Only Connect: how to Pitch Investors
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. — E. M. Forster, Howards End
The English novelist E.M. Forster wrote Howards End in 1910, and a famous line from his novel is “Only connect”—the only job of a pastor is to connect with her audience. So, too, it is with entrepreneurs who are pitching investors. In a former life, I worked for a small seed-stage investment fund, and bore witness to hundreds of pitches from eager investors who wanted the fund to invest in their early-stage startup. Usually, these startups were no more than ideas; they were pre-revenue.
Eventually, someone will write a treatise on what entrepreneurs can learn from pastors. Pastors need to connect with their flock, and convince their parishioners that they are the spiritual leaders the parishioners seek. I don’t want to make too much of the connection between entrepreneurs pitching investors and pastors pitching parishioners, but there is a line that connects the two.
Successfully pitching your idea is all about being able to tell a story, whether you’re a pastor, an entrepreneur, or a decorated military veteran relating how you came to understand, physically, the speed of light:
The point I am making here, lest it is not explicit enough: you have to connect with your audience. Only connect. If you are pitching your company to investors, you need to be able to connect with your audience. All too often, I would be pitched an investment opportunity, and I would have no answer for the question “Why do I care?”
“Why do I care about this company, this entrepreneur, this opportunity? All I am hearing is jargon and assumptions. I know nothing about why this entrepreneur thinks this opportunity is a great one. I’m not being told any story. There’s no connection.” When this line of thinking is my response to someone pitching me, that person has already lost me.
Connect with your audience, don’t speak to them.