Your pitch makes perfect sense. To you.

I got pitched recently by a brilliant founder in the oncology space. A scientist building a new kind of targeted cancer drug. Years of work. Deep expertise. Exactly the kind of founder you want tackling cancer.

About thirty seconds in, I was lost.

“ADC.” Okay, what’s that?

“Payload.” The payload of what?

“Ferroptosis.” ...

I was looking up terms on my Granola while she kept talking. By the time I’d worked out what an ADC was, she was three sentences further along. I wasn’t listening to the pitch anymore. I was decoding it.

And I wanted to follow. I was interested. That’s the painful part.

Here’s what happens in the listener’s head:

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Unfamiliar term → pause to decode → miss the next point → lose the thread → tune out

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Someone else in the room put it perfectly. Miss what “payload” means, and you’re lost for the next five minutes.

The science wasn’t the problem. Her command of it was impressive. The problem was that she knew it so well, she couldn’t see the gaps anymore. Her brain filled them in automatically. Ours couldn’t.

Founders spend years building context that feels obvious now. To them.

To everyone else, even a brilliant VC, it’s not always that clear.

This isn’t about dumbing it down. Investors don’t need to become experts in eight minutes. They need to understand enough to see why your expertise matters.

The fix is simple:

1. Use less of it. Pick the one or two terms your story depends on. Translate or cut the rest.
2. Say it, don’t abbreviate it. “Antibody-drug conjugate,” not “ADC.” Acronyms are shorthand for people who already know.
3. Define it in a line. “It’s a targeted cancer drug. An antibody finds the cancer cell and delivers a drug that kills it. That drug is the payload.” Ten seconds. Now everyone’s with you.

Do that, and people stay with you for the whole journey. Skip it, and you’ve left them at the trailhead.

The hard part is spotting your own jargon. You can’t hear it anymore. That’s why you need someone outside your own brain bubble who can tell you:

“I got lost here.”
“You never explained that.”
“If you define this first, the whole thing opens up.”

Basically, you need someone who asks the questions you’ve stopped asking because you already know the answers. Someone with enough distance to see what you can’t.

Brilliance gets you in the room, but clarity might get you the check.

Until next time,
Carl

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The Napkin shares one fundraising or storytelling idea for founders, every week. Carl Fudge is the founder of Presentation Mode, where he's helped founders raise over $1B in venture capital.
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