20 minutes is too long

Lately, I’ve attended a number of conferences that included startup pitches. The pitches ranged in length from 1 minute to 20 minutes, and the audience included potential investors, partners, and promoters.

And I realized:

20 minutes is way too long for a startup pitch.

When I started writing this post, I was sitting in one such conference, listening to a series of 10 pitches, each one 20 minutes in length. And because we got started late and everyone spoke longer than they should have, we skipped our scheduled breaks.

So I was hungry, overloaded with information, and more interested in meeting all the other people in the room who so far I could only make eye contact with. That’s assuming I could make eye contact, because at least half the audience was looking down at some sort of screen (me included!).

Why is 20 minutes too long?

Because not everyone in the audience is interested in every single presentation, and not every presenter has the capacity to hold our attention for 20 minutes. So after 2 minutes we’ve decided whether or not it’s worth our time, yet now we’re stuck in the room when we could be doing strategic networking out in the hallway. In 20 minutes, the presenter is going into the minutia of technology, market landscape, and budget. That’s a lot of information and we don’t all need to hear it.

Unless you are in a private meeting with investors who have already expressed interest in your idea, the purpose of a pitch is to capture the audience’s attention and lead to private follow-up conversations. That’s where you can get into the details.

Once again, the KISS principle applies. Keep your pitches short, sweet, and pithy.  Leave people wanting more, not waiting to get up; the real impact is in the follow-up.