6 Public Speaking Tips for Founders Who Hate Public Speaking

Public speaking is central to the role of the modern founder. Whether leading an internal all-hands, delivering a keynote at a conference, or pitching VCs in the boardroom, the ability to communicate well in high-stakes moments can shape the trajectory of your company. 

Not all founders have had experience public speaking before starting their companies. Some, in fact, find it terrifying. Others think they’re natural public speakers, but unexpectedly freeze when they take their first big stage. 

Whether you love public speaking or hate it, the reality is it’s a learnable skill that every founder can improve at. We recently spoke with Tre Balchowsky, one of the Bay Area’s leading pitch and executive communications coaches, about how founders can get better at public speaking.

According to Tre, many founders think public speaking is about what happens on stage. Almost all of it happens before, however. And that's good news for people who are anxious about it, because preparation is a solvable problem.

Let’s dive into six best practices you can follow to strengthen your public speaking preparation, improve your mindset, and nail your delivery.

1. Before Anything Else: Why this Stage, and Who's in the Room?

The two most-overlooked steps in the building of any talk are the first two. Skip them, and your talk has no destination, no connection, and no clear audience. 

Your first step, Tre explains, is to define your why. The why of a presentation has two layers:

• The talk's goal: What do you want the audience to feel, know, or do when you walk off the stage? Two weeks after the talk, what should the audience still be thinking about? 
• Your personal why: Why are you taking this stage, at this moment, and what does this talk need to do for you and your work? That answer shapes which version of your story you tell. 

Next, define your who—and this should be more granular than you expect. Is your audience technical or non-technical? Are you speaking to prospective buyers or active users? 

If your audience is mostly mixed across these criteria, who do you need to focus on most to achieve your why? As Tre puts it, “let's say that you have a room of 300 people. Is there any more specific audience within that 300 people that you want to be speaking to? Because you don't need to speak to everyone in a room.”

2. Before You Touch a Slide—Outline the Talk

Once they have a sense of what they want to say, most founders’ next step is to raid the pitch deck, the marketing deck, and something a colleague built three months ago to create a frankenstein presentation vaguely relevant to their topic. The result is a presentation that has no flow, consistent language, or clear message. It may feel like a shortcut, but it’s the exact thing that derails you. 

Many founders are subject matter experts who have learned to communicate in a world that rewards information density. But when you pack facts, data, and bullets at the expense of a clear story and message, the audience has no way to connect. Founders are left wondering why nothing stuck, why no leads materialized, and why they weren't invited back to speak again.

Instead, Tre recommends founders use their why and who to create a story to take the audience on. Outline the key steps of this story and the concluding point you want to deliver, and define what makes that idea stick. Then find or build the slides to support that narrative. 

“If you skip the outline,” Tre explains, “then you are not writing the talk for the people in the room. In fact, you may not even be writing a talk for any given purpose. And the talk will end up drifting."

3. Rehearse the Failure Scenarios, Not Just the Best Case

You may be confident that you know your content ahead of a talk. You’ve been living and breathing your company for years, after all. But stress on stage changes what your brain can retrieve. Knowing your material and being able to deliver it under pressure are two different capabilities.

“These are the things that will evaporate out of your head when you walk on stage under stress,” Tre says. “You may know those facts inside, outside, and backwards. But then under stress it's—was it 20%? Was it 25%? Was it 52%?"

Many speakers crumble under stress because they haven’t prepared for it. They rehearse in a quiet room with slides working perfectly, with no interruptions, and at a comfortable pace. But they’re getting ready for a version of the event that almost never happens. In reality, mics cut out, clickers die, and phones go off in the audience. When you’re not ready for these disruptions, they throw you off your game. 

Instead, Tre recommends founders bring unexpected stress into their rehearsals. Things like: 

• Play a random YouTube video loudly while you practice. 
• Rehearse without slides. 
• Rehearse without speaker notes. 
• Practice starting your presentation from random points in the script. 

"Practice at least ten times, first focusing on the words that you're saying, then focusing on how you're delivering them — what is your body and voice doing,” she advises. “Then focus on that stress level, bringing the clarity and the repetitiveness into your body so that you know this so well that you can get through all of that stress."

4. Focus on the Audience’s Problem

Many founders have been trained to be as technical and accurate as possible. But in reality, there’s a continuum between 100% technically accurate and 100% accessible storytelling. Every audience sits in a different spot on that continuum, and founders fail by calibrating their presentation to their own preference, not their audience’s. 

Even a fully technical audience doesn’t live and breathe your solution. While technical detail can be important, it should be used to describe the audience’s problem and what their world will look like once it’s solved. "We need to resonate with the audience,” Tre explains. “Not to show off how cool our tech is."

5. Day-Of Nerves are Adrenaline, and Adrenaline has a Timer

We’ve all experienced nerves before a big moment. This is completely normal, Tre explains, no matter how experienced you are. “Adrenaline is your fight-or-flight response doing its job—just not the job you want. It flushes out of your system in roughly two minutes if you don't feed it. Feeding it means narrating it back to yourself—my hands are sweating, my mouth is dry, oh god I'm nervous—which tells the system the threat is real.”

Instead, here’s a practical toolkit for keeping day-of adrenaline in check:

1. Keep water within reach. Adrenaline reduces salivation, making your mouth dry. Taking a quick drink of water (or even chewing salivation-promoting gum) signals to your body that the threat is under control. 
2. Take slow, deep breaths with long releases. Try to be aware of hyperventilating. 
3. Burn the adrenaline energy with physical movement, like jumping jacks, shaking your arms. Adrenaline is building fight-or-flight energy for a sprint you don’t need to take.

6. How to Own the Stage

With why and who established, and your what created in the form of a compelling story, your on-stage delivery is the how. Nailing your voice, presence, inflection, and vocal tone will maximize the impact of your message. 

It begins the minute you walk on stage. Don’t walk on and start talking. Walk on, center yourself, take a sip of water if there's a glass, then begin. 

As you present, speak slower than feels right. It will be excruciating internally, but you’ll sound clear and composed to the audience. As Tre explains, “You will experience it as talking at a snail's pace. Because what's happening is your brain is encoding these as stress memories, and stress memory is recorded at more frames per second, which means you end up feeling time more deeply. But the audience isn't feeling that at all. They're not stressed."

Equally important is your on-stage physical presence. The default under nerves is to do two-sided helicopter hand gestures, or something similar—we’ve all seen it. Aim to keep one hand still and pre-plan a few specific moments to gesture throughout your talk.

Make Your Public Presence An Asset, Not a Liability

Delivering engaging presentations can materially impact your trajectory as a founder. A great talk can turn prospects into customers, users into advocates, and VCs into investors. 

The good news is that wherever you are on your public speaking journey, presenting is a learnable skill that every founder can improve at. With the right guidance, you can turn public speaking into an asset for yourself and your company. 

To get a better sense of your biggest opportunities for improvement, check out Tre’s article From Survived to I Killed It, in which she breaks down the continuum from avoiding speaking to thriving on stage.