(Reuters) – The crowd was restless as startups, investors, MBA students and a host of entrepreneurial wannabes waited in anticipation, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the next big thing, perhaps even another tech darling like Groupon.<\/p>\n
It was Technori Pitch, a monthly event held in Chicago’s Chase Auditorium to showcase emerging local ventures making a debut in their own backyard. As they took the stage to deliver short elevator pitches on their business plans, the presenters aimed to locate potential investors and tap a captive entrepreneurial network eager to foster good ideas and weed out the bad ones.<\/p>\n
“This is a way for them to say hello world, we are here,” said Seth Kravitz, co-founder of the event, which in about a year has grown to sold-out audiences of more than 500 each month and a backlog of companies applying to be selected.<\/p>\n
“Everyone has a different set of goals for being up there,” said Kravitz, himself an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n
“For a lot of them, the idea is to get a lot of feedback, get some customers.”<\/p>\n
Once the purview of tech hotspots such as Silicon Valley and Seattle, where venture capital is abundant and you can’t shake a stick without bumping into a Google board member, pitch-a-thons have steadily become popular in nontraditional tech communities as well.<\/p>\n
They are catching on in places where both money and the right mentors are harder to find. “I’ve really put a stake in the ground,” said Jennifer Morehead, a recent Technori presenter and founder of Lockboxer, an Evanston, Illinois startup that helps consumers inventory household goods when planning a move. “It really does lend credibility in a very efficient way.”<\/p>\n
Seen by some as the business community’s response to American Idol and other celebrity auditions, pitch-at-thons have now taken root in noncoastal cities, occurring with regularity in unlikely locales such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; St. Louis, Missouri; and Athens, Ohio.<\/p>\n
Some, like Technori, spring up organically and are independent. Others are sponsored by universities, angel groups and regional business incubators. The formats vary, ranging from staged presentations to speed-dating forums in front of small groups of investors and seasoned entrepreneurs. Some are judged, coming with small monetary awards; others allow audiences to pick their own favorites.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
CAN-DO ATTITUDES WANTED<\/p>\n
Less than a minute or so into her Technori pitch, Lockboxer’s Morehead experienced a technical glitch when the audio on her video presentation failed. True to the entrepreneurial spirit, she decided to wing it, managing to give the crowd a clear vision of her company’s strategy and finishing with her dignity intact.<\/p>\n
“I was very pleased to get the No. 1 spot,” she recalled. “What comes with it is you’re going to be the guinea pig.”<\/p>\n
Such resilience under unexpected pressure often impresses investors such as Hal Gentry, a partner in the St. Louis-based venture capital fund Capital Innovators.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got to figure out how to rise above everyone else,” said Gentry, a frequent judge at local pitch competitions. “If you can pitch really well you’ll attract attention. That’s what you’re trying to do here where there is limited investment.”<\/p>\n
And sure, it’s nice when a fledgling entrepreneur walks away with a bit of seed capital or a commitment from a VC. But companies said that rarely happens; the real prize is just getting on the radar. Along with that often sometimes comes sage advice that can mean the difference between moving closer to profitability or losing steam.<\/p>\n
Such was the case for Dennis Jeter, an East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania-based tech entrepreneur who has competed in Venture Idol, a local pitch event sponsored by Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania, a state-sponsored incubator.<\/p>\n
“Halfway through my two-minute pitch my first year, the VC was like, wait a minute, you’re a software company,” said Jeter, who had previously promoted his venture, A Sound Strategy, as a website development firm. “It was a game changer for me.” After the light went on, he went back to the drawing board to reposition.<\/p>\n
Today the five-year-old business books about $1 million in annual revenue, has a staff of 10, and counts marquee customers such as drug maker Sanofi-Aventis in its roster. “You learn so much,” Jeter said. “If you’re paying attention, it could transform your business and it has in my case.”<\/p>\n
With a prolonged downturn continuing to separate the startup wheat from the chaff, it’s a safe bet that pitching events will continue to be fertile ground for both companies looking for support and backers interested in helping to germinate the winners.<\/p>\n
Says Technori’s Kravitz: “There will definitely be a lot more pitch events coming out of necessity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The crowd was restless as startups, investors, MBA students and a host of entrepreneurial wannabes waited in anticipation, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the next big thing, perhaps even another tech darling like Groupon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economic-development-entrepreneurship"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}