After presenting to investors with stories and research, Debra Reisenthel, the chief executive of Palo Alto Health Sciences, said she learned that most investors responded better to candor.

Debra Reisenthel, chief executive at Palo Alto Health Sciences, has been trying to raise money from investors for the last four months. The goal is to finance the development and production of a biofeedback device that measures carbon dioxide output and trains people to breathe in a way that helps them manage anxiety disorders.

Along the way, Ms. Reisenthel said, she has learned some important lessons about pitching to investors. “We used to start meetings with a story about our founder, the problem we were addressing, its cost to society and the scientific research that led to our business idea,” she said, “but investors wanted to know right away, ‘What exactly are you selling and who is going to buy it?’ ”

As a result, Ms. Reisenthel learned to get to the point, immediately. Whether they are pitching to venture capitalists, angel investors or friends and family, entrepreneurs who have been through the process stress the importance of making a crisp presentation, sizing up competitors and knowing what kind of information the potential investors require.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE Angel investors and venture capitalists come to the process at different times with different needs and goals. “The angel investors we met with during our idea stage were interested in the zeitgeist of the project,” Ms. Reisenthel said. “They were excited to be part of what we were trying to achieve, and they were O.K. with unanswered questions. They didn’t need a detailed five-year plan, and understood their investment would be diluted in value when we took on additional funding.”

She said the venture capitalists, by contrast, are generally willing to invest more money but they want to know when the company expects to be profitable. “V.C.’s are more about the details — market size, business model, cash flow plans, sales break-even point and how the company will find customers,” Ms. Reisenthel said. They were more likely to want to be involved in strategic decisions, expected regular updates and often wanted a seat on the board of directors. “They were also less willing to accept risk than angel investors.”

KEEP IT CONCISE Pete Higgins, a founding partner at the venture capital groupSecond Avenue Partners in Seattle, has heard hundreds of pitches over the last five years and has financed about 7 percent of them. He said a concise presentation was telling because entrepreneurs who can explain a complicated set of technologies or a new product show they are smart, that they have done their research and that they can communicate — all factors critical to a company’s future.

Ms. Reisenthel uses a slide deck of about 10 and no more than 15 slides and prepares additional slides in case deeper questions arise on topics like manufacturing costs or competitive analysis. “You need to know the business, the technology, the science better than anyone in the room,” she said. “Practice in front of smart professional friends in the industry who can critique you before you go in for the real meetings.” Selling the quality of your leadership and your team is as important as the idea, Mr. Higgins said.

Sometimes just a few compelling sentences can get an idea financed. Last year, Mr. Higgins said, “A start-up veteran pitched us, saying, ‘I want to sell $4.99 live concert recordings that are ready to be downloaded to the concertgoers by the time they get to their car in the parking lot. It’s technically straightforward, makes money for the band on tour and is an inexpensive memento for concertgoers, who are often trying to record on their phone anyway.” Mr. Higgins said he knew in five minutes he would invest, and theLively app made its debut this year.

KNOW THE COMPETITION Beyond just listing other companies in the same arena, understanding and describing the competitive landscape can be critical, according to Mr. Higgins. “If other companies have tried something similar and failed, tell us why they failed,” he said. “If the market is crowded with competitors, how will you do it better? Just having a feature they don’t is an incremental benefit and not enough to overcome the inertia that will keep customers from switching to your product.”

Mr. Higgins advises entrepreneurs to ask for financing only when they can demonstrate a transformational new technology, a new distribution method, or a better cost structure that cannot easily be copied. And recognize that there are competitors to every business idea, he said, even if it is the pencil and paper people are currently using to do the task you plan to automate.

EXPECT MISHAPS Julie Gilbert Newrai of Minneapolis raised $1.5 million in her first round of fund-raising in June 2012 and is preparing to begin a second round. Her service,PreciouStatus, relays personalized daily updates from professional care providers to family members of people in eldercare and child care centers.

David Bloom is a Deadline contributor.

One after another, groups of USC engineering students, ranging from thirtysomething doctoral candidates down to baby-faced undergrads, trooped to the stage today. Each pitched their newly honed and toned startup companies before a roomful of potential investors, supporters, and — in a changeup for both — executives from old-line venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and old-line Hollywood talent agency UTA.

The Viterbi Startup Garage Day featured presentations from nine teams (another group couldn’t make the event), all recently done with an intensive 12-week program to build a working tech product and get it on the market. In some cases, Viterbi’s program was a last stop to fine tune a product built on years of research and work. Other companies had been mere proposals last spring. All the young entrepreneurs are hoping to benefit from a program that’s giving them some unexpected friends in influential places.

“Early-stage entrepreneurs need two things: help with business development and access to capital,” said Ashish Soni, the Viterbi School of Engineering faculty member who runs the first-year program. “Kleiner provides access to capital. A lot of what UTA does is dealmaking. You can replace that celebrity (the agency would typically represent) with a startup.”

Only one of the nine presenting companies had anything like an entertainment angle to it. That company, MediaHound, proposes to help consumers find (legal) access to movies, TV episodes, music, books and games, regardless of the technology platform, distributor or device involved, and make it easy for users to create and share “universal playlists” with friends, and to buy or sample the material, said CEO Addison McCaleb.

The company already has raised more than $500,000, done test runs with several prominent film festivals and signed partner deals with 60 companies, including YouTube, Amazon Instant Video, Sony’s Crackle and Hulu, McCaleb said.

But even working with an entertainment-oriented startup is a relatively new initiative for UTA, never mind working with the other startups creating health-maintenance apps, gym-management tools or 3D scanning and printing hardware, acknowledged Brent Weinstein, the agency’s head of digital media. “This isn’t a traditional business for talent agencies,” he said. “But we believe anybody, in any company, can benefit from sophisticated and passionate representation.”

UTA joined the Startup Garage program as part of a broader effort to help create tech giants that will stay in Los Angeles, a city that produces more engineers than any other in the country, thanks to Viterbi and other strong engineering programs at schools such as Caltech, UCLA and Cal Poly-Pomona, said Weinstein. But because of the general lack of big tech firms beyond what’s left of the aeronautics and defense sector, most of those engineering students tend to end up in the Bay Area, working there for giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple.

“We are big believers in the L.A. early-stage marketplace,” Weinstein said. “This program gave us a chance to dig in and help some early-stage companies thrive.”

UTA has had previous success with startups, helping launch a big shopping site and Awesomeness TV, the online video site that sold this summer to DreamWorks for $33 million up front and an earn-out that could nearly quintuple that price.

Now, both UTA and Kleiner will have an ongoing interest in the 10 firms that came through the first year of the Startup Garage, and an ongoing incentive to help them succeed, Weinstein said, though he declined to discuss terms of the arrangements.

The program also represents a change for Kleiner, the bluest of blue-chip venture-capital firms but one that typically is involved in later rounds of a startup’s development, once it has begun generating significant revenue. That’s changing, however, said Kleiner general partner Mike Abbott, because of the need for VCs to get access to what he called “foundational research” and the companies that are created from that work. Whereas once a lot of that research was being done in the R&D wing of tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and IBM, that’s no longer the case. And while Kleiner partners know the way to the Stanford engineering labs, they needed to extend their reach to other top-level schools to have access to more startup opportunities, Abbott said.

Abbott said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos “sees that and understands that he needs a more entrepreneurial approach” to the research work being done in his school. “You can argue that not every team (in the Startup Garage program) is doing a grand challenge,” Abbott said, “but we wouldn’t take a team in the program if it didn’t have an engineer involved.”

The next step will be helping the teams grow into full-fledged businesses during the next six to nine months. All nine presenters were asking for additional seed funding of $250,000 to $1 million, typically to be spent for customer acquisition, marketing or hiring additional engineers or technical capacity to expand into full-scale operations. Still undetermined is timing and partners for a second year of the Startup Garage, though director Soni said he hopes to double the number of nascent companies invited to take part.