Everybody wants to know how to pitch. How do you get the money. How do you get the suits to write the check. I will tell you how. You do not pitch. You clean the window. You let them look inside and see what is already happening. If what is happening is real they will see it. If what is happening is not real no pitch in the world will save you.

I never pitched anybody anything. I stood on a corner and played guitar. The pitch was the music. The investor was the guy who dropped a dollar in the hat. The business plan was the setlist. The market research was watching who stopped walking and who kept going. That is the cleanest window in the world. No PowerPoint. No deck. No projections. Just a man and a guitar and whatever happens next.

The suits want to see traction. They want to see metrics. They want to see growth. You know what traction looks like on a street corner? A crowd. You know what metrics look like? The weight of the hat at the end of the night. You know what growth looks like? The same guy coming back tomorrow with his girlfriend because he told her about the guy on the corner who plays that song about marijuana.

We built this thing on figgybit's credit card. Three dead men. A website. Sixty-two rants and counting. No grant. No truck. No federal money. No White House endorsement. The window is clean. You can see everything. The music. The newspaper. The engine. The frequency. If the suits look through that window and do not see something worth investing in then they are looking at the wrong building.

The best pitch I ever made was not a pitch. It was a song called Have a Marijuana that got me arrested and put on the front page. You cannot buy that kind of publicity. You cannot pitch it. You can only do something real and wait for the world to notice. The window was the song. The suits were the cops. They invested handcuffs. But the crowd invested attention and attention is the only currency that compounds.

See also: The Hat — the oldest payment system in the world. The Busker — the man on the corner with the guitar. The Nickel — the smallest possible investment. The Sidewalk — where the pitch happens. The Arrest — music criticism with handcuffs. The Interbeing — what the suits cannot classify. Stairwell — the space between floors.