Bad Advice: Don't Get A Pitch Coach

Bad Advice: Don’t Get A Pitch Coach
Read time 0.8 minutes.

Given my job as a pitching coach, I want to start by acknowledging my own bias on this topic. I decided to venture into this topic after seeing the tweet above because it helped illuminate that 99% of founders don’t even realize that they need a pitching coach to have any chance at raising venture capital.

What do you need to unlearn?

The fundamental problem with Venture Capital is that VCs spend their lives doing it. They dedicate decades to hearing and accessing pitches.

On the flip side, founders might run a company for 12 years, and raise five times, each time trying to dedicate as little time as possible to fundraising; in a perfect world, every 18 months, they only need to waste 3-6 months raising.

This system is so biased towards VCs because there isn’t much incentive for anyone to spend decades learning how to raise money.

The results? Most pitching advice comes from:

1. VCs who will advise you to pre-emptively answer every question in the pitch deck. Not because that helps you raise but because it helps them decide quicker.

2. Former founders can only provide advice based on their experience raising a specific VC, in a particular market condition, in a specific industry with a specific company.

The reality is that most advice you receive is either beneficial to VCs, not Founders, or only in minimal circumstances (and potentially harmful in all others). This is not to say all pitching advice from these sources is terrible, just the vast majority.

Why Pitching Coaches?

People like me exist because we saw a gap in the market.

Every industry that relies on pitching, from real estate to investment banking, has specific people hired to either make the pitch or consult on the pitch. This has yet to become commonplace in the startup community.

Where it has, however, become popular is in accelerators like YC and Techstars, where the founders then go on to raise ample seed funding. These leaders in the early-stage venture space have realized that having people who dedicate their lives to learning how to raise and working with founders helps ensure that the best companies get funding, not only the smooth talkers.

So whether it’s me or anyone else, I’d highly recommend you find people who dedicate their lives to raising venture capital and leverage their knowledge and experience when raising.

If you know anyone who is fundraising right now, I’d highly recommend you forward this email to them so they can hear this perspective and decide for themselves what the best path forward is for their business.

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Onwards and Upwards,

Liam Gill

P.S. Are you ready to take the next step in raising venture capital for your company? If so, you can book a 1:1 strategy call with me to help get you going in the right direction!

P.P.S If you aren’t already, follow me on Twitter, where I share tips and tricks for fundraising daily. And don’t forget; my friends at Brilliant are offering a 30-day free trial and 20% off an annual premium subscription. I personally use Brilliant to increase my knowledge of AI, Computer Science and other STEM skills.

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