pitch-practice-coach

---
name: pitch-practice-coach
description: Use when a founder needs to rehearse a pitch or prepare for investor questions. Triggers on "practice my pitch", "mock investor meeting", "what will VCs ask me", "help me prep for a partner meeting", "investor Q&A drill", "I freeze on hard questions", "rehearse my deck". Runs realistic rehearsal and objection drills.
---

# Pitch Practice Coach

The deck does not raise the round; the conversation does. Founders lose deals not
on the slides but on the third follow-up question, when they get defensive,
ramble, or reveal they have not thought it through. This skill rehearses the room
until the founder is calm and tight.

## When to use this skill

Use it after [[pitch-deck-builder]] and before any live meeting, and re-run it
before each Tier-1 fund from [[investor-targeting]]. The warm-up meetings in the
pipeline are live practice; this is the dress rehearsal. Run at least three full
mock sessions before a Tier-1 partner meeting - one is a read-through, not a
rehearsal.

## Drill the opening

- Rehearse the first 90 seconds until they are automatic: company, the problem,
  the insight, the hero metric. Most meetings are won or lost here.
- Practice the two-minute, ten-minute, and thirty-minute versions. You never
  know how much time you actually get. A partner meeting is typically 45-60
  minutes and the presentation rarely survives past minute 10-15 before
  questions take over - budget roughly two-thirds of prep time for Q&A, not
  slides.
- Read the [[fundraising-narrative]] aloud. If it does not survive your own ear,
  it will not survive a partner's.

## Run the hard Q&A

Simulate the investor as a skeptic, not a fan. Drill answers to the questions
that actually get asked:

- "Why won't [incumbent] just build this?"
- "Walk me through your retention cohorts." (And then: "Why does month 3 dip?")
- "What's your CAC and payback, and how do you know it holds at scale?"
- "Why is now the right time, specifically?"
- "What has to be true for this to be a $1B company?"
- "What's the biggest risk, and what would change your mind?"
- "Why are you raising this much? What does it buy?"
- "What did you get wrong last quarter?"

For each: a crisp 30-second answer, the evidence behind it, and a graceful
bridge back to the story. An answer that runs past 60 seconds is a ramble -
cut it in rehearsal, because live it will run longer.

The founder must also know their 5-7 core numbers cold - revenue/MRR, growth
rate, burn, runway, CAC and payback, retention. A pause of more than about two
seconds on any of them reads as not knowing the business; drill until each is
instant.

## Coach the delivery

- **Answer, then support.** Lead with the direct answer; do not narrate your way
  to it. Investors read rambling as not knowing.
- **Name the risk first.** When the hard question is coming, beat them to it.
  Self-awareness builds more trust than a flawless story.
- **"I don't know" is allowed** - paired with how you would find out. Bluffing a
  number you cannot defend ends the meeting.
- **Manage the energy.** Land the insight and the ask with conviction; do not
  trail off or over-apologize.

## Feedback loop

After each rehearsal, score: Was the opening tight? Which question caused a
flinch? Where did you ramble or get defensive? Drill the worst answer three
times before the next live meeting.

## Anti-patterns

- Rehearsing only the deck, never the Q&A - the Q&A is the meeting.
- Defensiveness under pushback; investors probe to see how you handle pressure.
- Bluffing a number you cannot back up.
- Memorizing a script so rigid that one interruption derails you.
- Treating one read-through as prep - the flinches only show up under live
  skeptical questioning, in multiple sessions.

## Quality bar

The founder is meeting-ready only when: the 90-second opening lands identically
on three consecutive runs; every question in the bank has a direct answer of 30
seconds or less with named evidence; all 5-7 core metrics come back in under
two seconds; at least one hard question was answered with a candid "I don't
know, here's how I'd find out" without visible flinch; and the last mock
session produced no new items for the drill list.

## Deliverable

A drilled opening (90-second + scaled versions), a tough-question bank with a
crisp answer and evidence for each, a delivery-coaching note on the founder's
specific tics, and a ranked list of the answers to drill before the next meeting.