NTUTEC Notes (3)｜The Deck Is Secondary. The Founder Is the Point: Soft Skills After Four Team Visits
Visiting NTUTEC with a pitch-training module and an investing coach. An investment manager’s takeaway: in startups, the people matter most.
This was my third visit to NTUTEC. This time I went with Dennis from Digital Presentation Lab and Simon from Finctory. Dennis speaks with clear structure; Simon takes the stage with real energy. Both have a strong presence. Over dinner I asked Dennis why he kept founding companies, even after failures. He simply said, “I just don’t want anyone managing me.” Very direct, and honestly funny. He now focuses on AI and corporate training. This time he pitched the presentation module on its own. Because I usually watch from the side, I keep noticing habits that, if fixed, would make pitches go much smoother.
A lot of what follows are mistakes I still make myself.
1. Step outside the deck. The subject is always the founder
My most common mistake is treating the deck as the main character.
You get dragged by the slides. Someone asks about a later page, and you scramble to click through the laptop. Or if it is not on the slides, you panic and start stumbling.
But VCs are not evaluating how polished your slides look. The subject is always the founder.
Even without a deck, you still need to share your thinking clearly and finish the story. Slides are support, not a crutch. When someone asks about content that only appears on page 8 while you are still stuck on page 3, they are already assessing whether you can think independently and explain logic under pressure. That is why the three-minute elevator pitch matters: it trains you to explain your business model with words and relationships alone when the deck disappears or breaks.
Before I bring a team now, I remind them: first practice finishing the story, then practice aligning the deck to the story. Reverse that order, and you will panic on stage.
2. Own the room: Why not me?
The second observation connects to the first, but leans more toward presence.
Can the room feel that you were born to solve this problem?
Why not me? It should be me. Who else could it be? I will finish this goal no matter what.
When Simon shared Finctory’s savings assistant, he said that although he also teaches investing, many people only start learning personal finance after entering the workforce. The real foundation should be built in student years. That hit me hard. If someone had reminded me of investing’s importance when I was a student, maybe I could have bought Nvidia ten years earlier. He now positions himself clearly as a coach for the 0-to-NT$1M journey, helping people build the mindset for their first pot of gold.
This is not arrogance. It is visible sense of mission. VCs have heard hundreds of “we will change the world” decks. They can tell who is reciting a script and who truly believes this work cannot be done by anyone else. It sounds abstract because it is hard to quantify, but you can feel whether someone is playing startup as a hobby or actually here to change something. Why are you doing this? What is your different entry point? These questions cannot be brushed off with bullet points on the Team slide. Through your tone, your eyes, and the emotion when you describe the problem, the other side should feel: this person will see it through.
3. Love for the product cannot be hidden
This is similar to point two, but finer.
Do you actually love your product and service? A product is like your child. When you share it, your eyes, tone, and pacing make it obvious whether you are serious or just reading a spec sheet.
When I sit with teams and listen, I often do not need to watch the slides. Watching the founder’s state the moment they talk about the product is usually enough to guess the team’s resilience.
People who love the product light up when asked hard questions and fire back, “Have you tried XX feature?” People who do not get defensive: “We will build that later.”
VCs invest in people. Whether a person loves the product cannot be hidden.
4. Consciously cut filler words
This is another mistake I make often.
When I get nervous in conversation, I flood the room with “so,” “okay,” “like,” “basically,” “right,” “and then.” Filler words signal low confidence and break the listener’s rhythm of understanding.
Practice preferring a clean pause and silence over forcing words out. In professional pitching, pauses are power. Filler words are noise.
My practice method is crude but effective: open the phone recorder, speak for three minutes, then listen back and count how many times “and then” appears. The first listen is usually awkward, but improvement comes fast. Toastmasters has a similar drill called the ah-counter: someone is assigned to count how many times you say “ah.”
Closing: the real subject is always you
Whether you meet a VC, a customer, or even a date, the logic is the same:
- Did you show real passion for this work?
- Do your words and presence carry conviction?
- Do you actually love what you are doing right now?
Hard metrics decide whether you can get in the door (covered in part one of this series). Soft skills decide whether the other side wants to take the next step with you.
You can hire someone to make the deck. You can hire someone to run the numbers. But the person standing on stage cannot be outsourced.
