Quora Answer: As a Speaker, How Do You Make Your Presentation Appear Effortless?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “As a speaker, how do you make your presentation appear effortless?” 

Every great speech and presentation that looks effortless means a lot of effort was put into it.  True mastery of anything, including rhetoric, involves work and practice, over and over again.  A great presentation involves good material.  That means you need to write a good speech to go along with it.  The presentation is an enhancement; it is not the star of the show and the focus of attention.  A good speech needs to have a reason built around a clear call to action.  It needs to begin with an opening statement that seizes the audience attention.  This could be stating the contention and the problem, which is the raison d’etre for the presentation.  This is the material from which you build your presentation. 

The purpose of the presentation is to illustrate specific points, such as data, and the context.  A presentation slide should not have blocks of text, and the presenter is not supposed to simply read text from a screen.  If that were the case, you may as well just give them the report and save everyone the time.  When doing up the slides, consider the time given for your presentation.  In general, depending on your style, it should take between 30 seconds to two minutes per slide.  This control of slides means you do not exceed the time. 

Now that you have your speech and your slide, you practice on your delivery.  You need to know your material so even if there is a slide failure, you can still deliver your material.  You should be a slave to your presentation.  You need to work on vocal variety, and eliminate filler words.  This is easily done by slowing down your delivery so that your brain has time to catch up with your tongue.  You also need to embrace the uncomfortable pauses.  What I mean is that when you state a major point, make a joke, or ask a question, look at the audience, and give them time to respond.  If there is silence, wait a few seconds more, and do not be afraid to call people.  You can do this when you recognise that you control the stage.  This is your presentation, and you are the master of that universe for the duration of your presentation. 

When practicing your delivery, pay attention to your body posture.  Practice power postures to emphasise authority or open postures to emphasise empathy and relatedness.  How you say things is as important as what you say.  When reviewing your material and delivery, consider what they hear, not what you say.  This allows you to tweak your presentation. 

Finally, you may think you have a fear of public speaking.  What you actually have a fear or embarrassment or ridicule because you might make a mistake.  The best way to overcome this is to prepare well, and practice until you know your material well.  Preparedness alleviates much of the fear of embarrassing yourself.  Practice and experience alleviates the rest.  As you get better, it looks effortless.

The Grey Space: Where Unicorns Dwell

The following are my presentation notes for my workshop on the 28^th October 2021, at Social Collider Toastmasters. 

Conventionally, a grey market is an unofficial market for financial securities.  Grey market trading occurs when a stock that has been suspended from trades off the market, or when new securities are bought and sold before official trading begins.  The gray market enables the issuer and underwriters to gauge demand for a new offering because it is a “when issued” market.  The gray market is an unofficial one but is not illegal.  The term “grey market” also refers to the import and sale of goods by unauthorised dealers; in this instance as well, such activity is unofficial but not illegal. 

The question now is, what is the grey space?  The grey space is the area of opportunity where an investor identifies a need before it becomes apparent, or where a founder creates a market where there was none, to address that need.  Instead of looking for that grey space, create it.  This is where unicorns dwell.  This is a relatively new definition, in entrepreneurship circles. 

Identifying and exploiting this grey space is where opportunities are found.  This allows us to seize market leadership without the initial constraints of competition.  Consider these companies below. 

Airbnb, Inc. is an American company.  It operates an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation rentals, and tourism activities.  The platform is accessible via website and mobile app.  Airbnb does not own any of the listed properties; instead, it profits by receiving commission from each booking.  The company was founded in 2008.  Airbnb is a shortened version of its original name, AirBedandBreakfast.com.  Airbnb, Inc. is not a property company.  It owns no property.  Instead, it leverages on other people’s ownership, which means it has no cost on its balance sheet to maintain all that property.  It is a technology company, fulfilling a need most people took for granted – people wanted a place to stay, and not go to a hotel or somewhere commercial.  Their current equity is close to US$3 billion.  Revenue for 2020 was US$3.4 billion. 

Grab Holdings Inc., commonly known as Grab, is a Singaporean multinational company headquartered in Singapore.  In addition to transportation, the company offers food delivery and digital payments services via a mobile app.  It has since expanded into other services, following the “super app” model.  It is Southeast Asia’s first decacorn, a startup with a valuation of over US$10 billion.  As of May 2021, its valuation was just under US$40 billion.  Grab does not own most of the vehicles we ride it.  It does not own any of the stalls or restaurants we order our food from.  It addressed a need we never knew we had – getting a ride, and having food delivered to us. 

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.  It started as an online marketplace for books but expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewellery.  Amazon is known for its disruption of well-established industries through technological innovation and mass scale.  It is the world's largest online marketplace, AI assistant provider, live-streaming platform and cloud computing platform as measured by revenue and market capitalisation.  Amazon is the largest Internet company by revenue in the world.  As of 2020, Amazon has the highest global brand valuation.  Amazon is the creator of online retail, and it changed consumer behaviour.  Amazon’s current market valuation is almost US$100 billion. 

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation which produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.  Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2016.  Microsoft, the portmanteau of “microcomputer software”, was founded 1975.  As of 2020, Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation.  This company is changed the way we work and live.  Most importantly, Microsoft makes its money on the back of its cloud services.  Do you know which companies depend on those services?  Companies such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix and IBM.  Whatever revenue they generate, Microsoft has a share. 

Finally, we have WeWork.  We know now that it is a failure, but the failure of the organisation lay in its founder, not the idea itself.  WeWork is essentially a commercial property version of Airbnb, Inc. 

The entrepreneurship mindset is about the blue ocean of opportunity.  Blue Ocean Strategy is a book published in 2004.  It was  written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors at INSEAD.  It is the name of the marketing theory detailed on the book.  They assert that specific strategic moves create a leap in value for the company while unlocking new demand and making the competition irrelevant – finding that grey space.  They call it the “blue ocean strategy”.  Unlike the “red ocean strategy”, the conventional approach to business of beating competition derived from conventional notions of market leadership, the “blue ocean strategy” tries to align innovation with utility and cost positions. 

In the red ocean, where your competition lies, there are sharks feeding and the waters are red.  What you need to look for is that blue ocean, where there is little to no competition.  Sometimes, it means seeing things that are not there yet, that grey space, and creating that market.  You cannot grow a business doing what other people did.  You cannot build another Amazon, or Microsoft, or Grab.  What you can do, is build something new. 

An example of what I mean, in the local context, is the Red Sycamore Experience.  Red Sycamore Pte. Ltd. is a company built on an idea that we can succeed with just the power of words.  We have absolutely nothing.  We have no technology, we have no major funds in our pockets, we have not credentials in the field itself.  Our credibility lies in two areas: finance, and the ability to put things together in structures that benefit all parties.  In business, there is no worth in appealing to altruism, or charity.  We appeal to self-interest.  And everyone has a self-interest in succeeding. 

Our principal is an American corporation.  They are a group of MIT professors with over a thousand patents, and brilliant ideas for changing the world.  They specialise in carbon negative technologies.  For example, Tesla claims to be ESG compliant.  That is far from the truth.  The production of their batteries itself produces such a large carbon footprint that it rivals oil companies.  All that lithium has to come from somewhere.  They developed a graphene battery.  What Tesla is talking about: a million mile battery, a thousand kilometres on a single charge, superior production – These people can already do. 

However, their board are all engineers.  They have no financial architects.  That is where we came in.  We brought to their attention that going head to head with Tesla in the US would end in failure.  But if they moved their production and fundraising to East Asia, we could conquer the market here, and then bring that back to the US. 

We saw that grey space in creating demand here, in our backyard, because we understand the policy changes governments in this world are taking, and we want to be ahead of that curve.  We articulated that position to the board of Quantum Age, and we secured sole rights for this half of the planet – the half that makes money. 

We positioned the vehicles as part of Indonesia’s national car programme, and we are in the final stages of negotiations.  All those cars need materials, and that is where the Quantum Trees, specially engineered paulownia trees have a role.  They replenish nitrogen in the soil, making them a useful pivot for palm oil plantations in Java, who have lost the European market.  More importantly, they generate carbon credits.  Before a single tree has been planted, we have already lined up buyers for those carbon credits. 

Climate change and the global pandemic is a time of trial.  It is also a time of opportunity.  If there are not problems, there is no opportunity to provide solutions.  Climate change means that specific needs must be addressed.  There is money to be made in helping people.  That money does not come from consumers, but from businesses, governments, and the people who have the most to lose, the wealthy elite.  There are a lot of floating funds in the market, with no place to go. 

Where do you think are the opportunities now?  Which industries?  They are in the most basic of things, in food, and water, and living space. 

When we started this project, our team considered where this would play out in the next decade or so.  We understood the market, we understood investor sentiment, and we were willing to break conventions.  The old ways of doing business, the old ways of investing, they are over. 

We must always consider where we want to go, and we did not want a unicorn.  We wanted a dragon.  We wanted to raise over US$1 billion, and have most of those commitments on hand.  What we offered was a chance to be a first mover in market no one thought existed.  SPACs are merely negotiating tools.  Most of them do not have the funds to expand the business.  Listings take too long.  The smartest play for us is to create structures and sell them for a consideration.  When you have hundreds of millions in tax exposure, like many do in Southeast Asia, the market is ripe to create vehicles for them, while leveraging on their funding. 

Where is your blue ocean?  Where is that grey space you can see?  Can it be scaled up?  Is it replicable?  Can you create a strategic bottleneck that you control?  When you can find that, you have the opportunity to create your own unicorn.

Quora Answer: Is There a Necessity for Food Banks for the Less Privileged?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is your take on the necessity of food banks in every city and town for the less privileged?”

If there is a necessity for food banks in every city and town, that is a massive policy failure, and an indictment of society as a whole.  There should be any such necessity.  That is why societies create social safety nets.  No society is stable if people need food banks to survive.  People who are disenfranchised to that extent are a threat to the stability of society since they are no longer stakeholders in it.  Their need leads to a rise in petty crime, which feeds a cycle of violence and abuse. 

Aside from compassionate grounds, there is an economic reason why every level of society needs to be enfranchised.  A community is only as strong as the least of its members.  When there is rampant homelessness and hunger, there is also crime, and substance abuse, feeding other, more sophisticated forms of crime.  This eventually corrupts upwards.  People who are not part of the system are a cost upon it, one way or another. 

When we have members of a community who are not earning enough that they are hungry and even homeless, they are not able to best contribute to it.  They do not contribute to economic growth, they are unable to be part of human progress.  This is to the detriment of the whole.  Social safety nets, minimum wage, and guaranteed public housing is not merely charity, and right, it also serves to benefit the whole.

Quora Answer: What is More Challenging to Successful Public Speaking: Fear or Being Unprepared?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is more challenging to successful public speaking: fear or being unprepared?” 

People do not actually fear public speaking.  What they fear is embarrassment, ridicule, and looking foolish.  We know this because otherwise reticent people can loquacious when in familiar company, talking about subjects and issues they are passionate about.  They are comfortable with the audience, and they are confident in their knowledge.  Overcoming that fear of public speaking is about extending that circle of comfort outwards to include increasingly unfamiliar audiences. 

Being unprepared feeds into that fear of ridicule, which is then construed as a fear of public speaking.  In a sense, they are the same.  Fortunately, there are methods and means to be prepared, even for impromptu speaking.  Public speaking is simply a skill which can be mastered by all.  That is what Toastmasters is about.

Quora Answer: What Do Venture Capitalists Look for in Startups to Grant Them Seed Funding?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What do venture capitalists look for in startups to grant them seed funding?” 

There are three things they look at: the problem, the company, and the people.  If they are putting money into a startup, they are betting that it will provide a return that ranges from 1,000% to over 10,000% upon exit. 

The company must be addressing a need in the market.  That need must be in an area that is either under-served, or unrealised.  It is preferable that the need is in the grey market.  The grey market refers to any market where people never realised there was a need until the company came along to offer it.  An example of the grey market would be ride hailing.  Until Uber came along, no one realised how convenient and ubiquitous it would be hire private vehicles through an application to bring us from one place to another.  This is what we also term the blue ocean market.  A company that offers something that is already on the market, even if it is marginally better, is unlikely to interest such an investor because due to the saturation of the market, it would be unlikely that they would achieve the sought after returns upon exit. 

They then look at the company.  Here, we are talking about the structure.  This includes an examination of the capitalisation table, any encumbrances, the stakeholders, ownership of patents and technology, financial projections, and proposed exists. Except for complications with the capitalisation table, which may complicate further fundraising, an investor may be lenient with the rest since they are likely to have their preferred mentors to be embedded with the team to help them along. 

Finally, and this is the most important, they look at the people.  Ultimately, venture capitalists recognise that they are investing in the people behind the idea, not the idea itself.  Someone may have a brilliant idea, and still be inept, or worse, lack integrity.  The wrong leadership, unethical behaviour, or risky behaviour can tank a promising company.  If the investor is not confident or comfortable with the people behind the idea, they will likely decline.

Quora Answer: What are the Reasons for Forming a Family Office over a Beneficial Trust or Corporation?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What are the reasons for forming a family office over a beneficial trust or closely-held corporation?  Are the differences purely tax related or are there non-tax differences?  How are they organised or registered with government agencies?” 

A family office is merely an entity to manage private wealth.  They serve the needs and interests of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.  It may be a trust, or it may be a company, or it may be a structure which has either or both within it.  They function as the total outsource solution for the management of the assets and finances of an individual, or a group of individuals.  If the family office serves an individual, then it is a single family office.  Anything else is a multi-family office. 

Family offices are more flexible then either a beneficial trust or a company.  A beneficial trust has a limitation in that it must be irrevocable for it to provide protection as a distinct legal entity.  The fiduciary arrangement, however, necessitates the grantor delegating custody and management to another party, the trustee.  They cannot simply take back direct ownership of assets in a trust without going through an arduous process.  A company, by itself, does not protect the director from full legal and debt exposure, only mitigating tax exposure.  A properly structured family office can address all these concerns. 

Family offices offer more than simply mitigating tax exposure.  They function as vehicles for fund management, creditor protection, obfuscate beneficial ownerships, provide extreme confidentiality, arrange charitable donations, manage political and other financial risks, hold the insurance portfolio, and manages disbursement to beneficiaries over an extended period.

Quora Answer: Should Investors Worry about the Chinese Economic Bubble?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Should investors be worried about the Chinese economic bubble bursting given the current economic situation in China?” 

Institutional investors are involved in China long-term, and have no such concerns.  Speculators, who are looking to make money in the short-term, are in for a roof ride.  Most investors are exposed to China via funds and exchanges.  Some have equity in Chinese companies listed outside China.  It is highly unlikely for retail investors to have direct interest in the Chinese market unless they are invested directly in China. 

China is still the manufacturer of the world.  It is the second largest economy, and it projected to eventually overtake the United States as the largest, within the next several decades.  China is not slowing down.  China has over a billion people, which means its domestic market alone is more massive than most countries’ population.  That level of consumer leverage grants China clout in international trade deals. 

What we are having is a shift in consumer behaviour due to the pandemic.  A post-pandemic economy actually benefits China since there is greater emphasis on online retail, which benefits their manufacturers.  China is coping with pent up demand as global economies open.  Our greatest concern at the moment is not a recession, but inflation.  While we expect periodic corrections, the long-term growth over an extended investment horizon is still bullish.