Every founder has a ten-minute pitch. Almost nobody has a sixty-second one, and the sixty-second one is the one that gets used. In the corridor after a talk. In the first thirty seconds of a fund meeting, before the partner has opened the deck. At the bar at a demo day, when someone asks what you do. The minute is not a trailer for the real pitch. It is the pitch, and the deck is what you send afterwards to people who already want it.
Start with the one word
Before you write a sentence, decide on the one word you want the room to still have the next morning. Not your category. Not your feature. The word that makes someone say "oh, that" when they describe you to a colleague a week later. For an avocado tester at CES it was avocado. For most founders it takes an hour to find, and it is the hour that matters most.
If you cannot name the word, you do not have a minute yet. You have a list.
The first ten seconds buy the next fifty
A room decides whether to listen within ten seconds. Investors do it faster, because they have heard four versions of your story that week. So the first sentence cannot be your name, your company name and the year you were founded. It has to be the thing that makes them lean in: the problem in one line that they recognize, a number that does not sound right, or the one word itself.
Then, and only then, who you are.
One ask, one sentence
The minute ends with what you want, and it is one sentence. "We are raising a seed round of two million to get to a thousand paying customers." Not a paragraph about the market, not three options. One sentence, said looking at the person, and then you stop talking. Founders lose more rooms by continuing after the ask than by any mistake before it.
What goes between
Between the first ten seconds and the ask there is room for exactly three things: what you do, why now, and why you. Each in one or two sentences. If you find yourself explaining how it works, you have gone a level too deep for a minute; that is what the follow-up conversation is for, and the minute exists to earn it.
No slides, on purpose
A pitch that needs slides cannot be given in a corridor, and most of the moments that matter happen in corridors. Build the minute to stand on its own. If it works without slides, it works better with them. If it only works with them, the slides were doing the pitching and you were reading.
Then say it out loud, three times
A minute written down is not a minute. It becomes one when you say it to a room, hear where they stop listening, and say it again. That is the whole design of our training day: you pitch cold before we teach a thing, again before lunch, and once more at the end. The difference between the first and the third is what you take home, and both are on film.