1 year of YetiZen—what I have learned from running a gaming accelerator
June 21, 2012
Philosophy 3: Avoid the nude beach of pitches, instead use neuroscience to create powerful pitches
During each accelerator round I run weekly 4 hour Friday pitch practices for the entire three months of the round. This past round, I started off my feedback on pitches I had just received by writing on the white board:
“your pitch should not be a nude beach”
(I realize the analogy was initially lost to a room full of young male entrepreneurs when coming from a female mentor, but they did eventually catch up 
).
What I specifically meant by nude beach pitches was that the pitches overwhelmed me their audience with lots of disparate pieces of information all without providing me with a structure for context or relevance.
Let’s go back to the nude beach for a second. The most unattractive of bodies with the right clothing can be made to look attractive but very few people are super model hot in the nude under the bright sun on the beach. Other attractive qualities like personality, values, and accomplishments are also completely unknown when at a nude beach.
Same goes for startups that overwhelm their audience with too much information without establishing context or relevance in a pitch context—the social proof of your champion advisors, team, investors; accomplishments to date and your business values are lost.
The best way to establish context and relevance to avoid a nude beach pitch is use an understanding of neuroscience to modulate the content and delivery of your pitches. After lots of iteration and testing I have found three neuroscience findings that not only help entrepreneurs avoid nude beach pitches but also use pitches to signal to and attract the right type of partners and investors. These are:
1) recognize the limitations of short term memory
2) create messaging for both the audience’s lower and upper brain
3) utilize the brain’s propensity for nexting
I will be writing more about this in future posts as well.