Credit card disaster

I could file this one under “what does that have to do with anything” — in fact, I almost did, but then thought, “no, write about this, and see what happens.” So here goes…

Yesterday I was listening to an absolutely fascinating podcast. It was analyzing court documents to understand what happened in a relatively obscure credit card-related fintech blowup that happened in May.

Basically, what happened was: Party #1 (the fintech) hit financial troubles and renegotiated its terms with Party #2 (the bank whose financial infrastructure the fintech was using), it didn’t tell Party #3 (the financial backer Party #2 was using to make its work with Party #1 possible), and so Party #3 got pissed off and came after Party #1 really hard.

One of the many lessons to take away from this was: The backer of your backer is as relevant to you as your backer is, so make sure you know who they are and stay on their good side.

You might ask, quite understandably, what this has to do with your presentations, and that is this:

Be aware of the environment your audience is swimming in even before they walk in the door to hear from you.

A lot of presentation training focuses on your interaction with the audience. My point is that if you want to have a good presentation, even more important than anything you can do on stage is understanding the world your audience was experiencing before they even walked in the door to hear you speak.

This is something we talk about regularly on the podcast, and in fact was one of the main themes of our recent interview with Dr. Nil Madi:

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