2025 Mentor Captains: Tiffany Bisconer

#VM25 Mentor Captain, Tiffany Bisconer, had some great words of wisdom to share!! We are so thankful we had her as part of our Mentor Captain team this year. 🌟

❓”How do you typically help founders refine their investor pitches?”

🎤 I typically start by helping founders get clear on two things: who they’re pitching to, and what they want out of it. Investor pitches can feel like a high-stakes verbal obstacle course, especially for first-time founders. The pressure to say everything often leads to saying nothing memorably. So we begin by accepting the foundational truth that you won’t get to tell the whole story right away, just the most powerful parts of it. Then, we dig into those parts together with the overarching objective to craft a narrative that aligns a founder’s personal conviction with market opportunity.

The goal of a pitch isn’t to give an investor all the answers. It’s to spark enough interest and clarity that they want to keep the conversation going. The best pitches are the ones that show you’ve done the work, built a credible strategy, and can communicate that with conviction, supportive data, and humanity. Done well, a pitch becomes more than an isolated transaction, it’s a moment of real connection.

❓”What common mistakes do you see first-time founders make when pitching?”

🎤 I wouldn’t call them mistakes so much as growing pains, but they can definitely get in the way. The biggest issue I typically see is when founders miss the sweet spot between dreaming big and grounding that dream in reality. Some go all-in on their product love letters by talking about features, roadmaps, and futuristic tech without ever naming the market or how they’ll make money. Others can get overly buttoned-up, presenting dense data with no intriguing spark. In my experience, investors don’t just buy into models, they buy into momentum, clarity, and the human(s) driving the business. They want to feel the potential and substantiate the rest.

Thanks for the helpful insight, Tiffany!!