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Pitching and pitch decks doesn’t show who the founder is; character, execution, substance
- Knowing people takes time, time that no one has enough of, so we need a balance
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Content/substance over presentation, Zuck apparently sucked at pitching back then
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Pitching notes:
- Context is king, adjust content accordingly (demo day vs elevator pitch)
- Know the audience: know their investment thesis, and their past investments that are similar to you
- Aesthetic should be simplicity and eye-catching: 10 slides, 20 mins, nothing smaller than 30 pt font, include page numbers!!!
- Keep short term memory in mind, they aren’t going to remember names and acronyms
- VCs spend on average 4 mins to read a deck
- Problem → solution → why you → why now
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Iterate after each pitch, pick up reactions and direct/indirect feedback
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Don’t deceive and manipulate, self explanatory
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Most VCs care about 3 things to different degrees:
- Team, potential market size, product
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Pitch deck formula (not to be precisely followed)
- Cover slide: name, tagline, date, investor it’s for
- Problem slide: clear and specific, quantify scale and severity (people affected, money, time consumed)
- Don’t state it as some enormous problem that humanity has suffered from since the start like loneliness… no reason to believe that you’re the one to solve it
- Check for congruence: do your users resonate with your problem statement and story?
- Product slide: live demo is best, quantify impact with numbers
- Team slide: faces, roles and titles, claims to fame
- It can’t convey team dynamics or who everyone is beyond the title, and it doesn’t need to
- Market slide: VCs need to see plausible scenario where you become massive, more massive than their whole fund (a good fund 3x initial amount raised within 10 years)
- Estimates of initial customer base and stepping stones to a larger market
- Example: geographical, start somewhere, learn a playbook, put it in other places
- Founder’s plan to go from seed to series A
- Would be nice to have clear stepping stone steps along with market size at each step!
- Of course don’t BS, very easy to do with top down market analyses
- Traction & business model slide: revenue, revenue model, cohort analysis of customers
- Competitors/existing solutions slide: quantify money spent or time lost
- Competitive analysis slide: how you’re different + how you maintain that when competitors imitate you
- Barriers to imitation, moat, defensibility
- Patents are nice but ‘you don’t have enough money for justice’, no money for lawsuits against bigger companies
- Tickbox chart with features and competitors is nice
- Financials slide: “We see our Series A happening in X months, when we hit Y metrics. We believe we need Z dollars to hire A-C, grow with D strategy.”
- Itemized list of spending, key milestone timeline, amount being raised
- Contact info slide
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Do:
- tell a story, a compelling one
- be ambitious
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Don’t:
- flood with bullet points (I am so guilty of this), more images and graphs
- use stock photos, do use photos of people using your product
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They have a bunch of useful resources and examples at the end of the blog, go check it out!