I haven’t pulled all-nighters stringing together code for an MVP or spent hours wrestling with AWS billing after exceeding a free tier. I haven’t lived the rollercoaster of 30% MoM growth—or tried to explain what “pre-seed” means at a family dinner.
But I have been in the room. Sitting across from founders—brilliant, brave, resourceful people—who are doing something most of us never dare to try: building from scratch. I’ve listened to pitches in boardrooms, cafés, Zoom calls, accelerators… enough to notice a quiet truth.
The founders who walk away with a yes aren’t always the ones with the flashiest deck, the deepest credentials, or even the most disruptive idea.
They’re the ones who can tell the story. Who can connect the problem to the product, the product to the vision, and the vision to the listener. The ones who don’t just pitch—they transfer belief.
And every time I watch someone come so close—but lose the room somewhere between slide 4 and “next steps”—I wish I could hit pause, slide them a coffee, and gently say, “You’ve got everything you need. Let me help you land the plane.”
So that’s what this is. Not a list of critiques or power moves. Just 10 honest, hard-won lessons from someone who’s been lucky enough to watch a lot of founders try—and succeed.
These aren’t rules. They’re reminders. From someone who’s quietly rooting for you…..
Absolutely. Let’s slow it down, breathe some life into it, and make it verbose, relatable, and rich with personality. Less like a pitch guide, more like a fireside chat from someone who’s sat in the investor chair, quietly watching founders talk themselves out of a cheque. Think: wry humor, grounded storytelling, and gently roasted truth bombs.
Here we go:
1. Don’t start with your resume. Start with the earthquake.
Please, I beg you—don’t begin your pitch by telling me your name, your co-founder’s name, your university, your dog’s name, and how long you’ve “been passionate about AI.” We can cover all that later.
Start with the rupture. The thing that made you say: “This is broken. This is wrong. And I’m the one who’s going to fix it.”
Tell me about the hospital that lost patient data in a blackout. The farmer who couldn’t insure his crop because the underwriting algorithm was trained on Chicago weather. The moment the world cracked open and made your solution necessary.
If you can start with a moment that hurts, you’ll have our attention before Slide 1 even loads.
2. TAMs don’t impress people anymore. Stories do.
Somewhere along the way, founders were taught that the way to impress investors is to show them a giant Total Addressable Market—$300 billion, $500 billion, “a trillion-dollar opportunity.” And look, those numbers do matter… eventually.
But when you’re sitting across from someone trying to decide whether to risk their capital, what matters more is whether you understand the market you’re actually walking into. Not the global category. Your category. Your wedge.
What makes my ears perk up isn’t, “We’re going after the $200B mental health market.” It’s:
“We spoke to 30 Gen Z users who said they don’t trust therapy apps, but they will talk to AI if it doesn’t feel like AI. That’s the wedge we’re building into.”
Now we’re talking.
3. Your pitch isn’t a TED Talk. It’s a campfire.
Great pitches don’t feel like performances. They feel like someone leaning in with a glint in their eye and saying, “You’re not going to believe what happened next.”
It’s a rhythm thing. A cadence thing. You don’t rush. You don’t list. You invite. You tell the story like you’re not just trying to impress me, but trying to include me in a journey that’s already moving.
The founders who pitch like they’re already halfway up the mountain—mud on their boots, GPS half working, but conviction fully intact—those are the ones people want to follow.
4. Nobody cares about your product until they understand your pain.
A weird but true thing about pitching: if you show me your product too early, I won’t care. It’s like handing me a key without telling me what it unlocks.
Before you show me the dashboard, the AI, the fancy buttons—tell me about the person who was losing hours, money, sleep, because this product didn’t exist. Make me feel their chaos. Their frustration. Their helplessness.
Then, when you finally say, “And this is what we built,” it lands like a relief, not a feature.
5. Ditch the superhero team slide. Make me believe this team is obsessed.
Yes, I get it. Your CTO worked at Google. Your CMO helped scale a startup in 2016. Your lead engineer breathes Kubernetes. All good.
But what I really want to know is: Why is this the only team that could build this thing? What do you know that nobody else does? What’s the chip on your shoulder? The hill you’d die on?
Because at early stage, people don’t back resumes. They back obsession.
6. The competition slide is not a chessboard—it’s a therapy session.
This one’s awkward. Founders either pretend they have no competitors (big red flag), or they paste in a 2×2 matrix where—shockingly—they always end up in the top right corner.
Here’s the truth: we’re not looking for domination. We’re looking for clarity. Who else is solving this? Why are they failing? What have you figured out that they haven’t?
And most importantly: if a trillion-dollar company decided to build what you’re building, why won’t they win?
You don’t have to be invincible. You just have to be thoughtful.
7. Show us the ugly spreadsheet, not just the hockey stick.
Look, no one believes the five-year revenue model. Not really. What we do believe in is financial maturity: that you’ve actually thought about how money moves through your business.
Show me:
- How much it costs to acquire a customer
- What they pay you
- How long they stay
- When they break even
Even if it’s early, show me the shape of the machine. Not the fantasy, but the gears.
8. Practice your pitch until it sounds like a conversation. Then keep practicing.
You know those founders who pitch like they’re reading a script their investor coach wrote the night before? Yeah. Don’t be them.
The best founders I’ve seen? They’ve rehearsed so much that it doesn’t feel rehearsed. It flows. It breathes. They make eye contact. They pause. They crack jokes. They handle questions like they’re at a dinner party, not a deposition.
Practice until the pitch lives in your bones. Then forget the script—and tell the story.
9. Build urgency without sounding desperate.
You want investors to feel like the train is already moving. That the round is filling fast. That there’s momentum, traction, and limited room on this rocket.
But don’t lie. Don’t fudge the numbers or overplay the FOMO.
Just frame the moment honestly:
“We weren’t planning to raise until Q3, but growth pulled us forward. Now that Stripe’s onboarding us for their pilot program, we want to move faster. We’re raising $1.5M to seize that window.”
That’s urgency rooted in reality. That works.
10. If you don’t believe it’s inevitable, why should I?
You know what separates a decent pitch from a great one?…… Conviction.
The sense that this founder doesn’t hope it’ll work—they know. They’ve seen too much, tested too much, obsessed too much to walk away. Whether you invest or not, they’re building this thing. It’s happening. And you can either get in early, or wish you had.
If you can bottle that energy—and back it with real data, real customers, real traction—you don’t need to be flashy.
You just need to be undeniable.
The Bottom Line: Your Pitch Isn’t Just a Presentation. It’s a Belief Transfer.
The deck matters. The metrics matter. But more than anything, I want to walk away from your pitch believing—not just in the market, or the model, or the margins—but in you.
In your ability to see around corners. To keep going when it’s brutal. To solve a problem so painful, so urgent, so neglected, that you had no choice but to build.
So please. Don’t pitch to impress. Pitch to infect.
We’re not here for perfection. We’re here for possibility.
I hope this helps all you aspiring founders out there to make your dream a reality.
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Until then, continue to learn, unlearn and relearn folks……..
