Make Every Conversation Count: How to Build Your Elevator Pitch with Mila Iličić

​Storytelling in Networking: Making Every Conversation Count

​Most fundraising processes don't start in a pitch meeting. They start in an informal conversation that shapes everything that follows.

This 60-minute interactive workshop is about making those conversations count. You'll build a twenty-second introduction that passes the three tests every founder story has to face: understandable, memorable, and repeatable. Then you'll learn the narrative modules that carry the rest of the conversation, deployed by what your listener responds to, not delivered as one memorized spiel.

This is a working session, not a talk. In two breakout exercises, you'll test your current introduction on a partner, hear it repeated back, rebuild it, and test it again. You leave with a hook that survives retelling.

​We'll cover:

• ​Preparing for an event: researching attendees, arranging warm introductions, entering conversations cold

• ​The four components of a twenty-second hook, and the two failure modes that kill most of them

• ​Reading your listener in real time and adapting mid-conversation

• ​Making a specific, light ask, and writing the follow-up email that gets forwarded

​Who it's for: Founders actively meeting investors or customers, especially pre-seed and seed. Works across sectors. If you're not currently raising, the same structure applies to customer and partner conversations.

​About the speaker
Mila Iličić is a Berlin-based communications strategist with five years in venture capital. As Director of Communications and Research Analyst at Moonshots Capital, an early-stage US fund, she built the firm's communications infrastructure and supported due diligence on emerging technologies. She holds a PhD from Columbia University, where her research focused on how narrative structure produces effect. She runs Arc Labs, a pitch and storytelling consultancy for early-stage founders.