How to Pitch Anything in Two Minutes

1. Demonstrate enthusiasm
   1. Leave your comfort zone (record your presentation à redo it with more energy)
   2. Have fun
   3. Move your body
   4. Copy personalities
2. Find a personal connection
   Tell a personal story (make it less than 30 sec)
3. Sell the benefit
   Give examples
4. Nobody Wants a drill bit
   Don’t sell the tool, sell the result – every year, 6 million quarter-inch drill bits are sold, yet nobody wants a quarter-inch drill bit; they want a quarter-inch hole
5. Teach us something new

Entrepreneur Pitch Workbook

Pitch DNA:

• Mind the time
• Sell, don’t explain
• Showing is better than telling
• Provide use cases from the perspective of a customer
• Assemble the right team
• Cite reports to give credibility to your claim
• Story + Execution = Valuation
• Metric matter
• Convey a clear differentiator
• Tell a good clear, easy-to-repeat story
• Focus | Focus | Focus!

Tips:

• Tell a good, repeatable story
• Make sure the concept fits into the VCs portfolio (is not competing)
• Be prepared to discuss key assumptions
• Big problem = big market
• Have 1 key take-away per slide

1. Introduction [1 page]
   1. Key Objective:
      Everyone should know what the company does and the target market. The only question that should remain is: How are you doing it.
   2. Tell Us:
      1. Give a brief history of the company, when it was started, how it’s been funded.
      2. Define the company, business or product in a single sentence.
      3. Concisely state your core value proposition, including the target market.
      4. What unique benefit will you provide to what customers to address what need?
2. Team
   [1 page] Identify a core group of talent that can execute on the next
   set of milestones. Invoke confidence that your team believes in the
   company and can move forward. “Why you?”

• Who is missing → hiring plans

1. Opportunity [2-5 pages]
   (clear) Problem + (large) Market = (great) Opportunity
   Establish the need for your company’s solution and convince us that solving the problem is worth the effort.

• What is the problem? Describe the pain
  1. Why does the problem persist?
  2. Recent Trends
  3. How is it currently addressed?
  4. Why are we at an inflection point now?
  5. Who is the customer?
• Market Size
  1. How much is spend on the problem today?
  2. Start with the economics of 1 customer (# of customers) x (% who buy each year) x (avg amount spent annually) = market size
  3. Calculate the TAM (top down), SAM (bottom up)
• Define addressable market share
  1. How does the market change and grow over time?

1. Solution [2-6 pages]

• Help us understand how you will solve the problem.
• The Offering – What specifically are you offering to whom?
• What’s your differentiator or unique competitive advantage?
• Clearly quantify three or four key benefits you provide, and who specifically realizes these benefits.
• Highlight the elements of your technology that give you potential for leverage and scale as you grow.
• Explain how your solution is a company, not just a feature.

1. Competition [1-2 pages]

• Help us understand who you compete with, why you have a better product or solution and how you can win.
• Explain whom you compete with and summarize the few (3 – 4) key reasons why customers will prefer your solution to others.
• Include a competitive quadrant matrix.
• Who are investors of competitors
• How does the market change over time?
• Do
  you complement or displace commonly used technology? Do you change
  business processes, or do you do the same, but faster and cheaper?
• Do you disrupt the current value chain or fit into established channels?

1. Business Model [2-4 pages]

• Explain how you will generate revenue
• Show what you’ve accomplished to date
• Make future forecasts.
• Convey that you understand the realistic economics and evolution of a growing, dynamic company.
• Be able to discuss key assumptions and be able to defend them
  1. How do you make money?
  2. P&L
  3. Balance sheet – focus spending only on what’s critical.
  4. Cash flow, burn rate
  5. Cap table
  6. Revenue model
  7. Pricing + average account size and/or lifetime value
  8. Who are the key customers? How and what do they buy?
  9. Explain your pricing, your costs, and how you will achieve profitability.
  10. Key
      metrics that drive revenues, expenses and growth (such as customers,
      unit sales, new products, expansion sales, new markets, user stats,
      page views, global reach, uniques, registered users, subscription base).
  11. Marketing, sales & distribution model
  12. Pipeline of customers and strategic/channel partners that have expressed interest in your solution and/or are referenceable.

1. The Ask [1 page]

• Outline what you need from the investor to make your business a success and what you are looking for in an investor partner.
• “The
  amount you’re raising shouldn’t be arbitrary,” Canaan says. “Tell your
  story in numbers. Investors want to see that you’re hitting milestones
  and that you are asking for the right amount of money to get the
  company to a meaningful next step.”
  1. How much are you raising
  2. Valuation expectations
  3. Burn rate
  4. What milestones will it get you to? Why is this the right milestone?
  5. Why is this the right amount?
  6. Post-money of last round
  7. Amount of cash in the bank
  8. How much runway the new money will buy

How to pitch:

1. What is the product
2. Always ask yourself after a sentence: SO WHAT? → then answer that question
3. For instance (examples)
4. Know
   your audience (What do you want to learn about the organization? | What
   convinced you to listen to me? | What points do you want to hear about?
   | Background check of the Investor
5. 10 slides [Title | Problem | Solution | Business Model | Technology (magic) | Marketing – Sales | Competition | Team | Financial Forecast | Status (use of fund/ timeline à next step to action)
6. 20 min presentation (even if you have 1 hour)
7. if the audience remembers what your business does you are in the top 10%
8. Set the stage (organize laptops)
9. First words: How much of your time do I have?
10. What are the most important points you want to hear?
11. Only use realistic forecasts [e.g. almost everyone has a laptop. | Buying over the internet is cheaper than in a store.
12. Show you have a vision > show technical understanding
13. TAKE NOTES
14. Rewrite your pitch from SCRATCH after every meeting
15. Pitch at least 25 times before it goes real
16. Dark Background | Add your logo | “Normal Fonds” | no effects | one lvl of bullets maximum| diagrams | print slides
17. Compelling story
18. Imagine audience is bored and just wants to go home

David S. Rose on pitching to VCs

Most important thing VCs invest in: the Team

10 things you have to convey in a pitch:

• Integrity
• Passion
• Experience
• Knowledge
• Skill
• Leadership
• Commitment
• Vision
• Realism
• Coachable

How to implement that:

1. Grap the emotional attention
2. Take them on an ever accelerating emotional journey. Grand final = end
   
   
3. Explain: Market | What | How …
4. Tie in touchstones (other companies) I might have heard of
5. Validates (Sales | Award | Beta tests are great …)
6. Don’t say anything that is unrealistic
7. Make sure EVERYTHING in your presentation is understandable
8. Don’t let them think – take them through the presentation like kid without patronizing them
9. Check internal inconsistenciesVery bad: Typos, errors, unpreparedness

Presentation Practice

What is better: Short bullet points < just headlines < images

1. Company logo
2. Business Overview
   15 min overview (1 sentence service description)
3. Team
4. Market
5. Product
   What is the product (demo)
6. Business Model
   How I make money
7. Strategic Relationships
   Who are my partners [amazon]
8. Competition
9. Barriers to Entry
   How am I special?
10. Financial Overview (start → 3 years in future
    How would I spend the VCs money
11. How much money do I want? | what is the capital structure (other investors)
12. Logo → the final orgasmic pitch (make it about the speaker)

5 presentation tips:

1. Always use presenter mode
2. Always use a remote control
3. Handouts should NOT be the presentation (the presentation consists only of headlines | the handout has to stand by itself)
4. Don’t read your speech
5. Never look at the screen behind you

How to Present to Investors

1. Explain what you’re doing (say it in the first sentence)
2. get rapidly to demo (better show than talk)
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one. (show them the cools stuff your product can do)
4. Don’t talk and drive (make sure you never stop looking at your audience)
5. Don’t talk about secondary matters at length (Prioritize the shit out of your outline)
6. Don’t get too deeply into business models (just mention how you think you might make money)
   1. the presentation is too brief
   2. the business model is very likely to change anyway
7. Talk slowly and clearly to the audience
8. Have one person talk
9. Seem confident
10. Don’t try to seem more than you are
11. Don’t put too many words on slides
12. Specific numbers are good (not more than 4 / 5 numbers)
13. Tell stories about users (have a specific user in mind + make the stories personal)
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads (create an unique phrase = Slogan)

Pitch your Business

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