For ten years, my job was to get people to tell me the truth, clearly, under pressure, often when they didn't want to. Interview rooms don't leave much room for waffle. You learn fast what works and what doesn't.

1. Lead with the point, not the build-up

In an interview room, you don't get to warm up for ten minutes before you say the important thing. The same is true in a pitch. Investors and customers decide whether they're listening in the first thirty seconds. If your pitch opens with your origin story before it opens with what you actually do, you've already lost half the room.

2. Watch for the moment someone stops listening

Reading a room isn't a soft skill, it's a practical one. You can see the exact moment someone's attention drops: eyes glaze, posture shifts, the nodding turns automatic. Good pitchers notice this in real time and adjust, rather than ploughing through a script regardless of whether anyone's still with them.

3. Clarity builds trust faster than confidence does

People often think confidence is about sounding certain. It's not. It's about being clear enough that the other person doesn't have to work to understand you. Ambiguity, even confident ambiguity, reads as evasive. Founders who over-polish their pitch language often lose more trust than the ones who explain things plainly.

4. Silence is a tool, not a gap to fill

New founders tend to fill every pause. But a well-placed pause after a key point gives it room to land. In an interview, silence often gets you further than another question. In a pitch, it does the same thing: it tells the room that what you just said actually mattered.

The takeaway

None of this is really about pitching. It's about communication under pressure, which is exactly what a pitch is. The skills transfer more directly than people expect, and once you see the pattern, you start noticing it everywhere — in negotiations, in team meetings, in the way you explain your business to a stranger at a networking event.

If you want to work through your own pitch with this lens, that's exactly what a session with me looks like.