Investor on The Pitch Seasons 2–10
Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at SoftTech VC. In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure.
November 22, 2023
For our season 10 finale, we’re trying something crazy. We’re giving you a full pitch from start to finish with no editing whatsoever! Founder Chase Robbins presents his snack delivery business, Handle, to investors Paige Doh...
Consumer Tech PitchfolioNovember 08, 2023
Ever stood at the recycling bin wondering, “Is this cup really recyclable?'' Enter Nicole Toole, the founder of ECGO, an AI-powered app designed to tackle this confusion. With ECGO, you snap a photo of any item, and the app w...
SustainabilityOctober 25, 2023
Venture investors have spent the last decade searching for the killer use case for VR. Today’s founder, Andrew McHugh, thinks he’s found it with his startup, Wist. But days before Andrew gave his pitch, Apple sent shockwaves ...
VR/AR Consumer Tech Subscription PitchfolioSeptember 27, 2023
Jason Vego wants to disrupt an industry so old school he has to sell door to door. Yet somehow his SaaS platform for convenience stores boasts a 95% conversion rate from free trial. Another number comes up in The Pitch Room t...
B2B SaaS Ecommerce PitchfolioSeptember 13, 2023
If you're murdered in the US, there's only a 57% chance your killer will be found. Jim Brown aims to change this statistic by enabling the massive true crime community to solve cold cases on his website Uncovered.com. But mys...
MediaSeptember 06, 2023
Despite a decade in engineering at Apple, Dhaval Patel didn’t have any smart technology in his home. So he designed a ring that converts every home into a smart home – using old technology found in your typical TV remote. But...
Hardware PitchfolioAugust 30, 2023
When Mariam Braimah led product design at Netflix she struggled to find participants in Africa to test new products. So she started Kimoyo Insights, a research analytics platform that helps companies like Microsoft & Flutterw...
Badass Female FoundersAugust 23, 2023
When Madeline Fraser tried to design her engagement ring online, she was stunned to find it couldn’t be done. After bringing a cash deposit to a rando in LA, Madeline got her custom ring and, with it, a new business idea. She...
B2B SaaS Ecommerce How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors Badass Female Founders PitchfolioAugust 09, 2023
We’re back for Season 10 with double the digits, double the deals, and double the drama. Your favorite investors return along with some new voices ready to shake up The Pitch Room. And for the first time ever, we’re posting n...
May 17, 2023
Co-founders Kelvin Johnson and Max Huc know first impressions are everything. That’s why they created Brevity, an AI powered software to help craft a persuasive first pitch. But pitching a pitch product to a room full of pitc...
B2B SaaSApril 12, 2023
Founder Ariana Vargas wants to destigmatize talking about mental health. So she built a social app. No wait, now it’s a Slack app for the workplace? This founder is willing to do whatever it takes to secure investment - maybe...
Consumer Tech MediaApril 05, 2023
Jenna Sereni believes the best product recommendations come from family and friends. That’s the genesis of her social shopping app, HandsDown. Her pitch starts out like normal - until the investors flip the script and start p...
Consumer Tech EcommerceMarch 15, 2023
This tale starts with a problem Kehan Zhou found when trying to buy a hobby farm. Zillow didn’t have good search options for land and LandWatch.com was even worse, so Kehan ventured off to combine computer vision technology a...
Consumer Tech MarketplaceMarch 08, 2023
There are tons of companies popping up in the scheduling space now that Calendly is valued at 6 billion dollars. Everyone wants to build the next billion dollar calendar app, including David Matthews, founder of Dotcal. He th...
B2B SaaS PitchfolioMarch 01, 2023
A few years ago, Claire Smith moved back to her family farm, where they practice sustainable farming, and created Teffola. It’s granola made with an ancient Ethiopian grain called teff, which is filled with lots of protein, f...
CPG Food & Bev Ecommerce SubscriptionFebruary 22, 2023
Clothing rental companies get a bad rap in the VC world. It seems like no matter how much money investors sink into them, they always just… fail? But today’s founder thinks she found a way to make it work. Capri Wheaton is go...
Consumer Tech Marketplace Fashion Ecommerce Badass Female Founders PitchfolioFebruary 15, 2023
AWSM Sauce founders Carl and Paul have perfected a sustainable way of making sauce. But then, they had another idea – a futuristic way of getting sauce on our plates. Will the investors see this as a two-innovations-in-one de...
Hardware CPG Food & Bev EcommerceFebruary 08, 2023
Founder Luis Medina Rivas travels across the world to pitch his big vision on how to solve one of the most important problems of our time - energy. His pitch is close to perfect. However, the VCs worry about the location of h...
B2B SaaS EV Tech Sustainability The Greatest Hits How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors PitchfolioNovember 23, 2022
Welcome back to The Pitch! This season, we head to Chicago to meet 14 founders with 12 business ideas big enough to change the world. Everything from a better ketchup to a potential solution to one of the biggest problems of ...
December 09, 2020
This week, we've got a show like no other. Instead of startup founders asking for money to grow their business, we hear investors Jake Chapman and Howie Diamond pitch their new venture capital fund. And they learn right away ...
November 04, 2020
In VC, before you pitch investors, you’re expected to get some initial cash from friends and family. Getting this money is a critical first step for a new startup. But what if your friends and family aren’t wealthy? Two found...
September 30, 2020
Today's founder had everything going for him: a huge market, loads of experience, and $70k in monthly revenue. But then, everything went wrong. Christopher Hussain's startup, RealKey, is supposed to make the complicated mortg...
B2B SaaSAugust 05, 2020
When gyms closed at the start of the pandemic, Kevin Allen’s at-home fitness app, Row Vigor, went gangbusters. But there was a problem -- a few lines of code were preventing Kevin from cashing in.
Where Are They Now?July 15, 2020
When Alon Shwartz started his parental control app, UnGlue, he thought Apple would be an ally. But then Apple decided to make their own competing product and Alon was forced to go toe-to-toe with the biggest tech company in t...
Where Are They Now?June 10, 2020
In 2018, founder Cody Candee raised $150,000 on our show. He went on to raise over a million dollars in funding that led to extraordinary growth for his startup, Bounce . But then Cody found out the hard way that to keep grow...
Where Are They Now?May 06, 2020
For years, Pierre Laguerre worked as a truck driver. During those years he saw one of the biggest inefficiencies in the industry up-close: getting available drivers matched with trucks ready to get on the road. Barely a year ...
MarketplaceApril 22, 2020
Investors are giving founders everywhere an ultimatum: just find a way to survive the next few months. This had us concerned about the entrepreneurs who’ve been on this show. Debbie Wei Mullen pitched Copper Cow Coffee to our...
Where Are They Now?April 15, 2020
In the last few weeks, COVID-19 has changed just about every business in the country. Investors everywhere are scrambling to help their startups survive the pandemic. On today’s show, investors Elizabeth Yin and Charles Hudso...
April 01, 2020
Last year, investors woke up to the fact that the biggest ridesharing companies still struggle to make money. But today’s founder, Aparna Srinivasan, thinks she can buck that trend by introducing pets into the equation. But o...
Consumer Tech Marketplace Badass Female FoundersMarch 25, 2020
Founder Ray Li says he can make you a custom suit, out of a quiz. And his company, Sene, is already making a profit. Ray wants to pursue the technology AND build up a cool brand but the investors wonder if Ray would be better...
CPG Fashion EcommerceMarch 11, 2020
There’s a tried and true playbook in tech: get a ton of users, then figure out how to monetize them. Today’s founder, Ofo Ezeugwu, has plenty of users on his site, but the investors press Ofo about his plans to monetize. And ...
MarketplaceMarch 04, 2020
Tiffany Walling McGarity called in to the show and you, our listeners, voted her on to pitch the investors. But from the moment she stepped in the room, it was clear that this pitch would play out differently from the rest. O...
How Not To Pitch Your StartupFebruary 19, 2020
In VC, investors want to win big — that’s why they love highly scalable tech companies so much. But today’s founder, Jaclyn Fu, is selling actual things. Her startup, Pepper, makes real bras in a very real factory. There’s no...
Badass Female FoundersFebruary 12, 2020
This is how much of a go-getter Bobbie Racette is: when she got laid off, she started a business to help thousands of other people who were out of work. Now, she has so many customers, she can’t keep up. And Michael Hyatt, ou...
Badass Female FoundersJanuary 29, 2020
During our last call-in show, Thor Wood wowed us with his 30-second elevator pitch for SnapShyft, a company that matches workers with open shifts at restaurants. Now Thor will have to convince a much tougher crowd, the invest...
January 22, 2020
Ben Trenda thinks he can stop the trolls on Twitter and other social spaces. He’s building Goodtalk, where famous people can have public one-on-one conversations without interruption. But if you strip away the bad, will you a...
January 08, 2020
“Move fast and break things” is a mantra for a lot of startup founders — but what if the federal government is slowing you down? That’s the situation that Josh Israel is in with his startup, Hava Health. Josh needs to wait fo...
How To Crush Your Pitch To InvestorsNovember 13, 2019
Tiffany Dufu has spent her career uplifting women and girls. Now, she’s turning a lifetime’s worth of expertise into a venture-backed business. Her startup, The Cru, is dedicated to helping women achieve their goals by connec...
How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors Badass Female FoundersNovember 06, 2019
Kate Flynn has a plan to make her healthy snack bites stand out: skip the grocery stores, and find potential customers when and where they need a snack. It’s a strategy that’s outside of the investors’ wheelhouse, but if she ...
Food & BevOctober 09, 2019
The 2.4 trillion dollar fashion industry is due for a makeover, according to Andrea Madho. She says her company, Lab141, will be the biggest change to the way clothes are made in over a century. But it’s a moonshot and she kn...
October 02, 2019
Ryan Lee says he has a better way to buy plants, on his website, Rooted. To conquer the market, Ryan has a big, audacious plan, and this is his very first time pitching it to VCs. Find out if he can convince the investors tha...
September 25, 2019
For businesses, the process of buying software is brutal. Founder Andrew Hoagland launched his company to make it a breeze. In fact, he says that his startup Vetd has made it so easy that he can’t keep up with the demand he’s...
September 18, 2019
Orion Brown is very early in her journey as an entrepreneur. In fact, this is her first pitch to venture capitalists! At this early stage, the investors are listening for something a bit different. They just want to know, is ...
September 11, 2019
When founder Jen Saxton landed a partnership with a big name retailer in the baby industry, she thought her startup, Tot Squad, was on the way to startup stardom. But five years into the deal, things just weren’t working out....
September 04, 2019
What if you could listen to the exact same music as your favorite celebrities, at exactly the same time? That’s the question that drove NFL lineman Jason Fox to build an app for that. An app called Earbuds. Now if Jason can j...
Josh's PicksAugust 14, 2019
Founder Rahul Jindal might be the king of bootstrapping. And when investors see similarities between his startup, Hyde Closet, and a billion dollar business known as Rent the Runway, they start dreaming of unicorns. Until a w...
How Not To Pitch Your StartupAugust 07, 2019
Back in May we asked entrepreneurs to call in and give us their best pitches. The winner was Leigh Isaacson and her startup Dig — a dating app for people who love dogs. In this episode, Leigh enters the pitch room and asks fo...
How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors Badass Female Founders Josh's PicksJuly 17, 2019
When he came on the show two years ago, Amado Guloy said his startup would change the business of animal agriculture. And the investors bought it! But since then, Amado has found himself at a crossroads between his own health...
Where Are They Now?June 05, 2019
Dennis Meng’s first company was a major flop. So he started another one that could’ve saved the first. It’s called User Interviews, and he needs $4 million to get it into the hands of big companies. Will investors buy into wh...
May 15, 2019
Spencer Shulem wants people to learn from their mistakes. Also, he wants to help them organize their time. Oh, and he wants to gather data on everything they do. All this is packed into a single pitch for his startup, WeDo. C...
How Not To Pitch Your Startup Josh's PicksMay 08, 2019
Ramya Possett and Rachel Lee founded BlueFoot to make tracking the competition easy for massive companies. And they think that what they’ve created is so powerful, it demands a premium price tag. One that takes the investors ...
How Not To Pitch Your Startup Josh's PicksApril 10, 2019
Jonathan Kumar pitches his startup, Samaritan, which aims to help people who’ve lost their homes. But can he convince the investors it’s OK to earn a profit off of homelessness? Today’s investors are Charles Hudson, Michael H...
April 03, 2019
Ben Walters came on the show to sell the investors on Feedback, an app that lets restaurants change their prices on the fly. But when Ben shows up in the pitch room, he’s already decided that it’s time to make some changes to...
Josh's PicksMarch 13, 2019
Jennifer Brandel of Hearken is pitching a new kind of business. She calls it a zebra: a company that’s driven by a mission — but still wants to make money. And Jennifer’s mission with Hearken is to help journalists do their j...
March 06, 2019
Rama Poola is here pitching his airline ticket business, SkyHi, where customers pay a monthly fee to access tickets on the cheap. But the investors are worried that it sounds a lot like MoviePass, a company that offered a sub...
February 27, 2019
Ryan Husk wants to take your workplace culture up a notch. His startup, Culture Force, matches companies to “experiences” designed to improve community at work. He says it can be a huge business, but the investors want to kno...
How Not To Pitch Your StartupFebruary 20, 2019
Chelsea Brownridge wants to help dog owners keep their pooches safe when they’re out running errands together. Her startup, DogSpot, makes internet-connected dog houses, with features like webcams and A/C, and puts them in fr...
Badass Female FoundersFebruary 13, 2019
After losing his shirt on sports betting sites DraftKings and FanDuel, Adam Weinstein decided to flip the script on daily fantasy sports and give everyone a better shot at winning. He’s changing things up using prop bets inst...
How Not To Pitch Your StartupJanuary 30, 2019
Zahra Kassam has been on the road in a major way, pitching her startup, Monti Kids. A few months before our show, she pitched on ABC’s “Shark Tank.” Today we find out: Did she win over any investors in her two very public pit...
Badass Female Founders Josh's PicksJanuary 23, 2019
Tom Impallomeni is here to pitch Tribe XR, a VR app that teaches people to DJ. He’s got a vision for using virtual reality to teach creative skills — but the investors are skeptical. Can Tom convince them he’s putting the rig...
VR/ARJanuary 16, 2019
Debbie Wei Mullin is pitching her pour-over Vietnamese coffee startup, Copper Cow Coffee. The company is already doing well on Walmart’s shelves. But does she have what it takes to take the brand online?
Food & BevOctober 31, 2018
Susan Sierota wants to help dog owners keep their furry friends healthy with her pet-tech startup, Waggit. Can she convince the four investors that her smart collar will win best in show?
Badass Female FoundersOctober 10, 2018
Blake Sorensen has a deathly nut allergy — one that's led to some harrowing trips to the ER. But then he decided that enough was enough. So he started a company, Blake’s Seed Based , to make snacks safe for people like him. W...
Food & BevSeptember 26, 2018
The college dropout rate is high, and schools are paying the price... to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Marquett Burton says his education startup can help solve the problem. Will the investors agree? Today's inv...
September 19, 2018
Somewear founder James Kubik thinks going off the grid shouldn’t have to mean going out of cell phone range. That’s why he created a device that turns smartphones into satellite communication hubs. Can he convince investors t...
August 29, 2018
Entrepreneur Julie Roth Novack says her party planning platform is exactly what event professionals have been missing. And it all hinges on a secret ingredient—something Julie calls "marketing gold". Now she just needs invest...
August 22, 2018
Cody Candee believes his company, Bounce, is the key to freeing us from the stuff we lug around all day. But can he convince investors that his temporary storage solution isn’t a liability disaster waiting to happen? Today's ...
How To Crush Your Pitch To InvestorsAugust 15, 2018
Amazon is on track to grab nearly HALF of all online retail sales this year. But not if Chelsie Lee’s startup Shipsi has a say in the matter. She wants to give online retailers the ability to compete, by helping them offer su...
How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors Badass Female Founders Josh's PicksJune 13, 2018
Stefan Loble wows the room with his near perfect pitch for Bluffworks, a company that makes travel-business attire. But is his compelling story enough to get investors to sign on? Today's investors are Nicole Verkindt, Michae...
How To Crush Your Pitch To Investors Josh's PicksJune 06, 2018
Tina Hedges believes the future of beauty is all-natural, organic products. But the investors aren’t sure what to make of her food-grade products for your face. Today's investors are Nicole Verkindt, Michael Hyatt, Jillian Ma...
May 30, 2018
Founder David Sarabia’s experience with drug addiction inspired him to build an app, called inRecovery. It’s meant to help people who are in rehab. But can he get the rehab centers on board? Today's investors are Nicole Verki...
May 09, 2018
Max Tuchman is on a roll with Caribu, an app that lets parents and kids read together virtually. But can she convince investors that early success will lead to future returns? Today's investors are Nicole Verkindt, Michael Hy...
February 08, 2018
When scientist Amado Guloy saw an opportunity to combine farm animals and big data, he traded the laboratory for the boardroom and created Rex Animal Health. But can he convince investors he’s got what it takes to make it in ...
January 31, 2018
The apps on our smartphones seem to be engineered for addiction. Alon Shwartz wants to fight this with an app of his own: unGlue. Today's investors are Daniel Gulati, Jillian Manus, Phil Nadel and Charles Hudson.
January 17, 2018
Hunter Rosenblume is pitching Lunar Wireless, a company he co-founded as an answer to pricey cell phone plans. But getting investors to gamble on a 22-year-old who claims he can take on a decades-old industry is a hard sell. ...
The Greatest Hits How To Crush Your Pitch To InvestorsJanuary 10, 2018
Romy Raad and her cofounder have created Metabrew, a healthy beverage they believe could replace your morning coffee. But can they get investors buzzing about this plant-based substitute? Today's investors are Phil Nadel, Jil...
Food & BevDecember 20, 2017
The founders of Harper Wilde want to take the B.S. out of bra shopping. That means convincing our investors that they’ve found a way to turn it from a major inconvenience into an easy at-home experience. Today's investors are...
December 06, 2017
Co-founders Kevin Allen and Moses McCall think rowing is the next big trend in fitness. To cash in on their hunch, they need to convince investors they can make waves in a space already crowded with competitors. Today's inves...