What I learned about fundraising from trying stand-up comedy…

When I was 29, I started trying to stand up because I wanted to improve my public speaking skills. I had a thick Dominican-New York accent that often got in the way of my public speaking.  I tried Toastmasters but found stand-up comedy to be a scarier and more fun way of improving my public speaking, which ultimately would impact my ability to fundraise.

Here are three things that I learned about fundraising from stand-up:

✅ Pace yourself: Effective communication, in fundraising and in comedy, is all about getting your point across. For you to do this effectively, you need to know when to pause for dramatic effect. Most founders make the mistake of power-walking their way through a pitch. Leaving the audience disinterested and not understanding what that founder's startup does. One trick I learned is to take a powerful adjective and move it to the end of a sentence, then pause for dramatic effect. For example, instead of saying, "XYZ makes this an enormous market opportunity," say, "XYZ makes this market opportunity (beat) enormous (beat)"
✅Anecdotes are worth a million words; humans are wired to remember short stories. Before the printing press, stories were how knowledge was passed down from generation to generation. In fundraising, as in comedy, try getting your point across by showing, not telling. Showing off how a customer uses your product to solve a problem is the easiest way to show why your startup is valuable
✅If you can control the crowd, you can control your outcomes. Have you ever been in the middle of a pitch, giving it your all, only to have investors casually start checking their phones? The same thing happens in comedy, and it means that you lose the crowd and, along with that, any chance at a check. To avoid this, make sure you engage your audience early and often. Ask them questions and get their opinions. It's also good to keep them guessing. Misdirection is a great tool to retain the audience's attention. The more you do that, the better your chances are of getting the outcome you want.