Stale Words and Hackneyed Ideas That Make Edtech Investors Cringe - EdSurge News

If you go to startup pitch events, you've seen it happen: An entrepreneur says something--something so naïve, egregious and hackneyed--that it makes the investors, along with educators who are now increasingly in the audience, physically cringe. As funders wince and squirm uncomfortably, some are thinking along the lines of: "How do I respond to this pitch genuinely without coming off like a jerk?" In the interest of fixing this problem at the source, I reached out to some of the advisors and investors in the Dreamit Edtech network to get their "lemon lists" of concepts, statements, and business models that edtech entrepreneurs may want to think twice--or thrice--about. These are not inherently "bad ideas" per se. It's just that the investor community have seen tons of these, and in order to impress you need to jump right to what makes your approach a quantum level better than everything else out there.