It’s a dirty job, but

Bursting the World’s Bubbles, One Prick at A Time

Pablum!’s venture capital pitch deck

Thank you for inviting me to Pain Capital Ventures. My name is Joey Bologna, and I am the President, CEO, CTO, and Chief Pablum Officer of Pablum!.

Though I am so excited to be here, I’m not shouting intentionally. Our company is Pablum!. Oops, indoor voice, right? Anyway, ends with a !. Like factorials?

Never mind. Geek joke.

Let’s talk about pablum. All of us in this room are whip smart. Not like your average yahoo on the street. I myself have a BA in Communications from Memphis State. That’s south of Cairo.

Not Illinois.

Egypt.

They loved that joke in Tennessee. Anyway, I use the term pablum to gain a competitive edge and throw people off their game. People are more easily cowed when they feel stupid.

Making people feel stupid is more than my calling. It’s what motivates me to leap out of bed at 10am every morning and do some squats.

Not everyone knows their pablum is pablum. That’s where Pablum! comes in. Pablum! curates pablum so people can rapidly discern pablum from garden variety crap, which lacks the je ne sais quoi of bona fide, certified pablum.

Given the explosion of content on the Internet, the amount of pablum on the Internet is ginormous©. We’ve copyrighted that term to describe the vast quantity of pablum infesting the Internet.

What is the problem we’re trying to solve? There’s no scaleable system to reliably inform people that their content is pablum. Yes, there is Barfbag, but as you can see in the footnotes to the slide, their service is constrained.

A number of companies are trying to win this market, from start-ups like SteamingPileofOtterShit to the more established AreYouF*ckingKidding?. Every one of them falls short.

Question? Yes. The woman in the lower lefthand corner is indeed Lauren Boebert. My apologies to the gentleman sitting by the coffee urn who appears to be throwing up in his mouth.

We at Pablum!, by which I really mean I, realize that Pain Capital invests exclusively in companies with a sustainable competitive advantage. We have one. While companies like Barfbag have scale, neither Barfbag nor the other wannabes are qualified to identify pablum. This is a highly sophisticated skill. Almost impossible to acquire.

You heard ReportCardofDoom is developing AI? Non-starter. Can’t be done. Way too complex. You’d need AI to develop AI that developed the AI. You’d need machine learning to study me for decades and not just give up and go back to training on captcha photo selection. Doom almost melted down AWS in their Wordpress pilot. Bezos had to personally shut them down. Now they’re racking servers in a rented barn outside of Duluth.

That’s why we, by which I mean I, by which I do not mean AI, created Pablum!.

Again, my apologies for shouting. We may lose the exclamation point.

Our secret sauce? Me. Joey Bologna.

That picture is from last Halloween. At Pablum! we’re all about work hard, play hard. As you can see, I no longer wear eyeliner, and my attorney has advised me that the earrings are a bit louche.

There is really only one person qualified to decide what is and isn’t pablum.

Me. Joey Bologna.

When Pain signs the check, and I can see by the untouched danish on the credenza that’s where we’re headed, you’re locking in Joey Bologna. The only person on this planet who can separate the Wheaties from the pablum, as we say in the biz.

Know who the Chief Pablum Officer is over at YouSuck.com? Sidney Powell. Yep. That Sidney Powell. A woman who doesn’t know pablum from a hallucinatory screed. RUFKM.

For those of you who couldn't find me on LinkedIn, and I’m still trying to figure out why they nuked my account, I’ve summarized the key points of my CV.

Also, it’s supposed to just say “Fluent in English.” My admin has a hair across her, err, is still ticked about having to leave her webcam on during working hours. You can’t be too careful, especially at $14.33 an hour.

What would a pitch deck be without Gardner’s Manic Quadrant? Just to head off the rumors, I did not pay Gardner to put a thumb on the scale. What I did tell Gardner was if, if, Pablum! became a unicorn, that I would consider gifting them several Caribbean islands to be used exclusively as a non-profit recovery sanctuary for harried executives.

Let me reassure you that Pablum! is not another Theranos or WeWork. Though I feel a deep, deep dedication to making people feel bad about themselves, we can still combine business with pleasure.

Yes, Pain Capital is going to make money. Pain is going to make a whole lot of money. Pain is going to make so much money that maybe you’ll even change your name to something a little less Eeyore’ish. IDK, maybe Happy Endings Capital? I mean, wouldn’t that make your clients manlaugh when you hand out the coffee mugs you order from Vistaprint at Christmas?

So. Thank you all so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure to share our vision, by which I mean my vision, with fellow masters of the universe. Tom Wolfe, one of my favorites, no pablum there. Though his wardrobe’s a bit overstated.

I’m sure we’ll be in touch. By the way, your website? Some of the content? I’m not saying it’s pablum per se, but some of it is maybe umm a little off?

No, of course I’m not going to put it in our database! I just thought you would want to know. Gratis. Because we’re building a relationship.

Those werewolves at Barfbag, they’re dementors, they’re psychos. You do not want them to catch wind of this.

A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse, right?

Yes, I’d be happy to stay longer. Mind if I grab a danish?

Credit to Sarah Paris for “flaming sac of douche.” Don’t ask. 🤣