Kyle Forster is intimately familiar with tech startups—and the importance of one’s speaking voice to the success of a startup, of a career in tech, in business, in board rooms, in pitches to venture capitalists, investors, potential shareholders, and just as critically: to the people on the startup team.

(This is especially true, as Forster points out below, when it comes to hiring for your startup—hiring people who are often older and far more experienced than the founder.) Forster spent more than a few years cutting his teeth at a couple of tech giants—Google and Cisco—before going out on his own (first as founder of Big Switch Networks, and lately, as founder and CEO of RunWhen).

Forster is gung-ho about rebranding “voice coaching” (speaking better in public, speaking better, period) as “executive presence.” According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of the 2014 book Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, executive presence is “a dynamic, cohesive mix of appearance, communication, and gravitas.” Or, as former Forbes Councils member Gerry Valentine put it in Forbes, it’s “your ability to inspire confidence — inspiring confidence in your subordinates that you’re the leader they want to follow, inspiring confidence among peers that you’re capable and reliable and, most importantly, inspiring confidence among senior leaders that you have the potential for great achievements.”

Ultimately, these qualities are more or less inseparable. A client’s speaking skills play into their sense of gravitas and appearance, their ability to inspire confidence.

But what Kyle also emphasizes is the importance, yet again, of being able to speak well, speak confidently, speak convincingly as an entrepreneur or part of a startup team, and how critical this is, especially when hiring other professionals (in particular people, as he can’t stress enough, with more experience than yourself—or who are just older) or presenting your new company or idea to a venture capitalist firm or to other potential investors.

Forster has honed his executive presence over the years via hard work and personal experience—and by listening, again and most especially, to people with more experience than he. “It’s a tough, emotional journey when you’re recruiting really senior, really strong, really experienced people who themselves were at the top of their field at every step of the way,” says Forster. “If you can’t recruit people like that, then you’re getting all kinds of first timers running the business.”

The implication of first timers being—well, collectively, they constitute an unknown. And for investors, VCs, shareholders—unknowns do not always inspire confidence.

Even so, whether it’s people with years under their belt or newbies out of Stanford or Rensselaer Polytechnic or a high school wunderkind, no matter where they are on the food chain, they all need to be on the same page, and they need to be able to speak well and clearly define what your company is and how it’s going to make other people money.

It was, in fact, a board member from Forster’s first startup who first told him about the importance of having that executive presence. “Executive presence really comes down to coming across verbally,” says Forster, who used to speak 165 words per minute.

“Dealing with board members and VCs,” says Forster, “that’s really where Sandra helped me out a lot.”

When you’re making that pitch to a board, to a VC firm, to potential shareholders, “you’re kind of telling them what’s going to happen next,” explains Forster. “And so you really don’t want to invite a whole lot of questions and opinions when you’re in that mode.”

And as Forster describes it, there are really only two modes (mental states—or, how you are presenting your pitch) when talking to venture capitalists and other potential investors: bleeding mode and completing mode. In time and with work, Forster figured out how to switch between these two personas. “I believe that in a board conversation, there’s absolutely nothing in the middle of these two modes,” says Forster. “You have to be extreme in one and extreme in the other. Any time spent in the middle is ambiguous.”

Again, ambiguity—the unknown: no bueno.

Why? Because if they’re board members, “You only get to meet these people every three months,” says Forster. “So you can’t afford any ambiguity.”

And one of the keys to both of these modes, to speaking well in general—ironic as it may sound—is listening.

When you listen, you slow yourself down. You pay attention more. Especially if you have learned how to also slow down your own delivery. That subliminally compels the person (or people) you’re speaking with to slow down as well. And to listen more intently to what you’re saying to them. The questions from your potential investors become more interesting, and so the conversation gets more interesting. And you give and receive better answers and better, more useful information.

As Forster says, “Everything’s more informative, not just in terms of speaking, it deepens the level of interaction. Which is what executive presence is really all about: you have a deeper presence, you have a deeper connection, and people are going to remember you more, they’re going to be more likely to invest in you and listen to you and really hear what you’re telling them.”

Or asking of them.

Slowing down his speaking voice allowed Forster to have better control over these conversations and interactions—without being controlling.

Before working with Sandra, Forster described himself as having been “breathless most of the time. But once he slowed down, “I realized that fast talking style was only affecting my persona, it had been setting the tone of the whole conversation, because then the other person is trying to talk at 165 words per minute, and they’re breathless.”

In time, “slowing down made a huge difference for me, especially in that startup stage.”

Which, over time, helped hone his executive presence.