Will Young, director of Zappos Labs, breaks down the two-minute pitch: open with a relatable story showing the problem, explain why you care, then name your market size. He cites a Teach-for-America team that showed substitute teachers sleeping in class, then revealed a $4 billion market. Avoid vague TAM claims like "everyone with two legs."
I mean, so you do a lot of seed investing. My first question was just like, what's a good 2-minute pitch? They all have to do them. What's a good 2-minute pitch look like to you?
Yeah, I heard Tim talk about you guys are spending 10 weeks preparing for 2 minutes. That sounds super stressful. I wouldn't think it's that extreme, but those 2 minutes are pretty important. For Vegas Tech Fund, we don't really invest in one domain. So we're open to retail, B2B, SaaS, whatever. But I think what's important is because we're willing to see businesses that we don't understand, that you get me excited about a business I have no idea about very quickly. I'll give an example. We were talking about— I do some mentoring for some Teach for America alumni who are building social enterprises in the teaching space. And I don't know anything about that other than I went to high school. And they opened up with, here's— Some pictures and videos of substitute teachers sleeping in classrooms that students are taking. So, you know, they kind of kick off, it's kind of light, it's funny, and they're like, we want to fix how bad substitute teachers are. So I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. You know, it's like, I can see that being a problem, but I'm not super excited yet.
We've all had terrible—
We've all had terrible substitute teachers, right? And then the third line was, the leading provider of substitute teachers in America is a $4 billion business. We're taking them down. I'm like, I'm excited about that, right? So those 3 things, a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of context, and quickly, what's my market opportunity? That was really— that kind of blew my mind.
When's the market opportunity get too big? I'm sure you hear some crazy, like, the total addressable market is all of transportation, or all of logistics.
I think if you're painting that pic— if you're a really early startup, and you're painting, like, my total addressable market opportunity is everyone with 2 legs, It just shows that you're not focused at all. I think even if— I wasn't in any early Uber pitches, unfortunately, but Uber, in the early days of pitching, when I've talked to investors, they weren't saying, we're gonna take over the taxi industry. They're like, we're gonna kill black cars. We're gonna reinvent how people get black cars. And that was still big enough for a lot of people to be excited about. And now, I know people in San Francisco that take Uber instead of Muni now, because it's so cheap.
Yeah, I felt silly this morning. I arrived, At Caltrain, and there were all these taxi cabs, so I called an Uber to come and get me. It's crazy, right?
And you feel kind of bad because you see them all giving you stink eye as you walk past, jumping into the Lexus or the Prius. But yeah, that happens.
So what's the biggest train wreck pitch you've gotten?
I think one of the things you have a good opportunity being in the Bay Area is go to a lot of pitch comp— not even competitions, like meetups where people just practice pitching. And you'd be surprised, even when people have 10 minutes to pitch, and the panel at the end of it, how many people's like, so what is your business? Because people might spend too long on the narrative of the storytelling of teachers in America are broken. We all need to band together to fix it. And you're like, yeah, that's a problem. It's like, I still have no idea what you guys are doing. So make sure that you— and that seems like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how many people's like, at the end of a pitch, I have no idea what you do as a startup.
