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Why Less Is More When It Comes to Pitching

Guy Kawasaki Co-Founder, Alltop Recent Posts

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September 21, 2009

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“Short,simple and direct is good, but he keeps ...”

RALPH SULLIVAN

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I recently saw a pitch that a group of strangers put together in four days. It was better than 98% of the pitches I see as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

This occurred at a conference for bankers called Sibos last week in Hong Kong. I was a keynote speaker and one of the judges of a “pitch” contest. These bank executives had not met each other before the conference. As part of one conference track, they formed teams and worked for a couple of hours a day for four days to come up with a business idea. The culmination of the project was to pitch it to a panel of venture capitalists.

You can watch the eMe, the winning entry, by clicking here. Here are the key lessons of this pitch that you can learn from this video:

One person, the “CEO,” was clearly in charge. He made the bulk of the presentation, and yet he called in others on the executive team for important, but brief (and often funny) tidbits.

He initially and quickly explained both the problem that his team was solving and how it was solving it. Most teams spend fifteen minutes talking about their backgrounds and “industry trends” and don’t explain what the hell they are doing until it’s too late.

He covered everything you’d need to know in a first meeting, and he only had eight minutes to do this. Most companies have sixty minutes and don’t cover as much ground—mostly because they have sixty minutes, ironically.

He hardly spent any time on bull shiitake forecasts. The truth is that the best way to attract investors is not with hard numbers but with a fantasy: “Imagine all the people who need a digital safe deposit box.” Yeah, that’s a big number all right—“tell me more.”

There’s a lot that startups can learn from this video. Be sure to watch if you’re meeting with venture capitalists anytime soon. As you will see, less is sometimes more.

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Related keywords

Guy Kawasaki, Article, business pitch, alltop, venture capitalist, sibos

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RALPH SULLIVAN 2 years 4 months and 14 days ago

Short,simple and direct is good, but he keeps referring to complicated looking, messy visuals. He should keep the visuals easy to see and short and sweet as well.