Hank Williams has a great article over at Why does everything suck? that is a must read, not only for investors, but for entrepreneurs as well. The basic idea is that not every good idea can be boiled down to a simple elevator pitch. As Williams says, “Some things are better seen and experienced than explained.”
As someone who has spent hours pounding my head on the desk trying to whittle down to the “essence” of the complexities of calculating the pricing on dynamic financial products (and why it’s important) and trying to give a one-liner on trust-based recommender systems (come on, people write their dissertations on this crap), Hank’s post is a breath of fresh air.
Huh?
We need to be realistic. If I’m developing some new filtration system, I can come up with a pitch like “Clean Water for Everyone”. And I’ll get the requisite pat on the back for having such a concise and easy to understand pitch. I may catch your attention, but probably not, as I really haven’t told you anything about my company or what we really do or what makes us unique.
Probably a bad analogy (I’m notorious for those) but think about Robert Oppenheimer pitching the Manhattan Project:
- “More fission, faster” – Most people probably wouldn’t get it or be interested
- “Kill more people, faster” – Now you’re just freaking people out
I could go on, but in the name of good taste, I won’t. The point is that not every great idea (no, I’m not advocating that the Manhattan Project was a great idea) can be reduced to a simple one liner. I know, I know, I know – it’s all about marketing and capturing the potential investor’s attention, yada, yada.
Williams says it better: “Good potentially profitable ideas sometimes take time to really understand and they may take resources to prove. The venture community should spend less time and resources on the obvious and more time and resources nurturing ideas that may take more than an elevator pitch to really appreciate.”
