Cheryl Milone, founder and CEO of Article One Partners, was alone in a coat closet at the NYU Stern School of Business, rehearsing a six-minute speech for the fifteenth time in the past hour and a half. She had survived three rounds in Silicon Alley Insider ‘s 2009 start-up competition to beat out some 150 other hopefuls and land in the contest’s top ten. Her big idea: apply the crowdsourcing concept to prior art searches and reward those who uncover evidence that helps companies invalidate shaky patents and prevail in infringement suits. Now, she was about to make her first pitch to a group of potential financial backers and bracing for the tough questions that would come once she wrapped up her spiel. With $75,000 in venture capital and services at stake, Milone was intent on finishing 15 seconds before the buzzer sounded. Failing to do so meant automatic elimination, and that wasn’t an option. Milone had figured out exactly what her pitch was worth—and had prepared accordingly in the days leading up to that moment. “I calculated that $13,043.48 per minute warranted at least fifty practice rounds,” she says. As she waited offstage, she ran through her speech one last time. “In those six minutes, the judges needed to clearly understand what Article One Partners was all about,” she recalls thinking. “And why I was the right person to make it all happen.”
All that practice paid off. Almost as soon as Milone ended her pitch, the crowd was abuzz. Before long, she was walking off with the competition’s top prize. Her timing, it seemed, was just about perfect.
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