Pitching Startups: LinkedIn Top Voices' Perspectives on Best Practices

Startups, to support their growth, often need investors who believe in their projects. To access new sources of financing, new business ideas are presented to business angels, venture capitalists, and other actors of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the form of pitches. This form of exposition is a communicative and strategic practice for presenting business ideas. However, the practices that a startup should deploy in its pitch are only partially discussed from academic literature and institutional sources. For this reason, the LinkedIn platform can be identified as a complementary space where professional identity and knowledge intersect to provide practical and up-to-date direction to startups. Therefore, this study aims to analyse a corpus of documents extracted from the platform and evaluate whether LinkedIn can be a useful source for revealing emerging practices in constantly changing conditions. At the same time, the limitations arising from the use of the platform will be analyzed and partially mitigated to provide a comprehensive view of the case. Through a literature review and platform analysis, both theoretical and managerial implications will emerge.