Hey, this is Napkin Notes: the top athletes start the day with stretching, and the smartest founders their day with this newsletter. Buckle up ☕️

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Let’s get to the lineup for the day. 🥁

Our Newsletter Menu

• 📰 News you missed

• 👋 Meet 5 founders pitching on Tuesday

• 📌 10 tips to crush a pitch

• 🗓 RSVP to demo day

• 📷 Thoughts of the week

📰 News You Missed:

72% of you gave out big chocolate bars on Halloween. Daylight savings is this Sunday. HubSpot acquired ClearBit. Shopify crushed its last earnings. 29-year-old Taylor Tomlinson just got the nod to Host CBS’s Late-Night Show after 'Colbert'. Startup accelerators keen to host their own demo day are throwing their name down here. Let’s get to the goods.

👋 Meet 5 Founders Pitching on Tuesday

If you haven’t already marked your calendar, 5 brilliant founders are pitching on Kernal’s deal room on November 7th at 1pm PST. RSVP if you haven’t already. The 5 founders are alumni of the League of Innovators, the #1 startup accelerator in Canada for founders under the age of 30 with $1b of enterprise value and 1300+ alumni across the country.

This Tuesday, we’re excited to be hosting:

• Eric Zhu, Co-founder of Aviato, expert memer, and regular converser with Elon on Twitter replies. You may also recognize his startup name from a TV show…

• Brayden Kehler, Cofounder of 3Common, master party planner and someone who just closed a six-figure angel check

• Diana Virgovicova, Founder of Xatoms, 2023 Young Entrepreneur of the Year award recipient, and friend of Alexis Ohanian

• Kiran Dhatt, Founder of Ceco AI, sustainability thought leader, and mining industry disrupter

• Tefari Bailey, Founder of Hutsy, past dragon’s den pitcher and also a 2023 Young Entrepreneur of the Year award recipient, and friend of Alexis Ohanian

It’s all happening this Tuesday, online, at no cost. If you’re looking to perfect your pitch or wanting to allocate some investor dollars into bright young entrepreneurs, this is the event for you:

🥁 Some Pitching Tips To Live By:

After being asked quite a few times by readers of this newsletter, we wanted to share some of our favourite pitching advice to close $$ on a demo day.

Pitching is critical in today’s world. If you can’t convey your ideas, you’ll never be able to:

• hire smart people 

• close critical client deals 

• or raise VC money 

Pitching is the art of communicating your startup’s dream. Here’s 5 ways to pitch-perfect:

1. Start with a story: before you drop numbers, stats, pros or cons to your business model, BUILD RAPPORT. Start with a story. Drop some bait. And then reel them in. After building a good connection, you can then start adding more details to convey your pitch.

2. Know your audience: always tailor your pitch to the specific interests and needs of the audience, whether they are potential investors, customers, or partners. You can do this by asking for people to put info in the chat if it’s online or to raise their hand or make a motion if they’re in the audience. 2-way communication is very underrated to get buy-in. then lock eyes with those that motioned interest.

3. Elevator pitch: Know your 30-second elevator pitch inside and out. Have a “1-liner” you know off by heart so well you could say it in French. Well maybe not that well, but you get the point.

4. Build FOMO with Traction and validation: show goals you’ve crushed, clients you’ve surprised, tweets that have gone viral. Prove the bus is leaving with or without the audience. And that’ll drive more investor meetings than you’ll know what to do with.

5. Team and expertise: prove you have the A-team in your corner. Then double prove why we should believe you. Investors bet on the people 10x more than they bet on the idea. Guarantee your audience you’re the best person for the job to lead that A-team.

Want to see how the pitching pros do it? Watch Eric, Diana, Tefari, Kiran and Brayden pitch next Tuesday by RSVP’ing here.

Or you can check out more demo days below.

🤫 New Surprise

Enough of you have emailed us that we thought it was about flipping time we launch an investor newsletter. Get updated with qualified deal-flow and hit that subscribe button below.

👏 Founder Kudos this week goes to

• How Honey pre-sold with a loom video

• Shankar recovered his revenue and bounced back from losing his traffic

• Sipp.ly launched a beta test in LA

🍷 Thoughts of the Week

Does this hit home with anyone else? Reply and tell us why 😅

Now go have an awesome weekend friends.

💚 The Kernal Fam