In April 2015, UNB's J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management & Entrepreneurship ran its annual Student Pitch Competition — a record year for it, with 33 teams, more than 60 students, and over $8,000 in prizes on the table at the closing dinner.
Alongside Muhammad Saad Amjad and Rizwas Ali, I pitched KnowYourChild, and it won the Impact Award that year. It wasn't the top prize in either the ideas or growth categories — those went to a recycling-incentive concept and a heart-rate-synced workout app, respectively — but the Impact Award specifically recognized the kind of problem we were trying to solve, not just the pitch itself.
What actually mattered
I don't remember the exact wording of our slide deck anymore. What I do remember is how much of the process was compressing a genuinely complicated idea into something a five-person judging panel could evaluate in a few minutes, and defend the parts that would obviously get challenged first.
That's a skill that's shown up again and again since — writing a project proposal that a funding body will actually read past page one, explaining to non-technical stakeholders why a piece of infrastructure work matters, or making the case for a security investment to people who don't spend their day thinking about CVEs. The format changes. The underlying discipline — know what you're actually claiming, and be ready to defend the weakest part of it — doesn't.
A good pitch and a good technical proposal solve the same problem: getting someone who doesn't have your context to trust your judgment quickly.
You can read UNB's original coverage of that year's competition, including the full list of winners, on the UNB newsroom.
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