Tweener Madness Round 1: MyMatR (Smart Garbage Can) vs. ZW (Industrial AI Optimization) ...
Selection Committee: David Jones (Bull City Ventures), Anil Chawla (Founder+Angel), Nikin Shah (Front Porch Ventures)
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Robinson Bradshaw - A full-service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle entrepreneurial ecosystem. Learn more about Robinson Bradshaw’s startups and venture capital practice here.
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ExtensisHR - As a Professional Employer Organization (PEO), ExtensisHR empowers tech founders and growing businesses to scale smarter. We take HR administration off your plate—managing payroll, recruiting, employee benefits and retirement plans, compliance, risk, and more—so you can focus on innovation. For over 25 years we’ve leveraged a people-first approach, customer-centric mindset, and deep industry expertise to ensure employers have the tools needed to stay competitive in today’s market.
Also huge shout out Raleigh Founded for being our coworking podcast studio host and Earfluence (a Walk West Company) - they worked tirelessly on this project and it shows!
Exceptional Eight Bracket
The first head to head match up in Tweener Madness is now available. To refresh your bracket, here is the Exceptional Eight bracket as seeded by the Tweener Community:
Schedule-wise it worked out that we have MyMatR vs. ZW as the first matchup from this bracket. The company selected goes on to the Fabulous Four and one step closer to the $25k investment!
Round 1 Selection Committee
Our selection committee for this round is:
Anil Chawla - Angel investor and founder of ArchiveSocial. Anil’s Meet the Selection Committee Episode (<20min) audio and video.
David Jones - General Partner at Bull City Venture Partners. MTSC Episode: (< 13 min) audio and video.
Nikin Shaw - General Partner at Front Porch Venture Partners. MTSC Episode: (< 20 min) audio and video.
How To Watch/Listen?
To watch the epic startup battle between MyMatR and ZW, you can watch here:
Check out the audio here for all your favorite podcast links, or listen right from substack:
Takeaways….
In our audience here at Tweener Times + Talks we have a wide range of readers: Founders, ‘someday founders’, startup team members, investors, ecosystem vendor partners and many more. At the intersection of those, I think the interesting takeways watching two real unscripted, non-cheesy reality TV startups pitch in front of real experienced investors are:
Always Be Pitching - As you see companies move on, you will see their pitch improve. Pitching is 100x harder than it looks, plus we restricted them to 10 minutes or less - even harder! To counter this, my advice to founders is to ABP - Always, Be Pitching. The more you pitch in a real world setting, the better you get. As you take incoming questions, you learn to put those topics forward in the deck, to address them with slides, to improve your visuals and so on.
Questions are hard - In the Tweener Madness environment you are pitching to three people. I’m pretty sure every IRL pitch I’ve ever done, I’m outnumbered 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, etc. You have to be fast on your feet, take a lot of questions from a variety of people on a range of topics and not get flustered, never get frustrated and try not to get stumped. This is tricky and both of these founders did a great job.
You don’t know what’s going on in the investor’s world - It’s commonly said you have to pitch 100-200 investors to get to ‘yes’. As a founder, what you don’t realize is you maybe up against a company that’s further along than you, or they have a higher Total Addressable Market. In the Selection Committee’s deliberations, you’ll get unprecedented access to how real investors think about real pitches, no Mr. Wonderful, no silliness, this is real-world feedback and there’s a ton to learn here.
Enjoy, round 2 of the Exceptional Eight will be out next week!