Am I ready to pitch?

How many times have you heard that the market is flooded with money/ideas/startups? I hear it at every angel investor gathering: “the market has too many investors” or “too many startups”. It’s always about the market being “overly” saturated.

Well, I don’t believe there is such thing as too many funds or too many ideas. I believe that what rather concerns people is that the VC – Startu

p industry is starting to look like a casino. How many times you run across people that are writing checks to 10 companies in industries that are foreign to them, hoping that one of those will exit and will make them money? To me that is exactly like hoping for 24 red. The world is moving forward at an exponential pace and we all want to be aboard that train, but we sometimes forget that to get there takes a great deal of effort and dedication.

As an entrepreneur myself, I strive to employ practices that will bring about a shift in the industry. I aim to cultivate more smart money in the industry. Additionally, I seek to promote effective communication between the founders and the investors to improve clarity and transparency. The best vehicle startups have is the pitch. When you are in front of potential investors, how you communicate is usually more important than what you are saying. When preparing a pitch, remember that most times the investor is not from that industry nor your specific business area. Startups need to make sure that their communication is crystal clear in presenting their business idea.

When I was in pre-school in Israel, we played a game called “broken phone”, where you say one word in your classmate’s ear, and he repeats the word to the person next to him, and it continues like that until the last kid says out loud the first word. It’s never the same word the game started with. This is a classic example of miscommunication, something that we all experience in our daily lives. How many times have you told someone something and they understood something else? Now when it comes to our daily life, we don’t pay attention or are just too lazy to change our ways. But when it comes to the pitch, the smallest error in miscommunication can cost the startup their opportunity in receiving funding, whichcan lead the idea to stay as it was, just an idea.

The source of all miscommunication is in our thinking process. In our brain many small connections form before we reach a conclusion. Our brain is designed to use memories, pictures, thoughts, and a myriad of other things which are stored in our “hard drive,” and our brain uses them to form an opinion – to reach a conclusion or produce an idea. But what happens when we try to share that idea with other people? We usually give them the bottom line, which creates the so-called miscommunication because the receiver (the investor in this case) doesn’t have all of that “data” which is stored only in the speaker’s brain.

When a startup is preparing to pitch any type of investor, they must first learn how to communicate their entire train of thought in a clear, transparent manner in order for both the startup and the investor to arrive at the same conclusion together. Our goal is to guide the founders on the art of communication. It is not enough to understand the idea and the problem it’s solving, but you have to learn how to tell the story. The biggest challenge you will face during the pitching stage is the how well you can convey the entire story while connecting all the pieces that produced the idea. This is the perfect pitch – when the investor can connect you and your history to the product and the idea. Boom, you have funding.