2025 Mentor Captains: Tom Fulcher

👏 A huge THANK YOU to our incredible #VM25 Mentor Captains! 👏 Your time, dedication, and expertise played a critical role in helping our founders sharpen their pitches and step onto the Venture Madness stage with confidence.

Here’s some insight from Tom Fulcher, Board Chair, on what it takes:

❓”How do you define a ‘successful’ pitch beyond just getting funding?”
🎤 When an investor pitch generates significant interest from investors in the form of questions leading to follow-up discussions it is successful. I often think of these pitches as a ‘first date’ and not a ‘marriage proposal’.

❓ “From an investor’s perspective, is it more important early on to highlight strong unit economics or the size of the total revenue opportunity?”
🎤 For early-stage companies, demonstrating strong early unit economics may reflect a company’s financial health and ability to scale sustainably. They provide evidence of the potential to achieve those long-term revenue results. However, this answer is very general and many factors including industry, technology, company stage, competitive advantage, market dynamics, and the company management team play significant roles impacting this.

Big shoutout to Tom for all of his hard work! 💯