Pitching To 100 People Showed Me What A Founder Should Be
It’s about encouraging a vision to become obvious.
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The best way to sound like you know what you are talking about is to know what you are talking about. — Anon
5 months ago I create my first company. And oh boy it has been a wild ride.
A few months isn’t a long time on paper but when you work very hard on something things can go very fast. I always wanted to create a company centered around cleantech. Meteory was born out of the idea that we can monitor greenhouse gases from satellites.
We have therefore built a prototype that can, given an area of earth, tell how the carbon concentration has been evolving over time but also how much carbon has been absorbed in the soil (or lost).
My co-founder and I are both massive geeks.
We like to code. We like to do some proper data science. We like to spend a day behind a computer.
But sometimes one has to get out of their comfort zone. At the incubator we’re in, there is an event every month that brings together the entire space community of the Netherlands at the European Space Agency business incubator.
It’s the type of event you would expect. Drinks, a lot of good food and people selling their ideas.
And of course, pitches.
We had pitched before and in front of a lot of people as well but this time was very different. We were supposed to pitch in front of everyone we are working with on a daily basis. Experts in our fields which mean we couldn’t mess it up. It wasn’t just 100 random people, it was amongst the most important people for our particular business. Kind of a do-or-die situation.
The result? It went amazingly well and moved our startup to the next level. Here is how I did it.
Be Prepared
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. — Alexander Graham Bell
That seems pretty obvious but that would be the single most important advice I would give to anyone in the same situation.
Nobody is born a natural pitcher and has ease speaking in front of their most important…
