Jason Calacanis has a new cause.  He is railing against the so-called “pay-to-pitch” phenomenon.  A good read – check it out here.

Update: Scoble, Fred, and Lance have since commented on it as well.

My views on the pay-to-pitch thing are pretty well known, as I’ve written about it a ton in the past, and we’ve torn the topic to shreds several times on the podcast.  And I think we (the larger community, of which I am but a small part) have done a pretty good job here in Atlanta, at least, of (A) educating the entrepreneurs, and (B) tearing down the walls that allowed that sort of thing to come about in the first place.  Many of the pay-to-pitch groups don’t even bother with Atlanta any more (because they know they’ll get a boot in the face from the community). But I will add a few additional thoughts here …

I think the fact that someone with Jason’s “web-clout” is a bit late in jumping on this bandwagon is illustrative (to me, at least), of how “disconnected” the valley-minded crowd can be from the rest of the country.  Don’t get me wrong – I want Jason to fight the good fight   But StartupLounge (and others) have been screaming about this, and fighting against it, for several years.

There is a difference between someone in a place like the Valley paying to pitch, and someone in Des Moines, or Tampa, or Atlanta, et al.

If you are paying to pitch in the Valley, you and/or your idea, must really blow. It’s like the handful of applications for CapitalLounge that we get from startups in California that want to come to Atlanta to find money.  Wow – really? WTF?

If you are paying to pitch in some other part of the country (i.e. an under-served capital region, like Atlanta), you may very well be sitting on the next Google, but you likely don’t have the infrastructure and support system around you to tell you that you are wasting your capital paying to pitch – you may think that you don’t have an alternative. And that is where education comes in play.

Uneducated entrepreneur + desperation = “Gee, I bet I can charge this clown $5K to come ‘pitch’ at my service-provider dry hump fest.”

To me, it is all about supply and demand.  How do you kill the demand, since killing the pay-to-pitch organizers is, well, illegal? We’ve found that making more well-rounded, educated, and agile entrepreneurs is the best antidote for the pay-to-pitch problem.  If I had a nickel for every entrepreneur that we’ve collectively “converted” from the dark side through stuff like StartupLounge/CapitalLounge, PitchCamp, Startup Riot, ATDC, Startup Gauntlet, mentoring, et al, I could fund half the deals in the Southeast at least through Series-D

At any rate – good read – Jason’s a firebrand – gotta love it.  Kick ass – take names – peace out.

Cheers.

We get a TON of applications every time we put together a CapitalLounge event. While most of the applications have some degree of merit, and eventually get accepted, there are many that don’t.  Historically, we have a non-invitation rate of anywhere from 20-30%.   Despite the enormous level of detail that we’ve published as to our selection criteria and process, invariably, we get a flood of emails the week or so leading up to the event with people appealing and arguing with us (or trying to) about why their deal was rejected.

Here is a tongue-in-cheek look at some reasons why the event applications for some entrepreneurs and investors get rejected.  If you don’t find any of this at all funny, then you most likely fall into one of these categories.

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Lance wrote a nice bit on today’s Georgia Technology Summit. I agree with everything he said. I’ll pile on a bit more.  Pet peeve time.

I worked pretty diligently to follow the guidelines that TAG gave us for the Top 10 Innovative Company presentations. Pretty simple: “3 slides, 3 minutes. Any more than that and you will get the hook.” If you ever been to a big event like this, you know how hard it is for them to stay on schedule with so many speakers, presenters, exhibitors, breaks, etc. Everyone has to do their part, however small it may seem.

I was surprised, and a little taken back by how many of my fellow entrepreneurs ran roughshot over the rules. Some of the companies had what appeared to be a dozen slides, one guy tossed up a video, and some ran WAY over the limit (I swear one guy took 10 minutes). I know that Tino (TAG) didn’t seem all that thrilled about it either. Then again, these were supposed to be the same pitches that the judges saw during the audition … who knows.

I will say this, though. If you can’t pitch the essence of your company in 3 minutes to a room full of people (and obviously can’t follow simple instructions), that is a pretty clear indicator to me that you either have no advisors, some really iffy advisors, or you’re just toast.

Whenever I watch other people pitch, I also try to take notice of the crowd … what are they thinking? doing? gesturing? When people start breaking out the Blackberries that’s a pretty good indicator that you have a first-class ticket on the non-stop to nowhere. At that point, the applause is simply gratitude that you’re done. Trust me, you don’t want to be that guy (or gal).

The goal of the 3 minute pitch is not to raise money, and it certainly isn’t to provide due diligence – it is to get your message out there. Who are you ? What do you do? Why are you great? That’s it. Say enough to spark some interest out there – you want people seeking you out during the break, not praying for you to stop talking. That isn’t the time to amaze the crowd with your superior knowledge of dynamic link libraries.

Jeff Haynie (Appcelerator) had a nice pitch … nice, clean design … easy to read … got his message out there, and got the hell off the stage. You could tell he’s done this before. His pitch was reflective of a professional entrepreneur. Hopefully, TAG will post the videos soon – should be very instructional for some folks.

One suggestion for future events: It would probably be beneficial if TAG did a “bootcamp” pitch session for all entrepreneurs that are presenting at the Summit. Since we already do this coaching via our free PitchCamp sessions via StartupLounge, I’ll offer that up to TAG as a way to do it for free. We’re happy to help, and provide some sounding boards for you. Or, if you’re an entrepreneur who is getting ready to hit the pitch trail, stay tuned to StartupLounge.com for dates as we post them and come on your own – again, it’s free.

There’s no such thing as the “perfect pitch” (I’ll include every pitch I’ve ever done as well) – there is always room for improvement. But good lord … some of those pitches illustrated this fact: as hard as it is for companies to find capital in Atlanta, the entrepreneurial community has work to do to meet the money half way. Blocking and tackling …. the basics.

I will close with this, though – the TAG Summit definitely keeps getting better every year.  I remember past Summits with pretty thin crowds.  Much like building a company, it is an iterative process.   As Lance pointed out, Tino does a good job of listening to feedback from TAG members, and the event continues to evolve.

Cheers.

One of the things that we’ve implemented for the upcoming StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event is that we require all attendees to provide us their “one-line” elevator pitch as part of the application process. We limit them to 125 characters. How important is it? Extremely. You have 125 characters to convince our steering committee that your particular venture will be of interest to fast-growth investors.

It is a curse. Most entrepreneurs CANNOT construct a concise, effective pitch for their venture. However, turn them loose on a friend’s deal, and they can work magic.

Below you will find a sampling of a few good one-line pitches that we’ve seen, some bad ones, and some really ugly ones. We’ve anonymized them where appropriate. We also have some from investors, too – wheee!

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Yesterday, I did something I haven’t done since the dot com flameout – I pitched to a west coast VC (Norwest). Refreshing. Invigorating. And they didn’t bounce us out on our rear-ends, which is a good thing. In fact, we did several pitches this week, which was both exhausting, and exciting. All of our efforts got me thinking about pitches in general, and I decided to put down some of my thoughts.

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