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Can Good Investors Spot Great Startups Even When the Founders Aren’t Great at Pitching?
What if a good fundraising pitch doesn’t matter nearly as much as most entrepreneurs think?
I recently spent a day sitting in startup pitch meetings as a guest of a partner from a seed-stage VC firm. They wanted my feedback on some of the companies pitching them, and, quite frankly, I was excited to be on the other side of the fundraising table for a change. Even though I wasn’t going to be making any investment decisions or writing any checks, it was a great opportunity to better understand the perspective of an investor.
At least, that’s what I thought it was going to be. The quality of the pitches was, overall, surprisingly awful, and, by the end of the day I was done listening.
“Is this really what VCs listen to most days?” I said to the partner who’d invited me to join him. “If so, I seriously have an entirely different level of respect for venture capitalists.”
The VC chuckled. “It’s not every day,” he explained, “We do, occasionally, get exceptional founders. But they’re a lot more rare than you’d think. Unfortunately, finding them requires sitting through a lot of the… ermm… less polished pitches.”
