Avoid This Startup Blunder When Pitching Investors

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when pitching to investors is to claim that you have no competitors. As investor Marc Andreesen said in a posting on Quora, “It’s almost always a red flag when someone asserts that they have no competition – from an investor standpoint, good markets naturally draw competition, and so if there is no competition, that often means that a company is in a terrible market.”

Andreesen, who is a general partner of the venture...