Mittwoch, 20. Mai 2009

how to win seedcamp & other pitches

start.ups compete all the time. for customers, money, press attention, employees. how to win such competitions was in the spotlight at the opening event of the mini seedcamp laibach.

the most minimalistic approach for a successful pitch is to a) show your product, then b) show your google analytics metrics and finish by c) shutting up. then wait for questions from the audience. to be clear, this also means d) not to talk about technology and e) all the rest.

this is the essence of the introductory talk of dragos ilinca from ubervu, 2008 winner of seedcamp on “how to win seedcamp” and other pitches.

a crowd of 50 people was gathering together for the pre-opening of the laibach mini seedcamp 2008 at kiberpipa. spreading out all over Europe, this was the 6th out of 7 mini-seedcamps taking place all over Europe, from paris to ljubljana.

having lost count of all the pitches held around the world, be it 20 or 50, dragos was blunt in what to expect from venture capital. “90 percent of the start.ups fail, most do not fit into the venture capital criteria."..."start.ups not solving a critical problem will get no funding!"

the same holds for those which don not know why customers will spend money for their products or do not have an excellent team. those things sound common. still, most start.ups do not practice it in real life.

thanks to the folks from kiberpipa , there is a complete video coverage of the opening event:


How to win Seedcamp? from Kiberpipa on Vimeo.


read on about seedcamp laibach in the upcoming post “venture capital is not fast food”.