StartupSac Warm-Up Pitch is an event designed to help near investment-ready startups hone their presentations skills and pitch decks. A cohort of Sacramento region startups is selected to attend an Investment Pitch Preparation workshop and then compete for a prize package in front of a panel of judges and an audience of investors, mentors and other key players in Sacramento startup ecosystem. A First Place, Second Place and Audience Choice are selected and awarded a non-cash prize packages of services that will help them advance their company. The presenting startups do not offer investment opportunities–this is a Demo event only. The events help participants develop presentation skills, provide valuable feedback for future pitches to investors, and connect startups with mentors and coaches.
Objective
Improve Sacramento’s economic trajectory through innovation by improving the viability, visibility, and scalability of Sacramento startups by holding a series of community startup pitch competition events each year.
The Need
A 2018 report by the Brookings Institution found significant gaps in our innovation ecosystem – that Sacramento lags our peers in business dynamism and that to improve our economic trajectory requires actions to help young innovative firms start and scale.
Founders and investors report a need for more pitch events in the region to better prepare startups for pitching to investors for funding, to gain access to high level advisors in order to help them scale and succeed. Additionally, many startups lack connections with experienced advisors and mentors that can provide invaluable insight, guidance, and experience.
The Impact for Startups
Based on feedback from an initial pitch event held in December 2018, participants received invaluable advice, not only on presenting to investors but on their business plans as well. This event was literally transformative.
“The whole process has completely changed my business life and our business. It has been just stunning…we got access to some really high level advisors. To hear their feedback has just opened doors for us. We’re looking at things different. We have access to experts who know our business, our market inside and out and they are able to help guide us through all sorts of weeds that otherwise would have taken too much time.” ~ Jocelyn Munroe, Founder and CEO, eHandoff, presenter at December event.
“Keep putting on more events like the pitch competition. That was great. More events like that where we can showcase what we’ve got going on.” ~ Donte Morris, CoFounder HoopMaps
Benefits/ROI
The benefits of this project to the Sacramento community include:
- Improving the pitch quality of Sacramento startups and thereby increasing their odds of being funded and scalable in the future.
- Providing greater visibility to the community-at-large about the kinds of startups Sacramento is developing.
- Raise awareness of investors, both local and external to Sacramento, about the Sacramento startup and innovation scene
Past Events
StartupSac launched our first Warm-Up Pitch event in December 2018. Since that initial event, we’ve organized 3 additional events. Through these events we’ve provided two dozen local startups with the opportunity to hone their investor pitches and connect with investors. You can read more about each event including participating companies and winners in the summaries below.
