Insider's View of a Startup Jury Deliberation Process

Techstars is launching their seminal startup acceleration batch in a week. They had an elaborate curation process where Ray Newal (MD Techstars India) and the rest of the Techstars team identified about 20 startups from a group of over 1000 that applied. That process culminated in a 2-day jury selection process with a diverse set of 8 jury members to help Techstars select the Final 10.

 The jury was composed of a couple of entrepreneurs, a few VCs, a few corporate executives, and the Techstars Investment team. We had a sole female jury member as well. We started by learning about the Techstars investment philosophy and the mix of startups they were aiming to get in this batch. Since most of the startups were going to be early stage, they wanted strong founding teams solving interesting real-world problems. However, they were also keen to have a lot of diversity in the cohort – some moonshots, some “predictable” ones, different degrees of maturity, deep tech vs. a clear business model etc. In a sense, it was no different than a "portfolio" approach across the cohort.

We also had the benefit of folks like Jason Seats (US based Global Techstars CIO) on the jury who had a global view of early stage startups. Fortunately, from an India ecosystem point of view, it was heartening to hear that both the founders and the quality of ideas were very comparable to global startups that typically pitch to Techstars.

Each startup started with a 1-2 min video demonstration followed by a 20 minutes to present via a video conference (5 min pitch followed by a 15 min Q&A session). The following are my personal observations on the group dynamics of this startup jury deliberation process.

I suspect that this is probably similar to many other large group-based decision making processes in hiring panels, promotion committees, sports team selection and many other areas. My intent is primarily to help startups or others pitching their cases to large groups. I believe it might also be interesting for prospective jury members.

1.    Be prepared to stand out!

The startups had little time impress a large panel with little context. The ones that succeeded quickly articulated the problem, why it mattered, and they were the best team to solve that problem. If they couldn’t get to this in the first 2 minutes, the probably had lost the plot. Once the basic premise was established, the best ones offered the pertinent supporting evidence – customer research and insights, product demonstration, traction, team credibility and more. Last but not the least, the better startups ended strongly with why the world will become a better place through their work.

One thing to remember is the committee is going through 20 pitches and needs something to remember you by. Everything that you say or do matters – your passion, body language, communication transitions between team members, the team chemistry, the conviction in the idea, the understanding of the domain, and your ability to interact quickly and effectively with all the jury members.

Takeaway: Get to the point; be authentic and memorable.

2.    Diversity of the Panel – you can’t please everyone!

The strong diversity on panel meant that everyone was looking different things. Some were focused on team; others on the uniqueness and/or viability of idea, yet others on the customer understanding and validation, etc. Basically, as a startup, you can’t please everyone. You have to pitch your core strengths and secondarily eliminate the top 2-3 objections. Lastly, in the Q&A, you need to be clear on who is going to front what kind of questions so the transitions are smooth. Metaphorically speaking, you will get selected based on “Promoters” who loved your story (apropos Net Promoter Score) and would evangelize you in the panel discussion. The “neutrals” rarely mattered and you need 3-4x more promoters than detractors. One interesting insight that Jason shared was companies that have done the best for Techstars historically, tended to be those that had the highest standard deviation on the scores at the jury stage. We actually computed variance in scores and stack ranked the startups as one of the signals (see anonymized scores below). C are the companies and S are the independent jury members.

As high successful entrepreneur and VC, Marc Andreessen has said, the most successful ideas are those that don’t have consensus and are right!

Takeaway: Aim to get lots of strong believers rather than a good “average”. Don’t sweat the neutrals or the detractors. I'm also reminded of Kevin Kelly's famous article 1000 true fans is better than 100,000s of average followers.

3.    Domain or Functional Expertise:

While the divergence of scores may be a good indicator, as Ray Dalio, has mentioned in his book Principles – one needs to have a “believability” weight for each decision maker or influencer. If someone has a deep expertise in a certain area, their vote and insights will and did account for a bigger impact on the final selection process.

As a startup, you may not know who is the “expert” on your domain so it is important not just pitch at a 10,000 feet level. One needs to assume that there’s at least one domain expert in the committee and go deep into the details of the product, the technology, and the customer insight or the business model. It is perfectly fine to lose some of the audience for a few minutes (a slide or two) since winning over the "expert" will give a lot of credibility to your pitch.

Takeaway: Zoom in and Zoom out; don't just stay at the high level.

4.    Attempt to identify and influence the influencers

Often, in juries, as in any large group, there will be influencers. They will impact the overall view of a startup. Your role as a presenter is to ensure that you have planted enough seeds to convince different people about different aspects of your startup. As a facilitator, it is important to ensure that everyone gets to share their point of view and yet the natural “leadership” and influencing does happen.

Takeaway: Take on the strongest jury members and convince them. Some cues to identify them would be basis the tuned in listeners or folks that are making subtle but important points.

5.    Luck and Serendipity do play a big role

All said and done, luck does play a role in this process. I’ve recommended Michael Mobussin’s book “The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing” in the past. Michael would argue that just because you got selected does not mean you were the best skilled company and vice versa. Even extraordinary companies like AirBNB were rejected almost 50 times by professional investors before getting their first round of funding!

There are a lot of factors beyond just the pitch. Even the best group decision making is not the most efficient or effective process, so put your best foot forward and let the rest happen.

Takeaway: Focus on what you can control and what you can influence. Ignore the rest!

Overall, I had a great experience to be a jury member for the TechStars India seminal cohort. My best wishes to the Final 10 selected companies that will be announced at the end of January.

Have you ever pitched your company, yourself or your team to a large jury? Also, if you have been a jury member, did any of the observations I cite make sense? Please do share your thoughts and comments on how to make this a more effective and efficient process for both sides!

Special thanks to Ray Newal and Rajesh Navar for reviewing a draft of this article and sharing their valuable feedback.

(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. Find his other blogs on LinkedIn and tweets at @amitsomani)