Dispatch #02: Top pitching mistakes we see Founders making again and again

Our pitch calls are scheduled for 45 minutes and almost always run over – just because we don’t want to invest doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn, or no relationship worth building.
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But the decision is usually made early. And the most common reason is this: the founder opens by telling us about the plastics problem.
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Know your audience
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Our thesis is built around the plastics problem and finding deep tech solutions to change the status quo for a particularly troublesome material. It’s what we invest in, and around, and we know it well. After all, we built the thesis.
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So when someone spends their first five minutes explaining it to us, it tells us three things.
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They haven’t researched us. Thirty seconds on our website would have told them we know the space. And if they haven’t looked us up, they almost certainly haven’t looked up anyone else they’re pitching to either – which makes the raise slower and most likely less successful.
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They haven’t asked. This is the version that is simple, engaging, and costs nothing. If there was no chance to research us — we met at an event, the intro was made that morning — then please just ask. “What’s the thesis? What have you invested in recently? What are you looking at now?” Founders ask us this far less often than they could.
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They only have one pitch. Different funds invest on different theses. A founder who can’t move the relevant material to the front is telling us they’ll give the same deck to every investor they meet, whatever that investor happens to care about.
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What we want to hear
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A few months ago, we had a call with a startup pitching a novel material solution. It started fine and then drifted. We could see the use case, but couldn’t see whether it would be adopted by industry or work at scale.
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Then, after 40 minutes or so, the founder mentioned an offtake agreement. Signed, seven figures, for their first volumes.
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Suddenly we were listening! Scale is what every investor in our space wants to see, and they had proven market demand. We would have invested, but a larger fund was already in advanced discussions and took the entire round.
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But why didn’t the startup lead with news of their amazing traction?
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In both these examples, founders made the same mistake, just in opposite directions. One spends five minutes on what we already know, the other spent 39 minutes not mentioning the thing we most wanted to hear. Neither had quite worked out what mattered to the person on the other end of the call.
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Sell what we’re buying
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The pitches that work, for us at least, open with:
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We sought you out.
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We think we fit your thesis, and here’s why
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The product we’re building is going to succeed - the vision, the proof points, and the route to profitability.
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All of it inside the first five minutes.
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Five minutes is enough to lose a pitch, but it’s also enough to win it!

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Lucy Mortimer is a Founding Partner of Archipelago Ventures.