Before You Need To: What Memphis Founders Learned About Being Understood

Every seat was taken. The energy inside the Crews Center of Entrepreneurship on a Friday evening wasn’t the polite, waiting-for-it-to-start energy of a panel. It was the kind that builds when a room senses it’s about to get something useful. Something it actually needed.

Carl Fredrick Hill hadn’t even opened a slide yet.

Launchpad Session #2 was billed as a session on pitching. What it turned into was something harder to name and more valuable to carry: a working conversation about how founders learn to be understood. Not just in front of investors. In every room where the work they’re building needs to be believed before it can be backed.

For tech professionals with an entrepreneurial lean (those who build things, lead teams, and eventually need others to say yes), this was not a detour into soft skills. It was infrastructure.

Hill started where most speakers don’t: with a question pointed back at the room.

What do you already know about pitching? What are you afraid of? What are you assuming?

The back-and-forth that followed set the tone for an evening that never quite felt like a session being delivered at people. It felt like something being figured out together, which, it turned out, was exactly the point Hill was building toward.

His core framework arrived through an image the room recognized immediately: the TikTok unboxing video. The packaging communicates the value of what’s inside before anyone sees the product. For founders, the pitch is the package. He named three layers that work together as a system: narrative as the gift wrap, articulation as the product itself, and elocution as the ribbons and bows. Not three separate skills. One integrated act of communication.

Memphis founders tend to build real things and underpitched them. The work outpaces the story around it. This framework gave the room a language for a gap many people in it had already felt but hadn’t been able to name.

The package metaphor didn’t disappear after he introduced it. It stayed in the room all evening: a thread to pull whenever the content needed grounding. When he moved to narrative: is the wrapping paper doing its job, or hiding what’s inside? When he reached elocution: are the ribbons adding to the experience, or distracting from it?

The practical mechanics arrived mid-session and landed with the specificity of someone who’d earned these lessons somewhere other than a textbook.

On silence: most founders fill it. They shouldn’t. A timed pause is not dead air. It’s an invitation for the audience to think, and thinking audiences stay present. The founders who know where to pause have practiced enough to trust it.

On timing: being grossly under your time limit is as damaging as running over. Both signal that you don’t yet own the material.

On the body: volume, eye contact, posture, and the position of your hands. These land before the words do. Arms crossed is a message. Hands in pockets is a message. The body is always pitching, whether the founder intends it to be or not.

On narrative: it’s a vehicle, not a destination. Use active verbs, place the listener inside the story, and move with intention toward the main idea. The warning Hill returned to more than once, “don’t make the narrative the business.” The story serves the idea. When it becomes the idea, you’ve lost the pitch.

There was dry humor throughout, the kind that lands when the speaker is confident enough not to explain the joke, and the room leaned into it. Laughter here was a sign of engagement, not distraction.

For the tech professional managing stakeholders or quietly building something on the side: these mechanics reach well beyond a pitch stage. They apply to the Monday morning meeting where you’re asking for resources. The conversation where you need a skeptical partner to believe in a direction. The moment where your idea needs someone else to say yes before it can become real.

The session’s most consequential moment wasn’t a framework or a diagram.

Hill shared a childhood fear with the room: not as a warm-up, not as a technique for loosening the crowd, but as a demonstration of the very thing he’d been teaching all evening. Vulnerability, deployed with intention, is not a liability in a pitch. It’s often the fastest way to make an audience trust that what they’re hearing is real.

The room went quiet in the way rooms do when something true has just been said.

And then, because he’d gone first, three founders decided to go next.

One described how growing up around entrepreneurship had shaped something specific in her: a goal to become a judge, and a commitment to building a pipeline of future Black lawyers in Memphis. She wasn’t pitching a company. She was pitching a life’s direction, clearly and with ownership. The room heard it that way.

A second founder spoke about being an introvert: not as a confession, but as a lens. She’d built a purpose in education through it, and she’s not planning to do that work someday. She’s doing it now, in the present tense, while developing the public voice to match it.

A third described how her background had forced an early reckoning with instability. She’d turned that weight into a question she’s still answering: how do you help someone use the burdens of the past to build a stable life? For the right investors and partners, that’s not just a personal story. That’s a founding thesis.

None of these women had a polished pitch. That wasn’t the point. What they’d done, because Hill had modeled that it was worth doing, was speak with authority about something they actually owned. The room felt the difference between that and a rehearsed answer.

Key takeaway: Before you package something, you have to believe it’s worth packaging. Before you pitch your idea, you have to be willing to pitch yourself. Specifically, truthfully, without waiting until the story is tidy enough to share.

The Launchpad Series is not a collection of one-off workshops. It’s a semester-long curriculum, sequenced deliberately. Pitching arrived second, before many founders in the room had ever stood in front of an investor or a real stage. That’s a strategic bet: build the communication foundation early, before the stakes arrive, so the mechanics are already in the body when they’re needed.

Founders here are showing up to ZeroTo510, Epicenter Demo Day, Code Connector demo nights, and increasingly to regional and national stages. The skills Hill delivered (the package framework, the narrative GPS, the practiced silence, the willingness to go first with something personal) are pipeline infrastructure. Not optional enrichment.

The session’s culture modeled something else worth naming. Hill, a practitioner with real range across his career, showed up for a room of people earlier in their journey and gave something from his own story before asking anything in return. That’s a Memphis pattern the community keeps returning to. Knowledge shared freely. Experience offered without transaction.

Key takeaway: The Crews Center’s Launchpad Series is establishing the communication foundation Memphis founders need before the high-stakes rooms arrive, not after.

The evening wasn’t about pitch competitions or investor theater. It was about founders and tech professionals building toward something, learning to be understood. That skill compounds every time you open your mouth about your work, and it starts long before the formal pitch moment most people are waiting for.

Hill’s dry humor, his interactive rhythm, his willingness to share something personal first — these weren’t techniques for keeping a room warm. They were the content, demonstrated in real time. The best instruction demonstrates itself.

For a room full of people building something for the first time, the session offered more than a framework. It offered permission: to take up space, to speak with authority, and to trust that the stories' founders carry (specific, unpolished, still-in-progress) are not separate from the work. They’re the most credible part of it.

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