Shadowing Practice: How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers - Michael Seibel - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Hello, I'm Michael Seibel.
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I'm partner at Y Combinator.
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Today I'd like to talk about the difference between your investor pitch and your customer pitch.
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What most founders typically screw up here is
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that your customer typically knows a lot about the problem
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that you're trying to solve and is extremely personally interested in the solution that you have.
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Whereas the investor might not have the problem
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that you're trying to solve at all
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and might be only interested in the solution in so much as they think it can build a big company.
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What this means is that the same pitch often doesn't work for these two communities.
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So when you're talking to a customer, one of the ways that you build credibility is that you use jargon.
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You use the language of the industry.
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Another thing that you do is you try to get them to speak a lot about the problem that they have.
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You want them to be talking more than you.
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And then the third thing is
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that you try to figure out how the solution can help them personally as soon as possible.
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When you think about where to use this customer pitch, it can be on a sales call, it can be on the front page of your website, it can be on your to -do, your help, your FAQ, it can be in user interviews.
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A lot of the language is really relevant there.
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On the other hand, when you're talking to an investor, unless you're pitching a consumer product that you're pretty sure that they'd want to use,
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you have to assume that they don't really understand the problem.
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In this situation, jargon is actually going to hurt you.
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It's not going to help you.
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So you want to make sure your pitch is jargon -free.
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In addition, what you want to do is make sure that you're using language that they can understand.
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Oftentimes, people will incorporate flowery language.
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Oh, we're building a platform, or this is like the first thing ever done.
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It's the most unique thing ever.
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What I call marketing language.
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Marketing language, unfortunately, is fluff that an investor has to filter out to understand what you really are trying to do.
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The best example I give about this is pitching Google.
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Imagine if I was pitching Google and I said, oh, Google organizes the world's information.
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For an investor, that's actually not telling them anything.
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If they understood what Google did already, then sure, that'd be great.
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But if they don't really understand what Google does, that doesn't tell them anything.
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It doesn't create any picture in their head.
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A much better pitch for Google is to say, Google's a new type of search engine.
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With Google, you actually go to our website, you type what you want to know into a search box, you click enter,
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and we report in an ordered list websites that we think can help you with the information you're looking for.
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What makes Google different is that those websites are ranked by how other websites link to them.
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And so those results are way more relevant.
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That is something that people can understand, even if they don't use a search engine.
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That is something that people can understand when they don't know any of the jargon of your industry.
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You have to be really, really careful when you're thinking about an investor pitch.
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Your investor pitch is probably not something you want to put on your website.
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It's probably not something that feels comfortable when you're talking to a customer.
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It's something that really is only typically reserved for your pitch deck.
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If your front page of your website and your pitch deck are saying the same thing, and you don't have a product where you assume the customer is also a user,
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a product like Yelp or Uber, you might be doing it wrong.
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So in an investor pitch, typically what the investor is curious about is, one, what do you do in the simplest language possible?
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Two, how far along are you?
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Just the idea phase, are you building the product?
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Have you launched the product?
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Do you have customers?
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Do you have growth?
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Three, how big of a total addressable market you think you're addressing?
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Four, how do you plan to charge your users?
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Five, what do you think you know about this market? that other people or competitors don't understand?
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And six, who's on your team?
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Specifically, who are the founders?
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More specifically, do you have the ability to build the product that you are trying to bring to market?
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So those things are what the investor is really interested in, as opposed to the customer,
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where the customer often doesn't really care about at least half of those things.
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The customer certainly cares how much you're charging, and they certainly care about what you're doing.
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But they're actually probably far more interested in what the functionality of what you're doing is, what the onboarding process is like, specifically how the pricing applies to them.
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Specifically, does it solve their specific problems versus maybe some more general problem?
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And so in a customer conversation, you end up getting into a lot of interesting nitty -grittiness about the product.
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It might be you want to bring up screenshots.
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You actually might want to do a live demo.
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In an investor conversation, more often than not, you're really getting to the integrity about the business, about how big the market is, whether customers actually want to buy this product, what their demand level is,
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how many customers there are potentially for this product.
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All of those types of things are on the business
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and less getting into screenshots and demos and so on and so forth.
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Of course, there are exceptions on all sides.
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I would certainly say that mass market consumer products.
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The investor pitch looks a little bit more like the customer pitch.
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But for most companies that are going through YC, we have to split these up.
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We have to kind of teach founders that just going one -to -one investor pitch, customer pitch, is not the way to do it.
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Interestingly enough, it takes them some practice.
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Within the first month, YC founders are still trying to figure out how to meld their customer pitch and their investor pitch.
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Only after kind of constant trying do we convince them it's better just to have two separate pitches.
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In summary, the customer pitch and the investor pitch are two very different things.
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The investor is trying to understand, can you build a big business?
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The customer is trying to understand, does your product solve their specific problem?
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Because there are two different motivations for these two different audiences, most likely you're going to need two different pitches.
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That's one thing that you should focus on, even at the early stage of your company.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 85 sentences and 1158 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:00. The speaker talks fast, about 193 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pitch noun | /pɪt͡ʃ/ | A throw; a toss; a cast, as of something from the hand. |
| investor noun | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/ | A person who invests money in order to make a profit. |
| founder noun | /ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/ | One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.). |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| deck noun | /ˈdɛk/ | Any raised flat surface that can be walked on: a balcony; a porch; a raised patio; a flat rooftop. |
| demo noun | /ˈdɛm.oʊ/ | A demonstration or visual explanation. |
| screenshot noun | /ˈskriːn.ʃɑt/ | An image of computer or smartphone screen output at a given moment in time. |
| curious adjective | /ˈkjʊɹ.i.əs/ | Tending to ask questions, or to want to explore or investigate; inquisitive; (with a negative connotation) nosy, prying. |
| rank noun | /ˈɹæŋk/ | A row of people or things organized in a grid pattern, often soldiers. |
| flower noun | /ˈfloʊɚ/ | A reproductive structure in angiosperms (flowering plants), often conspicuously colourful and typically including sepals, petals, and either or both stamens… |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
| potentially adverb | /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/ | In a manner showing much potential; with the possibility of happening in a given way. |
| summary noun | /ˈsʌm.ə.ɹi/ | An abstract or a condensed presentation of the substance of a body of material. |
| exception noun | /əkˈsɛpʃən/ | The act of excepting or excluding; exclusion; restriction by taking out something which would otherwise be included, as in a class, statement, rule. |
| versus | /ˈvɝsəs/ | Against; in opposition to. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| bring up verb | To mention. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 33 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: screenshot /ˈskriːn.ʃɑt/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, exception /əkˈsɛpʃən/, motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, integrity /ɪnˈtɛɡɹəti/, motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/, credibility /kɹɛd.əˈbɪ.ɫɪ.ti/, incorporate /ɪŋˈkɔɹ.pɚ.eɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like pitch, investor, founder.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.