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Returning from Warsaw I jotted down a few notes about the experience I had coaching entrepreneurs this week at Europe Unlimited?s Biotech Venture Academy.

The venture academy format brings together leaders of young technology companies to pitch their businesses to a group of coaches, a group that included active venture capitalists, professional business advisors, and experienced entrepreneurs - including your correspondent. The project is funded by the European Commission, and the entrepreneurs can participate for free.

I enjoy this kind of exercise, however my interest was not merely academic. I?ve been asked to help bring the Biotech Venture Academy to Budapest in June this year. So how well does this format work?
The goal of the venture academy is to teach technology entrepreneurs how to pitch their businesses to investors ? focusing on the so-called ?elevator pitch? and the PowerPoint presentation. And that?s about all you can hope to achieve in just one day.

My informal feedback from the entrepreneurs was they found this experience useful. We were working with a small group of companies (I counted 19 in the program booklet) relative to similar events in Western Europe. In my session in the coaches actually outnumbered the entrepreneurs.

One benefit is the entrepreneurs get to pitch to real investors, ie the coaches. They also have a chance to compare themselves to others doing the same.

The fact is, presenting your business to an investor (or for that matter the media or other parties) requires a vastly different set of skills than actually starting and running the business.

One set of skills has to do with understanding what kind of information an investor needs to see. (A good starting point is Steven Kopits? Basics of Venture Capital series, which he presented at First Tuesday in Budapest).

Another set of skills has to do with projecting confidence, and winning the attention of your audience. (Rule number one: never, never read your slides!)

Frankly, some in my group needed a lot of help ? I found out later we had been assigned the hard cases.

I?m pleased to say a few people in the group made substantial improvements. Most needed much more than just one day of coaching, however, the time was surely not wasted if they made a few steps in the right direction.