RECAP: Founded In Philly Series I Pitch Night
Photo from Founded in Philly Series I Pitch Night February 2020
ABOUT PITCH NIGHT
During our Founded in Philly Series I Accelerator, the highly-anticipated Pitch Night is an opportunity to bring together the cohort and PSL’s larger network, including investors and board members. This event marks the halfway point through the Founded in Philly accelerator, and the startups are eager to practice their pitches and take away as much feedback and advice as possible.
We aimed to give our founders a look at the real-life pitch experience in a socially distanced setting. Our idea-stage founders were challenged with the task of creating their pitch decks and two-minute presentations. Using Zoom breakout rooms, we created a speed-dating type format, which allowed each startup to pitch three separate times to different investors and judges, and receive feedback in real-time. The goal of the evening was to provide opportunities for our founders to practice their presentations and to begin cultivating meaningful relationships with industry experts.
Supporting judges
This year, we were able to bring the following experts in to facilitate our virtual Pitch Night:
Robin Hood Ventures
TMX Group
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania
Games24x7
Philly Startup Leaders
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania
Games24x7
EyeSeeTea SL
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania
supporting psl board members
As always, the PSL Board joined in support of our startups and the event.
The Feedback
Our founders rose to the occasion and pitched three times in a row, while navigating the particular nuances of a two-minute pitch in a virtual event experience. Our cohort was grateful not only for the positive feedback which reinforced their initial findings as a startup, but for the challenging questions and constructive responses which pushed them out of their comfort zones. Some of our founder’s takeaways from the evening:
“One biggest takeaway was to show some type of metric that would show any type of growth or any promise that there is going to be growth. So even if it's not revenue you have a pipeline or a lead list of 10 people, 1000 people, it’s good to show that because it will help investors understand there may be a need for this.”
- Marvin Sanders, Mission Athletics
“The takeaway I would say from pitch night, as exhilarating as it was, was hone in on my competitive advantage. Might not have an opportunity for the judges to dig in with questions and something so small as a competitive advantage.”
- Carrol Franklyn, GigU
“One of our takeaways was to really keep the message focused and kind of big picture mission related concept and not try to explain every single aspect of our idea and all the little parts are not necessarily the big picture”
- Jen Herczeg, Food Collective
“These were the shortest two minutes. The first one failed with flying colors the second was better and the third one was even better. So what it taught me was even though I had rehearsed this so many times in my mind beforehand but time flies, you should practice this infront of someone else and get feedback from other people. The more and more of these pitches, the more we do the better we get.”
- Neeraj Bagga, Fender Bender
“One takeaway we had is we need to make sure that our value proposition is clear on our slides. We didn’t really explicitly state it, we mentioned the problems and what we do, so we changed our slide deck so that it’s very clear what we do.”
- Steffen Cornwell, Keep.id