I think a big variable here is how complex your pitch is. Even highly intelligent people have trouble following a branching narrative, and will wind up less focused on and invested in the main story. For this reason, I think a complex main story pitch will fail for most of the same reasons.
I’d say keep it simple, and present only as much of the fallback plans as necessary for this brief pitch.
So I think the pitch is:
“We are attacking the Death Star because we have a unique, hard-won opportunity to destroy it in a single blow. We will fire a torpedo into the undefended exhaust shaft, using these tactics.… (many tactics and specific battle plans follow).
Should this plan somehow fail (no mention of specific failure possibilities), we will disable the Death Star’s offensive capabilities, which will allow us time to pursue other paths to victory. Should this happen, you will hear this call to regroup around these targets… This attack can shift the course of the war (back to mainline story of the opportunity and worth of the risk).”
This is a bad analogy because you need fallback plans before going into battle, to avoid confusion and chaos; in running a startup, you have orders of magnitude more time and communication opportunities, and can come up with fallback plans as you go. So the pitch would be:
“we will commercialize this product, which is a unique opportunity for these reasons… (reasoning follows). Should that plan fail, there are many other possible applications for the technology we’ve developed. These include… (possible directions follow, but not details). This is an opportunity to take advantage of new developments… (back to main story).
The bulk of the time and enthusiasm should be spent on the main plan, with only as much mention of other opportunities as necessary in the limited time and attention you’ve got to spend on them.
A snarky reply to that would be: “OK, now put that on a powerpoint slide with 3 bullet points.”
Part of the point of my post is that the (reasoning follows) can’t actually be a real analysis in a pitch like this; to be appealing, it has to be a narrative that fits people’s preconceptions, a story that’s the kind of thing the executive-types being pitched to like. The part with technical details seems to just fill the same role as technobabble in Star Trek. Sometimes you’ll see sales guys who do the pitch listen to the engineering stuff and just pick out a couple keywords to use in the story they’ll make up.
I think a big variable here is how complex your pitch is. Even highly intelligent people have trouble following a branching narrative, and will wind up less focused on and invested in the main story. For this reason, I think a complex main story pitch will fail for most of the same reasons.
I’d say keep it simple, and present only as much of the fallback plans as necessary for this brief pitch.
So I think the pitch is:
“We are attacking the Death Star because we have a unique, hard-won opportunity to destroy it in a single blow. We will fire a torpedo into the undefended exhaust shaft, using these tactics.… (many tactics and specific battle plans follow).
Should this plan somehow fail (no mention of specific failure possibilities), we will disable the Death Star’s offensive capabilities, which will allow us time to pursue other paths to victory. Should this happen, you will hear this call to regroup around these targets… This attack can shift the course of the war (back to mainline story of the opportunity and worth of the risk).”
This is a bad analogy because you need fallback plans before going into battle, to avoid confusion and chaos; in running a startup, you have orders of magnitude more time and communication opportunities, and can come up with fallback plans as you go. So the pitch would be:
“we will commercialize this product, which is a unique opportunity for these reasons… (reasoning follows). Should that plan fail, there are many other possible applications for the technology we’ve developed. These include… (possible directions follow, but not details). This is an opportunity to take advantage of new developments… (back to main story).
The bulk of the time and enthusiasm should be spent on the main plan, with only as much mention of other opportunities as necessary in the limited time and attention you’ve got to spend on them.
A snarky reply to that would be: “OK, now put that on a powerpoint slide with 3 bullet points.”
Part of the point of my post is that the (reasoning follows) can’t actually be a real analysis in a pitch like this; to be appealing, it has to be a narrative that fits people’s preconceptions, a story that’s the kind of thing the executive-types being pitched to like. The part with technical details seems to just fill the same role as technobabble in Star Trek. Sometimes you’ll see sales guys who do the pitch listen to the engineering stuff and just pick out a couple keywords to use in the story they’ll make up.