🥳 Announcing the launch of First Pitches featuring Michelle Zatlyn, Arlan Hamilton, Aaron Levie, Elias Torres, Sid Visnawathan, and Cindy Gallop!

Special edition of my practical bi-weekly newsletter for early-stage founders, funders, and friends.

💥 I am excited to share that Eric Bahn (GP of Hustle Fund), Hung Pham (Founder of Culture Summit), and I launched First Pitches today! It’s a show where some of the world’s greatest founders share the first version of their pitch and share practical tips to help you succeed on your startup journey.

🔥 Our first season’s guests are on fire! They include Aaron Levie (Box), Arlan Hamilton (Backstage Capital), Elias Torres (Drift), Cindy Gallop (Make Love Not Porn), Sid Viswanathan (Truepill), and Michelle Zatlyn (Cloudflare). Yup, you get to learn from them. Make sure to sign-up for our newsletter, so you don’t miss out on 💎💎💎s!

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How First Pitches got to be

Eric reached out to me on Twitter on December 17, 2019 (a year ago today!), and I was thrilled because I was a long-time fan of Elizabeth Yin, GP at Hustle Fund, and Hustle Fund for some time. 

On January 21, 2020, we jumped on our first call together. We bonded over our immigrant experiences, our lives, and our passion to support underestimated founders. Fast-forward, on April 28, 2020, Eric got me an invite to Clubhouse and, soon after, we started talking about launching a show (because why not do it amid COVID?). 

We had our first show discussion on June 1, 2020. Hung Pham, a friend of Eric’s and Founder of Culture Summit, joined us then and we quickly decided we’d create a show where founders would have a chance to hear how the greatest founders got started. We wanted it to be practical and yet human. In the end, we landed on focusing the show on the first pitches with Eric and me being co-hosts and Hung producing the show! 

And now, we’ve launched and you’ll get to hear first pitches from Aaron Levie (Box), Arlan Hamilton (Backstage Capital), Elias Torres (Drift), Cindy Gallop (Make Love Not Porn), Sid Viswanathan (Truepill), and Michelle Zatlyn (Cloudflare)!

If you love the first season of First Pitches, we will produce season two!

BONUS: if you sign-up for the firstpitches.com newsletter between now and the end of this month, Eric and I will invite three subscribers at random to host join office hours with you! You must sign up for the newsletter before Dec 31, 2020.

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Tell me more about First Pitches

First Pitches is a videocast + podcast series, where famous founders share the first version of their pitch. 

No founder starts his or her journey with the perfect pitch; the beginning of every journey is fraught with self-doubt and lack of support. 

This show was created to demonstrate that every founder, even the most well known today, had to go through the humbling experience of getting started with an imperfect pitch.

In this show, we’ll travel back in time to when our guests made their first pitch. We’ll listen to their actual first pitch and discuss the experience. 

And in the process of exploring the first pitch, we’ll draw out vulnerability, honesty, and leave the listener with tactical advice on improving their own pitches.

Each interview is going to be cringe-worthy, hilarious, and profound.