There are plenty of great ways to come up with a serviceable elevator pitch. A quick Google search will come up with almost a million results. A few days ago, however, I ran across an article on TechCrunch that has what I think is the quickest, easiest way to formulate your own one-sentence business pitch, which is a great starting point for your company’s elevator pitch.

My company, _______, is developing _______ to help ________ do _______ with _______.

Not only is this a great springboard into the rest of your elevator pitch (which should be no more than a minute and a half long, since most people only have an attention span of 90 seconds), it’s also a good way to evaluate if your newest business idea has merit.

But once you have your elevator pitch perfected, you’ll still have to find someone with money to give it to. Preferably, a lot of people, because the vast majority of people you approach will most likely pass. Even great ideas sound dumb most of the time, and sometimes it seems like all the planets need to be in perfect alignment for a venture to get funded.

Luckily, there are events that you can attend where you’ll get the chance to give your elevator pitch to not just one or two potential investors, but an entire troupe of them. Events like the Venture Capital and Angel Showcase in NYC – where one of our managing partners happens to be speaking on Tuesday, February 7^th.

Not only do events like this give you a chance to hone your elevator pitching skills and try your luck with a number of different investors, they also do some of your homework for you. All attendees get background information on every firm in attendance so they can pick and choose who to approach.

But what if you’re not quite to the pitching stage quite yet? What if there’s still taking notes and getting your story straight? We can help you out there, too.

CapLinked is holding an online business-plan competition that has been narrowed down to five finalists, each of which will compete for the grand prize by giving their pitch to a panel of judges (which just happens to include another one of our managing partners) on Wednesday, January 11th.

Tuning into that discussion is free, so if you think you and your business could use a few pointers on crafting a great pitch before jetting off to New York City in early February, reserve a spot for the webinar.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with Wasabi Ventures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

Usually, all of this could be solved by a good talk over coffee. But that’s not dramatic. And we want drama. We want action. We want to see those flawed and human characters working through their problems because we want to think that we can work through our own.

That’s my theory, at least. My friend has a different one: It’s not that TV shows are defined by a lack of emotional intelligence but a lack of courage. In most cases, he posits, people are actually aware of what “the right thing to do” is – they just are too weak to do it. But we like stories about people who finally find the courage to do what they know is right.

Both our theories are bound by a common thread. Namely: we think people like watching TV shows about characters acquiring something that most people lack. For me, it’s emotional intelligence. For him, it’s courage. I assume that most people are fools that need to be pointed in the right direction. He assumes people already know where to go, but lack the will to get there.

The case could be made either way, I think. That really doesn’t matter. What does matter is this central question: how do these characters go from being flawed to being heroes? In most cases, it is because the writers and TV producers are kind enough to strip away all the distractions from the life of their characters so that they can make some crucial decision properly. The less time that character has to get it right, the more simple his life will become and the greater the hero’s chances will be of doing something great.

For TV heroes it seems easy. It’s always “do or die!” or “go after her!” The choice seems simple. What we don’t realize as people living disorganized lives filled with distractions is that it’s the same for us. We just have longer to figure it out than any fictional characters do, so we get to spend more time messing about and focusing on the wrong things.

Trouble is, the consequences are often just as real. Regrets, heartbreak, or even death. They’re just further off and obscured by the blur of possibility. But that doesn’t make them any less real – or any less probable.

The desire to create, accomplish, and be remembered is something that I think nearly every entrepreneur must feel. Perhaps it’s part of the human condition. But if we want to have any chance at all, we need to give ourselves the same advantage our heroes on TV have: simplicity.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with Wasabi Ventures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

But inertia has its uses, especially here in Silicon Valley. While it trivializes that condition, the statement that everyone (especially young entrepreneurs and VCs) has ADD is distressingly accurate. People swing wildly from “That will never work,” to “I told you it would work!” (And that’s just between board meetings!)

Eric Ries made a valiant attempt to address this with his Lean Startup methodology, which calls for startups to pivot (changing the business, but keeping crucial elements the same). Unfortunately, startups now seem to use “pivot” synonymously with “change everything about the business except the founders involved.”

Whenever someone proposes a change, I always ask, “Is this clearly better than what we’re already doing? Because as I recall, you thought you had some pretty good reasons when you made that initial decision.”

Change is shiny and new and exciting, but change also has a price (and we as eternal optimists always seem to underestimate that price, and overestimate the benefits). Try to be agile AND grounded.

About the author: Chris Yeh is a managing partner with Wasabi Ventures.  Follow him on Twitter or read his blog.

When we set out to accomplish something in life, we adopt or acquire a certain skill set to attain it and (as Greg Salciccioli observed) a separate skill set to maintain it. A common example; certain choices and skill sets allow one to lose weight, additional choices and skill sets allow one to maintain a healthy weight.
In the often frenetic, fast paced, ever changing landscape of life in the 21st century, it’s not easy task to balance life, health, family, finances and work.  Additionally, for whatever reason, success at work seems to have a stronger magnetic pull on our lives than other areas.  

Most of us are aware of the fact that a truly rewarding life mandates a skill set to find better life balance; a state (which in all transparency) I do not yet find myself.  In that journey and based on the insight garnered in this book, it may very well be that I have not understood the importance of developing two skills sets: one for attainment and one to maintain the balance I have managed to implement.

Great food for thought and an equally great road map towards that end can be found The Enemies of Excellence.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jonathan Fields, wrote a post about just that recently entitled Make More Bad Stuff.  He interviewed an accomplished guitar maker and confided that he had long thought about making his own guitar, but was deterred by the difficulty of the task.  The guitar maker’s advice?  Go make a really bad guitar.  Learn from it.  And then make one that’s less bad.  You’ll be making great guitars sooner or later.

The key part here that many neglect is the learning component.  You can’t just go out there and make mistakes all willy-nilly.  As a rule, be very careful about what you do “willy-nilly.”

The best way to make sure that you learn the right lessons from your mistakes is by conducting a project post-mortem.  These don’t have to be huge and formal (although they certainly can be, especially if it was a big project that involved a lot of people), but they do have to get done, and you do have to take them seriously.

I’ve been devoting a lot of thought to my most recent project, the Back to School Giveaway, which I organized for TestSoup along with five other co-sponsors.  We pulled together $150,000 worth of educational technology services and set up a raffle to give them away to 20 eligible schools.  The contest had over 250 entrants in the three weeks for which it ran.

Was it smashing success? No, definitely not.  But we got some promising leads for potential partnerships and made some decent connections with other companies in the edtech business.  We also scored TestSoup some extra exposure and gave away a bunch of product that will help educate kids, which always feels great.

But what did I learn?  Here are the highlights.

1) Don’t rely on other people.  Assume that everyone else involved in a project is just as busy (or busier) as you are.  Unless people specifically say that they will do something, don’t expect it.  So if your plan hinges on the active involvement of others, recruit those others carefully.

2) Spread the word in as many ways a possible every single day that you can.  If you are working on something that relies on sign-ups or participation from the public, you need to devote a massive amount of time and energy to getting the word out.  You cannot slack on this one, sorry.

3) Apply the “three times as much” standard.  This is a rule that my friends and I came up with for when we work on our cars.  Take as much time you think a new project will require and multiply that by three.  That’s how long you should actually budget for it.  Same goes for workload.  New stuff takes three times as long.  That’s because you need to figure out how to do it, do it once badly, and then do it again properly.

Granted, those are all just general business lessons that I learned from organizing the BTSG.  It’s not a true post-mortem (I do those privately, and mostly in my own head during contemplative walks), but there’s still some valuable information in there.  These are lessons that I would not have learned if I hadn’t put in the effort to run the contest and then to think critically about how it fared.

It may not be fun — or good for your ego — but conducting a post-mortem after each new project is an important step towards becoming a great entrepreneur.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

Have I gained perspective since then?  Of course. Then again, what I wrote in that post is still very much a part of my current experience:

Entrepreneurship means taking on [paying] work in which you have no interest while you slave away on something uncertain about which you are passionate. It means answering work emails when you come home at two in the morning after a night out. It means explosions of creative energy when you’re out running errands that you frantically try to record on your cellular telephone. It means running through your plan for the next day as you lay down to sleep; then again in the morning as you’re getting up. It means adapting to work on other people’s schedules to make use of their unique talents. It means sending your outsourced developers a whole week’s worth of work on Sunday because combating the time difference all week would lose too much time. It means trying, succeeding, failing, and retrying — often all in the same day.

I can certainly understand why this life isn’t for everyone.  Startups have a way of draining you even when you feel truly passionate about the business — and often times you will have to do stuff that has nothing at all to do with “passion!”

Then again, there are those moments that make it all worthwhile.  You might think that you’ll have to wait until a company sells, or at least begins turning a steady profit.  But there are many, many little moments waiting for you that will give you the “entrepreneur’s rush.”  Accomplishing a business goal, even a small one, is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

I think that while most entrepreneurs decide to go into businesses for themselves for various different reasons, most of them actually keep at it because of this feeling.

Most recently, I experienced the entrepreneur’s rush as the Back to School Giveaway, something I’ve been working on for the past two months, surpassed 100 entrants.  That was on Thursday of last week.  By the time this post goes live, I have no idea how many we’ll have.  Hundreds, hopefully.

The thought that something I created is getting so many educators excited and will help so many students is truly satisfying — even if 100+ entrants is unimpressive to other people.  It really is quite a rush.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

That’s BS.  Success is hard.

Success isn’t about raising money or getting a high valuation.

It’s about building a business that delivers a great product to happy customers.

Every great business started as an entrepreneur with an idea, no product, and no resources.  Hundreds of thousands of well-educated, highly qualified people each year set out from that starting point.  And only about 100 manage a life-changing liquidity event.

Many people think that I’m successful.  I won’t argue the point, but I will note that I’ve been doing startups since 1995, and every single one has been hard.  Some have succeeded.  Most have failed, or at least failed to make a major impact in the world.

If I were to start a company today, despite all my relationships and my minor notoriety (in the words of comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, I’ve spent decades clawing my way up to the middle), I would still estimate my chances of success at well less than 50%.  That’s because success is hard.

But remember this: Even though success is hard and the chances of success slim, there’s a 100% chance you’ll never experience the joy of a successful startup if you don’t try.

About the author: Chris Yeh is a managing partner with Wasabi Ventures.  Follow him on Twitter or read his blog.

First of all, I must say that I was a little skeptical about this book when I picked it up.  Sure, I did want to learn how to “leverage resources, establish online credibility, and crush my competition,” (the book’s subtitle), but the endorsements on the back cover made it seem more like a “get rich quick” guide than a useful resource for someone like myself, who wants to know how to honestly increase his online presence.

Still, I made a cup of tea and started to read.  I had finished part one before my tea had cooled, and I already knew that my initial skepticism was way off the mark.  And I was already making plans to re-read the book more slowly and pay far more attention to the action item lists Schwerdtfeger includes at the end of each two-to-four-page chapter.

I will caution you that reading this book the way I did (as if it were any other book) is not the optimal way to absorb the material.  You may get some great ideas for things that you can do immediately for your business, but you will miss the bulk of the material.  There’s very little fat on this book.  It reads like a series of blog posts, each with (at least) one thing you should do to market yourself and your business.  Some of these things are simple and can be done in an afternoon.  Others may take months of effort.

You may not be able to do everything in this book, but you definitely should start doing certain things right away.  For this reason, I must reiterate that this is not a book to be read just once.  Sure, go ahead and tear through it.  Revel in the incredible amount of helpful hints, useful links, and brilliantly simple ideas.  Take note of a few key things you want to improve right away.  Get psyched to build up your brand.  Go take action.

Then come back to the book and read it again, slowly this time.  Don’t go on to the next chapter until you have made some real progress on the one you just read.  Try to really get something out of it, because there’s certainly a lot to be gotten from Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed.

About the reviewer: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

1. What do you do that’s remarkable? Begin by identifying the things people are amazed by, the things you get asked questions about, the things that capture their attention.
2. What’s the “human story” behind that value? Take what you do that’s remarkable and explain how it changes people’s lives.  Describe the emotional impact of your product or service.
3. How can you tell that human story in a visual way? There are different types of content: text, audio, photos and video.  Which is most viral?  You guessed it: photos and video!
4. How can you get your customers to tell that human story? Content can come from two places: you or your customers.  Which is most viral?  Right again: content from your customers!
5. How can you incentivize your customers to tell more stories?  Incentives, incentives, and more incentives.  If you give people a reason to be creative, you’ll be amazed at what you get back.

There are dozens of examples of companies that have held contests to inspire their customers to create dynamic content promoting their business.  Take the Australian Tourism Board and their 2009 “Best Job in the World” campaign.  By offering a lavish compensation package and requiring a 1-minute video to apply, they ended up with almost 35,000 videos that other people created, all espousing the beauty of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

About the author: Patrick Schwerdtfeger is the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley) and the founder of the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy, one of the nation’s largest entrepreneur clubs.  He has spent most of his life starting and building small business ventures and is a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV.

I mean a couple of things by this.

First, the smaller picture. To us at Merus Capital, the most critical element of a pitch for any type of startup is that it must come across as something that you are truly passionate about and really, sincerely want to see become a reality. No shortcuts, no BS, no quick flips, and no pretending that there aren’t massive challenges ahead.  Challenges are OK. Finding ways to overcome them is what we’re all trying to do. Otherwise, where’s the fun?

Second, the bigger picture. And this part is more personal to me than just my capacity as an investor. I would love to find startups that are building products and services that encourage, and allow for, greater authenticity. Authenticity of information, opinion and emotion. And hopefully in ways that *help* people–don’t just entertain me, rather allow me to be more productive, make more informed decisions, work or play smarter, be safer, save money, whatever it is that can improve lives personally and professionally. Certainly the social web is helping us get closer to the vision. As examples, I’ll look briefly at three well-known communication platforms through the lens of productive authenticity: Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.

Facebook may be the leader in this light but to me, it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t really have 250 close friends and for me, it isn’t a useful productivity tool. Entertainment and personal connection, yes, but productivity and all the things mentioned above, not really.

I find Twitter to be a better productivity tool than Facebook, and thus a much more integral part of my daily life. And while the ability of Twitter users to spread important and useful information worldwide instantaneously is a fundamental societal shift, the cynic in me would say that at times Twitter can be a self-promotor’s dream–a bazaar of false modesty, feigned exuberance and hollow praise.

Quora starts to get at the issue. Real people with real knowledge on certain topics and events sharing their perspectives. But it still suffers from much of the blatant self-promotion that other services do. No doubt they are working hard to reduce the noise in the signal.

But how about the next communication platform? Can we build one that promotes and preserves true authenticity, exploits deep personal and professional relationships and helps people in their daily lives? I would love to find out.

About the Author: Sean Dempsey is a founding partner at Merus Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in Palo Alto, CA.  Prior to Merus, he spent a decade in Corporate Development at Google and Microsoft.  His blog can be found at www.avirtuouscycle.com.