Finding the Perfect Pitch

A.G., 33, is in a league of her own. She's a lawyer with a snake tattooed on her arm. She's an avid jock (snowboarding and biking) who graduated from Yale. And she was bored silly at UConn law school until she found her calling: civil rights. As a young lawyer, A.G. took landlords to court for evicting AIDS patients. She sued public officials for invasion of privacy. Her claim to fame: she drafted legislation that served as a model for the new federal privacy regulations governing the use of medical data by hospitals and insurance companies. She cofounded PrivaSource, in Waltham, Mass., to help health-care companies buy and sell patient-level information while protecting patient privacy.

Lucy, 37, is the big-company graduate. She earned her stripes as an engineer and sales star at large computer companies before taking the job of president at Chaoticom, in Hampton Falls, N.H. (The start-up provides a technology platform for compressing and resynthesizing images, videos, and music so that, for example, you can download a hot song to your cell phone inexpensively.) Her hope for Springboard? That it will prompt the investors she's been courting to "get off their butts and sign a check."

"I thought nothing else was important but those 10 minutes."

But for Lucy, A.G., and Shoba, boot camp marks the start of an arduous journey with lots of risks and no guaranteed rewards. The entrepreneurs can't forget that they're playing the VC game in a man's world. (The percentage of VC dollars flowing to female entrepreneurs is still paltry at 5%.) The women have just five weeks to perfect their pitch and convince this world that they hold the next billion-dollar market opportunity in the palm of their hand. All while running their companies.

At boot camp, Shoba, A.G., and Lucy each meet their main coaches, the people who will take the women under their wings and spend long hours helping them craft a 10-minute presentation. "It's an intense getting-to-know-you process," says Amy Millman, president of Springboard Enterprises. The New England forum is brimming with more than 100 volunteer VCs, bankers, lawyers, CPAs, executive recruiters, successful entrepreneurs, and business consultants. (And that doesn't count Springboard's network in Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York City, Dallas, and Washington, D.C.)

Springboard graduates like Jill Card are also on hand to provide their insights. Card, the founder and chairman of IBEX Process Technology, has raised $6.8 million. Once painfully shy, she shares how she finally overcame her stage fright. "The best advice I can give you is to imagine your audience naked -- 300 venture capitalists naked."

Scene II: Coaching, McKinsey & Co. offices, October 19, 2001. Three weeks to the VC forum.

"You guys rock!" says A.G.

The young cofounder of PrivaSource is sitting in a plush conference room inside the hallowed halls of the upper-crust Boston offices of McKinsey & Co., one of many Springboard sponsors that agreed to loan out their highly paid employees for a block of time. On this day, for the first and perhaps only time, more than a dozen of the Springboard women will receive 60 minutes of free tutoring from one of the most highly regarded consulting firms in the world.

A.G. is on the edge of her seat. After weeks of crafting her presentation and cranking out slides, she relishes this moment. The McKinsey consultants have been instructed to grade the entrepreneurs on the content and length of their presentations, on the quality of their slides, and on style (pitch, pacing, stance, body language, eye contact, and so on).

A.G. begins her pitch with an amusing anecdote showing how easy it is, with a little technology, to figure out someone's identity from supposedly private medical data. A cleverly created slide features the faces of some well-known people and their fictional ailments. The slide and story serve to grab the audience, providing a perfect segue into the entrepreneur's explanation of her company's solution to a pressing problem.

"Your style is great, so I won't mess with it," says McKinsey consultant Susan Mulder. A.G. is clearly comfortable in her own skin. After all, few female entrepreneurs show up at McKinsey's doorstep wearing army green pants, a black turtleneck, and a concealed tattoo. But the nonconformist A.G. can't ignore all business conventions. Specifically, she is struggling with the question that vexes every company founder that ever was: How big is my market, and what's my slice of it?

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