Loud and Clear Training founder Helen Gottstein joins Yoel Israel to discuss how Israeli founders come across abroad, what investors notice in a first meeting, where AI helps presenters, and how to network at a crowded conference.
Helen Gottstein has spent more than 10 years coaching executives, founders, and CEOs on how to present, from conference stages to Bloomberg TV. Most clients come to her with a specific event ahead and a goal she describes as sharpening, elevating, and directing their content faster.
In her conversation with Yoel, who once hired her to prepare for a 30-minute on-stage interview in Hebrew with the head of NVIDIA Israel, Helen shared what she sees founders miss and why most of it comes back to thinking about the audience first.
Israeli Directness Cuts Both Ways
Helen said Israelis bring real strengths into a room. They are direct, get to the bottom line quickly, and come with deep field knowledge from a small country with strong roots in startups and defense tech.
That directness does not always travel well. She noted that Intel has a handbook for employees working with Israelis that tells them to expect Israelis to be aggressive and direct and to interrupt them. Americans often see Israelis as rude, while Israelis often see Americans as indirect, saying less than they really think.
The habit visitors will notice most, according to Helen, is interrupting. She considers herself an interrupter too. In a recent meeting with a senior founder, she held her thought until the founder finished, then delivered her point more clearly and respectfully. Founders should save that kind of overlapping conversation for friends on the couch, since a first investor meeting calls for a polished founder story that runs under a minute, ideally 45 seconds.
The First Investor Meeting
Helen compared a meeting with an investor to entering a new country with its own rules. For a first meeting at a cafe, she advises founders to arrive early, offer to pay, stand until the investor is seated, and ask what they would like to order. The goal is to learn. Founders should notice where the investor lost interest and adjust their story, problem definition, or competitive positioning.
Respect in the room is separate from ambition in the ask. Helen often sees women founders aim too low. She recently worked with a CEO struggling to raise $300,000 who, in Helen’s view, should be aiming for $1.5 million to $3 million. “Small is not necessarily powerful,” she said.
Israeli founders meeting Israeli investors can skip the formal gestures, but Helen said they still need to listen better than their competition and treat the investor as a potential mentor or partner. She once watched a founder in Jerusalem take the stage and simply ask for money without making any case for why anyone would want to work with him.
Shape Every Message for the Audience
Many presenters open by announcing what they plan to talk about. Helen said audiences care only about what they will gain, so the opening should make a promise, such as the three changes a speaker made to bring AI into their pre-sales process. She recently worked with executives from Germany and the US who both opened with a new feature, so the tendency extends well beyond Israel.
“Your job is to make your audience feel smart,” she said. That means avoiding jargon and making ideas easy to follow. One company she worked with, Nanotherma, develops thin panels that turn waste heat from data centers into energy. Its line is simply “Turn heat into electricity.” When a slide shows a dense table, she tells presenters to point out the three columns that matter and highlight them.
She also tells founders they need two decks. The one sent to investors must explain itself fully, while the one used to present should carry far less text so the speaker can fill in the story.
Where AI Helps and Where It Falls Short
Helen has yet to see an AI-generated deck that avoids too many words on screen or a tone that reads like a marketing blurb. In sessions, she often strikes through slide text in real time so the presenter becomes the focus. “Text which is delivered by AI is so often generic, homogenized, pasteurized, and sounds like it was made by AI,” she said.
She does use AI for research. When preparing a CEO for Bloomberg TV or a New York Stock Exchange podcast, she runs three episodes through her tool to learn the interviewer’s usual questions, ideal answer length, and how quickly guests are expected to deliver numbers. Then she works with the CEO on the human part: their strongest case studies, failures, and lessons.
Networking With a Better Question
For busy conferences, Helen’s advice is to ask a better question. She pointed to Yoel as an example. At a Cybertech event, she saw him introduce himself briefly and then ask people how their marketing had changed in the last year, which quickly showed whether they were a relevant lead.
She also suggests standing where people walk away from the coffee or bar line, since they are looking for a way back into the room. Start with something human, keep the self-introduction short, and get the other person talking. “When you are talking, they are not,” she said. The goal is to earn the next step, whether that is another meeting or permission to send materials.
