VC Tip Of The Day
Last week I saw my friend Bryce, a partner at OATV in SF, twittering VC tips like this one:
vc tip-o-the day: if you’re not funny, don’t use humor in your pitch.
vc meetings aren’t the best venue for trying out new material.
Being obsessed with twitter bots, I immediately thought, "this would be a great twitter bot". And so I sent Bryce a message to that effect. He liked the idea but we weren’t sure how to set it up so that the only people who could post to the bot would be real venture investors.
We turned to Whitney who built the lotd and shakeshack bots and he came up with a slight modification and voila, vctips was created.
Bryce announced the creation of vctips on his tumblog this morning. He’s invited a bunch of VC’s to join the posting group and any others who would like to join should contact Bryce. This is his sandbox, we just get to play in it.
If you want to follow along, just join twitter and then go to this page and hit follow. This should be fun and informative.
Comments (Archived):
Although I’m not a VC, I’ve seen many pitches and worked with many students (when I taught entrepreneurship at the UT Austin business school). I’ve also done my fair share of pitching as a high-tech CEO/founder.Recently during a pitch a company was giving to join the Austin Technology Incubator (where I manage Operations) a guy tried to be funny by describing his software as something like “beautiful, bug-free, and easy-to-use.” He then attempted to transition to a slide with a supermodel. His timing was a bit off and I think he realized almost immediately it didn’t go over well when no one in the room laughed, and I raised my eyebrow.He never really apologized and at the end he sheepishly said he guessed his joke wasn’t that funny. I told him fairly bluntly that having the words ‘easy-to-use’ preceed a picture of a woman was in bad taste and that he should know his audience. I found it interesting that his partner who came with him was a woman and she just sat there and didn’t say anything during the entire presentation or much afterwards.Other than that he had a good business idea, done a lot of work on his software, and had some early beta customers lined up. It probably is not a VC idea but nonetheless a solid business.I am sometimes still amazed by what people think is funny in a business context. Maybe in a pitch to some of his beer buddies, the joke would have been funny…hey I might have even laughed in that setting…but not in a formal pitch with people who don’t know you.