracting investors through authenticity and long-term trust.

  5. Treat storytelling as sharing, not selling: When you present your product as a gift or solution rather than a transaction, audiences are more receptive and enthusiastic.


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Episode Transcript:


Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Michael Jeanfreau of Mariner Wealth, Michelle Feinstein of Salesforce, and Arnulf Hsu of GReminders. Today is a special episode of My Perspective series, where I talk to people to get different views of the world and find inspiration for all of us to learn with. Today, I'm speaking with Ben Wiener of Jumpspeed Ventures, also the author of the book Fever Pitch, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing when your business relies upon processing forms. Don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit forbes.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Kyle Gray of The Story Engine. He was also a prior guest on my show, so go check out his episode and check out Kyle's website at The Story Engine to learn how to tell your story better.

All right. My guest, Ben Wiener, is a venture capitalist and managing partner at Jumpspeed Ventures. He's invested in dozens of startups and is a lecturer on startup presentation and strategy, author of fiction thrillers Murder at First Principles and the number one Amazon bestseller Fever Pitch. Ben brings business strategy, concepts and principles to life through storytelling and makes investment education both enlightening and entertaining. Ben welcome to The Customer Wins.

Ben Wiener: 02:02

Thank you so much for having me I appreciate it.

Richard Walker: 02:04

Yeah, I'm excited to hear some of the stories here. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Ben, I want to understand what you're doing a lot better here because you have both the venture capital and the books that you're writing. So how are you helping people?

Ben Wiener: 02:26

Yeah, so the writing is really where I'm trying to be most helpful in my fund. I invest very locally, but my writing is meant for the global audience. And there I'm trying to share, like the very few things that I think I've figured out in this world of startups and entrepreneurship, and in an entertaining and fun, but also deeply serious educational way, like spread the gospel of the few things that I figured out. And those are the two books that you mentioned. They were both, you know, way more work than you know, I thought would would be when I started doing them.

They were incredibly fun to write. And Fever Pitch, like you said, has hit number one on Amazon and has definitely exceeded my expectations. And I'm really grateful to everyone who has enjoyed it. And more importantly, I'm very, you know, grateful that people have found it helpful and useful in their professional lives to help them grow their startup company. So I think that's the way that I'm trying to be helpful in general, helpful on this show, and kind of spread the knowledge that I think I've gathered over a couple of years of deeply researching some wonky stuff in the entrepreneurship space.

Richard Walker: 03:42

There's definitely some wonky stuff with us entrepreneurs know. I love that you want to share with the world because you spend your career with the hard knocks, all these lessons that you learn, and most of the people that you're helping don't go through the rigor that you've gone through. They do it once, twice, Three times maybe. First of all, just a point of clarity for anybody listening. Jump speed ventures, if I recall correctly, is you said locally invested.

Can you just describe that better for everybody?

Ben Wiener: 04:08

Well, I'm based very far away. Clearly I'm an American, like you could tell from my accent, but I live very, very far away in the Middle East, in Jerusalem, Israel, where we moved about 27 years ago. My wife and I and I invest only in one city, which is Jerusalem, which is the capital of Israel, which is the Start-Up nation. And there's just a ton of entrepreneurial activity in this little tiny country under focused in the capital. Most of the action is in Tel Aviv, in the center of the country.

So I've kind of captured this local ecosystem, and that's probably not going to be directly relevant to a lot of people listening. However, a lot of what I've learned I've put into this writing, which I think is relevant for anybody around the world, and my audience for the book or for the books is primarily the US, you know, North American audience. And that's where the books take place. Murder at First Principles takes place in Silicon Valley. Fever Pitch takes place in new Jersey.

And those those storylines, I think will be more, you know, recognizable or relevant to to the to your audience.

Richard Walker: 05:11

Yeah, I actually. I wanted to just tell all my entrepreneur friends who might be listening, don't go pitch bend unless you're in Jerusalem and you have the right kind of model, but definitely check out the book. So, you know, one of the things we talked about when I first met you is that you are actually storytelling. You're not just saying, hey, here's the prescription, do these things, your resume has to look like this, etc. you're you're using storytelling to do that. So my first question about that is, have you always been a storyteller? Is this who you are in general?

Ben Wiener: 05:43

I probably have some sort of aptitude for it, but most of what I figured out was the result of research, not I wouldn't I wouldn't say natural aptitude. So the the book, which is a novel about a founder, an entrepreneur who can't pitch a startup to save his life until he actually needs to pitch a startup to save his life. It's a teaching tool to teach through this crazy story that gets very extreme. What really happens to a lot of us as entrepreneurs? Just it takes it to a to an extreme level.

But a lot of his problems, he's very well meaning this guy. But a lot of the stuff goes off the rails. The problems that that start him on his crazy roller coaster journey are problems that I think would be familiar to a lot of entrepreneurs and the people that love and support them. So he has some misconceptions about business life and about the meaning, the meaning and significance of his product, etc. and he needs to kind of get smacked in the face to or worse, to like come to grips with what he needs to do to to raise the money to get him out of his trouble. I think that that is something that I was quite familiar with from, from my experiences as an entrepreneur before I became an investor, and I'm not sure if I'm directly addressing your question, but I think these things are general.

You know, these are general issues that I think would apply to almost anybody who's doing something entrepreneurial. I'm just trying to take it to an extreme. And and the act of writing the book was almost ridiculous. Like, I'm trying to teach something that I could have taught and ended up teaching for free, like in a in a 1000 word blog post. I just had fun turning it into a story.

And so your question was, was I always a natural storyteller? I think I had some teachers, you know, that when I was young that inspired me to be creative and that kind of propelled me to like to, you know, be creative in writing or in, you know, storytelling. But again, I think that's that wouldn't have been enough for me to write this book. I think I had to really spend a couple of years researching business communications, storytelling structures to be able to stand behind the framework that I'm pitching in the book. So I think I had some seeds of natural aptitude, but not enough to be a professional writer.

I had to learn a lot about how to turn that into something that was, you know, presentable to the outside world, right?

Richard Walker: 08:10

I asked because I've struggled as a storyteller through my life. I have the gift of few words, and I've had man. I remember in my 20s and early 30s, I would just say things in the most concise, precise way possible and as few words as possible. And I was trying to learn storytelling because I understood that we communicate better through stories and feelings and emotions that go with those stories. So that's been one of my own struggles in life, and I love the books that are more parables or storytelling, like The Richest Man in Babylon or The Go Giver is one of my favorite books.

What books inspired your writing style, do you think?

Ben Wiener: 08:48

Oh, there are definitely a few. One of the books that inspired me early on to take a shot at doing this is a book called The Goal by Professor Eli Goldratt, who of all things, was like an expert in in manufacturing and constraint theory and like how to run a factory, which is probably like one of the one of the most dry, boring topics like in the world. And I think he understood that in the 80s or 70s or 80s when he was writing. So he had this theory about how to run a factory properly, and instead of just writing a textbook, he wrote a novel that that is not it's not an incredibly, you know, it's not going to win a Pulitzer Prize, but he's teaching. He was teaching a story about a guy who had a, you know, a job running a factory, and things start to fall apart.

And magically, this professor, like, lands in his life and starts teaching him what to do. And it's really just a Trojan horse to teach his theory of constraint theory. But the crazy thing is that book has sold, I think to date, like 8 million copies. People reference it all the time. Professors of manufacturing, you know, and whatever it's called or organizational operations research or whatever.

They, they, they, they assign this book to their classes in college. So I thought, well, if Goldreich could write a book that was like on a scale of 1 to 100, if Hemingway is 100 and Goldratt was 50, if I could get to like 75 with my story, if I could be somewhere between Goldratt and and Hemingway, then then it was worth taking a shot. So I spent, I think I probably spent more time than he did on researching novel writing and story structure and technique, and I tried to put together a book that would be fun, not just for entrepreneurs to read, but for their spouses, or for their family members, or for their coworkers that would hold together as like a fun read. And I think one of the best endorsements that I got on the book cover, aside from the fact that Guy Kawasaki wrote the foreword, which we can talk about, which is completely insane, that I got him to agree to write the foreword or that he offered to do that. I had no relationship with him.

Like it was insane that he read the manuscript and wrote the foreword.

Richard Walker: 10:50

Well, how did you get it?

Ben Wiener: 10:52

I sent it to him. I just called, I called, emailed him. Yeah, I don't I don't recommend ever cold emailing famous people, but I thought I had nothing to lose. I knew that he was a generous person and I knew that he loved, like teaching and helping. And I kind of I reference him in the book like his his name comes up in the book.

Ironically, the character tries Kawasaki's famous ten 2030 pitching structure and it frankly, it doesn't work. And I improve on it with my, you know, with my framework. I sent the manuscript to Kawasaki, like with an email saying, you have no idea who I am. I'm a serious person. I wrote a very not serious yet serious book.

You're referenced in it, and I, I deeply admire your ten, 20, 30 rule. I've used it for a long time in my life, but and I it was very clear like but I've tweaked it like I've added to it. And if you're open to considering what I did to your structure, I would love for you to read the manuscript. And he very graciously, he wrote, you know, kind of neutral, like, okay, send it over. I'll take a look.

Which was cool that he even responded. Yeah, and sent it over. And then like three days later, I got an email from him that basically started off like, oh my God, this is hysterical. Here's the foreword to your book, please publish it. And that was incredibly gratifying.

Like, I could not could not be more grateful to him for for doing that. And it clearly added credibility to the book. But on the back of the book, what I was trying to say is even possibly even more interesting than that is on the back of the book, somebody I know who's a professor at Harvard Business School and a venture capitalist, wrote an endorsement to the book saying, I'm not sure whether I should read this book at the beach or teach it in my entrepreneurship entrepreneurship class at Harvard Business School. And the answer is both like it holds together as a beach reading book. But it's a very, you know, helpful teaching tool, like for entrepreneurs who are seriously trying to, like, survive and grow their businesses.

So I was trying to hit that double purpose, like fun, but also enlightening. And so far the reactions have been pretty good.

Richard Walker: 13:02

Now that's cold, man, that is amazing. Like I said, my favorite books of parables, and even though I've published two books, I don't have that writing style. I haven't done the research you've done, the practice you've done to try to learn that skill, to tell a better story. And I feel like if I ever republish my first book, my first book is called It's My Life. I Can Change If I want to.

It's a four step method of how to change yourself from within, and the methodology is very, very powerful. I've helped a lot of people. It's helped me, but I don't know that I've told it in such a way that everybody is going to be like, yeah, I want to read this more and get it, you know? So it's very inspiring what you've done. Ben.

Ben Wiener: 13:38

Yeah, I would just Say, by the way, I would add, like you mentioned the word storytelling a couple times. And I like to really, you know, stress That in some parts of our culture, storytelling has like a little bit of a negative angle, like, oh, you're telling a story implies sometimes that you're making something up or that you're, you're spinning a yarn or whatever. And it's very, very important to me. And what I'm trying to teach in the, in the framework is it's critical in my approach to be incredibly truthful when you're trying to certainly, like, raise money for your startup or something like that. I am never advocating storytelling as like a fiction, which is ironic because I'm teaching through a fictional story that I made up, but it's a very serious message saying, and what this protagonist has to learn in the story is that he's got to be completely truthful about what he has, but there's a way to structure that perfectly, 100% truthful case in a way that resonates with investors.

It's not about manipulation. It's not about being an incredible orator or a manipulative, you know, dynamic speaker. This guy's a he's a he's an academic. He's a chemist. He's, like, least likely to win over a crowd.

And so I'm trying to say that you can be that kind of person who is incredibly truthful, not a dynamic speaker. But if your content is structured right, it has the potential to strike into the heart of even a skeptical listener. So I'm really advocating storytelling in a truthful sense, like storytelling as a structure. We have an evolutionarily developed brain that responds to stories about the future that are presented in a certain way. And I'm trying to say, if you're an entrepreneur or in business, we tell these stories in our regular life and in the books we read and the movies we watch, they all adhere to these structures.

I'm just trying to take those structures that have been in existence since the beginning of human history, and translate that into the specific context of an entrepreneur trying to tell his or her story or raise money from a bozo like me. there's a structure. There's an optimal way to do that that's going to give you a better chance. And we've just taken these things from other parts of culture.

Richard Walker: 15:54

But I'm really glad. I'm really glad that you're talking about this, because, look, I'm going to qualify my statement by saying I have not personally had to raise capital in my company for 23 years. We've been bootstrapped, but I've been around it and I've seen it, and I feel like there's this, this inherent fear that somebody is not going to love my baby as much as I love my baby, or they won't see it for its merits. And so there's another part to this, which is we tend to see the people who are best at selling storytelling as the ones who win. So if I have to just go up in front of you and pitch what I do on its merits, I feel like there's a lot of risk in that versus if I can storytell and you're saying be truthful?

Ben Wiener: 16:36

Yeah, I'm saying that we misconstrue who the hero is in the story. And, you know, I'm going back to Joseph Campbell and the famous book Hero With a Thousand Faces, and he was the one. Professor Joseph Campbell in the 1900s came up with this understanding of human society that we we from the caveman and cavewoman era. We've constructed these stories and myths according to a certain structure, and those structures appear everywhere books, movies. You know, George Lucas was sitting with the with that book, with Campbell's book when he was writing The Empire Strikes Back.

He was like mapping the characters to that story. So what I'm saying is, this is the way we're evolved to to understand new information, to process new information and react to it. The the the the trick is just to port those structures into into business speak. And a lot of people think that when they get up on stage or they're in a meeting, that it's about them. And when I'm saying no, the hero of your story is not you.

The hero of the story is your product. Put your product on the table or in the conversation and say, here's what caused my heroic product to come into existence. I'm the one who happened to bring it into existence. But I'm just like facilitating this thing coming into the world. And you put the focus on the heroism of your new solution that you're bringing to the world.

So it's not about you, the entrepreneur, even though of course it is. But it's not your it's not about telling your story. It's about telling your product story in a way that resonates with the investor. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall into the trap of feeling very self-conscious, like, oh, what if they don't trust me? I'm like, no, let them trust your product.

Talk to them about why this thing is needed in the world, and let them fall in love with your product and then fall in love with you rather than, you know, vice versa. Take the focus off yourself and make it about this thing that you're bringing into the world, and that makes it a little bit easier to to digest. For people that are a little bit uncomfortable with public speaking or putting themselves in the center, which is totally understandable. Like, a lot of us get nervous about that. So I'm saying shift the focus.

Here's the structure to make your product the hero and how to paint that or structure that story that your product comes riding in on its white horse and saves the day. And you can feel more confident about speaking that way because it's not about you. It's about the thing that you're building.

Richard Walker: 19:02

That Makes more sense because as an entrepreneur, you're giving birth to this idea, building it into a product. But ultimately you want the product to take on its own life. You want it to have its own infrastructure and people that run it and manage it. I mean, my own goal is to just not do tasks anymore, just to lead, evangelize, etc. because I want the product and the services to do their own thing as they evolve. That makes a lot of sense.

So can we talk about your book in terms of the actual teachings beyond, you know, making the product the hero? What are some of the principles or core steps that we go through?

Ben Wiener: 19:35

Sure. So the crux of the book is around this Revolution that happens deep in the book. I'm not going to give away the ending because there's still a twist at the ending. But you can imagine that if I set it up this way, where there's a there's this protagonist who gets into big trouble with his startup and he's a, he's an academic and he's sort of thrust into this life as a founder, trying to raise money for his startup because he has to. And everything starts to fall apart. And the Mafia is chasing him and his wife is, you know, leaving him and his co-founder is like, you know, furious at him.

So it's all a mechanism to introduce this revelation that he has deep in the book of the five pieces of his startup pitch that he needs to to reframe. And what I'm saying is, like in jiu jitsu or kyokujitsu like, these are the five pressure points that you need to activate in the investor's mind in order to get them to engage with your pitch. So he and conveniently they fit into a five letter acronym, which is H.e.a.r.t. So it's the heart of the perfect pitch. That's the that's the framework that the book is set up to introduce.

But obviously the book has a lot of other learnings in it, and it's a lot of fun. You don't need to. I don't need to people to buy the book. Like I'm happy when people do. But I've given away that framework for free.

It's on the web. You can go to the website and just download it and use it. You don't have to buy my book to get smart, you can just get it for free. Book is a fun way to teach it, but so the framework is introduced deeper into the book. And then the question is, is he going to have enough time?

Are things just too far gone for him to to be able to use it, or is he just, you know, going to die basically, or something worse or in between? So that's the framework I can go into the what those five things are.

Richard Walker: 21:22

I'd love to hear it. Actually, I think everybody would get value out of hearing just at least the what the letters mean.

Ben Wiener: 21:27

Okay, I'll run through it really, really quickly and we can dive in. So the H is hypothesis. Start with why Simon Sinek Ted talk like every great movement. Amazing. I watched that Ted talk every couple months just to recharge my batteries.

It's so fundamentally important. And he's and he's so brilliantly correct. Like every great revolution, every great political movement, every great company, every great product started with why the leader explaining why they were doing what they were doing, not what they did or how they did it. So, so too, in our pitches for business, any new idea, any innovative idea, you got to start off with your not your vision statement, not your mission statement, your belief statement. Hi, my name is Ben.

I believe strongly that the startup pitch is broken, and somebody needed to write a book to explain you know, how to do it better. So I've thrown down the gauntlet. Now you either believe me or you don't. You know, you either agree with me or you're. But at least you're hopefully, hopefully open minded to like listening a little more.

You at least understand where I stand and what I'm trying to evangelize about. That's number one. So that's H hypothesis. Start with why e enormous stakes. There's a lot at stake.

So in our hero's journey I'm setting up right. The introduction of our heroic product coming.

Richard Walker: 22:37

On to fail. He's is going to lose his marriage, all his money, right? That's a lot, a lot at stake for him. You need to pay.

Ben Wiener: 22:42

Attention because there's a lot at stake, so you know. Hi. My name is Ben. I believe the startup pitch is broken. There are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to raise money every year from bozos like me who are failing because their pitch is improperly structured, not because they have a bad idea, but because they can't tell the story straight and they're not connecting with the right person.

There's billions of dollars at stake. A the alternatives are terrible. The alternatives are grossly inadequate. So for some reason there's not like a clear solution for this problem or opportunity in the market. And we can just survey what those alternatives are and why they all stink. And that that has set the stage.

Like at this point the person listening is like begging, okay. Like save us. Like the damsels in distress. The train is coming. She's tied to the tracks.

We don't have a scissors or a knife or anything to cut her free. Like, please, you know, save us. And then the R is the radically differentiated, paradigm shifting, game changing solution, not just a better alternative. That's not good enough, but just the hero comes riding in on his white horse, cuts the cuts the ropes, and she's freed. And we couldn't have done that without the hero.

So it's a it's the differentiation is the key. The focus on better is not good enough. Optimize is not good enough. We just have a radically different way of doing this. We look at the world a different way.

You're probably resonating with this like, you know, form creation Corporation is screwed up. Like people are getting bogged down in these forms. We came up with this way of making it super ten times simpler. Okay, this is super interesting. And then finally, the T are the traits and skills of the team, not the T doesn't stand for team.

The team stands for traits and skills of the team. We have the credibility and the ability to design, build and sell this new heroic solution like it might not exist yet, but we're the ones to to design, build and sell it. We have the unique capabilities or the roles defined on our team or the background or whatever it is that gives us the credibility and the, you know, the proof of ability to be able to do this. And in my mind, that's the perfect pitch. Like that is not only the five parts, the five most important parts of the pitch, but if you were stuck in an elevator, those are the five things to to describe to somebody like me, to get me to, to take a further interest.

So it's a hypothesis and or mistakes, alternatives, terrible radically differentiated solution and traits and skills of the team. Credibility and ability to design, build and sell. And that's it. That's the whole thing in a neat package.

Richard Walker: 25:16

I love it. Go ahead. Sorry. I'll just say.

Ben Wiener: 25:19

Ironically, as somebody who listens to hundreds of these a year, it's shocking to me how few of them not only hit some of those, but some of them don't hit any of those pressure points. And you're listening for like an hour or half an hour, and there's a lot of information coming at you, but none of it hits any of those pressure points. And I'm trying to fix that. I'm trying to say, don't change what the product that you're building. Just change the way that you describe what you're doing and make sure you hit these five points and you're not guaranteed to succeed, but you're guaranteed to have better chances and to feel more in control of that presentation.

Richard Walker: 25:54

Now, I love it. And you know what? I'm sitting here listening to this from a sales standpoint. It just generally selling your product to customers. It's the same thing. Why did we do this?

What's at stake? Your your time and your money and your experience is at stake, etc. this is such an amazing framework and it doesn't feel like selling. It feels like storytelling.

Ben Wiener: 26:16

It's sharing, I think. I think selling has a storytelling has a bad rap. Selling has a bad rap. If you have a if you have a treasure that you've built or you are building, you have this amazing product that you're working on. You've you've revolutionized the way forms are handled or dealt with. Wouldn't you. Want to share that with people like it's not. You're not trying to. Make a buck off.

Them. You're saying, I've spent a lot of time and effort building this thing. It really works. And it's totally different than anything you've seen. Would you like to?

Would you like to try it? Like, of course you're going to have to pay me for it if you like it, but, like, would you be interested in that? Would that possibly, like, make your life better? You're not trying to squeeze money out of them so that you can pay your bills. You're trying to say, I've got this really cool thing in my pocket.

Would you be interested in trying it? And I think that it just turns selling on its head. It turns storytelling on its head. You're sharing. A Treasure that you believe has incredible value with those that are interested in in in joining you.

Richard Walker: 27:14

I so I apologize. I still don't have the negative connotation of storytelling in my head. I think of it as a positive, actually. Of taking. People along a journey and and seeing an outcome that's different than what they imagined in the beginning. But I love what you're saying in terms of sharing, because as an entrepreneur, I do have that feeling. I have built an incredibly valuable product, service and company. Over time, we're solving problems nobody in the world is solving in ways that nobody's thinking about solving. And I feel like you deserve a chance to see it because it could change what you're doing.

And honestly, I'll tell you, we had a we had a call last week with a customer as a third call. The first call I got off and said, they're not going to be a customer, not the right fit. They don't see it. They called back and said, well, we have this other thing. And then the third call, I was shocked at how much they need this and really how big the opportunity is.

It's like ten times bigger than I thought. It was just this really magical moment. Like, they're excited and we're excited and it can all work because they took the time to see it and I got to share it with them.

Ben Wiener: 28:11

Yep. Yeah. Listen, anytime You ever bought something, you probably didn't feel like somebody was squeezing money out of you. You felt like you were getting some value and you were happy to. So we have to put ourselves in those shoes and say, I feel like I got this really cool thing. I'd love to share it with you, you know? Would you like to would you like to join me?

Richard Walker: 28:30

All right. So I'm going to ask a different type of question here. I don't know how much you get into AI and the use of AI, but how do you feel if somebody pitches you? They took your framework, ran it through AI, and rebuilt rebuilt their entire presentation using AI to get there. Does that come across?

Do you feel slighted or anything like that?

Ben Wiener: 28:47

It's already. Happened. I when I, when I saw it for the first time, it was very freaky. But two friends of mine who are pretty serious. One's a professor, one's an entrepreneur. So they, without asking me, turned my framework into an AI so that you could dump in any idea and it will spit back the Ben Wiener HRT framework pitch for that thing.

And it was. I was incredibly flattered that they did that. On one hand, I was also a little bit creeped out and uncomfortable because what I'm really trying, what I'm really trying to do, I made my own generator, my own pitch generator, which is free on the web. You can go to feverpitchbook.com and go through the playbook and get it at the end. The way I did it was I'm my form asks the entrepreneur questions with character constraint text boxes, and it's like forcing you, in your own words to articulate what your products, you know, value and differentiation is.

For me, that's much more about like, this is your baby, don't give it to an AI to generate. Like if you don't know your own product really well, that's not good. So I'm my form like forces the entrepreneur to regurgitate and spit out and refine and distill into very tight text what the real core of their product is. I was much more comfortable with that approach. Clearly, AI could do it ten times easier, but that's not the point.

I want the founders to come to the realization of what they really have, like the to, you know, squeeze the charcoal into a diamond themselves rather than it's their baby, rather than letting an AI do it. So I have no beef with my two friends who turned it into an AI, and it's been cool to play with it and watch it, you know, spit out stuff. But that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted I want the it's so important that I want the entrepreneur to get there by themselves.

Richard Walker: 30:39

Well, it's kind of. It's kind of like writing a book. If you had just gone to AI and say, hey, write me a novel on this premise, it wouldn't have been as gratifying or as good as what you've done.

Ben Wiener: 30:49

It's not. There yet. I play a lot with with AI. I use it a lot, and it is absolutely fascinating, but it's still not. And it comes up with stuff that is stuff that I wouldn't have thought of when I'm doing, you know, some writing or something. But I would still not use what it spits out completely.

And I've when I've had to make a speech or a lecture or do something, I'm not going to just take what ChatGPT gives me. It's not good enough. And it's it's not it's not my voice. It's not my creativity. So I'll use some ideas, but I'm not going to write a book using ChatGPT.

It's not it doesn't feel right. It doesn't. It's not me. So it's incredibly powerful. I have much more fun arguing with it.

For work, I've put lots of research into ChatGPT, and just to test new ideas that I'm hearing, or new markets that I don't know much about. And what's fun is when you challenge it, like the first pass is often not complete and it'll give you a very authoritative. Oh, yeah. And then you say, well, can you give me some proof of that? And then it'll come back and say, oh, actually I got one where it came back and said, I apologize. I apologize as if it's a person. I apologize. I spoke too soon.

I've done some more research and actually it's not what I said. It's different. Like, this is crazy. Is there some, like, little man inside my computer, like talking to me? So the most fun I have is arguing with it and pressing it to try to change its mind or do some more work.

Richard Walker: 32:20

Have you have you had it? Be devil's advocate and play tell you why it's not going to work, what the failure points are. Have you done that?

Ben Wiener: 32:27

Oh yeah. I've had some very, very bizarre experiences with it. The funniest one I ever had. I do a lecture on this on this topic a lot, and so I redid my lectures with cartoons from ChatGPT. So I'm I'm the character in the comic book, and it just spits out a little picture for each slide that I'm trying to describe. And in one of the slides, it's basically a venture capitalist.

I'm trying to explain how a VC fund lasts for ten years, and I'm three years into my fund. So I said, draw a picture of me sitting at a desk with a wall chart that has the years 2014 through 2024, with the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 crossed out. So it just kept trying to do it. And it had like the most bizarre outcomes. It had like 2022, 2022, 2022, 2024.

It gave me eight years. It gave me doubles of the same year. It crossed out 17 different. It was bizarre. So and I started to get upset and I started to type in just for fun, like, what's the matter with you?

Like what? What what did I, you know, are you. Are you insane? Like what? And?

And it writes back. You know, I'm deeply sorry. I see that I didn't follow your instructions. I'm going to try again. It was like arguing with a stubborn intern who had, like, a couple screws loose.

And finally I got. I just wrote in all caps. I don't understand why you can't do this. Like I thought you were supposed to be, like, intelligent. And it thinks for a long time, and it writes back.

Listen, I'm clearly having a problem with numbers and pictures at the same time. It's a known bug in my system. I therefore recommend it's crazy. I recommend that you ask me to do the picture with the chart without the numbers, and then fill in the numbers yourself and cross them out, and that should probably work for you. I'm like, first of all, oh my God, how did I not think of that?

B this is so twisted that this computer understands its own problem, can't figure out how to fix it, but tells me how to do it in a workaround like that was probably the most fun that I've had. Like I spent an hour and like, why didn't I think of that in the first place? Why was this thing too dumb to do it, but so smart that it figured out a way to hack it that I couldn't figure out? That's a long story to explain how A.I. is not.

Richard Walker: 34:34

Know you, but you get something you tap. Into. Something I've been doing over the past, say, 5 to 6 months, and I've been trying to treat it more like a human. And when a human and I don't communicate well, I then seek to understand and say, okay, what are we missing here? How are we off? What's your perspective?

So I've been doing that with ChatGPT. How do you act? How do you plan? How do you think? This way.

Why is why did I give you the same prompt twice. And you got two totally different answers. And? And the response is remarkable. I mean, for that specific one it said, well, you left out assumptions.

So I didn't know if you wanted speed or cost optimize. So one answer was for speed. One was for cost. They're they're in conflict with each other. So you can't have both.

No. It's fascinating. Ben, we're going to run out of time. And before I get to my last question, there's one other thing I wanted to ask real quickly. I connected you with somebody so that you could teach your You're pitching framework to entrepreneurs.

So who are you looking for so you can continue to do that?

Ben Wiener: 35:30

Yeah, I appreciate that question. I speak regularly to groups of entrepreneurs. So like accelerator programs, incubators, anybody who's building startups, especially in groups, it's just a very efficient way for me to get up or, you know, on zoom or in person. I've been doing this around the world, like, you know, appearing at conferences or gatherings of startup founders who are all kind of trying to raise money for their startups. That's the perfect place for me to spread this message, because it's the most helpful point in the entrepreneur's journey, and I'm happy to do it. Love doing it.

Grateful to you for the introductions that you made. You're sort of scooping some of my gratitude stuff at the end, but that would be optimal for me. And then any individual person who is building a business and needs to pitch it to other people to get them to come on board or certainly give them money, this is optimal for them, and I'm happy for them to partake of it again. It's free like you don't. I'd love for you to buy the book.

You don't have to. You can just go to. Go to the website and download the playbook and the free pitch generator. The point is for me to give back to the industry, that's been amazing to me, and to teach this 1 or 2 things that I think I figured out that could be helpful.

Richard Walker: 36:40

Nice. Okay, so what's the best way for people to find and connect with you then?

Ben Wiener: 36:44

So the best. Way to get the material is at FeverPitchBook.com. And you can find out information about the book itself, but you can also take a right hand turn at that web page and go straight into the free playbook, which is, you know, we give you the slides that you need for your presentation. We give you interactive, annotated notes on each slide to explain, like what kind of stuff should go on those slides, what should not go on those slides, why it's important, some other information. And then at the end we have this pitch generator that's free also, plus some other resources and links. So there's a lot of material in there that should be useful for entrepreneurs.

And then of course the book is, you know, fun and was a fun thing to do and so far has incredible reviews and accolades, and I'd be happy for anybody else to enjoy it.

Richard Walker: 37:29

Awesome. All right, so my last question is always one of my favorite ones because we just changed the whole conversation around. So my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Ben Wiener: 37:41

Yeah. So I'll do it a little bit. I'm, you know, I watched a couple of your episodes, so I know you asked that question. I, I would shift it. Of course, there are some people that have had massive impact on me. What I'd like to share with the audience is that, and I dedicated my book to these other people.

I dedicated the book to my unknown mentors like you can learn from anybody, and some of the stuff that's become so impactful to me was stuff that I learned from people that I've never met. Authors. Musicians like you can learn stuff from everyone, and if your antenna are up and you're in learning mode, some of the most important, impactful things that have affected the trajectory of my career were things that I learned from people like, you know, it was cool that I got to connect with Guy Kawasaki, but Kawasaki had an impact on me 15 years ago when I read his stuff, like it changed the way that I presented. So I dedicated the book to these people who they they don't even realize that they touched me because they don't know who I am. But I and I've never met them.

But I can cite to you, you know, with, with notes like I learned this from this person, this from this person. And they became building blocks for my career. So I think it's less an individual person and more a concept of your mentors can be people that you've never met. And some of your most important mentors can be people that you've never physically interacted with, but taught you something through their writing or through their content that had a big impact on you. And I consider those people my mentors as well.

Richard Walker: 39:10

I love. That answer. I do because I have so many of those myself, and I don't even know who I would name in this this question if I'm asked it because of this, this same thing. And there's so much. All right, I better wrap this up. I would love to keep talking to you.

So I want to give a big thank you to Ben Wiener, managing partner at Jumpspeed Ventures and the author of Fever Pitch for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Ben's website at FeverPitchBook.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins.

Ben, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ben Wiener: 39:50

Thank you. Thanks for having me. And first of all, I'm grateful to you for I'm grateful to Kyle for introducing us. You mentioned him before, and I'm grateful to you for introducing me to some other people. So let's keep it going and keep keep helping each other.

Outro: 40:03

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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