Concept: If your deck can’t clarify conviction, cadence, and character in one slide, don’t raise yet. Startups founders aren't the only ones with bad pitch slides. Over the years, I’ve written about how a cluttered team slide in a founder deck often betrays deeper issues—misaligned roles, unclear value, or a résumé-driven identity crisis. But fund … Continue reading Fund Managers: Your Fund Slide Sucks, Too
Minimum valuations and their required revenue at fixed value-creation-multiple of cash consumption. In the last blog post I wrote about Fred Wilson's excellent insight into value creation relative to cash burn. I got a lot of questions about it so here is an Excel spreadsheet for you to download and play with -- let me … Continue reading Fred Wilson’s “Return on Burn” (Excel Worksheet Attached)
Sounds obvious. So I am puzzled when I get pitches where the basic parameters of investment returns are not met. There are many different types of venture capital investors. You should know which type of investor you are talking to. So here's one real example from last month: We're selling an edge appliance for IoT … Continue reading Pitch Clinic: VC Investments Need Hyper-Growth (D’oh!) — Excel Worksheet Attached.
I know you have a great product. I wouldn't be talking to you otherwise. But I am not a customer. I am a potential investor. As the CEO, you have been juggling all sorts of crisis situations over the past year, and you have been at the forefront of selling, probably meeting with customers and … Continue reading Pitch Clinic: Sell Stock, not Product
We've got this awesome team and we're doing <insert-cool-stuff-here>. None of <insert-public-companies-here> can do that. We're light years ahead of them! I love great teams. Which investor doesn't. But just because you have not heard of any group within <insert-public-companies-here> doesn't mean they can't do it. In fact, any pitch about a unique technical skill … Continue reading Pitch Clinic: “Noone else is doing it!”
When it comes to your team slide in your pitch, there are usually two lines of thoughts: First tell me who you are and why I should listen to you First show me the problem set and what's hard about solving that problem. Once I understand what you want to achieve, show me how your … Continue reading Pitch Clinic: Your Team Slide Sucks.
