Krasnoyarsk startups told to dumb down their pitches

The Krasnoyarsk stage of the 2015 Startup Tour ended with two local companies invited to the Startup Village pitch sessions in Moscow and a message for all participating innovators: Dumb down your pitches!

The city in eastern Siberia was the ninth stop on the whirlwind innovations roadshow around Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Pekka Viljakainen in Krasnoyarsk. PhotoL sk.ru

“If you need to remember just one idea from my presentation,” said Skolkovo’s top startup guru Pekka Viljakainen, “then this is what it would be: You need to talk about your project as if you are explaining it to a five-year-old child,” the Finn added, bringing the curtain down on the two-day visit.

“Your potential investors  will not understand what you are talking about,” should the innovators object to making their pitches less science-heavy, the Finn added.

“Explain the problem and prove you are capable of solving it. The point, of course, is the technology, but from a business point of view it is the solution that you offer which is important.”

As usual during the Startup Tour, local innovators were invited to pitch their products to a Skolkovo panel. The judges picked a top three from four categories: Energy efficiency, industrial technology, biomedicine, and IT.

The Startup Tour has already visited Rostov-on-Don, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Almaty, St. Petersburg and Vladivostok. Next week it rolls into Minsk, and then Ufa and the Moscow Region.

Startup Village is at the Skolkovo Innovation Center on June 2-3.

A table showing the top places in each category. Those in bold are invited to the Startup Village.