Bhat's Notes

Coverage by Bhat Dittakavi of TiE Hyderabad on the “Art of Pitching” master class on 13th December at Novotel Hyderabad

Aris Lancrescent, CEO, DevPixel

“This is not a theatre class and you are not being hired for their best movie. Rehearse enough but internalise.”

As you evolve, so do markets and VCs. You evolve through failed pitches. Research profile the investors. Deliberate what was missing and readdress the entire flow until you formulate. Pool of 10 pitches make it no longer a gassing game. This helps you develop the exact sense of what you should do. Elan Musk pitches everything and convinces the market with everything. Pitching is knowing the audience and getting into the flow of doing it. When you deliver the pitch, don’t go off the script yet don’t memorise for 100 times in front of mirror. Rehearse your pitch over and over again until the end. Then take your pitch and throw it away. You best to internalise the pitch. All of your energy spent on recall won’t work. Observing and reacting in the love in that room is critical. Fantastic pitch decks are great. What a great story you told. After reading such pitch, it is like reading hamlet. When we read or watch, we don’t go back to the chapter or prior reel. VCs go back and forth. Pitching is telling a story and creating a deck is to build a narrative around your company or business? NO. Pitch deck must be like a dictionary and they should be able to go to any page and get any data they need. Don’t make a sequential pitch deck. Make them individually separable sections. We have something on the screen where you memorised to talk sequentially, then if VC skipped a slide then you have to fast forward your memory. We are very bad at that.

The moment you rehearse enough, deliberate without any visual cues for you and for the VCs. If the Vc gave you 30 minutes, don’t believe in them. Have a plan. Internalise the key information. Read the room. Are they paying attention? You know. Forget about making mistakes.

I tell my story to my family members the same story again and again. When I deliver the story the first time, I don’t really care as you are the first time hearing and it is something new for you and you are curious about what is going to happen next. What if you watch the movie tenth time? Is the VC still interested? Fast and furious has 13 versions and you still watch as they figures how to capture the audience. Tell the same story ten times and make them get interested again and again. W

hat ever you are doing is new and exciting for you and VCs have heard that extremely similar many a times from others.

You don’t want to innovate but imitate it all except for a key part where you innovate and solve a cortical problem for your target users. That is the market value why your venture is worth growing. That should be where you focus.

Keep things simple and make sure ethos’s three things that listener remembers at the end when he walks away. Keeping simple let’s you internalise better. Don’t move from one complex topic to the other. Know where to focus and where to skim through. Always ask what was missing. If you did right once it doesn’t mean it would be right the next time. Pay close attention to the feedback on what was missing. This helps you steer next better.