Any entrepreneur seeking funding for an early stage company needs to get straight about one key thing: The minute they start pitching outside investors, they are building two companies.

The "first company" in the startup cycle that an entrepreneur builds is the one that they automatically exit at the moment of funding.

The "second company" is the one that actually gets built on the shoulders of the first.

I've found this mental framework helps teams pitch with much better efficiency. It forces the recognition that investors have different pains and desires than a young company's potential customers do.

This first company is an odd duck, from start to finish... It should be much more open-ended and unsure of destiny. It doesn't need to have all the answers. It's a vast virgin territory with lots of natural resources to be mined and developed and the entrepreneurs are simply cartographers pointing out the wealth on a map.

Smart teams know that this first company is all about selling the potential to participate in the building of a company.  Its selling an experience to the investor. This calls for a very different kind of storytelling.

When I listen to fellow investors and VC friends talk about companies that excited them, they're discussing how "we" are building something cool, new, or groundbreaking with a fantastic team. There is always an implied participation. The power of investor inclusion is often missed by a lot of younger entrepreneurs. They come in and think that certitude and conviction (desirable traits) are best expressed through a highly detailed lock-step walk-through of a great business plan...Unfortunately, they're selling the second company already and they think that's what the potential investors want to hear. The best investor don't want that. On the contrary, the courage to be limber and responsive to fresh input -to admit where the team has been guessing- shows greater maturity and a disposition for success.

This first company must allow the investors to connect their own dotted lines. Let them discover key insights. Allow their organic ideas the space to take root in the team's garden. Less convincing, more exploring. Build openings for inquiry into the strutucture of the presentation itself.

At the level of emotional dynamic (which is where invest/no invest decisions get made), the more a pitch meeting resembles a constructive brainstorming session, the more likely a startup team is to succeed in getting that investor or firm to imagine themselves actually working together in the future.

Of course, do homework, know markets and products, have general GTM plans and pro forma answers at-the-ready, but come to the meeting selling the first company, not the second one that will be built with the capital from "exiting" the first!