Foundry Group Adopts Twitpitch Approach To VC Pitches

[Update 17 September 2010: Brad Feld twittered me to let me know this story is about the Foundry Group’s April Fools Day post, so they have not switched over to Twitter for candidate pitches, it seems.]

If an entrepreneur cannot explain their opportunity in 140 characters or less, how focused can they be? I was recently visiting the Foundry Group website and noticed this post from March, that I had totally missed.

Apparently the VC firm has dropped email as a way to start discussions with candidate companies: They want to be twitpitched:

Foundry Group Moves to Twitter Platform for Deal Evaluation

While we are fans of investing in companies in the email ecosystem with our thematic investing approach, we have come to the realization that email is not the most efficient form of communication for evaluating potential investment opportunities.

We are blessed to have a large number of entrepreneurs who are interested in us as potential partners and the volume of email we receive can sometimes overwhelm us, so we began the investigation for a more streamlined approach.  We hired consultants from McKinsey & Company last summer and after 9 months of working with us to learn how we operate, it was obvious that Twitter was the right choice.

The benefits of Twitter versus other platforms were clear.  First, everyone is on Twitter, so there is no chance that an entrepreneur wouldn’t be able to reach us.  Second, this will greatly reduce the number of spreadsheets and financial projections that we would feel obligated to read.  We realize that financial projects are just that – projections and therefore are never accurate.  We’ve decided to stop pretending that they make sense.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, if an entrepreneur cannot explain their opportunity in 140 characters or less, how focused can they be?

Besides, with the amount of board meetings that we attend, verbosity is not a wanted characteristic.

Speaking of board meetings, we have begun the process of streamlining board meetings with McKinsey, as well.  We’re hoping to devise a similar approach using Skype to eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings and travel.

So, if you are an entrepreneur and want to work with us, Tweet us!  One thing to note: PLEASE do not send us twitter links or multiple tweets per company.  This is just as bad as email and really destroys the spirit of what we are trying to do here.

We look forward to hearing from you:

@bfeld @ryan_mcintyre @jasonmendelson @sether

I also applaud their statement about financial statement as being myths. Yay!

Steve Rubel on The Twitpitch

About a year after I wrote about trying to convince PR professionals to pitch me on Twitter instead of email (see Twitpitch Is The Future, Twitpitch Me, and related posts), Steve Rubel reports on a trend where PR people are pitching via Twitter. I call this Twitpitching, but Steve steers away from that terminology, or any mention that the practice has been going on at least for a year or so.

[via Micro Persuasion: Could Twitter One Day Replace Email PR Pitches? Maybe]

[…] more of my inbound and outbound communication these days is in the form of Twitter direct messages or, sometimes, public replies. The direct messages arrive through email, but I find myself often reviewing or responding to these in one of my preferred Twitter clients - either Tweetie or TwitterGadget.

At first I despised the bacn. Now, however, I embrace it. What’s more, I have come to see the benefits of direct messages and its potential for PR. It has me wondering: can direct message pitches become an accepted practice that journalists can live with?

I don’t know about journalists, but I think anything that pulls PR blather out of the closed discourse of email is good: the unlimited scope of the medium allows all the worst of press releases to continue — bullshit quotes that no CEO ever said, third party marketspeak, the torrent of superlatives.

And pulling this all into open social discourse — not direct messages, Steve — is equally beneficial. Let everyone see the hype, let the community reply immediately to the bushwa that vendors are trying to pass off as newsworthy. Let the Edglings shape the discussion.

Steve tiptoes through this, though:

Now some pitches could be public tweets, others will have to be private direct messages depending on their nature. And of course Twitter will never replace email pitching entirely.

Yes, marketeers working around embargoed information might need to resort to direct messages, but otherwise I would steer them out into the open.

And I am leery of formulations like ‘Of course, new communication medium X will never replace old communication medium Y.’

I recall how people almost hooted me off the stage a few years ago when I suggested that the rise of the social web would lead to the death of newspapers. ‘Oh, Stowe,’ they cried, ‘you can’t say that newspapers — so important to democracy, and a pillar of our society — would ever fade away. You are crazy.’

I was almost tarred and feathered at Supernova 2004 for suggesting that email was not going to be the killer app of the new web, and that advances based on the instant messaging paradigm — buddylists, presence, fast twitch — would replace it. (See Email Blows).

So, I may be a bit ahead of the curve, but I will say it here: Steve is too cautious by half, and open press relations is the future. Smart PR professionals will move away from closed discourse — direct messages, email, etc. — and conduct business in public, to the degree that it is possible.

And the Press — to the degree that we will have a ‘Press Corps’ per se, in the future — will be online in the open, too.

The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch

By Stowe Boyd

I am shifting permanently to twitpitching as the sole medium for companies to pitch me. I debuted the idea in the past few weeks, leading up to Web 2.0 Expo (see Web 2.0 Expo Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me! and As Bad As It Gets: The Case For Twitpitches, Part II ). Basically, I want companies to get their story down to a one-liner ‘escalator’ pitch — like 10 seconds long — which is going to force them to drop the superlatives and buzzwords and get to the heart of the matter.

A twitpitch takes the following form:

  1. A twitter message of the form “@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
  2. A second, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. Just one URL, please.
  3. A third, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch”.

That’s it.

Twitpitches that work — that interest me enough to warrant spending some time to find out more — will be retwittered on my @stoweboyd account, and here on my blog.

And companies will be directed to this page to get the idea, and those that try to stick with the bulging email approach will suffer a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule: After three times of being warned, they go into the spam category. Obviously I am open to receiving emails for general communication, just not for pitches.

I have both @twitpitch and @twitcatch accounts at Twitter, but I am reserving them for a future, more complex and automated solution, downstream.

Web 2.0 Twitpitch Schedule - Updated 15 Apr 5pm ET

The Twitpitch experiment is going well. Since this morning, when I posted Web 2.0 Expo Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me! I have received a barrage of twitpitches, and I have set up a few meetings already, with Zude, Profy, Evernote, and SuggestionBox.com:


iCal, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I have also lost a slot to a conflict with another non-Web 2.0 Expo telcon.

Kudos to Katie Watson at Voce, who not only is teeing up a Twitpitch for Elastra (which I have not seen yet), but has already informed the other folks at Voce that this is how I want to be pitched in the future. Smart!

One note: vendors it would be smart, although it takes a few of the precious characters away, to tag your twitpitches as such: include #twitpitch in the tweet. People might subscribe to the RSS as www.hastags.org, after all.

Here’s the twitpitches, earliest at the top:

MKraft @stoweboyd #twitpitch: #zude is a social computing platform. Users drag&drop, build media-rich websites. Mashup whole web. Big News @ Expo

Matthew Kraft about 4h ago via web in reply to stoweboyd

[set up meeting]

Profy @stoweboyd Profy is a new blogging platform focused on social aspects of blogging and providing a blogger with all the tools in one place

Svetlana Gladkova about 4h ago via Snitter in reply to stoweboyd

[set up meeting]

ReedLyon @stoweboyd #twitpitch Awareness http://snurl.com/24ikt (founder Dave Carter) does enterprise social media communities http://snurl.com/24ijo

[considering. broke the rules, too.]

BJ @stoweboyd SuggestionBox.com - feedback management platform meets community collaboration with a business model ;)

BJ Cook about 3h ago via web in reply to stoweboyd

[set up, had to make three attempts to get it right!]

kwanlass @stoweboyd Bungee Connect dev & hosting platform-as-a-service wants to update, discuss comparison to other PaaS. www.bungeeconnect.com

kwanlass about 3h ago via web in reply to stoweboyd

[considering: I have already seen them many times]

ReedLyon @stoweboyd Awareness has a uniform content architecture so all forms of UGC can be easily repurposed. Provides admins accelerator and brake.

ReedLyon about 2h ago via twhirl in reply to stoweboyd

[considering. sounds scary. I don’t like the term ‘user generated content’.]

Jeremy_Frank @stoweboyd Static Flickr pic for scheduling?? Let us show you the light with TimeBridge. 2:20 or 4:40 Thursday in the press room?

Jeremy Frank about 1h ago via twhirl in reply to stoweboyd

[no. I have seen Timebridge many times before.]


Still have a few slots available!

I like the idea of forcing people down to the tiniest escalator pitch: if you had 10 seconds to pitch someone, passing each other — one going up, one going down — on escalators in the airport, what would you say? Twitpitch!

Web 2.0 Expo Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me!

[update: 15 Apr 5pm — see Web 2.0 Twitpitch Schedule - Updated 15 Apr 5pm ET for updated schedule and available slots.]

I can’t believe what a pain in the ass it still is to do something as basic as trying to schedule meetings with startups at a conference. The solution is probably to hire a PR firm to do it, since they seem so incredibly avid in their relentless pursuit in getting meetings for the clients.

Of course, I am aware that many of the PT flacks that are chasing me — and the companies that they represent — do not necessarily get up and jump out of bed in order to see what I may have written overnight. I am possibly just another name on the press list.

But in order to make things simple for me, I am hereby posting a schedule of the times that I will make available for meetings with companies at the Web 2.0 Expo, and I am not going to accept email-based proposals to meet, only Twitpitches.


Schedule For Web 2.0 Expo Meetings, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Here’s the rules for Twitpitching:

  1. All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
  2. Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
  3. Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.

(In the future, I plan to use my www.twitter.com/twitpitch account for this, but I haven’t set it up in a productive way, yet. More to follow on that.)

Alternatively, you can twitter me about trying to meet at one of the many parties. Note: I will be attending the South Park Crawl, and my office is on South Park, so I am open to being grabbed spontaneously at the party and maybe getting a ptich on the fly, but only by companies that have twitpitched me already. Of course, you could twitterpitch me in real time, right at the party, and then walk over. Could work.

Note also, in a twitterized style of business, I am only allotting 30 or 40 minutes for meetings. Let’s get down to it people. Cut to the chase. If I fall in love with it, I will be the first to ask for a follow up.

I am not setting myself up as a tin-plated God, but I am getting an ungodly amount of email from PR folks, and it’s extremely random: some have attachments, some have big, stupid, old fashioned press releases copied in their entirety. Gah.

I will post all the twitpitches I receive on my blog, here, so that should be an added enducement.

I don’t guarantee that I will agree to the tweetup, but I am definitely not meeting with companies that send email, henceforth. I will send an email to all those that have emailed prior to this post, pointing then to this.

Let the twitpitches commence!