70 CREATE THE STORY
During one week in September, dozens of entrepreneurs
pitch their start-ups to influential groups of media, experts,
and investors at two separate venues—TechCrunch 50 in
San Francisco and DEMO in San Diego. For start-up founders,
these high-stakes presentations mean the difference between
success and obsolescence. TechCrunch organizers believe
that eight minutes is the ideal amount of time in which to
communicate an idea. If you cannot express your idea in eight
minutes, the thinking the goes, you need to refine your idea.
DEMO gives its presenters even less time—six minutes. DEMO
also charges an $18,500 fee to present, or $3,000 per minute. If
you had to pay $3,000 a minute to pitch your idea, how would
you approach it?
The consensus among venture capitalists who attend
the presentations is that most entrepreneurs fail to create
an intriguing story line because they jump right into their
product without explaining the problem. One investor told
me, “You need to create a new space in my brain to hold the
information you’re about to deliver. It turns me off when
entrepreneurs offer a solution without setting up the prob-
lem. They have a pot of coffee—their idea—without a cup
to pour it in.” Your listeners’ brains have only so much room
to absorb new information. It’s as if most presenters try to
squeeze 2 MB of data into a pipe that carries 128 KB. It’s
simply too much.
A company called TravelMuse had one of the most outstand-
ing pitches in DEMO 2008. Founder Kevin Fleiss opened his
pitch this way: “The largest and most mature online retail seg-
ment is travel, totaling more than $90 billion in the United States
alone [establishes category]. We all know how to book a trip
online. But booking is the last 5 percent of the process [begins
to introduce problem]. The 95 percent that comes before book-
ing—deciding where to go, building a plan—is where all the
heavy lifting happens. At TravelMuse we make planning easy by
seamlessly integrating content with trip-planning tools to pro-
vide a complete experience [offers solution].”^9 By introducingThe $3,000-a-Minute Pitch