Watch three rookies gear up for the investor presentation of a lifetime.

This is your moment, and you'll never have it again. What do you do to get ready? That's the challenge facing 23 female entrepreneurs who have been selected to present their businesses before hundreds of VCs at an exclusive venture-capital forum. The cast of company builders is noteworthy for the number of early-stage entrepreneurs sporting Ph.D.'s and M.B.A.'s from Ivy League schools. But credentials aren't enough to get an audience with VCs.

Enter stage right Springboard Enterprises, the nonprofit hosting the forum. Springboard aggressively recruits the best and brightest female entrepreneurs and gives them coaches galore. Ever since its first packed forum, in Silicon Valley in January 2000, Springboard has defied expectations. All told, nearly 40% of its graduates have raised in excess of $700 million from VCs and angels. This year Springboard Enterprises is host of three VC forums and even more boot camps across the country.

So what does the nonprofit bring to the money hunt? Herewith, a backstage tour with three of Springboard's rising stars as they endure a grueling five-week "rehearsal" culminating in the VC forum on November 9, 2001, and, they hope, a deal.

Act I: The Pitch

Scene I: Springboard boot camp, Babson College, Wellesley, Mass., October 5, 2001. Five weeks to Springboard: New England 2001 Venture Capital Forum.

"Can we start over? Pleeeeeze!"

The video camera pans on a young woman struggling with her "lines." Wielding the camera is Kim Marinucci, a "pitch coach" with long blond hair who stands patiently in her high heels. "Try to make it through the 60 seconds without stopping," she says gently to the woman who is begging for another chance. After two false starts, the woman completes one of the longest one-minute elevator pitches in history and walks off mumbling, "I only got three hours of sleep."

But Marinucci offers her own aside: "It's not a sleep problem, it's a memorization problem. She cracks under pressure." Many entrepreneurs try to memorize their presentation, she says. Big mistake.

"Next!"

One after another, the 23 entrepreneurs come before the camera to make their pitch, some of them clasping notes on a napkin. But Shoba Purushothaman blows into the one-day boot camp laughing and smiling. Unlike the women who stumble over their feet, she seems to walk on a cloud of blustery bravado. With her British accent and well-fitting suit, she exudes the air of someone who's just stepped off the Concorde, even though she's actually driven herself in from New York City. You want me to talk about my business for 60 seconds? Let's go! Her megawatt smile lights up the room as she speaks about her company. "The NewsMarket offers enterprises a software solution ... that significantly simplifies the process and reduces the cost of marketing and distributing video news to the media ...," she says. Hard to know what her company does, exactly. But she makes it sound enticing.

Cheerful Lucy McQuilken, who has short brown hair and dimples, ends her videotaped elevator pitch by giving out her E-mail address.

A.G. Breitenstein breezes in for her close-up wearing a tight black T-shirt, no jacket, and one silver hoop on her upper left ear, the whole look topped off by a head of orangy blond hair. She is so casual that you'd never guess she dreads doing an impromptu pitch. "It's like getting the test before you get a chance to study," she says.

And most of the class flunks the test. Granted, 60 seconds isn't much time for a student to explain the size of her market, who her competitors are, and why investors should give her company millions. But most of the entrepreneurs don't even try. Instead, they wax poetic about their products. In short, there's a lot of work to be done before the women can represent their companies at the VC forum, where they each will have 10 minutes to address an audience of probably 200 to 300 venture capitalists and angel investors. It is Springboard's mission to groom female entrepreneurs for this moment.

Springboard has chosen this class of 23 entrepreneurs from a pool of 150 applicants. The rules: the women must hold a management position and a substantial equity stake in their business. It comes as a shock to find that many of the 23 already have major angel backers. So it's not a question of why they want VC money; the only issue is how fast they can get their hands on it. Shoba, Lucy, and A.G. -- as we will refer to the stars of our story -- seem to epitomize the new generation of aggressive female entrepreneurs. All three want to build their start-up companies to $20 million in sales within three years or less. They have the same fast-growth aspirations as their male managers and cofounders do.