Pitches That Fail
Perfect Your Pitch

Many an entrepreneurial dream has failed because the founder got in front of the right people with access to capital but failed to woo the audience successfully. This chapter is about how to succeed when pitching your idea.

There is no perfect pitch. When I was raising money, every investor responded to something slightly different. Ultimately, nothing speaks louder than a big market, a disruptive product, and an incredible team. But a great pitch can really help you tell your story. And telling your story well is just as critical in getting potential employees to come work for you as it is in raising money and getting users. What has caused entrepreneurs to fail in raising money? Why do some entrepreneurs raise millions while others can’t attract any outside capital at all? How and when should you pitch? How can you transform your pitching approach?

Pitch the Right Investors

One major reason pitches fail is that entrepreneurs pitch the wrong investors. Most startups, even technology startups, aren’t good candidates for venture capital. And as I’ve discussed previously, there are many reasons an investor may not invest—timing may be off, investors may be short on funds or looking for specific kinds of investments, or they may just be bad at picking good deals. Many investors passed on great opportunities like Apple, Google, Facebook, and others, to name just a few.

Conversely, some investors will be deeply knowledgeable about your market or approach because of previous experience in the space or a strong belief or investment thesis about a particular market opportunity. These investors are ideal—you don’t have to convince them of the opportunity, only that you’re the likely winner in the space. By any measure that is still a tall order, but it’s a much easier one to get.

Some investors are momentum investors—they invest primarily in companies they believe are already rising stars. Others are marquee investors—they want to invest in people who are big names or who come from large, well-known companies. Certain investors prefer to invest only in people they know.

Before you pitch, figure out who you’re pitching and what their style is. How can you find out if an investor likes a space and what their investment thesis is? Ask! Look at their portfolios. Talk to the founders of companies they’ve backed. Read blog posts they’ve written, articles they’ve been quoted in, and their career history on sites like LinkedIn.

Pitching Isn’t Free

Because investors see a lot of opportunities, they can look for familiar patterns across them. When you pitch a knowledgeable investor, if nothing else, you come away with some provocative questions and great insights. But you can also waste a lot of time pitching investors who aren’t a good match for your business. Pitching isn’t free: it costs you time. What’s more, if you pitch too many investors, your deal becomes “shopped” and thus hard to sell.

I remember that when we were fundraising for our first company, we spent countless hours pitching venture investors. After a while, the questions the investors asked and the feedback we received were more or less the same. Although it was critical that we raise capital, we weren’t spending that valuable time in the office working on the product or talking to customers.

All that pitching was exhausting! It reinforced for us the key challenges we faced and reminded us where we needed to focus. But it didn’t provide insight into ways to build a great product, nor did it help solve any of the difficult questions we faced. Given our stage, the best source of capital for us was angel investors—investors who were betting primarily on us as a team that could figure out the business. And given our resources, the best use of our time was to pitch a few people and then get back to focusing on building the business and getting those tough questions answered.

I’ll never forget the day we met with a potential partner in between a bunch of investor meetings. We started to give the product demo, and it didn’t work. We’d been so busy meeting with investors that we had completely neglected the product. Had we not reset our priorities and gotten back to product focus, our time mismanagement could easily have caused our company to fail.

Investor Motivations: Greed and Fear

A huge part of pitching comes down to psychology and emotion. Investors are primarily motivated by two emotions: greed and fear. An investor who has access to invest in a hot company wants to buy as much of that company as possible. That investor is motivated by greed. Another classic example of the greedy investor is one who votes to turn down a big acquisition offer because the investor believes the company can be even more valuable. Of course, greed-based gambles sometimes pay off.

Investors operating out of fear worry they’re going to lose a great deal or that a company they’ve already invested in will go out of business.

When you’re pitching investors, it’s easy to fall into the trap of selling. You’re selling your company, your vision, and the opportunity to invest. The investor decides when and where to meet and may seem unmotivated by time. Meanwhile, you’re trying to pay the bills, hire people, and generate revenue.

In fact, you want to be buying. Viewed through an extreme lens, you have a highly differentiated product—your company. All the investor has to offer is capital. If you’ve ever compared two $20 bills side by side, you can see how undifferentiated that capital is. Other than a difference in dates and serial numbers, those bills are just about the same!

Of course, investors are very different. They can offer access to a network of future capital, employees, and potentially better liquidity options down the line. But when pitching, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only selling. Make sure you’re buying good investors as well.

What does it mean to be buying? It means qualifying your investors. Investors are in the habit of asking lots of questions. You should ask qualification questions to get your investors to pitch you.

You must do this for several reasons:

• The answers are important: Without asking questions, it’s hard to disqualify investors as potentially wrong for your startup.
• It frames the discussion: It puts you on equal footing with your investors; instead of one-way communication with you pitching and answering questions, you have a conversation, a dialog in which both parties are deciding whether to work with each other.
• It plays to the emotional and psychological needs of your investors, not just the logical ones: You want to motivate your investors through emotion. Greed drives up the price of your deal. Fear of losing the opportunity to invest incents investors to move quickly.

If these tactics seem artificial, they’re not. They’re a very real part of raising money for your company. They’re the same tactics other successful entrepreneurs use to raise money. They’re the tactics existing investors use to get future investors to invest. Without them, you won’t be able to fund your company, and your company will fail. They’re not just tactics—they’re a key part of the strategy for making your company a success.

Process Matters

When it comes to pitching, it’s important to manage the process, not just the product. If you line up one investor meeting for the beginning of April and another one for the beginning of May, you’re not optimizing your investment process. Due to the amount of time between the meetings, you can’t create a competitive situation between the investors. Nor can you easily pull them together if you want them both to invest. And it’s difficult to compare them—you’ll be well down the path or finished with one before you meet with the other. Line up investor meetings as close together as possible.

Entrepreneur X managed the investment process well. He had previously raised a small amount of money from some investors who backed him before. Having made some progress in the business, he went out for a full venture round, raising $10 million. Most considered the price guidance the entrepreneur was giving for the deal—a pre-money¹ valuation of $50 million—to be extremely high.

Yet Entrepreneur X ran a great process. He lined up nearly all of his investor meetings during a two-week period. For those who came later, he specifically went out of his way to tell them that they were running behind—feeding their fear that they might lose the deal before they had even figured out whether they wanted to invest.

His approach injected a lot of emotion into the process. Investor conversations around the merits and drawbacks of the deal took a back seat to discussions of how to win the deal. Entrepreneur X also masterfully started and finished every discussion with a potential investor with a statement about what he was looking for in an investor. He framed every conversation so that he was buying—not selling. Not only did Entrepreneur X get his deal done, and done quickly, but he got an even higher price than he wanted: a $58M pre-money valuation, raising $12M from investors.

Another reason to make your pitch process short and sweet is to prevent a shopped deal. Even though you may not have pitched a particular investor before, if you’ve pitched a lot of people, the investor has likely heard about your opportunity through a colleague or friend. That investor is already biased by whatever their colleague told them, even if they try not to be.

What’s more, deals that have been around a long time feel tired. They get the taint of not being able to raise money, a taint that is very, very hard to remove. Because venture investors invest primarily in hope, not value, if a deal is shopped, it loses that shiny gleam of hope. Having an old and tired deal is a surefire recipe for pitching failure.

Vision First, Execution Second

Some early-stage investors look for vision. When they hear your pitch, they think even bigger, imagining what your company could become or how it could transform an industry. They immediately begin generating new ideas and talking about how big your opportunity could be.

__________

Other investors focus on operational excellence. They’re all about the numbers. They want market data, acquisition metrics, and conversion rates.

Some of this is a factor of the stage of your business; the more revenue you have, the more likely it is that investors will focus on operational metrics over vision. But much of it depends on the personality of the investor.

Investors come with biases. All too frequently, experienced investors have been burned on an investment that appears similar to yours, which colors their view of your company. Alternatively, they may have missed an investment and spent years beating themselves up about it; when you arrive, they see not just your company, but a chance to redeem themselves for the investment they missed all those moons ago.

In the same week, I have pitched investors who were all about vision and others who were all about operational metrics. It’s not that the operational investors didn’t care about our vision—they did, at least to some extent. They simply were far more practical and, by their own admission, lacked the imagination of the vision-oriented investors. They had a much harder time envisioning a world-changing play and tended to make investments based on metrics.

Conversely, it’s not that the vision-oriented investors didn’t care about our operating metrics. They did. In fact, at least one of them was a previous serial entrepreneur and proven operating executive. But the vision investors cared a whole lot more about the market opportunity and were betting on us as a team to “figure it out.”

Their biggest questions were around whether we had inherent biases that would prevent us from trying out diverse experiments on the path to scaling user and customer acquisition. In other words, were we willing to try many different approaches aggressively, some of them radical, until we figured out the ones that worked?

Of course, all vision with no metrics means you’re building a house of cards. All metrics with no vision, and you may build a good business, but you won’t get paid well for building it.

Investors want you to paint a picture of how you’ll scale efficiently—that is, acquire and delight lots of users or customers. Or they want to know that you’re already scaling, and that the invested capital will help you grow faster.

They need to convince themselves that you can, at some time in the future, extract more value from your users or customers than it costs you to acquire them. Note that I say “at some time in the future.” Early-stage investors recognize that it may take a long time and a lot of capital before you reach profitability—in fact, they may no longer be investors in the company by the time that happens. But they need to be able to convince themselves (and others) that there is a path to get there.

Spell It Out

Many pitches fail because they leave big chunks of the pitch as an exercise for the reader. Don’t expect your investors to reach the same conclusions you would based on your data, analysis, or a product demo. Instead, draw the conclusions for them.

If you tell potential investors your market is really big but you don’t tell them how you’ll reach that market, they may come away believing your market is really big. But they’re left wondering how you’ll reach it efficiently.

Addressing key issues like this not only requires that you think about them, which is a good thing, but also demonstrates that you have done so. Investors tend to assume the best about opportunity and the worst about risk.

Show them a big market opportunity, and they will think even bigger. Fail to show them how you’ll reach that market, and they will assume the worst—that the market is unreachable or that you have no idea how to reach it.

You Are the Product

When you’re pitching to customers, your product is a piece of software or hardware, a service, or a web site. When you’re pitching investors, you are the product. And just as you need to find product-market fit for the software, hardware, or service you’re building, you also need to find product-market fit when you are the product.

It may seem obvious, but a pitch isn’t just about the content. You’re evaluating your potential investors based on the questions they ask, the knowledge they demonstrate about your space and approach, and their networks. Meanwhile, your investors are evaluating the entire product that is you: the market opportunity, your strategy for capturing that opportunity, and you and your team.

Many entrepreneurs fail at pitching because they make incredibly basic mistakes. They don’t demonstrate knowledge of what they’re doing and confidence when pitching. As Admiral Greer told Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, “No one understands this material better than you do.”

When investors evaluate you, they’re evaluating whether you

• Present effectively
• Can recruit, sell, and communicate a big vision
• Know more about your domain than anyone else
• Think strategically
• Have ambition (are you building something big or small?)
• Are a great fundraiser

That last bullet may seem a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. But part of what investors are evaluating is whether they think other investors will want to give you more money in the future.

Investors know that most businesses ultimately require more capital. They don’t want to be in it alone and are already thinking about how the market will view you the next time you go out to raise money.

Saying things like “this is the last money we’ll ever need,” when you’re not doing tens or hundreds of millions in revenue demonstrates ignorance.

Perfect Your Pitch

Not only are you a product, your pitch is a product too. Although every pitch is different, there are five key elements to focus on when you pitch:

1. Framing and personal status
2. Your vision
3. That your category will be big, and the time is now
4. How you’ll reach the market, scale, and become the leader
5. Why what you’re doing is valuable and strategic

Framing Sets the Context

Tons of pitches fail every day due to bad framing. Fundraiser and author of Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff, writes that “framing” is one of the most important activities that separates good pitches from bad ones. With good framing, you set the right context for your interactions with potential investors and create equal status for your discussions.

You don’t need to be arrogant about your approach, but a little hotness goes a long way. Like it or not, raising money can be a bit of a high-school popularity contest, and status plays a big role. As one investor friend of mine is fond of saying about pitching, it often comes down to, “I’m hot, you’re hot, let’s be hot together.”

Cliché as it may sound, pitching is a lot like dating. One amazing fundraiser once said (he was European), “We will romance them.” And it was true. He did romance investors, and they fell in love with his vision and dream.

Framing starts long before your meeting. It starts with how you handle your availability and communication with potential investors. You cannot—you must not—be needy. If you’re sitting in a meeting room and your investors are running late, giving them a few minutes is no big deal. But don’t sit around waiting for more than 15 minutes.

Be polite about it, but reschedule. Ask yourself if you really want to be in business with someone who starts off treating you with that kind of lack of respect. I know the feeling—it was incredibly hard to secure that meeting, and it’s been rescheduled. But you must drive respect. People are on time for things that are important to them.

Similarly, don’t overstay your welcome. Set the expectation at the beginning of the meeting that you need to leave a few minutes early for another important meeting. Of course, you would be happy to schedule more time if that makes sense after the initial meeting.

This does two things. First, it sets the right tone for the meeting—your time is important, and you’re in demand. Second, it lets the investor respond with their availability as well; perhaps their schedule has changed.

As the old saying goes, don’t sell past the close. You have a lot of work to do—recruiting, building great product, acquiring users or customers, marketing, and so on. Your time is critically valuable.

If you have an hour scheduled for your meeting with an investor, prepare to leave ten minutes before that hour is up. If you want to spend more time and they want to spend more time, don’t worry—there will be plenty more meetings to come.

Avoid that all-too-frequent awkward moment when the investor’s assistant walks in and tells the investor, “Joe is on the line,” or “Your next meeting is here.” Be the first to stand up and make ready to leave. And then do just that—leave! Again, there will be more meetings if you intend to do business together.

I have had entrepreneurs ask me, “So, what are the next steps?” and, “Tell me, honestly, what do you think?” In many business meetings, the goal is to get to action items so the meeting will have been productive. That is not the goal of a pitch meeting. It isn’t a mystery what the action items and next steps are from a pitch meeting: more meetings, then a term sheet that spells out the terms of the deal, and then a wire transfer to your bank account.

Moreover, it may be OK to ask for direct feedback one to one. But if you’re in a group setting, where you’re pitching multiple people in the room, you introduce an unnecessary risk of failure when you ask for immediate feedback. Not only do you appear needy, but you also throw yourself into the deep end of a pool of group dynamics with which you’re completely unfamiliar.

You have very little idea what the relationships are among the people on the other side of the table and what the dynamics of the investment firm are. Who carries weight on investment decisions? How does the group handle disagreements about deals and associated feedback? Are there portfolio management issues that could impact investing in your deal?

Are the people on the other side of the table comfortable giving candid feedback in a group setting? Or would your contact prefer to talk with you one to one? The level of variability is incredibly high and something you have little visibility into and control over.

I have sat through pitch meetings where entrepreneurs mismanaged their time. They spent too much time on things that weren’t relevant to a decision about whether to have a second meeting, such as minute details of a product or financial plan. They simply ran out of time.

In cases where I or other investors tried to alert entrepreneurs that they were running out of time, many have tried to go faster but kept the same level of detail. This is a sure-fire recipe for failure. Instead, bump up a level and cover the important points. Save the rest for a second meeting.

Investors who are interested follow up. They make introductions, connect you with people, and generally try to act helpful. An investor who is really interested tries to suck up all your available time. That way, no other investors can spend time with you until the investor decides whether to do the deal. And if your deal is really hot, you may even experience that rare phenomenon, “Don’t let that guy leave the building.”

The negotiation for your deal starts long before you talk terms. How you frame from the very beginning impacts the tenor of your negotiation. Act needy and reschedule your life around potential investors, and you indicate low status in the relationship. In the remote chance that they still want to do your deal, they know they can not only beat you up on price; they can control your company as well.

Presentation Failure

Whether or not the oft-quoted statistic that 93% of communication is nonverbal is accurate, how you communicate during a pitch, both verbally and nonverbally, matters a lot.

Just the other day, a few entrepreneurs were running through their presentation with me. They had a great pitch, a great team, and a big market. The only problem was, they didn’t look at me while they talked. I remember another pitch where an executive spent the entire presentation looking down at the conference table. It was very awkward.

If you pitch poorly, potential investors ask themselves: if you can’t communicate your vision clearly to me (the investor), why would I think you’ll be able to communicate it to your own team? And if you can’t communicate with your own employees to set direction, how will you get anything done? The answer is—you won’t.

Many entrepreneurs face two key challenges when presenting. First, they have trouble making and holding eye contact. Second, they have trouble being succinct.

Connect With Your Audience

Having trouble connecting with your audience is understandable. Many product people spend a lot of time in front of their computers. Computers don’t stare back, move around, grimace, smile, go in and out of the room, check their mobile devices, or get distracted. In fact, they don’t respond much at all (except occasionally to let you know they’ve crashed and need to restart). It’s for this very reason that, consciously or subconsciously, many entrepreneurs with engineering and product backgrounds have chosen to work with computers.

As a result, communicating a vision in person, one to one or in a group, may not be second nature. Some entrepreneurs fail to make eye contact with their audience while pitching. They look down, they look away, they do just about anything but communicate with their audience.

Others suffer from what I call the “warm coffee comfort” problem. It’s one thing to take a sip of water so your throat doesn’t dry out. It’s another to coddle a warm cup of coffee or tea, in what is clearly a comfort mechanism. You’d be surprised how many people do this—it’s both distracting and confidence reducing.

Instead of looking at their audience, some people look at their slides, projected or displayed on a screen behind them, while they present. They talk to the screen instead of to the people in the room. Some go so far as to turn their back on their audience, and a few stand with the projector light beaming directly into their eyes.

People who are great at presenting become that way by practicing. But in the absence of having years to practice, following a few simple presentation rules can go a long way. These are rules you can easily see in action in YouTube videos on presenting:

• Make eye contact: Not short and sudden, but steady. Don’t jump around the room. Some people find making eye contact uncomfortable. It makes them feel awkward, or they worry about coming across as intimidating or staring. Whatever the reason, if you find making eye contact uncomfortable, use the old trick of looking at people’s eyebrows or just above their nose. It’s not perfect, but it’s a very functional quick fix.
• Keep your eyes in the horizontal plane: Look around, not down.
• Face the person you’re addressing with your body: Talking to someone isn’t just about making eye contact—it’s about facing them with your body.
• Stand up: It’s hard to pitch seated. It contracts your lung capacity and makes it more challenging to be expressive.
• Don’t pace, and don’t lean on chairs: It’s distracting.
• Use humor: You don’t need to be a comedian, but if people laugh because you’ve said something funny, enjoy the moment. A little humor builds a lot of rapport.
• Breathe: Take a breath. Many entrepreneurs rush through their pitches, and when they run short on time, they talk even faster. Breathe more, say less.
• Know your material and the messages you want to leave people with: You don’t need to read your slides if you know what’s on them.
• Acknowledge your co-founder or other executives, and hand off to them: It’s often hard for people to introduce themselves in a big room. Instead, demonstrate you’re a team with the simple words, “And now I’d like to hand things off to my co-founder…” or words to that effect. If it helps, visualize the hand-off as passing the football—you’ve made the pass, your partner has received it, and now you can continue to move the ball down the field.

Employing a speaker coach can help a lot. However, coaches often focus on details. Don’t try to change who you are. Instead, practice facing people, looking at them, breathing, handing off to your colleagues, and coming back to your concise, key messages. Minimize distractions. Do that, and you’ll be 90% of the way there.

Be Succinct

Now for the other 90%. Be succinct. When investors, potential board members, or people you’re talking to ask you a question about your business, provide a crisp, direct answer.

Engineers, especially, have a tendency to go deeper and give more detail rather than bumping up a level and talking about the big picture. Quite often when investors ask questions they’re not looking for long, drawn-out explanations. They’re evaluating how you respond as much as the specific content of your answer. In a group of people, if you dive into a lengthy explanation of how your product works, for example, you may connect with one person, but you’ll likely lose the interest of others.

Many presenters tend to provide a long explanation and then provide the answer. Just give the answer right away—you may as well, since you’re going to give it anyway. Then explain. Spend time with the best executives and leaders and you’ll notice they excel at “netting it out.” They cut to the core of big issues. Do the same and you’ll come out ahead.

Back to our entrepreneurs. While they started out seeming nervous and a bit disconnected, after working on connecting with their audience and being succinct they came across as a confident team. They aced their pitches. So will you.

Expect Due Diligence

Due diligence is the process during which investors dig into the details of your opportunity—the market, the competition, your metrics, and your team.

I remember one diligence call that was a reference on the founder of a company. The person I was calling was genuinely surprised to hear from me. Granted, I made the call the same day I got the reference list from the founder. But the founder had neglected to tell him that investors might be calling. That wasn’t a reason not to do the deal, but it certainly felt odd.

Contrast that with the entrepreneur who had been well-coached. He offered to provide references, but only after I’d made some progress on other diligence aspects like market and competition. I took no offense at this. Rather, it demonstrated that he valued his references and didn’t want to overuse them, and also that he was testing me to see how serious I was about investing.

There is a saying among investors that during diligence, a deal loses altitude, and the question is whether it will regain it. During diligence, investors come face to face with the incredible number of risks associated with a deal. They have to overcome those risks and potentially convince their partners, if they’re part of a larger fund, that they and the company have an approach to mitigating those risks.

Support Your Sponsor

To get through due diligence, it pays to get on the same side as your sponsor. Your sponsor, at any investment shop bigger than one individual, is the champion who shepherds you through the firm and “owns” the deal. No matter how in-demand your deal is, you want to help that person execute an investment in your company. After all, you never know when you’ll need a stalking horse.

That means helping your sponsor pull together the investment memo, slides, and diligence materials. It doesn’t mean bending over backward or in any way compromising the mutual respect that goes into the best entrepreneur-investor partnerships.

The most effective way to do this is to sit down with your sponsor and have a candid discussion about how the process works at your sponsor’s firm. This isn’t a discussion of the details of your opportunity. Rather, it’s a brief discussion about the investment process—on your side and theirs.

How are investment decisions made? What materials will the sponsor be pulling together? This brief process discussion is yet another opportunity for you to frame and reframe your relationship and the potential partnership you’re entering into with the investor. In addition to asking questions, you should take the opportunity to talk about activities that need to take place and are taking place on your end.

One major item is to begin speaking with CEOs of the investor’s portfolio companies to get a sense for how the firm interacts with its founders and CEOs. Among other things, you want to know how the firm deals with follow-on investments and handles companies that need more capital to reach their objectives. This is useful and valuable information.

You can also communicate—even if unasked—where you are in the process with other investors. Assuming that multiple investors are actively in diligence, you want to make sure those who are genuinely interested have time to do the work they need to do; but you also want to communicate that your deal is in demand.

By having these kinds of discussions, you continue to frame your relationship. Your message is that it’s not just a question of whether the investor wants to invest in you. It’s equally a question of whether you want to take that investor’s money.

Understand Partner Meetings

If you’re raising venture capital, at some point you’ll come in contact with a Monday partner meeting. Partner meetings typically take place on Mondays at just about every venture-capital firm (although some firms are known for holding Sunday night partner meetings to preempt the competition when there is a hot deal to be won). A partner meeting is when all the partners at a firm get together to discuss firm business and ongoing financings, and hear the pitches of new companies as a group.

When a company comes in to present, the sponsor typically has already circulated a deal memo, a capital planning model (CPM), a copy of the presentation the entrepreneur will present, and relevant diligence notes and industry material. Depending on the stature of your sponsor, you can expect more or less process, preparation, and material.

The deal memo describes the opportunity, risks, team, and financing in detail. The CPM models capital needs of the company and expected return. The other information provides additional context. The sponsor may give a brief presentation or overview before the company presents.

A partner meeting isn’t the time to get bogged down in gory details. It’s an opportunity to paint your vision, get people excited, and demonstrate complete command of what you’re doing, from market to execution. The most important thing you can do in a partner meeting is to be highly engaged. Give your pitch, and don’t overstay. Demonstrate that yours is a deal people should be excited about. Show that although you’re excited about the prospect of working with the firm in question, yours is a deal they need to win if they want to work with you.

A friend of the firm may sit in on your presentation and provide the partnership with a perspective on your deal and on your market. In most cases, you’ll have met that person during diligence. Don’t sweat it.

After you leave the room, your sponsor will talk about the opportunity, risks, risk mitigation, and financing. The partnership will discuss the opportunity.

Partnerships have different structures for deciding how deals get done. Some follow a sponsor/devil’s advocate model, where one partner is the champion and another is the designated devil’s advocate. Other partnerships require a sponsor and co-sponsor. Some require unanimity or the vote of at least one managing partner.

In some partnerships, it’s a foregone conclusion that a deal coming into a Monday partner meeting will get done. Other partnerships may see two or three new deals on a Monday and choose to do only one—or none—of them. What’s important is to be focused, engaged, in control of your material, and in demand. Remember, you’re not just selling; you’re buying.

A recipe for failure is to bring your whole team with you, mismanage your time, and demonstrate a lack of command of your material. You should bring at the very most three people, in the case of a multifounder company.

Think big. Be succinct. Get to the point when answering questions. And, because you’ve managed the investment process to perfection—get on over to your next Monday meeting!

Summary

Pitching investors takes a lot of time and energy. To succeed at pitching you need to:

• Pitch investors that are appropriate for your business.
• Get investors excited about what you’re doing and your ability to transform, recruit, and raise capital.
• Be in command of your material.
• Not need the money, or at least credibly give the impression that you don’t need the money.

Buy, don’t just sell. The right entrepreneur-investor combination can truly be a partnership. You’ll be in business with your investors for a long time. Find the partnership that’s right for you.