Elevator pitches, crowdfunding, and the rhetorical politics of entrepreneurship

摘要

Traced to editors at Vanity Fair in the early 1990s, the term "elevator pitch" has literary rather than entrepreneurial origins. Within a few years, this tactic of cornering a captive listener became a genre with remarkable breadth, covering all kinds of short speeches. Even as any talk under three minutes became a "pitch," though, the genre's defining rhetorical situation moved from journalism to venture capital, which shifted the focus to value propositions and created a hierarchical relationship between speaker and potential investor. Part of the mythology of entrepreneurship has always been its meritocratic allure, but the scenario of the elevator pitch emphasizes that the entire game is most often played within traditional arrangements of power. Today's crowdfunding platforms host pitches that in many ways follow the elevator pitch's familiar blueprint. Staging these arguments in a public forum, however, changes them appreciably - sometimes unearthing business opportunities that had been invisible to traditional industries, and sometimes enabling campaigns with different motives. Despite the potential limitations of both models, the flexibility of the pitch as a genre provides insight into a more diverse conception of the entrepreneur as rhetor.