Quick VC pitch tip #3

by Healy Jones

Yet another low-value tip for the entrepreneur about to pitch a startup idea or business plan to a venture capitalist. This one is for entrepreneurs/founders who will be presenting at the VC's office:

VC Pitch Tip #3 - Get to the venture capitalist's office early

A good venture capitalist is very scheduled during the day, and has only allotted a certain amount of time to meet with your startup and listen to your initial business plan pitch. Usually, for a first meeting, this is an hour to and hour and a half. The VC will likely be running off to meet with another entrepreneur or to get onto a phone call with a portfolio company right after the meeting with you - so you don't have a lot of time to get your vision across!

The reason that you should get to the VC's office a bit early is because you may experience annoying technical issues hooking your computer up to the projector, connecting to the internet or preparing your product/solution demonstration. Since you're only got a short amount of time to make the venture capitalist "get" your vision, any time spent fiddling with your laptop or messing around with projector cables is time lost. By getting to the meeting early you will allow yourself some buffer to set everything up and do a trial run of your demo - hopefully giving you all the time possible to get your idea across.

I know this doesn't seem fair. You've gone through the effort to prepare a presentation, dragged yourself away from your team and development work and are ready to bare your soul to some jerk VC… and they won't even give you the courtesy to run over the schedule meeting time by a few minutes. However, keep in mind that there is likely another entrepreneur in the meeting room next door ready to pitch their idea to the very same VC.

While we can debate the rudeness of being late to a meeting (something VCs are notoriously prone to doing, sorry), there is no debate that the more time you've got to explain your startup the better your chances are. So, while it's a pain to get set up early and then twiddle your thumbs for a few minutes waiting for the VC, it is much better than giving a half-focused introduction to your idea while you mess around with F8 key on your laptop.