Founder Journal: On Pitching

I have failed to pitch correctly more than anyone can count.

Some got meetings but no second call. Potential customers said they understood the product, then did nothing. I used to think the problem was clarity. If I could only explain the system well enough, people would get it.

That was wrong.

The Room That Taught Me

I remember one pitch where I was walking a room of execs through the architecture. Midway through I noticed them on their phones. One of them leaned forward and said: “I have a busy schedule, can you get to the point?”

I had been clear. I had been precise. And it had not mattered.

The lesson was brutal: clarity alone does not create engagement. There has to be something for the audience to feel.

That moment stayed with me. It was the beginning of understanding why my earlier pitches had fallen flat.

What I Was Doing Wrong

I was starting with the thing I knew best: the product.

“We are an X platform that does Y.”

Nothing wrong with that sentence in isolation. Nine times out of ten it communicates what you do. The problem is that it gives the room nothing to feel. No stake. No reason to lean in. I had optimized for understanding and skipped the step that actually makes people care.

Great pitches do not start with what. They start with why.

Not “why we exist” in a mission-statement way. Why this problem matters. Why it is urgent. Why the person in front of you should care before they have heard a single feature.

I learned that the hard way. I am writing it down so I do not forget.

Two Kinds of Emotional Trigger

Over time I started to notice a pattern in the pitches that worked.

When people leaned in, it was because something had landed emotionally. I began to separate those moments into two types.

Direct: You speak to a pain, a belief, or an experience that is personal to them. They feel it in the room. It is about them.

Indirect: You speak to a problem they know exists from the industry, from others, from the news, even if it is not their own story. They are motivated because they recognize the problem and want to be part of solving it.

Neither is better. The work is to know which kind of audience you have, and to aim the opening at that. I had been pitching the same way to everyone. That was another mistake from the earlier attempts.

Knowing Your Audience

The challenge is always the same: who is in the room?

Are they living the problem? Then the direct trigger is available. Are they observing it, managing it, or investing in it? Then the indirect trigger is the one that will land.

This does not come from the deck. It comes from listening before you pitch. From research. From questions that help you place them without giving away the idea. When I had no chance to do that, cold events, networking, I learned to default to why. Why this problem, why now. It is the safest opening when you do not yet know how they relate to the problem.

Why Before What

A “what” statement is: “We are an X platform that does Y.” Practical. Clear. Emotionally flat.

A “why” statement answers: why are we solving this in the first place? It connects to something that makes the listener want to hear more.

Example:

“The power demand for AI compute is increasing exponentially and data centres are producing extraordinary amounts of heat. With models getting larger and more compute-intensive, the problem will only get worse. That is why we are building next-generation hardware that is more energy efficient and can handle large-scale compute in one chip.”

I could have led with the chip. I could have led with the platform. Nobody would have felt anything. By starting with the problem, the trend, the stakes, the room has a reason to care before the product appears.

The aim is to get them to the edge of their seat, make them ask for the details.

What I Would Tell My Earlier Self

Pitching is more than one lesson. There is timing, pacing, and the psychology of how people decide. But if I could only pass on one thing from the attempts that failed, it would be this:

Do not lead with what you built. Lead with why the problem demands that it exist. Give the audience something to feel before you ask them to think.

It’s difficult and you will not get it right on the first try. This is very much an iterative process. In practice, you know it works when you get a follow on conversation. Experiement with your audience and see what works best.