Sprint Experiment: Pitch Events
News from the Funding Innovation Studio: November 19, 2024, Edition 21
At long last, I’m excited to share out the results of the sprints we ran this year! If you are new here, please check out our Intro page for context and background. As promised, we are publishing and open-sourcing the results from our work, so you can begin activating these tiny behavior changes in your work right away.
This year, we ran two experiments, one on pitch events and one on networking events. Both of these experiments have high potential because networking and pitch events serve as important gateways for founders to build relationships and gain support for their work in the community. Our goal is to find ways to make them more inclusive by design.
Our experiment around networking events needs further testing, and we have plans to run another cycle around that sprint next year.
Today, I’m going to focus on our pitch event sprint in three parts:
The Recommendation - what we learned
The Experiment - how we learned it
Tips for Activating the Recommendation - how you can put this to work
Let’s start with the recommendation first
Pre-load the first question in a Pitch Q&A
You can create a more inclusive, positive experience for the entrepreneurs in your pitch event by letting them pre-load the first question they will be asked during the Q&A after their pitch.
Imagine if during a job interview, you got to suggest the first question the interviewer asked. You’d pick a good one, right?! You’d pick a question that would set you up for success through the rest of the interview.
The same idea can be applied at a pitch event. Since our goal with pitch events is for founders to have a positive experience and hopefully walk away with some new connections that may be able to help them in the future, we can nudge the Q&A process more in favor of this kind of outcome by letting the founders pre-load the first question.
The Experiment
This sprint team consisted of four people, representing industry, investors, founders, and academia:
Ashlee Ammons Halpin is a partner on the a16z Talent x Opportunity Initiative (TxO) focused on TxO University and program management.
Adam Jenkins is the regional site director for BioLabs.
Tracy Warren is the venture capital manager at Healthworx Ventures.
Siri Chilazi is a Senior Researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School.
For this sprint, we utilized Siri’s work at Harvard Kennedy School as inspiration, which suggested that pitch events could be made more fair if they had more structure, specifically with standardized questions in the Q&A and defined evaluation criteria.
The suggestion recognizes that when men and women pitch their companies, men tend to receive future-facing questions about how big the opportunity could become and women tend to receive risk-mitigation questions about how the company might fail.
If we want pitch events to be successful for all founders, how can we design them on purpose to level the playing field? How can we set all founders up for success on purpose?
With this in mind, we utilized the basics of the scientific method to set up a tiny, fast experiment.
Assumption
We first formulated the assumption we wanted to explore. This step allows us to define and articulate the core assumption behind the experiment.
Here’s what we developed:
Letting founders “shine” at the beginning of the Q&A anchors investors toward a more positive perspective of the companies.
Hypothesis
In this step, we defined the experiment we would run. For example: when we do x (intervention we design), we expect y (observable behavior).
When we set up the Q&A in a pitch event so that the founder “pre-loads” the first question asked after the pitch (a question they know will set them up for success), we expect to observe a greater percentage of investors indicating excitement rather than hesitation compared to the control group.
For this experiment, we chose to measure investor sentiment on a scale of 1-6, indicating hesitancy vs excitement focused on four categories: overall sentiment, the science, the commercial viability of the venture, and the founder.
We chose to use a rating scale of 1-6, based on Siri’s recommendations for two reasons:
A scale of 1-6 is better than 1-7, because there is no “middle” or neutral zone.
The 1-6 range is better than 1-10, because 10 is perceived as “perfect”. There is evidence that humans are less willing to give women a perfect score. (Men are 50% more likely to receive a perfect score than women on a 1-10 scale.) Using a 1-6 scale closes this gender gap.
Here is a sample of the form we created to capture investor sentiment during the pitch event.
Sprint Facilitation
We facilitated this experiment during the Boston Biotech Investor Day, hosted by LabCentral, BioLabs, and The Engine on September 10, 2024. This event was an incredible opportunity to run this particular experiment.
At the event, 42 companies pitched, allowing us to run a test and control group. The test group, randomly but evenly spaced across four pitch sessions, were asked to provide a question for us to ask them during the Q&A after their pitch. Then, anyone in the audience was allowed to ask questions during the remaining time for that company.
The control group got questions from the audience at random, like any typical Q&A session.
The event was attended by over 200 people, including investors from 72 firms.
The Results & Analysis
We compared the average sentiment for the test and control groups across the four measured categories and found an increased score across all four, with the greatest increase measured around how the investors felt about the founders pitching.
This sprint had promising early results. It is ready to be activated.
Option 1: Organizations can activate this intervention within their pitch event.
Option 2: Organizations can activate this intervention and support our ongoing data collection efforts.
The Funding Innovation Studio will continue collecting data on results and reporting on the aggregated learnings.
Why activate this recommendation?
In our experiment, we found that the sentiment of the investors in the room demonstrated increased excitement, rather than hesitancy when the pre-loaded question was presented first.
Even more interesting, we asked the investors to rate their excitement or hesitancy across four categories: overall sentiment, the science, the founder, and the commercial viability of the venture.
We saw the biggest increase in excitement on the founder category.
This is so important! Early stage investors often say they are primarily investing in the team. As a pitch event organizer, you can nudge the overall interest and excitement around the companies you are showcasing by including this design recommendation.
I think there is still a lot for us to learn about why this works, but I have a hunch. The dynamics of a pitch event Q&A are not as straightforward as they might seem, humans being humans, after all. Sometimes the motivation of the question-asker is less about curiosity about the company pitching and more about making them look smart. The person asking the question might think they need to ask a tough question in order to look good to the audience at large. I say that, fully recognizing that I have done that as a judge at a pitch event in the past.
However, the focus of a pitch event is not on the judges or question askers in the audience. It’s the founders who stepped into the arena and are there seeking guidance, support, connections, and investment.
This recommendation re-centers the focus where it belongs - on our founders.
Tips for Activating the Recommendation
The great thing about this recommendation is that it is very easy to integrate into your existing pitch event format. The only pre-work needed is to collect the preferred question from each founder before the pitch event starts.
If you have a clear agenda and know exactly who will be pitching at the event, you can email the founders in advance to collect this info.
If you have a multi-stage event and won’t know who is advancing to the portion of the pitch event that includes Q&A until last minute, I recommend having notecards handy and asking the founders to write down their preferred question on the spot.
In either case, you can use simple language to explain the concept: “We’re going to open the Q&A by asking a question of your choice. Please provide us with a question you’d like us to ask - something that sets you up for success.”
Then, once the moderator has asked that question to the founder, open up the Q&A to whomever at the event you already planned to have ask questions - designated judges or the audience etc.
Ready to activate the results?
Take it and run with it!
The Funding Innovation Studio is successful when you - the practitioners doing the work - activate our recommendations and begin to explore what it would look like to integrate these changes into your day to day activities.
If you would like to talk through the design of your pitch event and get help thinking about how to integrate this, please reach out. I’d love to collaborate.
And if you do add this to your pitch event, please send me a note to describe what you did and how it went. I want to highlight and feature the organizations activating this recommendation - I know there are several in the works already!
For all questions or stories about activating this recommendation, please email me (Beth McKeon) so we can set up a time to chat: bmckeon@labcentral.org
Virtual Sprint Showcase
November 22nd, 10-11am EST
We recently hosted our inaugural Sprint Showcase, sharing the results from the experiments we ran this year - focused on networking events and pitch competitions.
If you’d like to connect around this recommendation for pitch events and learn more about the experiment that inspired it, please join us for the Virtual Sprint Showcase this Friday.
The Funding Innovation Studio is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding inclusion, access, and opportunity for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Studio convenes and supports innovators from across VC, universities, and entrepreneurial support organizations as they run rapid design sprints to solve the persistent systemic barriers and bias in the fundraising and capital deployment process. The Funding Innovation Studio has an open-source policy, sharing the wins and fails from these experiments here on Substack and with its community of practitioners with the goal to see widespread adoption and replication of emerging best practices in this field.