A Virtual Elevator

Last week, I had a post about how much easier it was to capture someone's attention using a new medium.- in that post, the medium was blogging. Well, over the weekend, it seems that has already become passe. Instead, the newest thing is getting your "elevator pitch" onto a VC's ipod via del.icio.us, feedburner, and podcasting.

This new idea was the result of Fred Wilson's post on how to set up a feed to auto-download to your ipod. As a music buff, he asked his reader's to tag songs that they thought he'd be interested in, but it only took a day or two for an entrepreneur to figure out that access to a VC's ears was a valuable opportunity, that shouldn't be wasted. So instead of tagging a new song, Eric, the CTO at Feedburner, recorded his elevator pitch, and put it in the queue.

Fred liked the idea so much, he went ahead and set up a new tag, "fred'selevatorpitch" just for this type of idea. And much like any good idea, it was soon copied by David Hornik ("ventureblogpitch") and Rick Segal ("rick'svcpitch"). So, a great chance to get your company in front of three VC's, something that previously may have taken weeks or even months.

Another thing I realized while browsing the tags above - del.icio.us is another way to screen your VC's. For instance - looking at Fred's account, you can see a lot of what he bookmarks is related to tagging, rss, or blogs. This starts to give you some insight into the types of technologies and markets he's interested in. Obviously, as a prolific blogger, you could get a lot of this out of his posts, but one thing I saw when browsing his tags was the "ajax" tab. So although he hasn't mentioned it specifically, you could draw the conclusion that he'd be interested in pitches that talk about making web sites more user-friendly with rich interaction.

The positive side of this is that entrepreneurs can learn more about VC's before spending time trying to pitch to them. It's not as good as the conversations that happen in blogs, but for a VC that doesn't have the inclination to post everyday, its an easy way to show the things that they are currently interested in.