What I Notice When Watching Startup Pitches

There’s a specific silence that happens about four seconds after a founder stops talking. The applause hasn’t started yet, the questions haven’t started yet, and a room of forty people is quietly deciding what it thinks.

I’ve spent a good number of evenings inside that silence at Unicorn Pitches Lisbon — I co-organize the events, I MC them, and I sit on the judging panel — watching founders take eight minutes to explain something they’ve lived with for two years. And the thing that surprised me most is how little the silence has to do with the quality of the performance.

Polish doesn’t win the room. Confidence doesn’t win the room. I’ve watched beautifully produced pitches — custom animation, perfect timing, a founder who could hold a stage professionally — land flat. And I’ve watched someone with a wobbly voice and an ugly deck get the room leaning forward within ninety seconds.

The difference isn’t presentation skill. It’s whether four things connect.

Every pitch is making four claims, whether or not the founder says them out loud. Here’s a real problem. Here’s our solution to it. Here’s how that solution reaches the people who have the problem — distribution, the unglamorous question of how a customer ever hears about you. And here’s how money works once it does — economics, meaning what a customer is worth to you compared to what it costs to get and serve them.

Four claims. The pitches that work are the ones where each claim makes the next one feel inevitable. Not impressive. Inevitable — as in, by the time the founder gets to the fourth thing, you’ve already half-guessed it, because it was the only sensible place the story could go.

Let’s imagine two versions of the same company, pitching on the same night.

1. The first founder explains that small clinics lose hours every week to insurance paperwork. Fine. Everyone nods.

2. Then the solution: software that fills the forms automatically. Still fine. Still nodding.

3. Then distribution: they sell through the practice-management systems those clinics already use, because that’s where the paperwork already lives. The room shifts slightly. That follows from the problem — of course you’d meet them where the work happens.

4. Then economics: a clinic pays a monthly fee that’s a fraction of the admin salary it displaces, and clinics almost never switch practice-management systems, so they stay for years. Nobody is surprised. Everyone has already arrived there.

Nothing in that sequence was clever. That’s the point. Each piece was the natural consequence of the piece before it, and by the end the business looked less like an idea someone had and more like something that was going to exist anyway.

Now the second version. Same problem, same software, same market. But distribution is “we’ll run digital ads and attend two trade shows,” and the revenue model is a per-form fee that only makes sense at a volume no small clinic generates. Every individual slide survives scrutiny. The pitch still falls apart, because the pieces were assembled next to each other rather than into each other.

Weak pitches almost always have exactly one of the four floating loose.

Sometimes it’s the problem — a genuinely elegant product built for a discomfort nobody would pay to remove. Sometimes it’s the solution — a real, painful, expensive problem, addressed by something that solves an adjacent and easier version of it. Very often it’s distribution, which in my experience is the most quietly fatal one, because a founder can build something people would love and have no mechanism by which those people will ever find out it exists. And sometimes it’s the economics, arriving on slide fourteen like a stranger who wandered into the wrong room — a pricing model with no visible relationship to the product just described.

An engine that isn’t connected to the wheels is a very loud object. It is not a car.

You can hear the loose joint in the Q&A before anyone names it. Judge questions cluster. If three unrelated people all circle back to “but how do you get your first hundred customers,” the pitch didn’t have a distribution problem in the founder’s head — it had one on stage, and the room found it in under a minute. The questions a pitch attracts are a decent map of where its story stopped being load-bearing.

I should say plainly that this goes beyond just keeping the evening running on schedule. The mechanics of how a funding decision actually gets made — what makes an experienced judge lean in at minute two and disengage at minute five — is a puzzle I find genuinely absorbing, and I’ve been chewing on it for years, on both sides of the microphone. Part of that is my day job: I work in payments, where a business either has a coherent path from cost to revenue or it quietly bleeds. Most of it is just curiosity. Watching a room decide something in real time is one of the more interesting things you can do with a Tuesday evening.

What I’ve come to think is that founders rarely fail at any one of the four. They fail at the seams, and they fail there because of how decks get built. You write the problem slide. Then, some other day, the go-to-market slide. Then, the week of the event, someone says you need a revenue model, and you add one. Each section gets rehearsed on its own and never gets tested against the section beside it.

The fix is unglamorous and costs nothing. Before the deck, say the whole thing as one sentence where every clause causes the next one.

We help this specific person with this expensive problem, we reach them through this channel because that’s where they already are, and they pay us this way, which works because this.

If that sentence needs an “and also” to hold together, the joint is loose. If saying it out loud makes you wince at one particular clause, that’s the clause the room will find. A slide can hide a gap. A single sentence can’t — it’s why I keep coming back to it, and why I’d rather hear a founder’s sentence than see their deck.

None of this requires you to be a better speaker. Some of the most compelling founders I’ve watched were visibly nervous the entire time and it didn’t matter at all, because the story underneath them held.

If you’re building something in Portugal and you’re anywhere near ready to say it out loud, come pitch. Or come sit in the audience for one evening and watch where the questions land — you’ll learn more about your own business from other people’s loose joints than from any amount of rehearsing your own.

I’ll be in the room, enjoying the silence.