No, he is not pitching the product. He's pitching the campaign. The TV show is great. Pitching and advertising are not the same thing and pitching is certainly not about getting people to believe a product can make their lives better, at least not in the most common cases HN readers are likely to encounter. The title 'this is how to pitch a new technology' is fairly silly. I think all of these are either obvious facts or trivial arguments and that's all I've stated and now you're telling me I'm hung up on something that I never even mentioned (startup founders pitching to investors). Now, if you want to draw pitching wisdom from this clip, terrific. But if you want to respond to me, respond to claims I've made instead of ones you said I've made, but didn't.
> No, he is not pitching the product. He's pitching the campaign.
You're insisting there's mutual exclusion where it doesn't exist.
> But if you want to respond to me, respond to claims I've made instead of ones you said I've made, but didn't.
I pretty clearly used the words "you seem", as in, "this is what I think you're thinking." I'm not a mind reader, so I'm forced to make a guess. Based on your other comments, it seemed like a pretty reasonable one to me.
By the way, pitching in its everyday usage just means to sell someone on something, whether it's customers or investors. (Notice how salesmen are often described as making a "sales pitch".) Advertising is a special form of pitching to customers. Pitching in the entrepreneurial sense of talking to a roomful of investors is also a special form of pitching.
This is a YCombinator site, so when someone mentions pitching, there's a good chance they mean talking to a roomful of investors. But a lot of us also talk about pitching to customers.
Either way, I think the clip offers some insight in how to do both, even if it's exaggerated for dramatic effect.
