The Startup Journey

From a  blog post  by Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital titled "How to Present to Investors": Everyone who watches Bond loves the opening sequence, before the titles come on. There’s suspense, action, and unbelievable stunts – in essence, those first 5 minutes bring home why you love Bond, and that keeps you going through the next 2 hours of nonsensical plot twists.  In the same way, you need to convey the main reasons why an investor should love your business in the first 5 minutes. We found the best way to do that is to open with 3 slides:   1.What’s changed? Explain what’s the discontinuous shift, break-through, or innovation that opens the window to create a substantial new company.  2.What you do: A one-sentence explanation of what your company provides to capitalize on that big change. It still surprises me how often we can get 20 minutes into a meeting without a clear picture of exactly what a company does.  3.Fast facts: Lay...

Rick Perreault of Unbounce has a nice guest post at OnStartups on the topic. Tip #1 Use video to tell your story In hindsight, probably the most effective thing I did was include a link on our profile and in all my email correspondence to a video of me giving our pitch I had the opportunity to pitch at the last GROW Conference here in Vancouver and lucky for us, they recorded it. I included it on our Angel List profile and almost everyone that contacted me commented that they watched it and especially liked the Q&A. Here is the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WcpFqKA7So You don’t need to spend any money doing this either. Record yourself giving your pitch and providing answers to all the typical questions that you get from outsiders and post it on YouTube. Your passion, conviction and knowledge of the problem you are solving will come across in ways that a deck can never achieve and by presenting your own Q&A, you’ll skip all the typical questions and have a...