Tag Archives: pitching

Calacanis on Paying-to-Pitch

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 …

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A Dozen Ways to get Rejected from CapitalLounge

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 …

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2008 TAG Summit Wrap-up

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 …

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Gallery of Crappy Pitches

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 …

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Surviving First Contact

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 …

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