Serdar Temiz

I was invited to a Pitching event organized by SwedishCrowds  at Offices of .SE -The Internet Infrastructure Foundation .

Robin Teigland from SSE was the moderator and organizer of the event. The event was supported by

• Nordic Edupreneuring
• .SE
• Silicon Vikings
• Stanford Alumni Club
• Nordic Innovation

I would like to list start ups below , so that you can have a look to their websites.

Baig Babar: Write Reader

Baig Babar: Write Reader

Daniel Bergquist: Pennybridge

Daniel Bergquist: Pennybridge

Adam Edström:Elsip

Adam Edström elsip

Harri Ketamo: Skill Pixels

Harri Ketamo: Skill Pixels

Ebba Kierkegaard: Forsslund Systems- sorry no photo 🙁

Sandra Kinnaman Nordström:TheGoodTribe

Sandra Kinnaman Nordström:TheGoodTribe

Scott Reed: Flikkt 

Scott Reed: Flikkt

Pitching Panel Participants (for more info regarding profile of participants  please go to event page http://swedishcrowds.net/ )

• Lena Ramfelt is a serial entrepreneur and private investor. (
  

  Panelists

  Here I want to have a personal break about her. It was nice to see   Lena Ramfelt there, she was the first professor of mine during Master of ICT Entrepreneurship education at KTH. No need to say, how positive she influenced me  in terms of education and entrepreneurship. )

• Jane Walerud is a well known serial entrepreneur and private investor
• Niklas Seren has been involved in a number of startups and is also in charge of .SE’s annual Internet conference – “The Internet Days (Internetdagarna)
• Mikolaj Norek is the Managing Director of the Forum for Innovation Management
• Susan Sjölund is Chief Marketing Officer at FundedByMe

I was not the part of the panel but I think I have a enough knowledge and experience to evaluate presentations and give my ideas to entrepreneurs who were there and who will pitch in the future.

(I will not point to any person or company but I am sure they can recognize themselves. The main idea of this post is to talk about lesson learned from this event, not to point any specific company or person.)

1) If you are an entrepreneur and want to present your company at a pitching event, do not send someone else to pitch on behalf of you . If I were an investor I would not invest to the company If I am there with my money but you do not bother to be present at pitching event. Try to join via skype, video conference but let me know you really care about your own company and you respect me.

2) Some presenters spend a lot of time talking about their team, board members etc in a way that they did not have time to talk about their product or service. Even, one company went deep into the history of the company, but I am not interested in listening ONLY history of the company/ project. I would care about your grandfather if you inherited a patent from him to your company / If your product- service is very attached to your grandfather in terms of branding, if it is very key thing in your product and service etc. You have just 7 minutes, cut to the chase, just tell me what it is about. Of course, history of the company, team members are important. Team A can be successful with product B but please do it so balanced way that I can connect your team with your product.

3) You are there to answer these questions

• what is the pain
• Whose pain is it?
• How you will you address the pain?
• what you want from investors
• What you give to investor in return?
• How will you use this money?

Stick to answer these questions, nothing else.

4)If you have a product, demo, show me the product. Let me see it in action. The board, the team comes after- in case I need I will ask.

5)It was interesting to see that, some of the presenters did not even say or mention how much they want for what. So why were you there?

6) You are there to pitch. Some investors understand your business, technology and some do not. You need to be able to keep balance of the details of the presentation. No need to go in detail about the technological improvements, show me chips etc but tell me how fast is it compared to existing ones, how does it address better than others, x times better than y, z times useful then t etc. Help me to remember it easily. Do not leave me with a lot of info that I do not need in 7 min presentation.

7) If you put statistical information, always mention the reference. Besides, if you put a graph there, you should help me to understand why you put a graph there? Which part of the graph is important for me to look at and why?

8) The moment you are on your way to event, you are pitching. You should be in pitching mode all the time.This means, you should socialize with people before event starts, during the event and after the event. As an entrepreneur if you just sit at your desk and only wait until your presentation time, then you are losing your opportunity to meet some other people that might be interested to invest you, join you, or give feedback to you or spread the word for you.

9) Try to relate your product with existing ones. For example, “twitter of video”, “live version of youtube”, so I grasp it fast.

10) Do not bring your two hour presentation and skip slides during your pitch. You did not come there in short notice, you knew you would come. Please prepare a presentation just for pitching.

11) Be ready for back up. What if your computer, slide, etc won’t work? Do you have a back up, printed document? Do you really NEED ppt or prezi? When you have 7 minutes, while you are connecting your computer, try to start conversation, try to get our attention.

12) Do not read your slides, I can read it.Do not ask me to read a paper, If I read a A4 paper, then I will not listen you. Keep your extra material, in case I ask you or in case there is a real need.

I should say that, I think it was very useful event. Robin Teigland did a wonderful job and I think all of us, including audience and presenters should feel lucky that they could get feedback from this high experienced  panel members.

I also would like to thank to  Pernilla Rydmark and Niklas Seren from .SE, for being nice host to us.

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all photos are taken by Robin Teigland