Liz Pasillas pitched Mersyv, a New Discovery Media product, on the main stage of unbound Global Miami in November 2017, as one of eight finalists in the Female Founders Startup Challenge.
The challenge was sponsored by Babson College and WeWork, and picked what New Discovery Media's own announcement called eight of the most promising women-led companies in South Florida, competing live in front of a crowd and a jury. KynderMed and Metastatic AI took the grand prizes.
Mersyv was not a slide. It was the prototype the company had built three months earlier inside CREATE, the accelerator at Miami Dade College's Idea Center, which is why there was something to put in front of a jury at all.
The pitch survives. Unbound published the whole challenge as a single recording, with Pasillas on stage at 11:37 — the primary record of a company still finding its words, three years before the training work that would define it.
The conference around it was not small. Univisión's memoir of unbound Miami 2017 describes two days in Wynwood of what the organisers called disruptive technology, with Bloomberg, IBM Watson, DHL, PepsiCo, UNICEF, Twitter, Google, Oracle, BuzzFeed and MTV in the rooms, and startups pitching between them. The company does not appear in that write-up; the challenge was one track among many, which is the honest size of the moment.
The Miami pitch she has told from a TEDx stage.
Pasillas has told the story of going blank in front of more than 30 investors in Miami, and what she built out of the three days that followed, in her TEDx Ciudad Juárez talk. The talk names the Startup Nation Conference as that stage; her posts from the time describe this competition instead, in November 2017, a few months before Startup Nation ran in February 2018.
It was the middle of the Miami stretch that also took the founders through CREATE at Miami Dade College and, the following year, Babson's WIN Lab.
A month after the pitch, on December 18, 2017, Pasillas was at Comcast NBCUniversal's Table Talk dinner in Miami, at a table of startup founders, chief executives and innovation leads. It is the kind of evening that leaves no record beyond the invitation, which is its own point about that year: the rooms were opening.