Sunday, November 18, 2007

90-second pitch

Pitch to venture capital is a hard one, especially in a short time like 90 seconds. Today, in the 4th Annual Entrepreneur Bootcamp held by Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association, the biggest Chinese VC association in Silicon Valley, ten teams did use 90 seconds to pitch their business idea to get selected by four venture capital firms. They covered industries including health care, online advertisting, gaming platform, custom-made suit and etc. 90 seconds are really short, and it is more based on the presentation skills to win over the others. But this is the valley, and you have to differentiate others in a short time.

Speaking as a whole, the ideas from those teams are very practical, such as ERP software for small manufacturers. Maybe I am too optimistic. but I really want to see some big ideas, at least some big dream to do something to change the world, such as Bill Gates' "making everyone have a PC", or Google's "download the whole web". Without thinking big, I don't think a small start-up could last long. Only dreaming of being bought by a big company is not enough.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Any idea impressed you or they were equally good? I had to skip this event unfortunately.

Not sure whether you had been to Web2.0 Summit, there was a similar contest (http://blip.tv/file/438954/), which also looked pretty interesting. :-)

Amy Gu said...

hmmm, one idea on a HR social website is kind of interesting. The two founders are very experienced, one works for Google to hire people, and one with a strong engineer background. But I do believe the idea is not a new one.

The link you gave is interesting. I've never heard of it before. Were you there then? any takeaway?

Unknown said...

i think the idea is not necessary a brand new one. execution is more important.

unfortunately i wasn't able to go to the conference. the registration was closed long before i got to know about this. :-(