Abstract:

An entrepreneurial pitch is a brief description of the value proposition of a company. This is a way to draw the attention of potential investors (Daly, Davy, 2016). Attracting investors is a crucially important part of early start-up development, as entrepreneurs are generally heavily resource-constrained (Clingingsmith et al., 2023). Since pitching plays such a significant part of early resource acquisition, it is important to delve into the mechanisms that make pitches interesting and convincing to investors.

There is a body of research pertaining to the influence of psychological factors on potential investors’ assessment of business pitches. There is also a strand of research that concentrates on the rational factors that shape the investors’ assessment of business projects. This paper is an attempt to systematically bridge these two distinct strands of research. The intersection of the two may be a fruitful area of research.

This paper strives to contribute to the development of a link between those two strands of research. It is an attempt to explain some seemingly non-rational factors in assessment of start-up pitches by plausibly linking them to known specific rational business project assessment criteria. If the link between those groups of factors actually exists, it can be also used to generate hypotheses of new, previously untested proxy metrics, based on the known specific rational business project assessment criteria.