In 2001, I was attending the Être conference in Rome. Être was the major tech startup conference in Europe back then, all VCs attended, it was the ideal opportunity for an entrepreneur to meet VCs. I was there to pitch the company I had started in 1998, Tryllian. We were creating a system of distributed intelligent agents, our market was in AI and social media.
On the second day of the conference, I was getting lunch, there was a buffet, I got myself some sandwiches. Next to me, there was a gentleman doing same, we greeted, and we ended up eating our lunch at the same table. I introduced myself, he said “Hi, my name is Tim Draper”, I took a bite of my sandwich, then he asked something like “What does Tryllian do?” I swallowed the bite I had just taken whole, and I pitched my company in two minutes. I saw Mr Draper think for a few seconds, then he asked a question. I don’t remember the question, but it was spot on, the most relevant question he could have asked. A question no Dutch investor had ever asked. We chatted some more, he gave me his business card, and we left the lunch table. A few years later, I arranged for him to speak at an innovators conference in the Netherlands.
At the same conference, they took us to a dinner location by bus, and I found myself sitting next to Arne van der Wal, back then a leading journalist in the startup tech industry in the Netherlands. We did introductions, my head was spinning “should I pitch, how long, what will I pitch, etc” when he said “I’ll be meeting your cousin tomorrow”. My cousin is Aart Heering, he lives in Rome and he was a correspondent for the same magazine Van der Wal was working for. So, head spinning again “change of plan, different relationship to person, different pitch, what to do?” I did a three minute pitch, casual, and let it continue as a pleasant conversation. When you talk to a journalist, it’s always good to educate them, to share knowledge. I kept in touch with Arne after the Être conference.
Different occasion: London, end of 1999, a big conference attended by some 1500 people in banking and investment for entrepreneurs to pitch their startup. They had a remarkable setup: a room with 1500 people, a huge empty stage (it was really huge) and a big digital clock at the front of the stage, counting down the seconds from 300 to zero. At zero there would be a beep and your mike was shut off. The first few speakers didn’t do well. I’m sure they had prepared for the occasion, but the big clock — 1ft high, 3 ft wide, bright red digits, counting down to zero — distracted them so much they totally messed up their pitches. When it was my turn, I got on the stage — again, it was huge — and when the clock started, I set my internal pitch clock to 5 minutes and I started. I managed not to look at the clock too much, I selected a few people in the audience as reference points to look at, I did the pitch, and right after I said “thank you” the beep sounded.
What can you do to time your pitch to any duration you want? The answer is simple: practice. And by practice I mean rehearse the pitch in your head, again and again. And again. And again. You pitch when you’re driving to work, when you’re walking the dog, when you’re in bed, when you take a shower, whenever there’s a moment available, do the pitch. In one week, you can do it a hundred times, or more.
Next, take every opportunity to actually pitch. Not in a presentation room in front of an audience, but to a friend who asks “what does your company actually do?”, to your family, to suppliers and customers, to your grandparents, to your kids’ teacher. By pitching to your mom when she asks “how is work going?” you learn to do the pitch not in a business-like robotic monologue, but rather as a friendly chat.
Don’t write your pitch down. Don’t cast the text in concrete. Don’t memorize it verbatim. Just pitch each time as if it’s the first time, making up the text as you go. You’ll find that the first three times, the pitch is different each time. The next ten times, you’ll find it will still be different, but a bit less so. After that, you’ll start varying the elements of the pitch, arranging them in different ways. After thirty tries, you’ll have material for half an hour, even if the pitch should only be five minutes. After a hundred tries, you’ll see that you’ll have created a collection of sound bites that you knit together in the pitch, in different ways each time. You’ll get a feeling for what you’re saying at the start, what you’re saying in the middle, or at the end. You’ll gradually associate every sound byte with a position in the pitch. Then, when during a pitch you find you’re going too fast, you can add more sound bites, if you’re going to slow, you leave some out. Of course, this only works if you know your pitch inside out and backwards.
I am not saying you should consciously think about all this. I want you to just do the pitch, again and again, until even in your dreams, you pitch. Some people call this visualization, although it’s really verbalizing more than visualising. You can imagine — visualize — being at a party or a conference and start pitching. It should feel like you are actually talking to a VC person. Keep doing this dozens of times, hundreds of times, until you feel so comfortable with it that when you actually meet the person, it feels like just another pitch to a VC person.
This is not a technique you can use for just any presentation. You can do it for your startup company pitch because this pitch will be more or less the same every time. It will evolve, the ideas will evolve, the company will evolve, the audience will, you will, but roughly speaking, it’s the same pitch you’ll keep doing for years.
The result of this technique is not just that you will time your pitch better. There’s also the way it comes across. When you’ve done your pitch a thousand times, you talk like an expert in the field — which you are — who explains issues from their enormous body of knowledge. This makes you much more convincing than the person who memorized a pitch and rattles it off.
Summarizing:
- pitch your idea in your mind as often as you can, whenever you can.
- Don’t be afraid to change things on the fly, you can change it back next time.
- After a gazillion tries, you’ll have done every possible version of your pitch so you can’t go wrong when finally the real thing happens.
