I just spent the last couple days in beautiful Banff at the Banff Venture Forum, a prestigious annual gathering of venture capitalists and other investors. My company RallyEngine was selected to pitch to the whole room, which I did yesterday morning during their “Startup Spotlight”.
We paid for the opportunity and bent our international travel plans to make this event. While we’ve pitched at several events over the past year, this one was a bigger deal because we chose it as the venue for announcing our first-ever fund-raise – a belated Seed round. For a bootstrapped company with sales and momentum, no small thing.
Unfortunately, “Startup Spotlight” turned out to be pitch coaching in disguise – and in public. I delivered what I felt was one of my stronger pitches – five minutes on the dot and nobody in the room looking down at their phones… and then the panel of investors/judges/critics ripped it apart. The thing is they didn’t critique the substance of what I pitched so much as the style. “I felt you didn’t make the best use of the first 20 seconds.” “I didn’t like that photo you used on Slide X.” They criticized one presenter for bringing notes up to the podium and another for slowing down in the middle.
It was all comments and no questions. There was no opportunity to respond; I just had to smile, nod, and take it. It felt like a public roast and it most certainly was not the boost we wanted out of the gates. Any wind I’d managed to collect in our sail was cut free by the Powerpoint Police immediately afterwards.
The panel consisted of smart, accomplished people and some of their feedback was good. In fact, I’d designed my pitch to provoke some of their more substantial comments. And I’ll give the event organizers the benefit of the doubt by saying they probably want everybody to do well.
But the startup pitch format is a mess and it is investor-led events that are ruining it.
It seems a lot of startup investors fancy themselves Dragons or Sharks, and they view their shallow feedback during these judging panels as some sort of divine community service. Pitch coaching belongs backstage. The trend to bring it on-stage – ostensibly as valuable feedback to entrepreneurs – is an alpha power play. We all know we’re doing this for deal-flow, so let’s judge it for that not for what colour the font is.
The format itself of many of these pitch events is counter-productive to pairing good ideas with good capital. It was only a few years ago that 10 minutes (with an actual demo!) was the norm. Then 8 minutes, then 5, then 3, then 3 with no slides, and now 2 minutes isn’t at all unusual. Intro and jazz hands, basically – “ideally” homogenized to a standard, robotic script. I get that there are many more startups (and more bad presenters) competing for attention and everyone is just a little more A.D.D. these days, but at what point does it seem stupid to critique an entrepreneur for not presenting their comprehensive business model (and a compelling intro and a value proposition and credentials and traction and forecast and…). It’s like expecting a movie in the space of a TV commercial. Great ads have a singular message; great pitches should have more than a tagline.
If the ratio of startups to investors is so high now, perhaps what we need to do is turn the tables on this tired dog-and-pony show. Reverse pitches. Have the investors – truly active ones – go on stage and, in less than two minutes, pitch a room of potential investees on why their money is better, faster, smarter, more patient, more purposeful, more connected, more relevant than the next guy’s. How are they better board directors. How is their back-office support so much more amazing. Really, why should the best founders and ventures in the room gravitate to them.
I somehow think both sides would find stronger matches faster if we all just dropped the charade.
