Fast Pitch, Quick Share at Dangerously Ambitious

Pitch events are great...sorta...Except they're often long, and not always that interesting. And it's generally hard to get the right people in the room. At this year's Dangerously Ambitious, I worked with the Sparkseed team to design a different type of rapid pitch event, based on the assumption that everyone in the room had something they could contribute.

There were a set of design constraints that influenced how the night came together.

First, Almost everyone at DA had some awesome social venture they were working on, and almost all of them wanted other people's help to find the particular resources they needed. That meant the first thing we needed to figure out was how to get 30+ pitches in one evening.

Second, we wanted to unlock resources beyond funding. We had a room full of great people, but the fact was that many of them were not in a position to be pumping cash into new ventures. What we knew they had was big ideas and awesome networks.

Third, the entire mood and tone of DA was fun, energetic community. The point was to push each other to new heights and have a blast doing it (see: group skydiving). The event had to embrace that spirt.

Fourth, as a final bonus, our friends at the Singularity University were celebrating the culmination of their summer program which had brought together some of the most ambitious innovators from around the world, and wanted to throw an aligned event on the same evening.

What we ended up producing was a big, fast, interactive rapid fire pitch session. Each presenter had 60 seconds to do two things: convince the audience why they should care, and let them know with as much specificity as possible what they needed. They had at most three slides with which they could do this. When the presenters started to go overtime, they were greeted with the final question music from Jeopardy.

While the entrepreneurs were pitching, the audience's job was to be tweeting like mad to recommend connections, ideas, and other resources that the ventures could be tapping, or simply to promote what they thought were the coolest companies and ideas. In between presenters, a DJ would keep the energy up with bangin beats.

So how'd it go?

First of all, it was a logistical sh*tshow. The audio was too quiet in the room; the overhead projector didn't work; the Quinceañera downstairs was throbbing the floor all night, and people were hungry. But second, it still rocked anyway. The seat-of-the-pants vibe actually probably set the right tone and it felt like a community hanging out with itself rather than a strange power dynamic between those needing to be helped and the helpers.

The takeaways for us were a few things:

1. Fun=Community. If an event is largely focused on building or amplifying community, it has to have some element of fun. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be serious as well, but simply that people have to come out of it feeling a little more awesome than they did before.
2. Chaotic and loud can feel like energy and life as much as they feel like poor planning. People are often afraid to try new things that they don't know how to control, because they feel like they could get confused, jumbled, or chaotic. Turns out, if you set the tone right, those things feel like the natural energy of life as much as "mistakes," and people are quick to forgive little logistical mistakes.
3. Not trying new things is way more risky than trying new things. If you're trying to get people to connect in new ways, and if you want to create something innovative, it is simply way more costly and way more risky to just do the same old thing everyone else is doing.

For those interest, I'll be posting the slide deck of all the presentations is below:

Photo credit: InVenture Fund at DA2010