The Art Of Not Pitching

Many great blogs and books tell you how to perfect your pitch to potential investors. What they leave out, however, is the most important pitch of all: the non-pitch. Successful entrepreneurs have mastered The Art of Not Pitching. Here’s how.

The key to not pitching is first and foremost that you are not raising money. But you need money to start or grow your business. Right, I know. This is the great irony of venture capital: the companies we are most interested in investing in do not need our money. They may want money from venture capitalists, it might help them go a lot faster, but they are going to carry out their vision with or without us.

Just last week I met a highly successful entrepreneur for lunch and he gave me the classic non-pitch. We talked for well over an hour, but never in that time did he pull out a single slide. Yet I would love to work with this entrepreneur.

He was able to communicate his concept and strategy in just a few sentences. He didn’t need a pitch because he was already busy building his product and acquiring users. Our money would help him scale, make key hires, and go faster, but he was busy building his vision.

The best entrepreneurs are starting stuff all the time, with or without money. This is simply in their nature. They aren’t starting completely new companies every second, but they are using every interaction — without thinking about it — as an opportunity for user or customer input, a chance to generate a new idea for a feature that might be useful, or a new company they might want to start somewhere down the road.

It’s not that the best entrepreneurs happened onto one idea and that was it, it’s that they were busy trying one idea after another and one of the ideas they tried stuck. Often the best concepts arrive when you are hard at work on something else.

Ultimately just about every deal does need a pitch of one form or another to synch the deal — to go in front of the partnership. But the best entrepreneurs can communicate their concepts so simply that no pitch is required — potential recruits, investors, and board members can “get” the concept without a slide deck. This enables them to come in and not-pitch: they may take us through a slide deck, but they could just as easily communicate their unique insight and vision without one.

How do you get to that point? It takes a lot of work. Forget the classic elevator pitch — far too long. See if you can describe your key insight in a sentence or two. Accomplish that, and a new avenue of pitching will become available to you: the non-pitch.