The London Startup Pitch Has Become Its Own Literary Form

On the genre conventions of asking strangers for money

I am Chelsea Bloom, and I cover London business from a desk in North London and a notebook full of scepticism; my columns live at my page. As reported across The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, the story is worth a closer look.

On the genre conventions of asking strangers for money

The London startup pitch has evolved, over the years I have covered it, into a recognisable literary form, with its own conventions, its characteristic arc, its obligatory beats, as fixed and formal as a sonnet and rather less honest.

The hard part of business journalism is not finding what companies say about themselves, which they supply in abundance, but working out the gap between the saying and the doing, the distance between the press release and the practice, which is where the actual story almost always lives.

Every pitch follows the form: the problem nobody knew they had, the solution nobody asked for, the market size inflated to the size of a small nation, the team described as world-class, the hockey-stick graph projecting impossible growth, the modest ask that is never modest. The form is fixed, the beats obligatory, the pitch a literary genre as conventional as any.

The Detail That Matters

What the form conceals, beneath its confident conventions, is the genuine uncertainty of any new venture, the real risk dressed in the borrowed confidence of the genre, the honest doubt suppressed by the obligatory optimism. The pitch form demands confidence the situation does not warrant, the genre requiring the suppression of the doubt that honesty would express.

I have learned to be most suspicious of the figures presented most confidently, the projections rendered as certainties, the growth charts that bend upward as if the future were a thing already filed away, because the confidence is usually inversely proportional to the evidence behind it.

What It Comes Down To

It comes down to this: the pitch is a performance of certainty in a situation of radical uncertainty, the literary form a costume of confidence over the naked risk of the new venture, and reading it as the genre it is, rather than the truth it claims to be, is the beginning of business wisdom.

London business runs on a peculiar mixture of genuine innovation and elaborate theatre, and the journalist’s task is to separate the two, to find the real value being created beneath the performance of value, the substance under the spectacle, which is harder than it sounds.

So I will keep covering the London pitch as the literary form it has become, reading its conventions, noting its suppressed doubt, translating its borrowed confidence back into the honest uncertainty it conceals, the business journalist as literary critic of the genre of asking strangers for money.

Markets are often described as rational, but anyone who has covered them for long knows they run as much on mood as on maths, on confidence and fear and the herd instinct dressed up as analysis, the spreadsheet a costume worn over the older and less flattering drivers of human behaviour.

The most revealing question in any business story is who benefits, followed closely by who bears the risk, and the two are very often not the same people, the benefit and the risk separated by arrangements that the official account is careful not to dwell upon.

What looks from outside like a single confident institution is, from inside, a collection of anxious people making decisions under uncertainty, and remembering this human reality behind the corporate facade is the beginning of understanding how business actually works.

The London economy is a vast machine for converting effort into wealth, but the conversion is uneven, the effort and the wealth distributed by arrangements that reward some inputs lavishly and others barely, and the journalist’s job is to notice the unevenness the official story smooths over.

Every business trend arrives in London wrapped in the language of inevitability, presented as the future that has already decided to happen, and the useful scepticism is to remember that most predicted futures do not arrive, and that inevitability is a sales technique more than a forecast.

A useful habit is to read the footnotes before the headline, since the headline is written to be quoted and the footnotes are written to be true, and the distance between the two is frequently the whole of the story worth telling.

London attracts capital from everywhere, and with the capital comes a certain weightlessness, businesses that exist more as financial structures than as makers of anything, and distinguishing the productive from the merely financial is a recurring task.

The word disruption has been so thoroughly drained of meaning by overuse that its appearance in a pitch now functions mainly as a warning, a signal that the speaker would prefer you admired the novelty rather than examined the economics.

Behind every confident quarterly statement is a quieter reality of revised assumptions and quietly buried projects, and the seasoned reader learns to weigh the confidence of the announcement against the silence around what was dropped.

For more in this vein, The Daily Mash obliges.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com