Why Some Investors Know More Than You Do

At a wine tasting, the person pouring will tell you about tannins and terroir for ten minutes.

Most of the table nods along. They're here for a nice evening, not a viticulture lecture.

But there's usually one guest who says almost nothing. Doesn't swirl the glass for show, doesn't ask the questions everyone else asks. Just tastes, thinks, and moves on.

That's the guest who actually grows grapes.

You'd think the person pouring should be performing for them. Tailoring the whole thing to impress the one who'd catch a mistake. But that's backwards — the ten minutes of tannin talk isn't for the grape grower. It's for the other nine people at the table who don't know tannins from tannins and just want a good story about the bottle they're drinking.

The grape grower already knows if the wine is good. They don't need the speech. They need one honest sentence, at some point, that tells them you know what you're talking about too.

Investor rooms work the same way. Pitch to fifty angels and maybe two of them know your industry cold. Five more have some exposure. The rest are smart people who will never be able to tell, from the pitch alone, whether your business is actually good.

Your job is to speak to the forty-three, not the two.

But don't ignore the two. Find them before you present — ask the Deal Flow Manager, ask the Executive Director, ask anyone who knows the room. Get in front of that person early, with a specific question, not a general ask. Investors like giving advice more than they like giving money, and it turns out those two things are more connected than they seem.

Because once one of the real experts in the room is nodding along with you instead of quietly noticing what you got wrong, they stop being the toughest person to convince.

They become the person convincing everyone else for you.

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More on finding your champion in The Pitch Deck Book: https://www.amazon.com/Pitch-Deck-Book-Business-Investors/dp/B098PKPL73

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