One of China’s biggest investors teaches you the perfect pitch

Last week, I wrote a quick summary of two core points about pitching to investors that Chinese investor Xu Xiaoping shared at a Sina startup event. But since then, Sina has released the full transcript of Xu’s speech, and there’s a lot more value to be gained from it.

So what did one of China’s biggest investors say about startup pitches? Below is our translation of his speech in full:

Hello everyone! I’m happy to have this opportunity to chat casually about how to do a pitch that gets money, a pitch that can convince investors.

First of all, you need to understand that you’re not talking to an investor, essentially you’re talking to a client and a user and the market. As a founder you need to understand that when you’re talking to an investor, he’s thinking about the users behind him and whether or not they’ll use your product.

So once you know that, what’s next is to figure out how to impress users and the market.

In this explosive information age with millions of apps in the app store, and millions of enterprise accounts on WeChat, there are lots of WeChat businesses and lots of entrepreneurs. What do you have that’s going to make you win the market?

What the market cares about is very limited. It’s like marketing: you can talk all day long, but if you fail to impress customers then they won’t buy your product. In the same way, when a new product is announced, sometimes it causes a sensation, but a lot of times a valuable product still can’t arouse the interest of the market, and that’s how your pitch fails.

So when you pitch you must rapidly grab the listener, the customer, market and investor. Not being able to pitch is a common problem with Chinese entrepreneurs. Why? Our culture doesn’t encourage people to show off, sell themselves, or put ourselves front and center. Back when I was starting New Oriental I saw this, students going abroad applying for scholarships had to sell themselves: give it to me and not him. Now I see a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs that have great plans, great projects, or great products, but they can’t sell themselves.

But towers are built from the ground up. First you’ve gotta get the pitch right. I think there are two key elements of a good pitch.

A good pitch comes first from a good name, and if you can’t even come up with a clear name, then you’ve already half-failed. Or to put it another way, if you’ve got a good name you’ve already half-succeeded, with a good name you don’t even need to make a pitch. ‘What I’m doing is steel-finding, stone-finding, wood-finding, ore-finding,’ a series of ‘findings’ are found [in the name]. New Oriental never had a chance to pitch, because back then there were no investors, and we didn’t need them. I ran into [TV presenter] Cui Yongyuan and said I’m from New Oriental, and do you know what he said? He said, oh you’re that company that taught that guy to take the TOEFL, and even though he couldn’t speak English, he got into Harvard, a high-end school. Yeah, “high end, Harvard, can’t even speak English,” that’s a great pitch!