Office slang: “step” when form meets substance

“The idea behind our venture is simple, it’s an exotic dance Wonderbox for single mothers. We already won the Inno’startup competition in Choisy-le-Roi with this project. » This mock startup presentation comes to us from Pitch French Tech, a great tool that automatically generates compact company presentations or “pitches”. Well-orchestrated, the pitch can be the quintessential, final stage of a company’s sometimes “boozy” official speech.

In the attention economy, where Google engineers put our ability to concentrate at the level of a goldfish (about nine seconds), a pitch is a very short presentation meant to pique the interest of whoever is listening. It is a topo, a summary that, of course, goes directly to the point, but knows how to handle the verb. As the poet Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) said, “What we imagine well is clearly stated and the words to say it come out easily. » (Canto I, poetic art).

For starters, the pitch, from five to ten minutes, will accordingly present the project to investors. The “elevator pitch”—or “elevator pitch” or “elevator speech” because you have to convince yourself during the elevator ride—doesn’t even have time to be pretty, since it takes less than a minute. Thus, it simply includes all of the following elements: what problem the company is addressing (with a specific number to describe that problem), what the solution is, product, market size, business model, competitors, and financial projections.

In HR, a job candidate is usually asked to “do” their career path when they are asked to introduce themselves: they have to tell a rhythmic story, not the CV we already know, in five. minutes. For example, he’ll embellish certain anecdotes from his past, gloss over childhood dreams, or an arrogant quote — like the one you see two paragraphs above.

In the middle of the cinema

We also see this term in the world of cinema: as in the world of business, summarizing a film in three lines can seal its fate, or remind the screenwriter that there is still time to turn around in the face of unoriginality. Or a page with no tail and no result head. On this topic, do not hesitate to consult the excellent “film generator Christian Clavier”, who creates fictitious scenarios for French comedies.