One of the highlights of the first day of the SBC Summit Lisbon is the SBC First Pitch competition, where five startups will pitch for a prize valued at €118,000.

To look ahead to the competition, Jessica Welman, Editor of SBC Americas, was joined on iGaming Daily by the host of SBC First Pitch, and the Betting Startups Podcast, Jesse Learmonth.

Jesse began by explaining his own experience with startups, including recounting his time founding Bet Smart Media Inc., which was later acquired by Pinnacle Sports in 2015, as well as the “affinity” he feels with startup culture.

“At the earliest stages, everything is potential and that’s the exciting part. You have nothing but the future to be hopeful about,” he explained. 

“As your company starts to reach scale, which of course is a great place to be, you lose a little bit of that enthusiasm, let’s call it, as these things start to need to have processes and infrastructure and some of these sort of more corporate-y things that somewhat detracts from that excitment of the earlier days.”

“There really is a special time in any company’s lifecycle at those earliest days. I think once companies, if they’re lucky enough to reach that critical mass and reach scale, they do look longingly back on this earliest days even though times were tough.”

During the competition, representatives from each of the five startups will be required to deliver a three minute pitch to a panel of expert judges. 

Given that Learmonth has been present at previous events, he is well placed to talk about what works best when it comes to making the most of the time on stage. As well as the need to make sure that the pitch is polished and well practised, Jesse put a particular focus on the need to tell a story during the presentation.

“Some of the better pitches I’ve seen tend to include a little bit of a narrative and storytelling opposed to pure facts and figures,” he explained. 

“At the end of the day, the judges are humans, and as humans our brains are wired to respond well to narratives and stories and intrigue. It gives you a bit of room to inject your own personality and show some passion.”

To end the episode, the pair took a look at the businesses taking part and Jesse suggested that this iteration of the event is the “most competitive field” that has been assembled for SBC First Pitch.

He said: “I would almost say that there is a bit more sophistication in the calibre of companies that are in this instalment of First Pitch because they are really thinking critically about some of the very narrow parts of the industry, but also ones that are ripe to be attacked, so I love it. 

“There’s a couple in there that, as you would expect, are very heavily leaning on AI. The technology that’s now being developed is extremely robust and this stuff probably has a lot of use cases for other industries or verticals beyond just iGaming in some instances.

“So this is very sophisticated stuff, and huge opportunities that they are attacking here. Each of these companies stands a very legitimate chance of winning next week, so it’s a fantastic field.”