The Pitch

Zoya had ninety seconds and three investors who had heard forty pitches that day. She could see the boredom setting in before she'd said a word.

She skipped the theatrics and went to the number they cared about: the margin. Her little logistics startup, she explained, kept forty paise of every rupee — fat for the industry, and widening as the software did more of the work.

The first question was about ownership. How much equity was she offering, and how much was she keeping? She had rehearsed this: enough to make them serious money, not so much that she'd wake up an employee in her own company.

The sharp one at the end pushed on risk. What was her biggest liability — the thing that could sink her? Zoya didn't flinch. Her warehouse lease, she admitted, was a millstone: too big, too early, signed in a braver season.

They liked the honesty. The conversation shifted, almost imperceptibly, from whether to how — and then to the word founders both crave and fear: acquisition. One investor mused aloud that a larger rival might simply buy her in three years. To Zoya that was not an insult but an incentive; being worth buying was the whole point.

She left without a cheque but with a second meeting, which at that stage was nearly the same thing. In the lift down she exhaled for what felt like the first time in an hour. Ninety seconds, it turned out, was plenty — if you knew exactly which forty of them mattered.