This week concluded the RISE Conference in Hong Kong— the largest tech conference in Asia. I was an attendee and spent a lot of the conference standing at the “Breakthrough Stage,” where regional startups stood and pitched their businesses to panels of judges for recognition and funding possibilities.
Quick observation from watching so many pitches— a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs try to bury their various deficiencies, and very few do it well.
The example that I find the most interesting is when a panel of judges asks, “where are you at for traction?” Notice, this is a question posed in the present tense— where are you at right now. Repetitiously, I saw entrepreneur after entrepreneur look the questioning panelist dead in the eye and respond in the future tense— “[I]n three months, we will be at X.” Square peg, circular hole...
Grammar is the tool most often used to obscure truth. Contemporary philosophy dictates this, and entrepreneurs unconsciously embody that truth. To the audience and panel, it is immediately apparent without knowing what that truth may be, that the entrepreneur is concealing some shameful data point. And of course, it’s not just any data point — it’s one worthy of hiding, at least in the entrepreneur’s eyes.
This leads to a rule of thumb for pitching: the more you try to hide something with grammatical maneuvers, the more others realize something is concealed within the structure of your language.
Following this rule of thumb, early-stage entrepreneurs have two options to evade this predicament when pitching. (1) Build the traction, technology, team, or whatever else she needs before pitching in front of VC’s, or (2) embrace the deficiencies and prove that funding relationship will act as the catalyst to overcome inadequacies.
Somehow this game of hide and seek with VC’s never seems to end well for the entrepreneurs— and rightfully so. Who in their right mind invests in an entrepreneur who conceals the reality of her business at such an early stage. It’s a bad precedence to set, and is a pattern of behavior and speech that is tough to break.