Ready for Your Start-Up Pitch? Make Sure It’s a Passionate One

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It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. The business plan at the ready, you know what you’re doing; you read all the “how-to” articles on the World Wide Web; you spent hours rehearsing your speech. Now all you need is an investor to put some cash behind your dreams. You’re about to walk through the doors to make a professional and level-headed plea for money… Just make sure it’s a passionate one.

It sounds like a no brainer, after all, you’re excited about your start-up’s potential. Why wouldn’t you show that? But now there’s scientific proof that impassioned pitches boost the attention of investors.

“No one has ever invested in a start-up they ignored,” says Scott Shane, a professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University in the U.S. What exactly goes on in the investor's brain when they’re listening to a pitch? Shane wanted to find out, so he asked investors to undergo functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) whilst watching video pitches. Functional MRI measures brain activity by monitoring blood flow to brain regions when they’re activated. It’s a pretty impressive technology that lets researchers study neural activation to stimuli.

In the study, participants viewed business pitches taken from crowdfunding platforms delivered by actors at varying levels of…