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'Perspective-Taking' and How to Close an Investor in 3 Minutes

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Related: The 9 Things You Should Never Do When Pitching Investors

Even harder is raising money without a network, we hear from friends and fellow entrepreneurs. With that in mind, my friend Evan Baehr and I decided to share one of the biggest secrets we wished we'd known when we launched our own ventures: Successful fundraisers don’t raise money; they raise friends.


So, how do you build those relationships that turn into fund-raising conversations? One way is to master the art of what psychologists call "perspective-taking": the science of recognizing and even anticipating initial reactions from the person you’re talking to.



There are certain clues and cues -- the presence or absence of eye contact, tone of voice, body language -- that give us insight into what a person is thinking. If we pay attention to those cues, we can understand the world from that person’s viewpoint. If we understand his or her view of the world, we can anticipate that person's behavior and whether he or she will want to invest in the deal.

And we can anticipate that before it actually happens.




  • What is he or she doing here in the room?
  • And, most important, why?

The first three minutes


  • 15 milliseconds: Should I trust you? Long before you have said a word, the person you are meeting has made an unconscious mental judgment of you, while you've made your own. The amygdala -- the part of your brain that you share with reptiles that tells you whether or not to punch someone, run away or play dead -- makes a nearly automatic conclusion about your surroundings that answers the questions: Do I trust this person? Does this person look like someone I might like?
  • Three Minutes: What Am I Going to Do? Eventually (in around three minutes), the prefrontal cortex kicks in to start making decisions about what to do with the information the person is taking in. It starts by coming up with a set of potential actions -- invest or not invest, for instance -- and then does a risk/reward calculation for each of those actions. Before long, you have a pretty strong idea of which action is worth pursuing.

Exercises to improve your perspective-taking


Parts of this post were adapted from the book Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your DreamsEvan Loomis and Evan Baehr. Harvard Business Review Press, November 2015. 

Related: 7 Psychological Strategies for Mastering Sales Negotiations