The pitch was over before I had sat down again.
I was raising money for a cable television technology business. A boardroom in London, a table of investors and a plan I believed in completely.
One of the investors was called Graham. When I finished he looked at me and said I was simply not the person for the job.
Not the plan. Not the numbers. Me.
There is nothing you can do with a sentence like that. You cannot go home and fix being the wrong person. The meeting did not recover.
In the corridor outside, another of the investors caught up with me. His name was Michael. He handed me his card and told me three things.
He thought I had promise. He thought the go-to-market plan was naive. He thought the technology was trying to do too much too soon.
Both of those, he said, could be fixed.
Two men had heard the same pitch. One gave me a verdict. The other gave me a list.
It is worth noticing that Michael was not gentle. Naive is not a kind word. He told me the plan was wrong and the product was wrong, which is most of a business. He had not been kinder than Graham. He had been more useful.
I remember those two. Most of the others I do not. Years later I spent months raising money for TPoint, a software business, and sat through so many investor meetings that it became a numbers game. I could not tell you now who most of them were. I did not dwell on any of them. It would not have helped.
But the pattern was there every time.
More than once an investor said no and did not end the meeting there. They told me where the story was weak, which assumptions they did not believe and what they would need to see to change their mind. They never invested. I left with a better pitch than the one I had walked in with.
I met versions of Michael many times over the years. People who had nothing to gain from helping me and who sometimes said no. They still gave me something useful: an introduction, a question I had not considered, ten minutes of advice or simply the encouragement to keep going.
The Grahams kept appearing too. The difference was that, with time, I got much better at spotting them.
A Michael might tell you the numbers were wrong, the plan was naive or the business was not ready. You could do something with that. A Graham tended to tell you something about yourself.
Eventually I stopped confusing the two.
I began to understand that a sweeping verdict from someone who barely knew me often revealed more about their character than mine. I could listen for anything useful and let the rest pass.
That is harder than it sounds when you are betting on yourself. You are short of feedback and hungry for it. There is often nobody in the room who has done what you are trying to do. So when a verdict arrives it lands with a weight it has not earned. It also hurts more, which makes it feel more true.
The sentence that stings most is rarely the sentence that matters most.
The faces have gone. What stayed with me is what the Michaels did. Many were people I hardly knew. They owed me nothing. Yet they took a few minutes to help.
Thirty years later, I think that may be the more important lesson.
You cannot stop the Grahams turning up.
But you can decide to be a Michael when you meet somebody who needs one.
Who was yours, and have you ever told them?
Field Note
When someone judges you, let it go past. When someone criticises the plan, write it down.
Try This
Think of someone whose work you have seen lately and had a view on. A pitch, a proposal, a website, a plan.
Tell them one thing that is working and one specific thing you would fix. Not a verdict on them. One thing about the work.
It will take you a few minutes.