Hot or Not? Judging Startup Pitch Night
October 2, 2017
Judging a startup competition is tricky business. Aspiring entrepreneurs bring their best pitches, compressing their company’s mission and value props down to the bare essence, in a do-or-die performance. The stakes are high: the company’s future, the promise of cash prizes, and the chance to dance another day before angel investors and venture capitalists. The crowd is clamoring for a show, and it can feel like a public Tinder audition. What’s a startup pitch night judge to do?
Last Thursday night I sat in that hot box as a judge at Santa Barbara’s Startup Mashup, hosted by Kyle Ashby, co-creator of the hip incubator The Sandbox, and Frank Gruber, founder of media and event giant Tech.Co. The seven of us were perched on a balcony overlooking a boisterous crowd of 250 on a balmy Santa Barbara evening, a dozen teams ready to battle it out for an all-expenses-paid trip to the nation’s capital to compete in this November’s Challenge Cup Global Finals, hosted by the DC-based global incubator 1776.
“Every team has two minutes,” said Ashby. “It’s sort of like speed dating, but it’s speed pitching.” After each startup’s slim 120-second pitch, our job as judges was to draw out the pros and cons during two additional minutes of Q&A. We’d been instructed to evaluate contestants on the classic criteria of idea, market, scalability, revenue, team, and presentation.
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