Pictures Paint A Thousand Words

We’ve been going out to raise capital for our AI startup over the last two weeks.

The average deck needs to contain < 600 words & convey your idea in under 4 minutes, according to industry advice.

One of the best ways I’ve found to tell a story, shortly and sweetly, is using comics.

Here’s how I got Google’s AI Gemini to produce it for free:

1. Find a reference image you like for the style of your comic - here’s the one I used

   

   Reference image from a video game

2. Go to Google Gemini

3. Describe to Gemini the type of comic you’re hoping for it to produce & ask it to recreate the prompt for you to produce the best image:
   
   “Can you please create a 4-strip comic panel that shows a scaffolder falling off-site, hurting his shoulder, sitting at home injured and then calling his insurer. Please rewrite this prompt for the best outcome in Gemini”
   

4. It will give you something like this:

   

   If you want the full prompt, you can read it here

When you don’t have a lot of space for copy, a picture can paint a thousand words.

On a side note, one of the investors said they enjoyed how the deck was pitched, as they hadn’t seen anything like it before - bonus points for novelty?

How I Work

Ideally, your business is big enough that you only do the work you're great at and can hire others to do the rest.

In small businesses, though, this just isn't realistic.

You have to do work in your weak areas.

That's what frameworks are great for. Packaging up work or ways to think about work into neat little bundles that do most of the job or thinking for you.

They give you the 20% of the inputs you need to get 80% of the result. Regarding my weaknesses, they do a better job of the work than I otherwise could.

I'm a below-average manager, for example.

So I use meeting templates from Radical Candour and One Minute Manager to structure my meetings.

I use OKRs from John Doerr for setting work objectives and basic communication methods from books like The Method to communicate better.

The corollary to this approach is avoiding using frameworks where you're strong. Doing 80/20 work where you're top 5%,1%, or .01% makes no sense.

This is where you want to spend most of your time, using your unique knowledge or skills to make the most of your advantages.

I'm good at strategic thinking.

So, using things like lean development canvases or the blue ocean approach to strategy actually hinders me rather than helps me. These frameworks regress me to the mean.

Of course, take this approach liberally.

It’s just my opinion on how to work. I'm sure there are many counterfactuals to prove me otherwise.