A pitch in time

No worries. This is not yet another wannabe expert telling the startup world how to craft your pitch when you go for funding. A veritable horde of VCs, angels, consultants, B-school profs, and a few entrepreneurs (not too many of those though) have taken on the burden of coaching you on just that. Many are useful, and I must admit it is kind of fun to see the different approaches (try these two for a poles-apart stance: the third 'do' in Tips for Presenting to Angel Investors and Guy Kawasaki's creed on The 10/20/30 Rule).

What no one comes right out and says is: the more you have to say, the easier it is to say it - even if it is boiled down to 10 slides of 3 bullets each. In other words, the more you have accomplished in building your startup, the less you have to worry about what to say and can fiddle instead with fonts, colors, syntax and such happy stuff. But this becomes a bit of a catch-22 if you're in the seed stage and looking for funds.

Conventional wisdom holds (does so with super-glue effect) that investors fund based on the team, the potential market and the technology - at any stage, just expecting more at each. It is tempting to think that just because the guy/gal across the table is spitting enthused about your idea they'd want to do something to make it happen. Not so. Investors are in the business of investing, which means they want big returns with little risk. And ideas, however compelling, don't turn themselves into booming businesses. So every aspect - team, technology, market - has to convey reduced risk and proven potential (which sounds like an oxymoron, but if you're familiar with a pitch, you'd know what I mean).

But a seed stage company is by definition just a notch beyond an idea. If you can moonlight or bootstrap for many months, you can build a working version of the product, get customers using it, scope out the market and get to the point you have something solid to pitch. (Of course, if you can fund it yourself, you're not obsessing about seed stage funds are you?) But what if that's not feasible? If you have a proven team with a stellar track record in startups (which means you could probably fund it yourself, but choose not to do it all yourself), investors could be sold on your spiel even if there's nothing you can show them. If you're not proven, but are a band of engineers from a top university who've worked on a project you want to commercialize - you're in too, heck, you're probably batting away the term sheets.

Does this mean that entrepreneurs who don't fit the slam-dunk mold for funding should give up on their ideas? Of course not. Real entrepreneurs don't do that. They don't let articles on how to do presentations take away their confidence because they don't have a 'strong story'. They continue building their startups and go for funding when it seems necessary. What they do is get creative. They figure out how they can show reduced risk and proven potential with what they have. They lead with their strengths and they lead with passion and determination. And all that can build one heckuva punchy PowerPoint.