Aron Solomon, Senior Digital Strategist for NextLevel.com and an Adjunct Professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. Aron Solomon  is the chief legal analyst for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today's Esquire.

I was a venture partner for a large Chinese venture capital firm. We were hosting some pitches in North America and one of the pitches involved a physical product that was supposed to be able to perform certain pretty amazing functions. Clearly, anyone would want to invest in this product.

So I did what I thought was a very common-sense thing after we had all spent around a half hour asking about this device—I asked the founder to show it to us in use.

It didn't work. There were lots of excuses and while you almost have to admire the guts of someone bringing a piece of technology that didn't work and would never work to a pitch, we ended the meeting and the founder got pretty aggressive pretty quickly. We were told that we just didn't understand—this was going to be revolutionary.