Pitching Your Startup to a New Investor

You walk in the door. So the first thing you’ve got to do — the overall, you know, arc of your presentation — it’s got to start like a rocket. You’ve got maybe 10 seconds — between 10 and 30 seconds, depending on how long the pitch is — to get their attention.

Key Insights

In my case, “I’ve invested. I have got tens of millions of dollars from PowerPoint pitches. I have invested tens of millions of dollars.

” That’s it — that should get you right there. This can be a factor, and everybody can be saying it’s counterintuitive. It can be a story, it can be experience.

Further Perspectives

But you’ve got to grab their emotional attention, focused on you, within that first few seconds. And then from there, you’ve got to take them on a very solid, steady, upward path, right from beginning to end. And everything has got to be reinforcing this.

And you’ve got to get better, and better, and better, and better. And it’s revving up to the very end, and then at the very end you’ve got to — boom! — knock them out of the park.

Looking Ahead

You want to be able to get them to such an emotional high that they are ready to write you a check, throw money at you, right there before you leave. Okay, so how do you do that? Well, first of all, logical progression.

Any time you go backwards, any time you skip a step — imagine walking up a staircase where some of the treads are missing, or the heights are different heights. You stop, you’ve got to figure it out. You want a nice logical progression.

Start with telling them what the market is. Why are you going to do X, Y or Z. And then you’ve got to tell me how you’re going to do it, and what it is you’re going to do.

How you’re going to do it. And the whole — it’s got to flow from beginning to end. [Startup Turkey](http://startupturkey.

com/) also hosted David S. Rose and below is his talk at the conference https://vimeo.