This Guide introduces resources to help you learn how to tell the story of the new venture and pitch the ideas to investors or in business competition.

The courses selected can be audited for free and you can find the audit instructions for Coursera and Edx courses.

Powerful Presentations (Kauffman Foundation)

This series will show you how to break through the massive amount of noise by communicating and presenting your ideas, businesses, products, and services in more compelling ways.

Powerful Presentations: Mastering Q&A (Kauffman Foundation)

Questions are typically the one thing you can count on happening as soon as you finish your formal presentation or product demo. These videos will teach you how to answer questions more effectively, especially the most difficult ones and those for which you don’t have ready answers at hand. You will learn several techniques to make Q&A sessions more memorable (in a good way) and to build effectively on the strength and credibility established during your presentation.

Startup Business Pitch Competition - What Makes a Winning Pitch (UMass-Lowell) Barbara Russell discusses her extensive experience in judging a vast number of pitch competitions around the world, as well as coaching and teaching entrepreneurship, and offers invaluable tips to inspire entrepreneurs in embracing the basics of how to create a killer PPT presentation and go on to WIN a pitch competition.

How To Do A Great Pitch with Guy Kawasaki (Global Entrepreneurship Week)

Making pitches is a way of life for an entrepreneur. Guy Kawasaki provides his tips for ensuring each pitch is better than the last. Part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week events.

How to Pitch a VC by Dave McClure

Dave spoke on "How to Pitch a VC", his signature presentation in 2011 at Startup Weekend Delhi.

NYU Startup School: Pitching to Investors (New York University)

One of the most critical jobs of a startup founder is communicating the vision and mission of your startup to the external community. Storytelling is a critical skill for hiring the best talent, attracting the right advisors, and convincing investors to put their money into your venture. This workshop, led by Frank Rimalovski, will teach you how to effectively tell your startup’s story.

How to Pitch Your Startup (Y Combinator)

In this lecture, YC Partner Kevin Hale goes over how to package up your idea and communicate it to an investor. He shares his tips on how to craft your pitch in a clear and concise way that effectively grabs your audience's attention.

Startup Investors On How To Pitch Like A Pro (CNBC)

Startup investors Alicia Syrett, founder and CEO of Pantegrion Capital, and Alex Kenjeev, president of O’Leary Ventures, share their best advice for entrepreneurs on how to pitch to investors.

How to Perfect Your Pitch (SCORE)

In this presentation, you'll learn the 10 P’s to success, the typical pitfalls an entrepreneur makes and how to avoid them, and the structure of the perfect pitch.

Craft a Persuasive Pitch to Break Down Investment Barriers (Gartner)

Applying lessons from the successes and failures of those who have come before, this complimentary webinar will show you how to distill your ideas into short, easy-to-understand, persuasive soundbites that attract interest and investment, so you can get your audience to say, “Tell me more.”

Business of Science: Tips and tricks for a perfect investor pitch (Nature)

Seasoned science entrepreneurs tell Adam Levy how to take the daunting first steps to commercializing your research.

High-impact Pitches and Presentation: Speaking with Confidence and Authenticity (eCornell)

In this skill-building session led by professional speaker and coach Casey Carpenter, you’ll discover how to pitch with confidence and authenticity in a virtual setting. You’ll walk away with tools to craft a persuasive message and techniques to deliver that message in a way that engages your audience.

The Art of Business Storytelling | Ameen Haque | Talks at Google

Ameen Haque, Founder of Storywallahs, is a storyteller, story coach and consultant. He trains leaders and entrepreneurs in storytelling, crafting narratives, and using story and story based frameworks to help organizations navigate change and inspire action along desired goals.

• The Ultimate Pitching Guide
  The Entrepreneur's Handbook lays out the essential parts of every pitch and suggests additions for the right crowds.

• How to Create a Pitch Deck for Investors
  MaRS Market Intelligence gives their take on the pitch deck based on Guy Kawasaki's teachings.

• Canaan Pitch Workbook 2013

Canaan partners, a venture capital firm, has put together an actionable guide to help entrepreneurs to clearly communicate their business idea.

Van Werven, R., Bouwmeester, O., & Cornelissen, J. P. (2019). Pitching a business idea to investors: How new venture founders use micro-level rhetoric to achieve narrative plausibility and resonance. International Small Business Journal, 37(3), 193-214.

You can search Harvard Business Review to learn more articles on this topic. You can also check if your university library has a subscription to the Business Source Complete database, which provides full-text access to Harvard Business Review articles, or use the library’s interlibrary loan service to access the article.

Tips for Pitching an Idea and Making a Good Presentation

• Landry, L. (2020). How to effectively pitch a business idea. Harvard Business School Online.

• Elsbach, K. D. (2003). How to Pitch a Brilliant Idea. Harvard Business Review, 81(9), 117–123.

• Gallo, C. (2020). What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Knight, R. (2014). How to Give a Stellar Presentation. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–6.

• Anderson, C., & Duarte, N. (2013). How to Give a Killer Presentation. Harvard Business Review, 91(6), 121–125.

Tips for Coping Stress and Nervousness

• Duarte, N. (2015). Conquer Your Nerves Before Your Presentation. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4.

• Wezowski, K. (2017). 6 Ways to Look More Confident During a Presentation. (cover story). Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–7.

• Grenny, J. (2015). 6 Ways to Reduce the Stress of Presenting. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4.

• Amy Jen Su. (2016). How to Calm Your Nerves Before a Big Presentation. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Duarte, N. (2018). How to Pump Yourself Up Before a Presentation (or Calm Yourself Down). Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Gershman, S. (2019). To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

Tips for Presenting Techniques

• Nawaz, S. (2020). Don’t Just Memorize Your Next Presentation -- Know It Cold. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Brouk, T. (2018). To Give a Great Presentation, Distill Your Message to Just 15 Words. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 1–4.

• Riegel, D. G. (2018). 3 Tips for Presenting in English When You’re Not a Native Speaker. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4.

• Samuel, A. (2015). How to Give a Data-Heavy Presentation. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Weinstein, L., & Abrahams, M. (2018). A 4-Step Plan to Make Your Q&A More Audience-Friendly. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 1–6.

• Brennan, M. (2016). To Persuade People, Trade PowerPoint for Papier-Mâché. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–5.

• Ferrara, A. (2015). Your Presentation Needs a Punch Line. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4.

• The Only Ten Slides You Need in Your Pitch
  Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start presents his 10/20/30 rule for pitching (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font) and summarizes the key ten slides for a pitch.

• Ten Slides to an Awesome Pitch
  In 45 slides, Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, condenses the basic pitch deck to ten essential slides.

• Tim Young’s Five Slide Example
  An example of Tim Young's presentation with a fictional business called "Acme Power". Notice how easy it is to follow and understand.

• The Early Pitch Decks Of 15 Startups Before They Became Billion-Dollar Companies
  Early pitch decks from companies valued (at one point) at over $1 billion.

More examples from https://pitchdeckexamples.com/

• Canva Pitch Deck Presentation Template And Startup Pitch Using Canva (Coursera Course)

• Slides Carnival (Powerpoint and Google Slide Templates)

• Prezi

• Ludus.One

• Beautiful.ai

• Powtoon

• Genially

Click the link to find a Worldcat book record; enter a zipcode to check which library nearby has the book you can borrow. When the record is not available, a link to Amazon is provided.

• Reichert, Bill, Angelika Blendstrup, and Guy Kawasaki. Getting to Wow! Silicon Valley Pitch Secrets for Entrepreneurs. 2021. Print.

• Baehr, Evan, and Evan Loomis. Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams. 2015. Print.

• Kleiman, Debi. First Pitch: Winning Money, Mentors, and More for Your Startup. 2020. Print.

• Shaw, Graham. The Speaker's Coach: 60 Secrets to Make Your Talk, Speech or Presentation Amazing. 2019. Print.

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Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is also the author of The Art of Social Media, The Art of the Start, etc.

Dave McClure, is the founder of Practical Venture Capital and has been an investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for over twenty-five years. Previously he was the founding partner of 500 Startups, a global VC firm and startup accelerator with over $500M in assets under management. He is known for his Dave McClure’s Guide to Pitch Decks for Startups.

SCORE mentors offer pitching-related consultation via video, email, phone, or in-person.

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