When Cameron Crake of Raven and Lilly discovered that she, not the company’s founder, would be pitching at Incubation Station’s Demo Day, she was nervous. To begin with, she’s the background person, not the public face of the company. Also, she was the program’s youngest member and desperately didn’t want her youth to be what the audience remembered.
“I said ‘like’ a lot,” she recalls. “I also would get high pitched at the end of sentences…I had a tendency to cock my hip. A lot of women do that. It’s how we carry our weight. I had to practice standing with my feet planted, looking confident and unshakeable.” She also had to practice her pitch as if she were speaking to a kindergarten class, to overcome the monotone she’d adopted to sound more mature.
