Sundance Film Festival Elevator Pitch Tweek

hi angie
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

The Masters of the Elevator Pitch at Sundance at the moment, would probably enjoy David Cowan's campfire story on Verisign's early elevator pitch iterations, as might Nik on his big US VC pitchingfest : "When Jim Bidzos first explained to me Ron Rivest’s idea for selling public key certificates (Rivest is the R in RSA), it took a while for the math to sink in. But as I came to understand how public key cryptography facilitates encryption, authentication and (theoretically) non-repudiation, I reveled in the cleverness. Like so many spectators of greatness, I congratulated myself for comprehending this wonderful meme. So when Jim and I launched Digital Certificates, Inc (later renamed Verisign), I proudly (and thoroughly) explained public key crypto to whomever I was recruiting as a partner, employee or co-investor. “You see, people encrypt messages today using a numeric key that they must first share with each other…blah blah… Now using one-way functions like multiplication of large prime numbers…blah blah… So if the public key decrypts the message, then that must mean…blah blah…” Surely the brilliance of the idea must compel them! Compel? More like confuse, bore and repel. I don’t think anyone (including me) really understood what our little startup needed to do until we hired our CEO Stratton Sclavos. Stratton dispensed with the math, as well as the notion that people feel the need to buy obscenely large integers with incomprehensible mathematical properties. Instead, Stratton announced that we are bringing Trust to cyberspace, and our first product is a Driver’s License for the Internet. (One of these Driver’s Licenses evolved into SSL certificates.)"