Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

I have sat through countless pitches with Ivy League grads spewing off intellectual descriptions of the details of their product or service and why it will win in the market. In a VC pitch this type of messaging will do just fine. These messages need to pass the cocktail party pitch. And I think this is a mistake.

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2010

Also, business development meetings can be valuable for the information they give you over and above getting the actual deal done. Vet your deck with them… let them see how you’re pitching the company. It probably even pays to get all of them in a room to pitch practice and get feedback on your value prop to a partner.

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development pitching startup venture capital 316

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JUNE 30, 2010

Instead, believing that they've only got one shot to win over an investor, startups often pitch far too late and fail to build a relationship over time with an investor. Here’s why: Investors have an information advantage. Of course, there are mitigating factors around actually pitching too early.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 26, 2014

Contrary to popular opinion I actually believe crowd-funding is best used after seed capital or venture capital. They get pitched by so many blowhards that more genuine people who aren’t in it for just a story stand out from the crowd. It super charges a business that is closer to product delivery.

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pitching media advice venture capital 319

David Teten VC

NOVEMBER 18, 2021

One of the first decisions we had to make in setting up our new VC fund, Versatile Venture Capital , was our CRM and marketing technology infrastructure. . Linkedin : Versatile Venture Capital / David Teten personal. Tim Friedman, Founder, PEStack , and a Venture Partner with Versatile Venture Capital , said, . “We

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venture capital capital ventures VC 123

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 6, 2013

In other words, if you aren't journaling what you're seeing and doing in a thoughtful way, you're running your company based on year or more old information, never cleaning off your blind spots. The chances of getting money from someone who is hearing about you for the first time during the pitch process is extremely low.

entrepreneurs 384

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TechCrunch

JUNE 28, 2022

Over the course of the past 10 weeks, I’ve taken apart 10 pitch decks as part of our Pitch Deck Teardown series. And it presents this information in a way that is easy to digest and discuss, without getting too bogged down in the nitty-gritty of the numbers. We want your pitch decks for our Pitch Deck Teardowns!

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pitching venture capital startup ventures 96

TechCrunch

JANUARY 14, 2023

It took me a while, but I’m realizing that my startup love language is discussing any attempts to standardize the opaque and often informal world of venture capital. The tool, started by pre-seed firm Afore Capital, is based on Common App, which sends one application to multiple colleges and universities. Chat soon, N.

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venture capital capital ventures pitching 84

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2010

I’m writing this post as part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital but will file it under Sales Tips as well since it applies equally to both scenarios. Information Asymmetry - The biggest problem that presenters face in large (5+ people) is information asymmetry. Congratulations. A lot, actually.

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TechCrunch

MARCH 3, 2021

Weeks or even months of working on your pitch deck could come down to the 170 seconds (on average) that investors spend looking at it. “Investors see a lot of pitches,” VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman noted. “In However, volunteering certain types of information can have the opposite effect. exit strategy”.

pitching 113

pitching VC strategy leadership 113

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 4, 2021

Below is a link to the pitch video. There wasn’t any context around it—not exactly something I’d call a “pitch”. I explained that this wasn’t really a pitch because it lacked all sorts of context. Honestly, I didn’t take it that seriously—mostly because I was starting with no information. Who was the team?

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pitching transportation consulting creativity 243

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 23, 2012

When people tell you how and why they raised capital or what drove their app to success, they often attribute success to planning or neat little explainable reasons when they might simply have no clue what happened. Venture capital is kind of like a knuckleball. Does it work for your customer? They don't stress test.

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advice startup VC strategy 416

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MAY 2, 2023

Back in 2004, I was working for the General Motors pension fund, which had been making limited partnership investments in venture capital since the early 1980’s. I got to see all of the top VCs pitching their funds. One particular example that Brad brought up was how Amazon was simply a physical store but on the web.

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opportunity investing investment disruption 253

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DECEMBER 29, 2010

As best as anyone can tell, the biggest issue in deploying resources efficiently is lack of information. Having information about how much snow is actually on each street, in real time, would be a great idea not only for deploying trucks, but for plotting routes for emergency vehicles. How do you power them? Maintain them?

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media communities pitching collaboration 256

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 1, 2010

But don’t expect every partner in a VC firm to necessarily divulge that information. In a future post I’m going to talk about how I recommend best finding out this information. Tags: Pitching VCs Raising Venture Capital VC Industry. You might call that the FourSquare Express.

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VC venture capital pitching board 275

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Their product--"311 in a box" if you will--is clearly resonating with entities that can't afford to spend tens of millions of dollars on building the kind of citizen information system that NYC has, which is basically almost every city besides NYC. There is a lot of talk about needing to be a technical founder.

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real estate leadership SaaS education 326

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 7, 2013

b) There really isn''t any more actual information to pour over--it''s just a lot of thinking and talking about the same things over and over again. In many cases, I got to know the entrepreneur before they were pitching or even had a deck. Venture Capital & Technology' The problem with dragging it on is twofold--.

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investment investing construction venture capital 335

David Teten VC

APRIL 1, 2021

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. Relationships with Venture Partners, Entrepreneurs in Residence , and other non-salaried personnel who can help your companies. Organize events in your vertical. Fundraising. Recruiting.

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venture capital accelerator capital ventures 81

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 8, 2011

The point is, someone building a career in venture capital that doesn't include prior entrepreneurial success probably doesn't look like they have much to offer in the beginning. Facing live pitching is a new thing, but that's no excuse for not having an approach to hitting and studying up to face this particular pitcher.

VC 275

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC.&#. I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. Tags: Pitching VCs Start-up Advice startup technology vc venture capital.

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VC peer-to-peer pitching advice 275

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 3, 2009

This is part of my ongoing Raising Venture Capital (VC) series. When people refer to a strategic investor they are usually talking about an investor that comes from the industry you serve as opposed to an independent venture capital investor. The reality is that their core business is not venture capital.

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advice venture capital frameworks entrepreneurs 279

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series about Raising Venture Capital. Surely they have more information than I do.&# And I think this line of thinking has started to become conventional wisdom as outlined in Chris Dixon’s excellent blog post saying that you need to be careful raising seed money from a large VC fund.

VC 283

VC real estate advice venture capital 283

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 8, 2011

Networking is not just handing someone a business card or giving them a pitch. Going to other people's events is fine, but organizers have the information advantage--they know everyone who attended and, more importantly, everyone knows them. 2) Get to know fewer people, better. 3) Host an event.

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networking media communities innovation 289

Gust

OCTOBER 18, 2011

The man stopped talking, finally, summarized his pitch, and thanked us for listening. He’d treated us – a group of local investors – to a pitch punctuated with detailed stories of how previous partners, an investor , and an attorney had screwed him. We sat in stunned silence. Bad fundamentals.

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pitching investing investment technology 124

TechCrunch

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Based on my experience, here’s how to avoid making the most common mistakes deep tech founders make when pitching investors: Work on your storytelling. Make your pitch tailored to what excites venture capital investors and avoid what does not. Investor pitch meetings are not dissertation defenses.

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strategy founder pitching venture capital 130

Entrepreneur's Handbook

DECEMBER 13, 2020

The Future is Uncertain, Your Pitch Deck (and Profitability) Can’t be On the off chance you need to be reminded, factors that can make or break your business are unpredictable, and 2020 has reminded us in no uncertain terms how quickly market opportunities, customer demands, and institutions can change irrevocably at a moment’s notice.

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pitching VC founder financing 109

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2011

If you haven’t read the post the thesis was that I care way more about watching the trajectory of your performance as a team (or individual) than I do about how good you “pitch” on the first day you come to see me. He waited to pitch me until he had a strong sense of what he wanted to build. Pose is no different. Here’s the deal.

investing 303

investing investment VC media 303

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

Each VC came on with different information, at a different price and with a different risk appetite. Best if you get much of this from due diligence of calling other portfolio companies and then use this information to confirm with the VC. Always Pitch Outsiders for Follow Ons. That’s a different story. The Pitfall of One.

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This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 5, 2012

You have no Twitter acount and there's no new stream of information about your criteria. If anything, your site is actually setup to hide more information than it gives out. The interesting thing is that being connected to wealth isn't necessarily a driver of good venture capital performance--why would it be?

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TechCrunch

MARCH 17, 2023

It’s too early to determine whether SVB’s downfall heralds a new era for venture capital, but based on anecdotal evidence, off-the-record discussions and chats with co-workers, it seems like we’re back to business as usual as far as pre-revenue startup fundraising is concerned.

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pitching frameworks advice strategy 92

This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

If I told you that the people who strike out the most batters, on average, have 98MPH fastballs, which is 2% higher than the league average, that’s much more useful information. Luckily for aspirational baseball players, pitch velocity, spin rate, and just about every other aspect of playing baseball are highly quantifiable in real-time.

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

DECEMBER 24, 2021

Otherwise, you lose sales even before you start Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash Do not mistake the perfect pitch for the well-rehearsed (read: memorized) presentation. The cookie-cutter pitch presentation kills your sales pipeline before you actually have one. My team members call it the Pitch Perfect experience.

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pitching consulting creativity board 72

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

The venture capital industry is built on signals. The startup, launching publicly today, is building a rating system for the venture capital industry. The goal is to create a more standardized way to track information about emerging fund managers so that institutional investors know how to navigate the shifting landscape.

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venture capital capital ventures disruption 85

TechCrunch

NOVEMBER 19, 2021

This is a fantastic time to found a startup, but unless you plan to bootstrap it, you will still need to go through the laborious exercise of crafting a pitch deck. According to Jose Cayasso, CEO and co-founder of pitch deck design agency Slidebean, there are five slides where pretty much all founders miss the mark : Go-to-market.

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pitching accelerator frameworks advice 85

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2010

This is part of a series that I’ve been working on called Understanding Venture Capital. If anybody has any more information or thinks about these issues differently please feel free to add in the comments section. Tags: Pitching VCs Raising Venture Capital VC Industry.

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investing investment VC venture capital 226

TechCrunch

JULY 6, 2021

According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. Even if you are lucky enough to land a meeting, it’s more likely that a junior person went through your pitch and ran it up the chain. According to Fisher, the pro forma pitch deck is a thing of the past. Walter Thompson. yourprotagonist.

pitching 78

pitching VC venture capital consulting 78

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2020

with $15 million to Prove It The venture capital world has started firing up a few cylinders again and looking for businesses that it believes will help us all succeed in ways that resonate with new ways of working as we begin to return to work. Bevy is Emerging as a Leader in Software for Building Virtual Communities?—?with

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