The Elevator Pitch Isn't for Closing

There's an unwritten rule in every elevator on earth: you face the doors, you watch the numbers, and you do not talk to strangers.

It's not posted anywhere. Nobody trained you on it. But step into an elevator anywhere in the world and everyone silently agrees to the same three things — face front, minimal eye contact, wait it out.

Every so often someone breaks it. They turn around, make a comment about the weather, ask what floor you're headed to. And you can feel the whole elevator tense up, because the unspoken deal was thirty seconds of nothing, and now someone's trying to have a relationship in that window.

That's basically what happens when a founder gets thirty seconds with an investor and tries to close the whole deal in it.

The elevator pitch has a bad reputation because people think it means "sell fast." It doesn't. It means "be understood fast." Those are different jobs. One is a transaction. The other is an introduction.

If you use your thirty seconds trying to get a yes, you'll get a no — a fast, easy no, the kind people give just to end the discomfort. But if you use it to make one thing clear and interesting, you get something better: a second conversation, on purpose, where nobody's trapped.

Think about the ski lift version of this. You get stuck next to someone for ten minutes, you talk, it's going well, and then the moment comes to land the plane. You've got two options: "Will you invest?" or "Want to grab lunch and talk more?"

Only one of those doesn't feel like an elevator conversation gone wrong.

The elevator pitch isn't the pitch. It's the door holding open long enough for the real one to happen later.

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More on this in The Pitch Deck Book — available here.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.