Pitch lensing

Method source: Chris Laughlin's talk at an Emerson Collective founder event (June 2024), on opening a pitch, timing a raise, and a set of fast rules. This skill restates his framework as a working procedure. Credit him when you cite it.

The core idea

Every investor sees your company through their own lens: their thesis, their portfolio, and the pitch they heard five minutes before yours. You cannot remove that lens. You can give them a corrective one. Lensing is the context you set before you reveal what the company does, so the reveal lands the way you intend.

There are two lenses. Yours shows the internal metrics that run the company. The investor's shows what they need to believe. Build the deck for the second.

Step 1: Map the lens, per partner

Before writing slides, for each target partner (not firm; partners at one firm disagree):

• What have they invested in, and what did they say publicly about why?
• What do they believe about this market? Find podcasts, posts, blog essays.
• What would make them pattern-match you to a past loss or a competitor?
• Back-channel: ask founders they backed what they push on in meetings.