The State of Pitching (it’s a war out there!)
It seems to be a sad truth: European startups are not terribly well versed in their pitching skills. Which is not only ‘too bad’ but a real problem as pitching your startup (and yourself) is so unbelievable important to get money, make those biz dev deals and simply survive in the shark-infested waters of entrepreneurship.
During Web 2.0 Expo I had some great conversations about this topic with Mike Butcher of TechCrunch fame, sat in the really well done PitchCamp x.0 session (my write-up is here) and had a great conversation (via Twitter of all things!) with Ted Shelton, one of the organizers of PitchCamp.
Now - here’s the deal: We all seem to agree that there is a lot to be learned on the pitching front. We all lament the current quality of most pitches (this explicitly includes myself - I love to moan about this topic!). Now I will put my money where my mouth is (well, there is no actual money involved) and will run an experiement: I will give a team/startup two to three hours of my undivided attention and will work with them on their pitch. We will do this at my house (which is in North-London), I will make coffee, provide cookies and we will make you pitch better. If this works I promise I will work on a way to scale this effort to help young startups hone their pitching skills.
If you are interested to join me for a morning or afternoon of coffee, cookies and intense discussions about your pitch, email me at [pascal at finette dot co dot uk]. If there is more than one team, I will rather randomly select one. We’ll do this sometime next week - so please send your emails with one to two sentences about your company before Sunday.