Chia-Jung Tsay, an associate professor at the UCL School of Management, asked 1,855 study participants to predict the winners of a total of 19 venture capital pitch competitions after being assigned to review the contestants’ presentations in various ways, including as videos with sound, silent videos, sound recordings, and transcripts. She found that the silent videos best enabled people to identify the entrepreneurs the investors funded. The conclusion: In entrepreneurial pitches, stage presence is everything.
A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review.
