Jonatan M Rasmussen

The “Dinner Party Asshole” test is a solution to a common problem: Startups often struggle at pitching their team, even though for the earliest stage companies, it’s incredibly important to do it well to raise capital — as I’ve described it below Pre-seed- Bet on the team 👨‍💻 Seed- Bet on the product 📱 Series A- Bet on the traction 🏒 Series B- Bet on the revenue 💸 Series C- Bet on the unit economics 💰 To figure out if you are properly pitching yourself in your team, run the thought experiment of describing yourselves at a dinner party. If you are pitching yourself hard, then if you are a kind human, you will turn red and blush with wild embarrassment. The reason is that a proper pitch includes many of your credentials, your achievements, the ways in which you and your team are highly unique, and we simply don’t talk like this at dinner parties. And yet this is exactly what you should do when you talk to investors, partners, customers, and potential employees. Be the dinner party jerk, pitch yourself hard. Don’t hold back. Your shyness and cordiality is not helping. I find that most founders tend to focus, primarily on describing their idea to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve heard thousands of “elevator pitches” and they generally focus on the idea and not the team, the market, differentiation, or anything else. And they downplay their achievements or omit them. Of course what you emphasize depends on your background. It’s often described that there are repeat founders and first time founders, but furthermore, there’s another axis, which is about obvious credentialing versus not. For first time founders that are starting a gaming company, for instance, but have already spent years at a top company in the field, a quick modification to the elevator pitch, mentioning that, is both beneficial and quite obvious. But what do you do, you’re an uncredentialed first time founder? Then the question becomes, what is your “earned secret“ behind the idea? Having a pithy story about how you were a Shopify seller, and that’s how you got to building any commerce product, is incredibly helpful. And if you have some metrics or an observation about the market that’s non-obvious, showing your expertise in the field, is even more valuable. If you have various credentials either professional, or academic or open source, achievements, it might be worth working those in even if not directly related. The other very awkward thing is to use facts and figures to describe yourself. If in your previous work, you worked on an app that served millions of people, or for your current company, you recently launched and got your first 10,000 users, you should save these numbers. Any traction and any validation is incredibly helpful proving your case. And of course, this is another thing that would make you a dinner party jerk. You might be going through a moment of introspection now and asking why am I like this? Why do I downplay achievements when I should be amping them up? My answer to this, is conformity. In real life, we often subconsciously conform to the people around us. If you go off at a friendly gathering about all the cool stuff you’ve done, and why you’re going to be great, there’s a fear that you’re exaggerating the differences between yourself and others. There’s a fun theory from evolutionary psychology that shyness is an evolved trait to keep us safe in a world where we grew up and tribes of a few hundred people, and a few wrong words might follow us around for our lifetimes. This is also my theory for why people are reluctant to engage on social media and share their knowledge, when it’s obvious that it might be very helpful to them professionally. TLDR; there’s pitch mode and dinner party mode. Learn to turn the former mode on!