Ask a founder how they feel before a pitch and you hear the same list. A heart rate you can hear. A voice that goes thin. Hands that do not know where to go. A pitch you knew by heart that morning, gone. And then the conclusion: I am not a natural.
Your body is doing its job
To the oldest part of your brain, a pitch looks a lot like danger: a group of people, all looking at you, all judging. So your body does what it does in danger. It speeds up. Adrenaline, a faster heart, shorter breath, sharper focus. None of that is a malfunction. The same response that makes your hands shake is the one that makes you alert, quick and present. The question is not how to switch it off. It is what to point it at.
What it does to sixty seconds
Nerves mostly show up as speed. You rush, so the one line that matters goes by before anyone hears it. You fill silences with filler words, because a pause feels like falling. Your eyes go to the floor, the screen or the exit sign. The room reads all of that before it hears a word, and reads it as: this person is not sure. You may be completely sure. It does not matter. The body speaks first.
Slow is the counter
Most of what helps comes down to one thing: slowing down on purpose. Not everywhere, in three places. After your first line, stop for a full second. Before your number, stop. Before your ask, stop. A pause feels like an hour on stage and looks like confidence from the chairs. The gap between what it feels like and what it looks like is the whole trick.
The night before
Do not rewrite the pitch. Rewriting the night before means you walk on with a version you have never said out loud. Say the one you have twice, standing, and stop. Fix your first sentence word for word. Then sleep.
In the corridor
Stand, do not sit, and walk a little if you can. Your body has energy to spend, so let it spend some before you are on. Say your first line once, quietly. Breathe out longer than you breathe in, three or four times. Decide where your hands go. Then pick one person in the room to give your first sentence to. Not the whole room. One person.
When it goes wrong anyway
At some point you will lose a line. Everybody does. The room does not know what you meant to say; it only knows what you do next. Stop. Look at your one person. Say the next thing you remember. Most of the time nobody notices, and when they do, what they see is that you recovered, which is worth more than never having slipped.
Practice the nerves, not only the words
You cannot practice nerves away by reading your pitch on the train. Nerves are about being watched, so the practice has to be watched too. That is why the first module of our day is Nerve, and why everyone pitches before we teach anything. You stand up, nerves and all, then learn what your body is doing, then stand up again. By the third round the room is no longer a stranger, and neither is the feeling.