Twitter Creator Gives Advice to New Entrepreneurs

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, speaking at today's TechCrunch Disrupt gathering in New York, gave three bits of advice to new entrepreneurs looking to raise money for their start-ups:

1."You want to see engagement" during your pitch. Dorsey said that some of his early meetings seeking funding for Twitter were "terrible" because he and his team weren't being questioned very hard by VCs. Dorsey said they either were disinterested or didn't get what Twitter offered, so Dorsey and team knew they weren't the right fit. [VC Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures, was an exception, Dorsey said. "Fred was one of the only people we saw that was a daily user of Twitter  -- 20 times a day in some cases." Wilson also asked tough questions about the goals of the company, Dorsey said.]

2. Make sure VCs know you want tough backers who will push you hard.  Dorsey said he was sure to make it clear that he wanted "someone on the board who would push the company in ways that I'm not now thinking about. We wanted people to guide us...We didn't have all the answers."

3. "Get something you can demo." Don't just rely on a PowerPoint. In fact, use PowerPoint only as back-up. Front-and-center should be the product or the site that you're pitching. Dorsey said he and his team had been using Square daily for seven months before they started to seek funding. When they finally did get on the road, he quipped, they were more than ready "to go into a meeting and take money from someone."

Of course, for Dorsey, raising money for his latest venture, Square, was easier than raising it for Twitter: Dorsey said he took two weeks to schedule 25 meetings in Silicon Valley and New York to pitch Square to VCs. The result? Square was valued at $40 million -- before it launched. But Dorsey also said that his past success with Twitter wasn't a total advantage when he was shopping around to fund Square, which Fast Company described recently as a mobile payment app that aims to make credit card sales "as easy for retailers with an iPhone as it is for someone to sell a couch on Craigslist." (Dorsey said he was never sure if people were interested in Square for its merits or more interested in him and Twitter's success.)

Dorsey, speaking on a morning panel, also used his time on the conference stage to take his own advice and "demo" Square to the audience, taking $100 from conference host Michael Arrington to contribute to charitywater.com. Not to be outdone, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis donated $1,000 to the same nonprofit -- on the spot - using Square.

What do you think? Do you have similar advice to share from your experiences trying to raise money for your social start-up? How do social start-ups differ from others at the pitch table? Let us hear from you.