Effective Fund Pitching and

Business Planning
Week 1
22 July 2021

1
Course outline

1. 22 July: Project Journey Overview, Entrepreneurship Overview, Business Iideation

(James + Brian)
2. 29 July: Market Research, Market Sizing, Product Market Fit (James)
3. 5 August: Elevator Pitch and Customer Discovery (Brian)
4. 12 August: Product Development and Competitive Strategy (Brian)
5. 19 August: Operations and Team (Brian)
6. 26 August: Go to Market Strategy and Entrepreneurial Selling (Brian)
7. 2 September: Funding, Pitch Deck, ESG Impact (Brian)
8. 9 September: Finance, Legal, Compliance, Risk Management (James)
9. 16 September: Budgeting, Forecasting (James)
10. 23 September: Business Plan Presentation (Brian + James)

Please bring to the class your own business ideas – we will walk through the above
journey using your very own ideas.

2
Course assessment

1. 15-minute individual business plan presentation (80%) in week 10

2. Written business plan in 800 words (20%)

3
Brian Tsui

• Partner, Cataliize

• Co-Founder, Chicago Booth Angels Network

• Member of investor networks at Cyberport,

Science Park, InvestHK, and HKTDC

• Speaker and mentor at HK FinTech week and

Asian Financial Forum

• Former management consultant specializing in

strategy, corporate finance, and technology

4
James Cheng

• Started my career in KPMG, a Big-four

accounting firm
• Currently an investment professional
• Strategy discovery and implementation,
efficiency improvement, resource deployment
• Responsible investment, impact investing
• Experience covers Greater China, ASEAN,
Europe, and North America
• Personal interest in machine learning,
assistance to start-ups

5
Why are you here?
Tell us about yourselves so we can understand
and help you better

6
Entrepreneurship journey overview

7
Entrepreneurship journey overview

Ideating Concepting Committing

Establishing Scaling Validating

8
Entrepreneurship overview

9
Entrepreneurship
(n.) skill in starting new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities

• Entrepreneurship can either mean the

activity of starting a new business, or
the skill of starting a (successful)
business. For obvious reasons our
focus is the latter.
“Good” “Bad” • There are many theories behind
• Perseverance, • Stubbornness entrepreneurship competencies.
resilience Common among these are the
• Curiosity, lifelong • Lack of focus
learning
characteristics on the left.
• Confidence • Over-confidence
• A successful entrepreneur often have
• Optimism • Ignorance of risk, conflicting competencies, some of
unrealistic these often described as “bad”.
• Adventurism • Recklessness Balancing and adjusting between
• Innovation • “Rocking the boat” these fast enough at the right time is
the key.
• Now we will take a quick look at each
of these characteristics

10
1. Perseverance
(n.) the quality of continuing to try to achieve a particular aim despite difficulties

• Perseverance is the ability to withstand repeated rejection and disappointment and

continue. it is an essential part of an entrepreneur’s capability.
• Rejections and disappointment are inseparable parts of the startup journey. Potential
investors, customers, suppliers or even peers can be sources of rejection.
• Successful entrepreneurs are able to draw lessons from rejections, learn from them,
and most importantly, prevent them from damaging their determination and self
image. They do not take comments - in particular the toxic ones – personal, but take
these as opportunities to improve.
2. Resilience
(n.) ​the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc

• Along the line of perseverance is resilience: the ability to recover after setbacks. One
may keep trying after rejections but loses confidence: this is not resilience.
• Unexpected challenges and problems appear constantly in life, more so in the life as
an entrepreneur. You must be flexible enough in your thinking to “roll with the
punches”, solve problems as soon as they pop up, and recover quickly.
• A successful entrepreneur must be able to get back up again without losing his/her
confidence and faith.
3. Curiosity
(n.) a strong desire to know about something

• Entrepreneurs almost always come up with ideas of starting a company because they
see unaddressed needs in the market, which even the market is not aware of.
• Taking smart phones as an example: smart phones are not “invented” by Apple
(recalling Blackberry devices), but Apple successfully created the demand of doing
more things with a “phone”.
• In short, Apple created an unaddressed need out of vacuum, and satisfies it by itself.
• Creativity aside, it takes strong curiosity to understand the world around us, how
things work and where things tie together, and discover the unaddressed needs that
people cannot see, or let them pass out of ignorance.
• Successful entrepreneurs are therefore almost always busy and occupied, if not by
work then his desire to learn something new.
4. Lifelong learning
an ongoing, voluntary and motivated pursuit of knowledge

• Curiosity is an inborn characteristic of human beings, in particular for children.

• Adults lose the trait somehow, but entrepreneurs are always hungry for knowledge,
constantly learning the world around them, finding things they are not satisfied and a
solution to existing problems.
• There is a subtle but importance difference between hoarding knowledge and truly
learning, digesting and understanding the world around us, in particular in the age of
information explosion and “Google knows everything.”
• One may spend a lot of time reading, but this is not learning until s/he internalizes the
knowledge and is able to apply what s/he learnt.
• To quote von Goethe, the author of Faust, or more recently Bruce Lee, “knowing is not
enough; we must apply.”
5. Confidence
(n.) the feeling that one can trust, believe in, and be sure about the abilities or good qualities of someone or something

• Entrepreneurs are confident in what they can do, that there are answers / solutions to
the questions and problems they face.
• Also they are self-confident: they will be the ones to find the answers / solutions.
• Self-confidence is also manifested in the belief that there are callings for what they do,
and they will grow stronger after each setback: “what doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger.”
• The self-confidence is intrinsic and to outsiders, this comes from nowhere.
• To quote Steve Jobs: “self confidence must come from within. Outside
reinforcement and strokes can help, but you have to build your own
confidence.”
• His story of being kicked out of Apple, the company he created, but eventually
gloriously returned is a story we should all bear in mind.
6. Optimism
(n.) a person who always expects good things to happen or things to be successful

• Starting a business is not always an easy task. As mentioned, one should expect lots
of setbacks and rejections, not mentioning other matters that an employee does not
need to deal with all at the same time, e.g. cash flows, customer, investor and creditor
relationships, etc
• For one with established career, leaving employee role and starting his/her new
business is a high risk bet. This involves high opportunity costs. Without optimism, one
will stay within the “comfort zone” and opt for monthly paycheck.
• Optimism is therefore a key characteristic: believing that the business idea will excel,
and not giving up when things do not go as planned
• The ability to see setbacks as “free lessons” for improvement is optimism by itself.
7. Adventurism
(n.) the fact of being willing to take risks in business or politics in order to gain something

• Entrepreneurs are adventurous and risk-taking in order to leave the comfort zone and
take a new adventure.
• This sounds intuitive, but consider someone who has just been laid off, and starts his
own business: he is not necessarily adventurous, he could be starting a business
because he has no other options.
• Consider Elon Musk as a serial entrepreneur, he has Zip2, Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla,
SolarCity, Hyperloop, the Boring Company: he is definitely not a boring person but full
of adventurism.
8. Innovation
(n.) the introduction of new things, ideas or ways of doing something

• Perhaps the most important characteristic of a successful entrepreneur is to innovate

and change the status quo. This can be through reduction of costs, invasion of a new
market, or creation of demand, the oft-cited example being smart phones.
• Innovation leading to revolutionary changes of the way people live is not a new idea:
the idea of “creative destruction” appears in thoughts of Karl Marx to Schumpeter.
• But if “creative destruction” sounds old-school and boring, the more modern term of
“disruptive innovation” was coined by Prof. Clayton Christensen in 1995.
How do you rate yourselves?
You don’t have to quit if you don’t have all these.

19
Business ideation and business plan

20
Starting point: unaddressed needs

• A business idea does not come from vacuum, but starts from a set of unaddressed
needs.
• In daily terms, “unaddressed needs” are identified when you say “hmm, it would be
better if it works differently”
• The needs should not be too trivial – after all, you are asking people to pay for a
proposed solution (i.e. your product) for these unaddressed needs.
• Unaddressed needs may not necessarily be easily identifiable: take Facebook and
Instagram as an example, the need to share life moments was unaddressed, but not a
lot of people thought such needs can be turned into a business opportunity.
• Can you think of the unaddressed needs around you? Please pull out your smart
phone, open a notebook app, and type out 1 – 3 things you are unhappy with, and you
hope there are better ways to do the same thing, since you woke up this morning. Put
down your phone when you finish.

21
Viable solution to the unaddressed need

• Following the brainstorming exercise just now, you should have three unaddressed
needs that can be turned int business ideas.
• How can we address the unaddressed needs? Are there viable solutions to the
unaddressed needs?
• Because there are so many experts in any given field, there are usually existing
solutions in the market. But, the needs remain unaddressed, because the solutions
are not well-marketed, or not the best solutions of the need, or not commercially viable
because of cost issues.
• Your business idea will need to beat the existing solutions by being a better solution,
or commercially viable. We will spend more time on this in week 4.
• But for the time being, pull out your smart phones again, pick one of the unaddressed
needs you write down, can you think of three solutions for the unaddressed needs?
Which one do you think is most likely to excel as a product, and why?

22
Business plan

• Now we have our unaddressed needs and potential solutions, we can summarize our
thoughts using a business plan.
• A common tool is business canvas: there are variations to it but the fundamental ideas
are the same.
• You should have a paper copy with you now, a PDF copy is also available for
download. We will run through it quickly and take a deep-dive at some of the key
topics later during the course.

23
For the next class

24
For next week, and the rest of the course

• Please come up with a business idea, preferably one that you are keen to implement.
• You should be able to identify the “pain points” you plan to address, and formulate
strong arguments as to why your business ideas is a good solution of the pain points.
• You should consider market size as well to make sure your business plan is
commercially sustainable. We will discuss more about definitions of “markets” and
how to size them in next week.

25
THANK YOU