By Brooks Borden - 7MS Editorial
Last week, Aaron Calafato brought his lecture series back to Professor Bill Collier’s class, “Introduction to Venture Capital,” at the George Washington University Investment Institute. In this recurring workshop, Aaron shares how storytelling techniques elevate entrepreneurs’ pitches to investors, showing students how to build and deliver a narrative rather than only try to impress potential investors.
One of Aaron’s lessons this week was to use the “human story” – the passion that inspired the entrepreneurial endeavor to begin with – to drive the pitch and all of its data forward. When aware of the human story, the entrepreneur becomes engrossing and inspiring as a person – someone whom potential investors believe in. The data, the numbers, the growth potential, the value propositions, all necessary parts of the pitch, are delivered compellingly by the entrepreneur and presented as incremental parts of their entrepreneurial (and human) story.
Finding the human story involves uncovering the human vulnerability that’s buried within entrepreneurial endeavor. Vulnerability, when used well, elevates the pitch, the presentation, and the entrepreneur. Crafting a pitch this way, as a storyteller, allows the entrepreneur to leverage all of the essential data and balance it with authenticity. Capturing an audience’s attention, whether it be investors or a crowd in a theater, cannot happen without coming from that deeper spark of true human passion.
Bill Collier, himself a Principal at Noblis Ventures, and his students were “second to none” according to Aaron in everything they did during the workshop. This class at GW has become a favorite stop of Aaron’s, and he’s pumped to keep coming back every semester!