Putting together a good venture presentation
From time to time I’m planning on writing posts aimed at giving some insight into the venture industry. Brad (sometimes co-authored by Jason Mendelson, our GC) has done a series of these that I think are very informative. In fact, my very first blog was a guest column for Brad that described splits and the various ways to calculate them in a venture deal (and why this matters to entrepreneurs). I sit through a lot of venture presentations. Literally hundreds of them. Some are very good but a good number of them are really poor. Seriously. This amazes me. I think it’s pretty hard to get an audience with a VC (I think about the number of plans we receive every year that we don’t see the pitch for vs. the number that we invite in for a meeting). I’m amazed how often entrepreneurs fail to put their best foot forward when they do get a meeting by having a sub-par presentation. I think it’s because too many entrepreneurs know their business so well that they forget how to describe it to people who don’t. Here’s a couple of do’s and don’t that I hope will be helpful. Also below is a list of what a good venture presentation should include (I believe this was originally put together by my colleague Chris Wand a few years ago). – DO have a 2 or 3 sentence description of what you do. This should be simple and straightforward. You grandparents should hear you sa this and say ‘oh – I get it’. – DO make sure you start your presentation by telling the people who you are talking to what it is you do (I’m truly amazed by the number of times it takes 6 or 10 powerpoint slides to get to the part of the presentation where I finally understand what it is the company that is presenting actually does) – DON’T assume that the problem that you solve is obvious. Make sure you do a good job outlining what it is that you ‘fix’ – DON’T have a financial plan that shows you becoming the most successful [insert your company type here] company ever in existence. I’m amazed how many enterprise software companies show us with a plan that has them generating $50m in revenue in their 4th year . . . while at the same time insisting that their plan is ‘very conservative’ – DO make sure you do time checks – first at the beginning of the presentation to know how long you have an audience for, and then periodically to make sure you are still on schedule – DO make sure you then organize your presentation around the time you have (which is to say, understand the meat of your presentation and make sure you get to it in the time you have allotted); a corollary to this is to make sure that you skip sections that you are asked to skip. We regularly spend 10 or 15 minutes time going through something (for example the market overview of a market we already know broadly very well) that we’ve asked an entrepreneur to skip over, only to run out of time during the real guts of the presentation (i.e., defining how the company’s technology is unique from that which we’ve seen before). – DO make sure you practice your presentation out of order and interrupted – a lot of good presenters get completely flustered if they get off track or have to take things in a different order than they planned – you should expect that you’ll get interrupted with questions, asked to skip over sections and challenged on certain points – practice your presentation that way. Questions to answer in a venture presentation. (n.b., please don’t see this as an end-all/be-all list, but rather as just a guide): Vision – What is your big vision? – What problem are you trying to solve and for whom? – Where do you want to be in the future Market – – …
January 8, 2005· 6 min read
Hats Off!
Someone once told me a story that I think about often. It went something like this: Two friends were walking together through some fields when they came to a high wall. The wall stretched as far as they could see in both directions. As they were talking about what to do in this impassable situation one of the men takes off his favorite felt hat and throws it over the wall. The other looks at him and says “why did you do that – that was your favorite hat,” to which his friend responds “now we’re going to have to find a way over that wall.” …
January 6, 2005· 2 min read
Eyes closed . . . head first . . .
I spend a reasonable amount of time on-line (or in my RSS reader) and more recently have begun to read an increasing number of web logs. It’s a fascinating phenomenon – a voice for everyone (although not necessarily a listener, but more on that in another post). I work for Mobius Venture Capital and have been interested in the emergence of some prominent VC’s in the blog world (my boss, Brad Feld, has a very popular and I think informative blog; other blogs, including some of the venture blogs I read are listed here on my site). One thing I’ve noticed is that most of the VC bloggers seem to be partners (two notable exceptions are Ryan McIntyre and Robin Bordoli – both colleagues of mine at Mobius). I’m not entirely sure why this is. My initial assumption is that those of us non-partners who work in VC are simply too busy (trying to become partners) to put anything together; or perhaps it’s because in the world of VC people care a lot about what partners think and say and not as much about what the rest of us say. So I decided to test this theory by starting a blog of my own. I’m calling it “VC Adventure (you are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike”) because I’m intending to muse about the twists and turns of the VC world (points to the first person who gets the full reference). I’d like to talk directly about my view of the world – the triumphs and frustrations I go through with my companies and in my firm as I try to figure out what kind of venture capitalist I’d like to be. …
January 5, 2005· 3 min read