The Escalator Pitch
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
"lefora.com is forums made easy—it's like blogger for forums"
I need to know what Forums are, what Blogger is, and what they mean.
Compare this to Google:
"access to the world's information in one click"
I'm playing around with mine:
"Get more out of your calendar than you put in."
Your users wouldn't care for your mission statement nearly as much you yourself or your investors should. The press, well those might be either way - depending on who is their target readership.
One important exception to the rule is if your mission is touchy-feely, like "our new GM seeds are solving world hunger, one seed at a time" (for a GM research lab). That would make good press for any newspaper.
Dyson is the iPod of vacuum cleaners.
How's that? :)
Which is the whole point of escalator pitch.