The Problem with Pitch Competitions

I have attended many many pitch competitions. Heck, I’ve even hosted them and championed for them. I don’t think pitch competitions are all bad at all. They can be a great way to pull founders out of the woodwork and to receive helpful feedback. Pitch competitions can offer you a little competitive pressure to step up your game and meet talent and supporters. 

My problem with pitch competitions is that they often signal the wrong thing to emerging founders. 

Typically, in pitch competitions, there are a few big winners - and a lot of non-winners - i.e losers. No matter how you sugar coat it, when you don’t win, you lose. 

I spent a great deal of time at Harvard University studying entrepreneurship across all thirteen schools on campus. I had a role in the Office of the President and Provost in a small unit tasked with making Harvard a more innovative place for teaching and learning.

I was really curious to better understand student entrepreneurship in the social impact sector so I hired a team of students to help me collect and analyze data from Harvard Business School, Harvard Graduate School of Education, the iLabs, and the Kennedy School of Government. What I learned was that there were hundreds of students across all pockets of Harvard who cared deeply about using their intelligence and academic training to do good at scale by launching a startup organization. There was a ton of interest in social impact entrepreneurship on campus. 

I also learned something that surprised me. I discovered that there was a three-week window in early April (right about now, actually), when several big prize competitions are held on campus. There were thousands of dollars of funding going to, essentially, a handful of teams across all of Harvard during a couple of frenzied week of pitch competitions on campus. 

When you take a giant step backwards, these pitch competitions are unintentionally sending a rejection message to a whole cohort of emerging entrepreneurs.

Often winning a prize or getting an award is just enough to nudge you to continue on your startup journey. It’s certainly enough to leverage to build momentum externally. 

Entrepreneurship is not an innate skill or talent. It is a muscle to be developed and practiced. You can’t learn entrepreneurship in a book or from a smart professor. You need to experience entrepreneurship to learn it.

It felt like these pitch competitions made entrepreneurship into an all-or-nothing game. Students would work on their ideas all year and, come end of April, they’d give up on them if they didn’t get any positive recognition at these high-profile events.

I designed and launched a new fund, at Harvard, called “Operation Impact,” which was fundamentally set up to scaffold and structure entrepreneurial growth. It was an active learning model for how to explore entrepreneurship first-hand. It was inspired, in many ways, by MIT’s Sandbox Fund, which also gives out small amounts of money more frequently to student builders. 

I learned, while leading Operation Impact, that $200 is the smallest amount of money you can give to students that is fundamentally useful in helping them build their ideas - and is also not insulting. Instead of giving out $10K+ in prizes to teams, we awarded loads of $200 - $1000 awards every quarter. In order to get more funding, you had to demonstrate that you were learning, refining your ideas, and were committed to keep working on them. By the third quarter, it was obvious who was picking up speed and ready for more resources and support. 

If you really want to teach entrepreneurship, pitch competitions are not the right tool for the job.

I recently saw an institution put in a great deal of effort to increase the number of female entrepreneurs on campus. The cohort experience culminated with a pitch competition with a cash prize for the first place awardee. After all of that work building a community of founders and helping first-time founders take their initial steps towards building, I worried that the pitch competition signaled to 90% of these women founders “no,” instead of “yes.” What would have happened if all of the women founders won awards and got feedback that would encourage them to keep working on their ideas? Maybe we should gate the experience a bit later on for these women so they persevered on their ideas a bit longer.

What if, instead of pitch competitions, we hosted showcase events? What if we did a high-profile demo day or flash talks or really anything that gave everyone a chance to polish up their ideas, share them, and get feedback? What if we were to think of these moments as “debutante ball moments” when we introduce our newest members of the founder tribe to the ecosystem?

I don’t fundamentally have a problem with pitch competitions. I also don’t think everyone should pursue their startup ideas or dive head-first into a career in entrepreneurship. I wonder, though, if we are prematurely pushing talent out of our pipeline with so many prized events. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get more creative, collectively, about finding ways to signal “YES! Keep going!”

We need an army of top talent innovating right now to solve some of the world’s most daunting challenges. Let’s get more people into the top of our founder funnel - not less.