A pitch competition rewards a specific skill: explaining a company clearly, in a fixed time, to judges scoring against a rubric. That makes preparation unusually concrete, because most of what you need to know is written down in advance. This guide covers how to read a competition’s rules, how to build the pitch around what is scored, how to keep slides out of the way, and how to prepare for the questions that decide close calls.
Read the rules before you write a word
Competitions differ more than founders expect, and the rules decide what a good pitch looks like. Two examples, both read on 18 October 2026:
- The Rice Business Plan Competition asks each team for a 60-second elevator pitch and at least two 10-minute investor pitches. Teams have two to four members, all current students, and at least two must present. The page covers the competition held from 8 to 10 April 2027; our Rice Business Plan Competition listing has its dates.
- The University of Colorado Boulder’s New Venture Challenge (2025–26 rules) starts with a 2-minute video and a live 5-minute presentation with 5 minutes of questions, and gives its five finalists a 5-minute pitch with 7 minutes of questions.
Before you prepare anything, find the answers to these questions in the rules:
- How long is the pitch, and how long are the questions? Rehearse to the exact limit, and expect to be stopped when you reach it.
- What format? Slides or none, a video round, a live demo, a written summary.
- Who is eligible? The New Venture Challenge, for example, excludes ventures with more than US$1,000,000 in investment or more than US$100,000 in revenue.
- Who judges, and against what? Investors, operators, faculty, sponsors; a published rubric or a general brief.
- What is the prize? Cash, a grant, services, or an investment that takes equity.
That last question matters more than it looks. The New Venture Challenge’s first prize in its Open category is a US$40,000 SAFE investment, not a grant. A SAFE converts into shares at your next priced round; the SAFE calculator shows what it becomes. Every competition we list is in the pitch competitions section, with its prizes and dates, among them the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
Build the pitch around what is scored
If the competition publishes a rubric, it is the best brief you will get. The New Venture Challenge’s 2025–26 rubric scores four things: a promising idea (30%), progress (40%), the team (20%) and the presentation (10%). Progress outweighs everything else, and delivery counts for a tenth. A pitch that spends three minutes on the vision and thirty seconds on what has been done is built backwards for that rubric.
Where there is no rubric, a widely used structure comes from Michael Seibel’s How to Pitch Your Company, written for Y Combinator in 2016. It builds a pitch from a short list of questions, which in our words are:
- What do you do? One plain sentence a stranger understands.
- How big is the market? Who pays, and how many of them there are.
- What progress have you made? Users, revenue, pilots, growth.
- What is your insight? What you know that others in the market have missed.
- How do you make money? The business model, simply.
- Who is on the team? Why these founders, for this problem.
- What do you want? The ask: money, partners, customers.
Seibel’s post also tells founders to strip out jargon and vague words such as “platform”, and suggests a test: send a two-sentence description to a smart friend, and rewrite it if they come back with questions. That test is worth running on your opening line before anything else.
Order the questions to fit the rubric and the time. In a 60-second pitch, you have time for what you do, the progress and the ask. In ten minutes, you can cover them all.
Keep the slides out of the way
Slides support a short pitch; they do not carry it. Kevin Hale’s How to Design a Better Pitch Deck, written for Y Combinator in 2015, was aimed at a demo day slot of two and a half minutes. He suggested about 5 to 7 slides, each legible, simple and obvious, and advised against screenshots and videos, which are hard to read from the back of a room.
The same rules work for most competitions:
- One point per slide. If a slide needs explaining, it is doing two jobs.
- Large type. A judge at the back should be able to read every word.
- Numbers as numbers. “US$42,000 monthly revenue, up 18% a month” beats a chart nobody can read.
- No walls of text. If you would read it aloud, it does not belong on the slide.
- Backup slides. Keep detailed slides on unit economics, the market and the competition at the end, for questions.
Check the logistics as early as the content. Find out whether you present from your own laptop or a shared one, which file formats are accepted, whether there is a clicker and whether video works. Bring the deck in two formats, with fonts embedded, and have a plan for giving the pitch with no slides at all, because sometimes the projector fails.
For video rounds, the same principles apply on a smaller screen: one speaker in frame at a time, clear sound, captions if the platform allows, and no slide that has to be paused to read.
Rehearse the pitch and the questions
The pitch is the part you control; the questions are where close calls are decided. Prepare both.
Rehearse to time, out loud, many times. Time every run with a clock. A pitch that fits when you read it silently will run long on stage. Rehearse in front of people who will tell you what was unclear, then cut what they did not follow. Decide who on the team says which part, and practise the handovers.
List the questions you least want. Then answer each one in thirty seconds or less. The usual ones:
- Who else is doing this, and why will you win?
- Why now?
- What does it cost to win a customer, and what is a customer worth?
- What is the biggest risk, and what are you doing about it?
- What will you do with the prize?
Answer the question asked. Short, direct answers leave time for more questions, which is usually good for you. If you do not know, say so, and say how you would find out.
Use the judges. Many judges are investors or experienced operators. Ask for feedback after the event if the format allows it, follow up with anyone who showed interest, and keep notes for the next competition.
If you win, read the prize terms before you accept: a cash prize may be taxable, and an investment prize will appear on your cap table. If you do not win, you still have a tested pitch, a list of hard questions and, often, a few new contacts. Our guide to what a demo day is covers the investor version of the same skill.
Sources
Each page was read on the date shown. Figures in this guide carry the date the source gives them.
- Rice Business Plan Competition, Rice University: Competition rules and format. Undated page, for the 2027 competition. Read 18 October 2026.
- New Venture Challenge, University of Colorado Boulder: General competition. Undated page, for the 2025–26 competition. Read 18 October 2026.
- Y Combinator blog: How to Pitch Your Company (Michael Seibel). Published 19 July 2016. Read 18 October 2026.
- Y Combinator blog: How to Design a Better Pitch Deck (Kevin Hale). Published 15 November 2015. Read 18 October 2026.