Category Archives: pitching

corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, pitching

Pitching Masterclass @ Reifenhäuser

Recently I was honored and excited to be invited back to Reifenhäuser.

We’ve worked together on some interesting digital innovation projects (under NDA) in the past and it’s always a great pleasure to work with their talented people.

This time, they arranged for my “Pitching Masterclass, Corporate Edition” to be held for the participants of their internal “summer school” program.

The “Pitching Masterclass Corporate Edition” teaches employees how to get internal buy-in from the necessary stakeholder for their innovative ideas to generate additional or new business for their company.

It also teaches how to better understand their stakeholders, how and why pitching inside a company is very different from pitching investors as a startup – and provides a framework (taught at Harvard Business School) for navigating and overcoming potential internal resistance.

The “Corporate Edition” also provides an additional alternative framework and pitching format (used successfully in a very large and infamous company) to the classic pitch deck.

If your company or organisation would be interested in improving communication between your decision makers and idea people to massively improve innovation outcomes and increase employee job satisfaction – please feel free to get in touch to talk about how I can help you too.

If you’re at an educational institution like a college or university, a startup support program like an incubator or accelerator, or an event featuring startup pitches – get in touch to talk about how I can help you too with the “Startup Edition” of the Pitching Masterclass to help manage the quality of output and massively improve the fundability of your participants.

The Pitching Masterclass was initially created to serve the needs of the Rheinland Pitch 11 years ago to help educate our regional founders – and has been constantly evolving ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served.

Until now, the Pitching Masterclass Startup Edition and Corporate Edition was only available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or startups lucky enough to be in an incubator or accelerator or corporate innovation program who decided to book me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.

Today, the Pitching Masterclass is also additionally available, both the Startup and Corporate Edition, to all startups and corporate innovators everywhere as on-demand eLearning at https://pitchingmasterclass.com, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download – also bookable in packages which additionally includes online mentoring & support vouchers for your teams.

Some of my other happy Pitching Masterclass (Startup & Corporate Edition) customers
Standard
Education, entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

My Pitching Masterclass now available to anyone, anywhere, anytime

Pitching Masterclass – 2024 Edition: Now available ONLINE!

As you may or may not already know, as the co-founder of the Rheinland Pitch, Germany’s largest startup pitching event founded back in 2013, I’ve been preparing and training the applying startups how to pitch investors.

And with training how to pitch, I don’t mean how to put on a song and dance in front of investors – I mean how to actually find investors, how to contact investors, what investors are looking for, how the funding game works, and the contents of what and how to actually pitch investors successfully – with my in-person Pitching Masterclass.

So far I’ve trained over 3.000 startups how to successfully pitch in person.

Over the years I’ve also been booked by companies, events, organisations, startup programs (like incubators and accelerators), and universities and colleges, to help their employees, members, startups, and students improve their pitching skills.

Happy customers include KIT ( Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), Cologne Business School, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, RTL Journalistenschule, Bertelsmann, Budapest Enterprise Agency, USAID, DMEXCO, Web Summit, Pirate Summit, Medien Gruppe RTL, ottobock, Zentis, Founders Foundation, 0-1 Booster (Japan), Startup Nano (Portugal), Startup Braga (Portugal), IHK, DigitalHUB Aachen, DigitalHUB Düsseldorf, DigitalHUB Bonn, DigitalHUB Cologne, Reifenhäuser, etc.

But until now, you’d have to be able to attend an in-person Pitching Masterclass to enjoy the benefits.

As the Pitching Masterclass has been evolving and updating – and the aggregated collective wisdom of the thousands of startups I’ve been working with for over the last 11 years – I thought it was a damned shame that you could only access the knowledge if you were somehow able to attend an in-person Masterclass.

So to be able to help as many people as possible to pitch investors for raising funds, I’ve now created and released a 100% digital version of the Pitching Masterclass open for anyone, anywhere, anytime!

So, got startup? Get smart, get funded: Enroll today.

Also available: Corporate Edition

And that’s not all; I’ve also created a different version for employees wanting to secure buy-in from stakeholders for their innovation ideas and for companies wanting to train their employees to be better at pitching new innovations internally. Spoiler alert: corporate innovation ventures are not startups and they need a different approach to securing funding and support. This version includes a framework for getting to yes, for securing buy-in from stakeholders and an additional very useful alternative pitch format to the classic pitch deck just for corporates. Here’s how to learn more about this corporate edition.

Also available: Unlimited Edition

Both versions of my Pitching Masterclass are available either as a single user for startups and employees AND as an subscription edition with unlimited users for companies, organisations, startup support programs, and educational institutions who want to make it available to all of their employees, members, startups, or students on-demand. Here’s how to learn more about the unlimited users options.

Contents

What you can expect is +2 hours of video and +370 slides with these topics and contents in a user friendly web-based learning interface:

INTRO

  1. Intro
  2. Welcome
  3. About your instructor

BEFORE YOU START PITCHING

  1. First thing first
  2. The Basics
  3. Your competition today
  4. Capital available today

HOW TO RAISE MONEY

  1. Funding sources available to you
  2. What investors are looking for
  3. How the funding game works
  4. When should you raise money
  5. How to find investors
  6. How to contact investors

PITCHING

  1. Pitching TL;DR
  2. The three pitch types
  3. The High-Concept Pitch
  4. The Elevator Pitch
  5. The Pitch Deck (The Funding Pitch)
  6. Final words

ADDENDUM
20.1 Startup metrics
20.2 Pitching Tricks
20.3 Further Resources
20.4 AirBnB’s first (successful) pitch deck
20.5 Acknowledgements

DOWNLOAD
+370 slides as PDF

AFTER THE PITCHING MASTERCLASS
What’s next?

Enroll today!

Standard
Events, pitching

Prepping Startups for the (FINAL!) Pirate Summit

Today, I was honored to be back helping the startups walking the plank at this year’s (and also the final one – RIP 2011 – 2023) Pirate Summit prepare giving feedback on their pitches – one week out before they walk the plank!

I’m also moderating the Walk The Plank pitch competition, so see you there!

And if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, have a look at the ticket page – there should be tickets available for most kinds of budgets (if they are not sold out yet!).

Standard