Five Insights from the Room Where It Happens: Grab a Seat at the Judges' Deliberation Table

Education is one of the three pillars of the Enthuse Foundation, alongside capital and community. When Kim Lawton and Kristy Snyder created the Enthuse Foundation, one of the first realizations was the lack of feedback founders received.

“We found that few, if any, organizations and incubators offering financing and mentorships to women-owned businesses offered constructive feedback as to why a business wasn’t selected for their program,” they said. “We realized that it wasn’t what women entrepreneurs were saying, but, perhaps, what they weren’t saying that was preventing them from getting to the next round.”

With that principle in mind, after each Enthuse Foundation Pitch Competition, Kim and Kristy meet separately with each finalist to discuss their pitches and provide specific feedback from the judges.

A former judge, Kim now enjoys the opportunity to lead the deliberation of judges and learn from the perspectives of experts. She saw firsthand how the 2025 judges, including Deepa Gandhi, Co-Founder of Dagne Dover; Claudia Schubert, a Senior Advisor at Boston Consulting Group; Nicole Angel, Founder, Angel Ventures NYC, and Eugene Khabensky, VP of Strategic Initiatives at DIAGEO, evaluated early-stage companies once the pitches ended and all the products were sampled.

The judges returned to the same core question: is this founder building a beautiful brand or a durable business?

Here are five insights from this year’s deliberations. Check out the blog post “Six Things Every Founder Should Learn from This Year’s Pitch Competition” for general application feedback and overall observations.

• How Can the Founder’s Vision Outgrow the Founder? Judges consistently praised founders for authenticity, expertise, and personal connection to their mission. For Kim, the judges’ feedback was clear: Founders open the door. Systems keep it open. Systems in this situation referred to tight financial operations with sustainable margins, a clear go-to-market plan with allocated resources dedicated to supporting the movement of products, and manageable quality control of the product that can be done on a mass scale. The brand must be able to survive without the founder handling every single aspect of the business.

  
  

• Profitable Growth. Judges were excited by strong retail tests, fast distribution wins, sellout activations, and national media attention. But here was the critical question - can this brand grow without breaking the business? Margins matter, and founders need to be ready for that velocity.

  
  

• Direction Matters. Judges pressed for sharper differentiation and a clearer usage occasion that could defend the brand in the long term. They weren’t questioning whether the founders could sell; they were questioning whether the brand could own a lane that competitors couldn’t easily copy. Judges wanted to know:

  • Which channel truly comes first?

  • How does DTC support retail (not replace it)?

  • How would velocity be driven without burning cash?

  • How would the brand expand regionally and nationally?

    
    

• How Can Your Product Tell Your Story? When the founder is unavailable to sell the brand, how does the brand market itself? Is there a way to define competitive advantage via packaging? What the judges wanted to see was how that story worked commercially, how it pulled the business forward, not just the brand identity.

  
  

• Founder Meets CEO. These founders were not being evaluated as early-stage business owners. They were being evaluated as future national CEOs. There are only so many places one person can be. How are entrepreneurs thinking about scaling and running an entire business rather than selling a brand with their own personal story? If the founder exits or is no longer associated with the company, will the product still sell?

Bottom Line: This year’s Pitch Competition proved that storytelling could only get you so far. Systems built to last are what take you over the finish line.