Up and Running:

I’ve seen so many pitches recently; literally several dozen. There was the University of Oregon venture competition, then the Rice University venture competition, one at Smart-ups in Eugene, and then we had the Big Idea Bash in Portand. I’ve seen some great pitches, actually, far more of them good than bad; but I can’t resist adding my suggestions as a quick (3-minute) video here.

If you can’t see the video here, then please click here for the YouTube source.

I’ve been watching a lot of business pitches lately–several dozen in the past three weeks, actually–in my role as angel investor and venture competition judge.

Pitches can be tough, but they are also vital. Your audience is judging your dominance of your own business by how well you come off. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it.

You don’t want to memorize, because you come off stilted. You do want to know your stuff thoroughly, from all angles, so you can immediately answer any question and so that, as you tick off the main points, you seem confident and knowledgeable. Make sure you cover the key points–which, if you’re talking to investors about a new business, should include market size, your secret sauce, the management team, and how much money the investors can make and how long they might have to wait for it.

And I like thinking in terms of stories. Tell your story. More important, tell your target market’s story. Why do people buy from your company? How do they find you? What problem are you solving?

For example, the best pitches give a customer a name, and talk about how he or she or it (if it’s a business) had a problem that your business solved. Make it a story. Flesh it out. Make it seem real.

I’m grateful to Garr Reynolds for posting this five-minute video with Ira Glass, master storyteller, from YouTube.  This is great background for anybody involved in a business pitch.  And on his blog, Presentation Zen, Garr adds some additional advice in a post called Ira Glass: Tips on Storytelling.

You should be able to click the clip here to see the video, but, just in case you can’t, you can click here for the source video in YouTube.

In the rarefied air of the high-tech venture-capital-seeking new venture, these days the presentation–alias slide deck, PowerPoint, keynote or “the pitch”–is indispensable. What’s weird, though, is that some people talk as if the presentation replaces a business plan.

That’s sort of dumb, don’t you think? Doing a presentation without having first done a plan? How can you build a pitch without knowing, among other things, how much money you think you need and what you want to spend it on? Or how many people you need and what they need to be doing? Or how much reachable market you project, or the major milestones?

A plan is not just another sales document. It’s a plan. It’s what determines what’s in the sales document.

And it doesn’t have to be a document. It lives on your computer. The document happens to be one of the various outputs of the plan.

This is a TED talk, just released on the TEDblog yesterday, although it was recorded last year. David Rose presents it as 10 things you need to know before you pitch your plan to a venture capitalist. I think it’s more universal than just pitching to venture capitalists; it applies just as well to talking about your business to anybody.

For example, in about the middle of this, he points out how what you might think are silly, easily explainable errors throw off your credibility. And beyond that, this is a good treatment of presentations in general, pitch presentations specifically, and what matters to investors.

So see what you think . . .

[Note: if you have trouble with the embedded video, you can click this link to go to the source and watch it there.]