An investor in the room: notes from Pitch & Connect, a SusHi Tech side event

Ahead of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, 3P Ventures spent an evening at Pitch & Connect — an official side event hosted by Lee Jean and Pulsar Innovations at the Google for Startups Campus in Shibuya. The format is deliberately simple: five-minute pitches, live questions from the room, and candid feedback from a small panel. It was the first time Pitch & Connect had an active investor on that panel, and it's exactly the kind of room we like to be in.

Why the side event, not just the main stage

SusHi Tech draws tens of thousands to Tokyo. Pitch & Connect is the opposite scale on purpose — around a hundred seats, seven founders, one microphone. That intimacy is the value. On a main stage a founder performs; in a room this size they get questioned, kindly, and walk out with something concrete to fix on Monday. The earliest and most honest signal about a company tends to surface here, not under the lights.

What an investor is actually listening for

Across five-minute pitches and live Q&A, the same few things separate a memorable pitch from a forgettable one — and none of them are polish. Is the problem stated with precision, or just gestured at? Is there evidence a real customer feels the pain today? Does the founder meet the hard question in Q&A with candor instead of deflection? That's the lens we bring at 3P — people, process, and product — and it's the same lens we built into PitchVault.ai, a tool that lets founders pressure-test a deck from an investor's point of view before they're ever in the room.

Feedback is the thing most early founders can't buy

The reason we keep showing up to rooms like this is simple: candid, real-time investor feedback is scarce, and most early founders never get it until it arrives as a 'no.' A side event that hands seven founders live critique in a low-stakes setting is doing quiet, compounding work for the ecosystem. Thanks to Lee Jean and Pulsar Innovations for building it — and for raising the stakes by putting an investor on the panel. We came for the pitches and left with a handful of founders worth staying in touch with, which, a week out from the main stage, is the whole point.