Great Pitch, Wrong Room

Great Pitch, Wrong Room There is a strange pattern in how founders pitch. Put them in front of an investor and they talk about the product. Put them in front of a client and suddenly they are talking about the business. Both times they are answering a question nobody asked, and both times they walk out of the room wondering what went wrong. On August 27, we are going to watch it happen live and then take it apart. One company gets pitched on stage, cold. Sitting in the front row are two people who hear pitches for a living and who want completely different things out of the same nine minutes. Bobby Edelman is deciding whether he would fund it. Hillary Applin is deciding whether she would buy it. They will stop the pitch where it worked, stop it where it lost them, and show you the version that would have landed in both rooms. Bobby is an early-stage investor with more than 170 startup investments, through direct deals, NuFund Venture Group and the San Diego Angel Conference. He was an operator long before he was an investor, and today he coaches founders at The Brink SBDC at the University of San Diego on how to prepare for investors and raise capital. He knows what makes an investor lean in, because he has been the one leaning in about a hundred and seventy times. Hillary spent more than 15 years building and scaling revenue organizations across AI, SaaS and enterprise technology before founding Pype, where she is now CEO. She has sat on the other side of the table from countless companies trying to sell to her, and she can tell you in about thirty seconds why most of them lost her. Between them they will walk through the ten moments where a pitch wins or loses both rooms: your opening, the problem, the product, your numbers, competitors, your team, hard questions, price, vision and the ask. Then it is your turn. In the second half, the floor opens up and you can put your own pitch in front of both of them, in front of everyone, and find out what each of them actually heard. Moderated by Mario Corona, Co-Founder of Frictionless. Co-hosted with Matthew Zimmer of VibeCraft, at Downtown Works, Mission Valley. Thursday, August 27 at 9:00 AM. Free to attend, and the room fills fast.