Alan Cumming, the British actor, has become internationally famous through his Hollywood role as Nightcrawler, the superhero who helps save the world in the X Men films.
He is now playing a minor role in the salvation of European entrepreneurs by letting his London apartment be used for the Seedcamp party, ending a week of activities for 20 budding start-up teams.
Seedcamp has a long list of famous supporters, including the founders of Skype, the global internet telephony service, and Fon, the world’s largest wifi network supplier, as well as senior executives from Google, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com, came to the event today to share some of his advice at a lunchtime question and answer session.
Among his pearls of wisdom was the recommendation to always raise more money than you think you need and to pitch to the venture capitalists you are least interested in first so that at least you can learn from the experience, even if you don’t get the funding.
For the 20 start-up teams, who hope to walk away with €50,000 of funding, today was the all-important pitching contest, where they got 15 minutes to sell themselves to the Seedcamp investors.
The winners, who will get a further three months of mentoring support as well as the cash, will be announced on this blog on Friday.
In the mean time, here are a few pitching tips from discussions with mentors.
Firstly, you should keep your presentation tight. Investors have a limited attention span and they need time to ask questions.
Secondly, investors are really interested in the team behind a business. They like to see people committed to the process, so it is definitely not good if your co-founder felt they had something better to do than come to the pitch.
It is also always good to mention if you already have solid customers paying for the service.
Finally, if you are asking for €50,000 for a 10 per cent stake in your business, as Seedcamp participants have been doing, you had better have a good explanation if you tell your prospective investors that your business is really worth many times that amount.
Of course this might be a good double bluff, persuading prospective investors that they are getting a bargain by paying so little for a considerable slice of equity.
