trendpreneur

We’re in the Guardian’s Tech Media Invest 100. Hurrah! Also coming up this week, we’re talking to David Lammy (the Minister for Higher Education) and pitching for the first time in about 2.5 months – let’s see if we can remember how it all works…

And an aside, I recently bought a suit on eBay (as you do). It duly arrived, with the trousers marked and one size smaller than described. My general experience with eBay, especially when it says in big letters ’seller does not offer a returns policy’, is that they basically say ’sucks to be you’ and you’re left holding the baby, so to speak. However, a really pleasant surprise; I wrote a fairly factual comment (I wasn’t angry per se, just a little disappointed) outlining the two ‘faults’, and the seller got back to me within 10 minutes to offer a return – then replied again a minute later saying ‘just give the trousers to someone they fit, and here’s a refund for one-third of the price you paid’. Wow!

This goes to show two things: when you deal with humans you often get a better deal than you expect from corporates; and being fairly pleasant, not angry, always helps. (Of course, perhaps the overhead of cleaning and selling on the trousers was too much for her to bother with, as well.) Anyway, one satisfied customer here. Hurrah!

I had the pleasure a couple of days ago of attending a pitching workshop at the British Library, organised by Techcrunch and UKTI. (It’s part of the lead-up to Geek’n'Rolla). As well as meeting some awesome fellow entrepreneurs, there was a lot of solid advice on pitching, tailored towards the TC-style 2 minute pitch.

Having previously attended Bill Joos’ pitching seminar here in Edinburgh, tailored towards a full VC presentation, it was interesting to see the marked similarities between the London and Silicon Valley take on things.

Here are a few of the key points from the workshop (note – I’m clearly not a pitching expert, so please don’t take this as gospel!).

• Don’t be vague.
• Don’t be slide-heavy.
• Don’t be negative.
  
• Engage the audience.

Let’s drill into these a wee bit. [...]

At the Expo’s PitchCamp x.0 workshop, a range of experts on pitching (or, rather, being pitched to) took to the stage for a semi-lecture, semi-panel-discussion, semi-workshop style session. Pitching is something many companies need to perfect, and it’s definitely a great idea to provide some coaching now before it really matters. The latter half of the workshop consisted of twelve startups refining their pitches in breakout groups with mentors, then presenting to the session audience; but more on that later.
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