My guest today is Cecilie Skjong, Investment Manager at Skyfall Ventures - a Norwegian early-stage venture capital fund.

As a founder, nailing your pitch, thinking big and challenging yourself to be more visionary, and quickly testing your ideas to get a sense of the market pull are crucial.

And the same applies to a cross-functional team building a new product in a scale-up. The same applies to a product leader leading a new opportunity in a large organization.

After being exposed to hundreds of pitches and investing in several early-stage ventures, Cecilie shared with me:

* Characteristics of great founding teams

* The importance of drive and resilience when testing ideas and building products

* Early signs of market pull

* Thinking big and the importance of Vision

* How to craft a great pitch

* The power of Founder-led Sales

* The importance of understanding your macro trends (Waves)

* The state of the Norwegian startup scene

* And more

If you’re a founder, I recommend pairing this episode with:

* Episode 1: Testing Ideas with David Bland, co-author of the book Testing Business Ideas written together with Alex Osterwalder

* Episode 9: Understanding Jobs to be Done with Bob Moesta, co-creator of the JTBD framework together with Clayton Christensen

* Episode 19: Nailing your Positioning with April Dunford, bestselling author of one of the most well-known marketing books out there

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit afonsofranco.substack.com