[Music]
Welcome to the Leslie eLab. I'm Frank Rimalovski. I'm the executive director of the Entrepreneurial Institute. We run the Leslie eLab,
this Startup School speaker series, the Innovation venture fund which I also run which
invest in startups founded by NYU students, faculty, and researchers.
And we also run a whole host of other programs.
I won't bore you with an infomercial today,
but I've been investing in startups since 1998.
So, I've seen a few pitches over the years and then
helped a lot of entrepreneurs work on their pitches. So, I don't profess to be
an expert or guru but I've seen a few.
Question for you guys.
So, first off, who's new to the Leslie lab today?
Anybody? A couple of you? Ok, good, welcome.
Who's new to Startup School?
Okay, good.
And who is actively working on a start-up that's thinking about raising money in the next six months?
Maybe a year? Okay. A couple more questions. Who here is an undergraduate student?
I'll get to you.
Who here is a grad student?
Any postdocs in the audience and faculty?
-We used to be.
Okay
Anybody else who I didn't cover?
All right, okay, last set of questions, then I get started. So, I'd like to know what schools are represented here, so
CAS?
-We actually don't have it on the side of an application. 
-It's only graduating seniors.
It doesn't say College of Arts and Science?
-No, it's not there.
Okay, we got to fix that. It's the largest college in the university, that's probably an error.
If it was there at one point, so that will we will look at it. Apologies for that.
We don't mean to disrespect the college of Arts and Sciences.
[Laughter]
Who's here from Stern?
from Gallatin? Tandon? Courant?
Who am I leading? I know, medicine? Who else?
-SPS.
SPS, 
-Liberal Studies.
Liberal Studies, anyone else? Okay, cool. I just like to know who I'm talking to.
[Laughter]
So, this way I want to kind of touch... actually, one more question. Who attended the
"When and how to raise venture capital" talk I did earlier in the semester?
Okay, so a few of you. This will make more sense to maybe those of you then I'm not going to try to
rehash much of that. I will touch on a little bit of it.
I think you did from this semester or last semester. I know those slides are available on our Slideshare channel.
I don't know, do you know if the video from that talk is up yet?
-Not yet.
Not?
-It will be soon.
If you go to our web page
on the upper right-hand corner, you'll see our
Twitter, our Facebook, our YouTube channel, our Slideshare channel, and I think Instagram, maybe.
So, you can get access to them there. Slideshare? You've never heard of Slideshare?
It's the icon that you don't know and it works by process of deduction. She's probably know the others. That's okay.
So, when to pitch, the roll to pitch, what you need to do before the pitch, and then we're going to tear down
a pitch, I found online. It's a fictitious pitch, but it's an okay one.
And we'll talk about what's good and bad about it as an example or case study.
And then I'll share with you some of my pet peeves, the things that piss me off
when I get pitches. And it says Q and A at the end
but at any point in time if you have a question just raise your hand or blurt it out.
I want to make this interactive and make sure everyone stays awake. So, the first question of
when to pitch. Now, for those of you who saw my "when and how to raise venture capital talk"
I showed a chart that looked, if not very similar, identical
to this. And these are the four stages that we like to talk about.
Startup development, right, customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, and company building.
Okay, I won't bother reading the definitions of what each of those means. The one thing I will point out is that these first two
phases are really when you're trying to figure everything out, when you're searching for the answers to who's your customer?
What's your value proposition? How much are they willing to pay?
How are you going to acquire customers? What's your distribution strategy? All those kind of basic, fundamental things.
This is when you're beginning to shift into execution mode, okay? When you're beginning to build demand,
improve the way you acquire customers. And then, as you see here,
this is really when we're beginning to put our pedal to the metal. Now, when most people think about,
well, not most, but many people,
think about raising money over here,
from venture capitalists and
venture, unless your name is Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, or Elon Musk, venture capitalists
don't invest in entrepreneurs or startups in in these in these phases.
The funds, as I'll talk to you more in a second, really look to invest to scale.
Okay, to help scale something that's beginning to work in the marketplace.
Okay?
The angels and VCs will invest a little bit earlier. But when you're in this discovery phase, this is not really when you're raising money.
Okay, this is a great place to take advantage of grants like the VentureWell grants or Green grants programs, and others we have within the University.
Competitions are a great place. You know, like the entrepreneurs challenge or Innovention which Tim would love to tell you more about,
if you have time, and other competitions not just within the university, but outside the university as well.
And actually, while you're student there's actually a tremendous number of
resources available to you that may not be available afterwards.
But the truth is, this is not a very expensive phase. This is largely about going out, talking to customers, and testing your
assumptions about the need or problem that you believe you're solving.
Okay, as you move into the validation phase and if you're building a hardware or physical product that might be a little bit  more expensive than,
maybe, software if you have the ability to build upon it.
But this is when things like, again, grants, crowdfunding, Kickstarter, Indiegogo.
Those are great resources at that stage. We have had a lot of startups that have had success in that.
Customers, okay, not necessarily as an investor, but as a source of capital. You know, you hit upon a
dire customer need or problem and a potential solution to address it if they're willing to pay for it before you have it.
Again, that might sound crazy,
but customers do that all the time. They want to will something into is existence. And the best way to do that
is to essentially pre-order. If you think about it, that's exactly what kickstarter is.
Right? Very few products that ever... Everyone know kind of vaguely what kickstarter is? Ready to nourish the crowdfunding?
Okay, very very few products are actually built at the time that people run the kickstarter campaigns. Usually they're doing elaborate
mock-ups and videos and, maybe, a working prototype.
But then they use the funding from Kickstarter to if it's a physical good in particular to acquire
inventory and materials that they need to build it and ultimately ship it. And often when you fund a kickstarter product you might not actually
receive product for six to twelve months. Yes?
-There is also Indiegogo.
Yes.
I think it was before Kickstarter. And also Indiegogo is international. And Kickstarted is only several countries.
Don't know if that's true, but I mean for...
-That's what I found when I started looking for it.
Okay, I I can't speak to that, but we've had teams that have worked successfully on both in Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
or Indiegarter.
[Laughter]
We like them both. We just had
Julio Tara who's an NYU alum, was here here last Friday?
Thursday, talking about Kickstarter, but we love them both. They're both great platforms and can be really really valuable.
We've had a lot of successful startups use them.
SBIR and STTR is
particularly thinking about commercialising research.
This is a great program run by the Federal government.
They invest about three billion dollars a year in small businesses through this program, through all the major
Federal research agencies: National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and others.
This is where you start to see accelerators coming into the play. Things like Techstars, Y combinator
where you you have some evidence
that there's an air there, that there's something worth building and your team has the hustle and commitment and all the other things that
they're looking for. And this can be a great way to get a little bit of money and
a lot of mentorship and coaching, and support, and visibility to take your startup to the next level. In terms of other investors,
you know, this is when you start to see friends and family come in. And friends and family is not a euphemism. It literally means
your friends and family. And they invest in you because they love you and they believe in you, and they care about you.
They're probably not professional investors.
They're probably really not thinking about all the risks or the return on investment other then, yes
it's a, you know, it's a start-up, and they believe in you and that's great.
But that could be, you know, sometimes people raised in the hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively from friends and family.
It's good to have friends and family who can write checks like that.
Where professional investors come into play, and this will vary a bit from sector to sector,
but even in... Is anyone here working on developing a therapeutic, or drug?
You are? So, but even here, okay,
we think about building demand and improving the efficiency of customer acquisition. In a therapeutic context you should think about the
pharmaceutical and biotech companies you might be partnering with. Not necessarily
the physicians that you want to write your prescription, okay? So, it is different mindset.
We can talk one-on-one about that offline. But for those of you building kind of more tech or consumer products,
you know, the angels and seed funds are really looking for there's evidence
A, that your team can build your thing, whatever it is and B, that there's some evidence of demand.
Okay, there's some customer engagement or attraction.
Okay, and then that that is growing.
Okay, as you know, it's nice to say we have ten thousand, a hundred thousand,
whatever the number is of users using our application, a product, or service. But the really interesting question is, well,
how many were using it last month? How many the month before? And the answer was, well, it was
9999 the month before and 9998 the month before that, that's not a good trend.
Okay, if you told me that well we have ten thousand this month, last month
we had a thousand, the month before that we had a hundred. I say holy shit. Wow!
That's really explosive growth!
I'm Interested at least. It doesn't mean I invest, but at least I'm interested. Ok, because those kind of growth trends are what investors are looking for.
-When you are talking about the beginning of build, are you talking about an MVP?
It depends. It depends if...
-You can get the sense of your losers by serving up to a big domain.
Uh-huh.
Talking to them, and again,
Uh-huh.
and get feedback, markup, showing people...
So, sounds like you're here, you're in this phase.
-Yeah, so yeah, but I'm not... I'm not...
It doesn't sound like it based upon the little gears you told me.
-So, MVP is where?
That's in this phase, right, you're beginning to
test or validate that people want your thing, right?
So, here, to simply. In Phase 1, I'm saying if this is my product
I'm saying, and I'm sorry if you've heard me say this before, you know, when do you get thirsty how often you get thirsty?
Where you look for solutions to satisfy your thirst? How much do you spend,
you know, to satisfy that thirst? What if you try what you like, what if you try what you don't like? Ok, that's
testing my assumptions about your needs or problem.
When I put up a web page and show this and see how many people click on it to learn more about it I'm doing this.
When I see how many people want to take in order for it, when I start doing maybe taste tests or I
set up a pop-up tent in the park and try to sell it. Ok, I'm seeking validation that people actually want
my delicious beverage. Isn't it great? Right? Ok, when I actually start trying to sell it at scale.
Or... Scale is relative. When I really start to try to sell it, that's here.
Okay?
So, the venture capital funds that people think of the Union Square Ventures, the Sequoia Capital,
Sparks, the Kleiner Perkins of the world, is they're these groups that run these multi-million dollar funds
and they're really looking to help scale things, to really help grow a
venture into the next stage. You've proven that people want it and that you can build it, and now you've
begun to demonstrate that you can acquire companies economically and efficiently. That makes sense?
Okay, now this will vary a little bit in enterprise versus consumer, online versus direct sales,
but you just have to adapt these terms into that context. We can
help you think through that. Now, obviously beyond that there's other sources of capital.
But, you know, most people when they think about venture capital are probably talking about, you know, what we call the these phases here.
Seed funds are just small venture capital funds.
There's a simple way to think about it. Some venture capital funds do seed investments, okay?
So this is a continuum. It's not step one, two, three, four, okay?
It really is a continuum. And you'll see funds will bleed around and, as I said, if you're Mark Zuckerberg
then these people might be interested in funding you over here,
but with the exception of Tim, I don't think there is a Mark Zuckerberg in the room.
But, with all due respect to the rest of you, maybe once I get to know you.
But for particularly for our first-time entrepreneurs,
I imagine most of you are, this model is the way I want you to think about it. These aren't rules these are guidelines, okay?
And at any point time we can help you
understand kind of where you are and what's the appropriate form of capital. So, when you're starting to think about
pitching and developing a pitch deck and all that, is you probably should be somewhere in this phase, okay?
So, I want to talk about what's the role of the pitch, okay? And that might seem obvious and is partially a rhetorical question.
But I want to change
But I want to change the way you think about pitching. Okay, so first, ask the question why do we pitch?
Why do you want to pitch?
-To sell your product?
Well, we're thinking about fundraising.
-Raising capital?
Okay, what else? Any other reason?
-To get a second meeting?
Okay, that... okay, you're a few slides ahead of me. Yes, I'm not just why you do the first pitch.
Why are we even pitching period?
So, most of you probably think it's like to raise money, duh, Frank, right?
Actually, that's not why you're pitching.
Okay, the real reason you're pitching is to sell shares.
You are a seller, you're not buying money,
you're selling shares.
Okay, I want you to think about this because it should change the way you think about pitching.
Okay, you're trying to get them to buy a piece of your company, you know, either through
convertible notes or preferred shares, or a safe, or a kiss, or whatever mechanism it is.
But you have to answer the question same way what you do with your product. Who is my customer?
And why do they want to buy? What are they going to get from buying my shares? not why do I need the money?
You do need to know that. You need to know why you need the money, what you're going to do with it, all that.
But they care less about that and they care much more about how are they going to make money by investing in you.
That's the first thing on their mind, not why you need it.
Okay, so they, you know, receive your executive summary or your a pitch deck, and they think.
It doesn't matter how much you need the money. They're looking at this going can we make a shit ton of money
by investing in this company? If not, pass.
Okay, and for those you who
attended my first talk, you know a typical venture fund will receive a thousand of two thousand pitches a year.
And they're only going to invest in
five to twenty depending upon the velocity of the firm.
Okay, so they're trying to knock things out, so they can figure out which ones they want to spend more time on.
Okay, so this is one of the most important things I'm going to tell you today. You may not believe me,
but changing your mindset about why do they want to buy is much more important than why I need the money, okay?
So, to put that another way, you need to raise money when you can raise it not when you need it, all right?
Just like you will sell your product to a customer when they have the need for it not just when you want their money.
You may be able to sell it just when you want their money, but
probably it's going to be more when you can satisfy that need.
Okay?
So, you want to think about raising the money when your best position. Like, who saw the movie the Social Network?
Right? When did he raise that round from Peter Thiel?
Does anyone remember? You never saw a Peter Thiel, but they talked about him.
Well.
-I think it was ten, definitely on the West coast by that point.
Yeah, he was in... I don't know exactly. He had like I think hundreds of thousands of users
65% of whom were using it every day.
So, he was beginning to get some scale and he had
amazing try. I mean 60, if you come up with something that people, your customers, will use
65 percent will use every day, that is crazy.
That's incredible.
Okay, so, you know, he didn't raise the money on an idea.
No one really understood how big Facebook was going to be back then and I don't think anyone was under that impression. But even so.
Okay, they had, and he was the first, he was a college student just like most of you guys are.
Okay, now the other role of the pitch from so I can give you an opportunity to sell your shares,
right, is that the investment pitch is also a proxy.
Okay, it's a proxy for you and your ability, to recruit talent lead a team, to
sell the customers, and to attract partners.
Okay, because you as a first-time entrepreneur don't have a long track record
of performance and neither does your venture.
So, they're looking for people who
are going to be able to do all these two. Because if you can't convince them to part with
$100,000, a half a million dollars, a million dollars, how are you going to be able to do all those things?
Because that's why there's a lot of emphasis put on the pitch.
Okay.
And so, they're looking for, you know, a charismatic leader who's going to be able to attract great people
to be with them, right. No matter how good you are it's never going to be just about you. Every startup requires a team.
Okay?
And you're also going to have to sell to customers one way or the other. At a minimum
you are probably going to have to attract partners to work with you.
Okay, so, this pitch is really a proxy for that. So, you need to tell a story and engage your audience,
not just to drown them in facts.
Ok, facts are important.
Ok?
But it's not just about your product or your tech,
this is actually a classic mistake that on entrepreneurs make. They do a pitch about that product
and product is important, but it's only one element of your business and what might make it a good investment.
And also, remember, the pitch deck to this gentleman's
point, right, your pit your first pitch is just that, it's your first pitch. Your goal of your first pitch is
to get a second meeting.
Ok, no one is going to invest based on your first pitch
or based solely on it.
Ok, you might actually win their heart that day,
but you take a little longer to win their mind and their wallet.
Ok?
So, put another way, you will not raise money solely on a great first pitch,
but you definitely will not raise money on a bad first pitch.
Ok, so the goal of that
first meeting as I said is to get another meeting.
Okay, you'll know that meeting went well if they schedule it the next meeting right there
and then. They call their assistant and come in and try to schedule it or if there's an email waiting for you.
Okay, now that said,
just as you would probably intuit in the sales process you don't wait for your customer to call you back, you do a follow-up.
Right, you need to follow up with investors as well.
But for that first meeting it's
really, you know, it's a good meeting when they're trying to schedule. If they say we're interested, we'll let you know,
that's not a good sign.
Okay
So, okay, before the pitch you need to ask yourself, are you really ready?
Okay, and there's kind of two elements to this, right. There's all the kind of questions and we'll go through
these in a second that you need to know to anticipate the questions that they're going to ask and
Have some of them in your deck, and some of them kind of in your head,
but you also need to answer the question of
"are we in a good position? are we in the position to raise money?"
I'm not going to spend time on that for the rest of this talk, but that's how we can help you, okay.
So, if when you think you're ready to raise money even if you're not interested in getting money from our fund
coaching entrepreneurs and startups on the fundraising process is an important part of what we do. It is something we do every day.
So, in terms of the questions you need to ask you need to,
you know, start with when are you going to raise, and if now, why now?
Okay, how much are you going to raise? You'd be surprised how many pitch decks I see where they don't know how much money they're asking for.
And that's not the investor's job to tell you how much money you need. They may
want to tell you, they may give you advice to raise more or less.
Okay, it's not uncommon that a first-time entrepreneur may underestimate or overestimate for that matter, you know, their needs.
But you need to understand how much you're going to raise and what are you looking for?
I shall come back to the quantum and up in a second. What are you looking for an investor?
Okay, it's not just money, okay? You're entering into a partnership with them
Okay, and a good investor, particularly a fund,
angels might be different,
but a fund is going to try to or want to provide some value add above and beyond their money. It might be strategic, it might be simply advice,
it might be connections. There's a growing number of venture funds that offer,
what some call, platform or community services.
These are kind of shared resources to help a startup. It could be
marketing advice, it could be an in-house designer, it could be legal, it could be recruiting, it could be
accounting and bookkeeping services,
it could be pitch coaching for your next raise.
Ok, a lot of funds are doing more and more and more of this. First round capital kind of made this a really big
thing and now you have Lerer doing this and Union Square Ventures,
Two Sigma just hired the colleague of mine
to do this for their fund.
So, you want to know which of those things are important to you, okay? You also want to know
about the individual as well. We'll talk more about that later, okay?
Coming back to the money,
right, what are you going to spend the money on?
You know, you don't necessarily need a
five-year plan down to the penny on this, but you need to know in broad brushstrokes.
Okay, well we're going to spend it on, you know, hiring a business development person or hiring two more engineers,
you know, doing some initial customer acquisition on Facebook, or Google Ad-words, or
you know, whatever it is.
You should have a good sense to be able to talk about it.
It's not just a spreadsheet. Really talk about why you want to spend that money.
Okay, how long will that money last?
Ok, there is no real
rule of thumb on this, but a lot of people
myself included, think 18 months is a good amount of time.
Now, there's no magic to that other than to say
It's going to take you a while to do something with that money and to turn it into something that's good.
If you're going to need to raise more money that is.
Okay.
If that's what your business model, because if you don't need to raise more money
then don't. There's no law that says you have to raise a series A after you raise a C,
or you have to raise a certain B after you raise the series A.
Okay, if you don't have to raise more money, don't.
But how long will it last?
Implying that it's going to run out.
12 months to do something meaningful in your business to
attract the next class of investor
and then six months to raise that round. Don't forget to build in some time to raise the next round.
Okay, it will take on average
three to six months to raise a round of capital.
Okay, anything less than that you're really putting your company at risk.
Okay, so you want to think about how much time do I need to get to a meaningful
valuation inflection point to attract that next round of capital. Not just when I run out of money, but when do I
get somewhere with that money. Does that makes sense?
Okay, and then to build in some cushion to raise the next round. What will you accomplish with that money?
Okay, and or put it another way, what is that next round investor looking for?
Okay, a seed investor might be looking for,
you know, some demonstration of customer validation and that you can acquire customers.
The next round the series A investor is going to be looking for the fact that you actually you know accelerated your growth rate.
Okay, that you achieved certain revenue goals or targets.
Okay, whatever it is. You need to know what you're aiming for there.
Okay, so what will you accomplish with that money?
-Can I ask a question?
Yes
-So, why, I don't know, but I see a lot of investors getting, you know, in
stages. What don't, you know, investors deal with one project throughout the whole period?
Well, venture funds typically do for their successful companies, but they also will cut their losses also.
Okay, so a venture, angel investors and seed funds
typically will invest in one or two rounds. That's just their abysmal, they invest small amounts of capital early.
They buy early and hope to sell high. It's really not more complicated than that, okay?
The larger venture capital funds like Union Square, Sequoia, and so on, okay,
they have larger funds and they need to put that to work. They don't then... they generally are not going to write a
ten or twenty million dollar check, you know, on the first date for the first round, okay? They might invest
anywhere from 1 million to 5 million. You will find more you will find less. Maybe, that's the sweet spot,
but then they'll want to, if A you need more money, or you can make good use of that money,
they will then follow on. That's the language that we use in the series B round,
or series C round.
And essentially what they'll do is, they'll double down on their winners.
If your company sucks, just because you need more money
they're not going to throw good money after bad. But they do want to throw more good money after the good. Does that makes sense?
-Yes.
Okay
I'm sorry? Okay. You want to know what your investors are looking for in you.
Okay, what kind of companies do they like to invest in? What sectors? What stages? What criteria?
What does traction or engagement mean to them? If you talk to five different investors and at the seed stage you're going to get five different answers.
So, you need to know what they're looking for.
Right, if you've participated in any of our other workshops,
you know, we talked about, and we'll talk more about this in a second, about doing customer discovery getting to understand
your customer and what they're looking for before you try to sell them anything.
Same thing with investors. You should really treat this the same way, okay?
And as I'll say in this in a few more minutes you
should go out and find out what it is they're looking for before you actually begin the process of pitching.
Okay, and that's an easy thing to do. That's something that we help entrepreneurs do all the time.
Right, Sara's turn on the startup before she's ready to raise money
she might come to me and I'll say, hey, let me introduce you to these three investors, and I'll write to them. I'll say
Sara's great she's working on a new startup, can you give her some early feedback?
Okay, most investors will say yes to that and without even really looking at her pitch.
If I say Sara is trying to raise a two million series A, they are going to look at the pitch and they'll say either
I am or I'm not interested, and if I'm not interested I don't want to waste my time talking to Sara.
Which is their loss. Sounds lovely, but...
Okay?
So, you need to know what they're looking for and that's easy to do, easier actually then it sounds.
Ok, you wonder why they should invest in you? How are they going to make money?
Okay, because, you know, investors talk a lot about being founder friendly and entrepreneurs themselves
and they like sectors, and they like trends, and they say other thing, but ultimately they are money managers,
just like mutual funds are hedge funds.
Okay, they have other people's money that they're investing and they have a legal obligations called a fiduciary obligation to
maximize that return. So, they're looking at startups not that are cool or neat,
or people they like, but they're trying to figure out whom can I make the most money with because that's my job,
that's what I'm being paid to do as an investor.
This is important that you understand their business model just as much as they understand yours.
So, how will they make money by investing in you?
It doesn't mean you have to give them a detailed plan for who's going to acquire you in five years because that's crystal ball stuff.
But you need to understand
how is your business going to grow and ultimately become
profitable and then be attracted to someone else to acquire or maybe, if you're one of the fortunate few, go public.
And you need to have a sense of,
and this gets harder, okay, but are you going to need to raise more money?
Are you just raising this one seed round, and you're done?
We're going to need to raise more. Okay, so that goes back to this question, right?
How long will it last?
If so, do you have a sense of how much you're going to need to raise and win?
Okay.
It's not so much
critical that you know this answer, right, there really is no way that you could know that answer. A lot is going to change between
the time you close on your seed round and the time you need to raise your next round.
But if you think you can get cash flow positive and sustain your growth organically
through that and you don't have to raise more money, good for you.
You're going to end up owning 75% of your company at the end of the day as opposed to 35%, good for you, okay?
And then similarly you need to understand if you raise a seed round,
then what's the target that you're aiming for the series A
investors as we talked about, or if you raise your A, the series B.It  is because often if even if the
insiders, your existing investors are going to
follow-on, as I talked about, then they will often want a new lead investor to come in and set the price of your round.
Okay, does that makes sense? And I'm talking jargon here. But if that, please stop me, if I'm not being clear. Yes?
-When you are presenting how much based on what you already have will you imagine in projection
So, you know, you should and you'll see this as we kind of go through the sample deck in a few minutes,
but you should have a good sense of
how you're going, you know, what are the unique economics?
How you going to acquire customers and your revenue model and demonstrate you've been able to do it at some even small scale?
Okay? And then when you're doing is you're extrapolating that
rather than saying I have an idea, think about the difference through, I have an idea and
now I have to take it on faith, that you can build it, that your customers want it, that they're willing to pay for it,
that you can acquire them as customers. right.
So, there's that, kind of, you know.
-So you have something and then you are projecting it in a small scale?
Exactly.
-So how ok is it to project?
Well, you have to, you have to project at some level, but
they're going to look much more at the evidence that you have than the projections.
I mean, really, you know, I don't put a lot of stock.
So, I invest primarily in the seed stage. I don't put a lot of stock in a Five-Year Financial Model.
What's more interesting to me is to see,
maybe, three things. Is what, you know, do the unit economics make sense? Meaning, if I sell one of these
you know, including my cost of goods, including my cost of sales, including my cost of marketing, can I make money on that?
Okay, and if it's a physical good, I might assume that, okay,
I can see the cost curve going down. If it's, you know, a virtual thing then, you know, you know there's less economies of
scale that you're going to get.
Okay?
So, understand the unit economics are one.
Two is understanding how big the market is.
How big and how crowded the Market is.
Okay?
I'm not really looking at, you know, what you're saying your
growth rate is as much as I'm seeing what the end point. Is this a big enough market to sustain another company coming into it?
So, is it big or is it growing really quickly, or ideally both. And the third thing is that
how can you and how are you acquiring customers?
Okay, and that's why,
you know, having some evidence that you can do that is so important. This is the one thing that I find
most entrepreneurs overlook they they're all about their product.
But if you can't acquire customers,
then it doesn't matter and they're not going to.
It's not about inventing a better mousetrap in the world being a path to your door. That just doesn't happen.
It's not if you build than they will come. It's if you build it
how are you going to go out and get them and make them your customers? Does that make sense?
So, if you can't really answer all of those questions, then you're really probably not ready to raise.
Okay, I got a pitch tick just this morning.
They didn't mention how much money they were trying to raise or what they were going to do with it.
Okay, so that to me doesn't look like a pitch deck.
Okay?
Those are kind of obvious questions that any investor will have. Okay, so,
though if you don't have the answers to those questions, right, some of them,
right, you might have to actually go out and talk to investors to understand the target range for some of these.
You know, we can help you figure out on your own or
point you in the right direction to figure them out.
Okay.
So, we can help you with that and we will do it when the time is right. If we really don't think you're ready to raise
money we don't want you to waste your time doing that.
You know, we can't prevent you and we're not going to prevent you from doing it. We'll offer advice and you can take it or leave it.
But raising funding is a very time-consuming and, pretty much most entrepreneurs will tell you, near full time job.
Let me say, there's something else probably a lot of other elses, but they're not doing.
During that someone's try run the startup.
Right, so it's exhausting even when it goes well. It's an exhausting very demanding process.
Okay?
So, some things to think about.
As you think about different kinds of investors you want to make sure that you're
not wasting your time and other people's time, okay?
So, you want to just like you would think about targeting customers, you should target investors. You'd be amazed.
I don't know if it's every day, but probably every other day I get some random pitch from someone in the four corners of our planet
asking me to invest in their company.
And it very clearly, I don't know where they get my email from,
but it very clearly says on our website what the innovation venture fund invest in. It's only you people.
We invest in startups founded by NYU students, faculty, and researchers. That's it.
And I get pitched constantly. They're wasting their time, and I don't even, I don't even read them.
The only thing I really care about is are they an NYU person?
Otherwise I don't do personal investing right now, so I don't even waste my time.
Okay, so anyway, some things to think about. Are they, are you the right stage for that investor? Are they seed?
Right? Are they series A or are they series C investor? Do they have a certain sector focus and how do you fit with that?
This one's a little bit harder.
We spoke about this in my last talk, but where are they in their fund life cycle?
So, most, this is less true for angels, but more true for venture funds, is
the funds have a finite life cycle typically ten years.
Okay, if they're at the end of that fund that means they need to return the capital to the investors at the end of the fund.
So, you wouldn't want to invest in a ten year fund that's in year seven because if you don't
exit, meaning sell your company within three years,
you're going to have a mismatch with that investor and your expectations.
So, you can just ask them, you know, what funds
are you investing at? If you really want to sound savvy, say what vintage is it?
So, that's like California speak for what year was the fund formed.
Okay, so, a 2016 fund means they're probably just really getting into or 2017, even more so just starting to invest in that.
Okay.
You want to know what they've been investing in recently, okay?
So, these first thing, the first two you can very easily stage and set your focus.
Almost every fund is very clear on this on their website, okay?
Fund lifecycle, some yes, some no, and you just might have to ask. There's nothing wrong with asking.
Recent activity. Most are pretty good about updating their website. It might be hard to discern which ones they've invested in recently,
but as I'll point to in a second there's a lot of online resources that can help, you know. You want to know, are their last five
investments all in augmented reality or artificial intelligence even though it says they are a mobile focused
website but they haven't made a mobile investment in three years.
Right, that's important to know, they may or may not be worth your time. Hey, do they lead or follow?
Does that language mean? No? Okay, so in a round,
in an investment round, it's often what's called a syndicate which is just a fancy for a group of investors.
Okay, and so and there's no average.
It's a very broad distribution, it has been around. It might have 20 angels in them
or one that has two or three venture funds and everything else in between.
Okay
Typically someone is leading that round meaning they're setting the terms.
They're determining the price of the round,
the, you know, the what type of anti-dilution protection there is, what type of
liquidation preferences, all the kind of nuts and bolts of the security that they're buying.
Okay, they're setting the terms of negotiating that with the entrepreneur.
And they may sign a term sheet with the entrepreneur that says: yes,
we're willing to lead a two million dollar round and we're going to put a million dollars in and we'll let you find the other million dollars, or
we'll help you find you the other million dollars.
Okay, the other people who fill in the gaps are the followers, the follow-on or the follower.
They follow someone else's lead is the term that we use.
Okay, does that makes sense?
Okay, what's their investment pace?
Alright, some funds only invest in five years, some invest in 50 a year, some more.
Okay, well, that tells you something about the amount of, you know, also you have to look at it relative the size of their team
of the type of diligent. You know, someone that does 50 investments a year with three people,
I don't want to say, they're spraying and praying, but they're not spending three months doing exhaustive due diligence on you either.
Okay, so you need to understand that.
What's their typical check, okay? Do they normally write one hundred thousand dollar checks or five billion dollar checks?
Where can you get warm intros to these people?
Okay, sending in your
executive summary or pitch deck, or business plan, or whatever,
you know, investor at UnionSquareventures.com might get looked at, but probably not.
Okay, so some kind of warm intro.
It could be through us, it could be through a lawyer, your accountant. It could be a bank,
it could be a friend, it could be another entrepreneur.
But any kind of warm intro is better than something just coming in cold over the transom.
Okay, it may not get you the meeting, but it will get you at least
consideration, at least look at what your email says. If it just comes in over the transmit, it might not even get a look.
Okay, we talked about value added services.
If that's something important, what do they offer? Is that valuable to you? Do you need it? Are you going to take advantage of it?
Okay, because maybe, you know, you might get
competing term sheets from two different investors and
one might have, you know, they might have different valuations, but valuation alone is not the only thing to consider. The terms
might come into play as much as the valuated services.
Okay, is this an investor who's going to invest once and they're done with you?
Or do they, are they looking to do follow on investments?
Okay?
And this is a really important thing that a lot of people overlook. Do they have directly competitive portfolio companies? Port for Porco's.
Okay, most investors won't invest in something that they have is directly competitive. Ok, if you're creating a shelter startup
and they already have a shelter startup in their portfolio they probably won't
invest in if they're ethical and they won't even look at it, at yours, okay?
But don't send them something if you know they're not going to
invest, because they might look at it just to know if this is something. Oh, this is directly competitive and
once it's in front of them they're looking at it already. So, don't, you know, don't send
it to them. It's worth a little bit of time and effort. So, how can you figure out the answers to those kind of questions?
There's a bunch of online resources that
all have a fair amount of information that's freely accessible.
Crunchbase,  CB Insights, and Angellist are the best ones.
Crunchbase probably has the most
individual company investor information.
But you're not going to find necessary valuation, you might not find a complete list of investors, but it's pretty good.
I am on it probably every other day.
CB Insites also has a lot of information. If you can get access to the subscription version of these, to the library or something
you'll find there is a lot more information.
Angellist, excuse me, is an online kind of angel network. It's a way for angels to find deals,
but they also have a lot of publicly available information that you can
find about who invested in what particularly when you're talking about angels. These are more valuable for funds.
As I mentioned, fund websites
are usually pretty good about updating it,
but a lot of them blog and
actually might have more information, more current information in their blog about a recent investment or the recent areas of interest that might be,
then might be reflected in their kind of, you know, boilerplate marketing
statements on the website. So, it's important to look at that because things move relative,
I mean a lot of funds in just in the last Few years of investing a ton in
virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. And their website may not have been updated to do that.
But if you look at what they invested in, you'd see that
the news and media and, you know, Crunchbase grew out of Techcrunch if that was not obvious.
And so, that's how they feed a lot of their data.
They look for funding announcements and then they capture that in a more searchable database structure. But there's a lot of information out there.
So, just if you google a fund's name, you'll probably come across news stories
that may not be captured and some of these about their recent investments.
Talking to people, talking to mentors and coaches
is a good way to get intelligence, right. If, you know,
scan these sources, right, but then ask people who are in the know
about this fund and what they invest in.
And so, you can learn a lot from that. Other entrepreneurs, okay?
You can actually pick up the phone and call the CEO of any startup and see if they're willing to talk to you.
Oh, I see Union Square ventures invested in you, can I just talk to you about your experience working with them, how it has been?
You might be surprised how many might be willing to talk to you about that.
As I mentioned, your lawyers, accountants, banks
it's another reason to go with someone who is very active in the startup space.
Okay, JPMorgan
and, you know, Skadden Arps, and
Ernst & Young might be the best bank, the best law firm, and the best accounting firm on the planet.
But they tend to deal with big companies.
You want people who specializes in startups and small companies. So, going with
Silicon Valley Bank,
Fenwick and West, and
EisznerAmper might better serve you.
Right, because they're going to be wired into the startup community, know the investors, know the players.
And then of course there's our team. This is a big part of what we do.
Okay,
so, this is a lot of information that you're going to need to keep track of. So, it pays to be organized.
Okay, it could be as simple as a, you know, an Excel Doc.
But there's no way you're gonna be able to keep track of this  all in your head.
Particularly once you start mailing people, emailing people, and, you know, is it time to pester them and follow-up?
Who my schedule meetings with? So, being organized will pay dividends to you, okay?
You don't have to necessarily use an expensive tool,
but it will help. Alright, let's talk about the elements of a good pitch.
So, there is no universally true approach, right.
As you're in different stages different things will be more or less important.
I thought of this deck, this outline that I'm going to share as what would be appropriate for a
seed stage fund, a seed stage raise, fund raise rather.
And so, I'm going to go through this very quickly, and then we'll look at a deck that kind of follows this model more or less.
Okay, so start with a
slide that has your name or logo on it, explains in one sentence what you do, okay?
If you don't know, what a business thesis is, it describes
what you make, who's it for, and why they care.
Okay, so
we make the most economical drinks for very thirsty people.
Okay, that's kind of lame, but you get my point. As opposed to just saying beverage,
okay, it explains who it's for and what your value is to them.
Okay,
and this is just to get that, explain who you are.
It's a good opportunity to introduce yourself and have that sit on the screen while you're while you're making introductions.
Okay, I really like to start with the problem.
Okay, before you even get,
because you already set the stage a little bit, you gave them a tease of what your solution is with your business thesis.
And now we talk about what's the problem that you're solving and who you're solving it for, okay? So, this sets up
the scope of the problem and who has it.
Who you're focusing on, okay? Then you can introduce your solution
Okay, and you should try to focus on quantifiable benefits.
Okay, and as you framed the problem,
okay, the solution should naturally address them.
Okay, but now you should be demonstrating some evidence or data
about how you save people's time, how much time you save people's money, how much money, okay?
And then you talk about what your product is, how it works and evidence that it does that.
Okay, what you'll see this in example.
You also need to talk about how you make money.
Okay?
What's your revenue model? Are you selling advertising? Are you selling a subscription?
Alright, are you selling a physical good?
Okay.
How big of a market are you addressing?
And how much, you know, to kind of get them excited that how much money...
-It's 5 o'clock. 
Thank you.
How much money you could make if you actually dominate that market?
Right, who's the competition and why is your solution better?
Okay, and that should tie back to the problem that you're solving.
Right, because you should be presenting a problem that is not solved in the marketplace.
Right, so, it's not everything that your product does. What's the most compelling
way that you're better or different
than your customers in a way that you've already established that they care about?
Okay, how are you going to acquire and retain customers?
Hopefully, to do it profitably and at scale.
Okay, unit economics answers the question of if I'm selling it for x
how much I could potentially make on each sale of that product or service?
And then some evidence subtraction, proof that customers or users love your product.
This is the validation of everything else that you just said so far.
Who's the team and why do you have the experience and our expertise to own this opportunity?
Okay.
What are you going to do with the money?
What are you going to accomplish? How long is it going to last?
And then some summary slide that
captures the key things that you want them to remember.
And this is a slide that I recommend you don't ever talk to but you just leave up there while you're doing Q&A.
Okay, so let's go through an example of this outlined. By the way, these... Yes?
-Will you share this deck?
Yes.
Sarah we'll send them out or send out a link to it to everyone who RSVP'd for this and
it'll also be available on, I think there already is a version from last semester already on Slideshare that is 99% of this deck.
Okay, so,
here's a pitch deck for Gleamer. This is not real, this is put together by the pitchdeckcoach.com.
I think there's a lot of really good things about it,
but I think there's some things that could be improved, and it roughly follows that outline I just shared with you.
So, Uber is... Gleamer, rather, is Uber for mobile Auto details. Get an affordable professional auto Detail wherever you are, whenever you want.
Okay, so that's good as an intro. It's pretty clear on what they do.
Okay.
I would say it's a little bit broad on who their customer is but that's okay for this slide.
You might not want to get in too much detail. My beef with this one is
this notion of Uber for, or AirBnb for, or Amazon for is overdone.
And it might mean one thing to you, it probably means
other things to an investor who might actually be much more familiar with Uber's business model than you are
and might connotate things that you don't necessarily mean to connotate or  connote, or whatever.
So, I just like, use plain English. Mobile auto detailing. Does everyone know what
detailing is, by the way? So, this is a okay. I should explain.
Yeah, it's kind of high-end Kleenex.
When you get someone to, you know,
clean and wax your car by hand. So, kind of like if you ever bought a used car from a dealer.
Okay, that car would detail before you bought it. So, it looks like it's as close to brand new as you can and
wealthy people get this done all the time.
So, they're saying this is a business that you could go to an app, say I want my car detailed on Tuesday at,
you know, 2 p.m. at this address, okay?
It makes sense, quickly at Silicon Valley this point might make a lot more sense than it does in New York City.
Ok, so, just avoid these kind of pithy analogies.
Because there's, well, this is on demand, right. Uber is maybe different.
Ok.
This is actually a good in a
sense that it articulates the problem. I'd rather see it more specific and quantified.
Ok? Busy consumer essentially is talking about ever... I really wanna know. What is, who is that busy consumer?
[Sneezes]
Right?
You're all busy consumers, but I don't think you're their market if you're living in New York City and you don't own a car.
Ok, now maybe it's obvious
we're talking car owners here, right?
But maybe it's in, you know, major suburbs or maybe it's people who have, you know, above
$100,000 incomes. The more specific you can be,
okay, it also shows that you've done your research.
Okay, you're not trying to be all things to all people.
But quantify the problem, right. How much time are they wasting
doing this the existing way? And I'd say same thing here.
So, they're like Uber kind of, they are a marketplace, right. You have the, busy
consumers and mobile auto detailers. They're looking for more business, and it's expensive and time-consuming to do it. And for them
it's hard to find someone to do it at their home or office.
Okay, so with Gleamer I could with tap of my thumb I could get someone there.
So, if you told me that they're spending,
you know, auto detailers are spending $50 for every customer
and you could bring that down to 20, well, that just sounds like a no-brainer to them.
Okay, but too much money could mean anything.
Okay, and again it reflects your knowledge and understanding of the market and also sets up your value proposition.
Right. If they they only have to pay five dollars by using Gleamer versus fifty dollars if they have to use by
taking out ads in the newspaper or whatever it is, right. 12 k per year doesn't really tell me much.
It doesn't tell me enough.
That's too much, too much for what business run rate?
Okay.
Yes?
-I wanted to ask about the first slide. How...? It's probably something that we would use from then on, the importance of how
short or how long do you think JV...? What's the, sort of, what's the sweet spot?
For what? For your business thesis?
-For the thesis, yeah.
Like what you could tweet.
-Ok.
It doesn't have to literally be 140 characters, but like that's roughly the length.
Right, if it's a paragraph... I mean, generally you want to be careful at one rule of slides is the more key text you put on a slide,
the more time they spend reading it and the less time they spend listening to you.
And you're probably going to start talking the second that slide goes up there.
And if they have to spend 30 seconds reading the slide they probably really didn't hear the first 30 seconds of what you said.
They heard you going "whoa-whoa-whoa,"
but they really didn't internalize what you said. You want... I mean, have you ever seen
the way Steve Jobs presented? He'd have one picture or one word on a slide.
Okay, now, we're not all Steve Jobs. I certainly am not.
Okay, maybe you are, maybe you're not. Okay, the less words you can have on your slide the more they're listening to you.
And you use a slide to reinforce a key point or as a visual cue for you.
Okay, so less is more is the way to think about it
-One more question.
Yep.
-You don't want to, like you said, put every single detail onto one slide. So, what if there were more than one, you know, revenue systems that we have?
Well, on the intro slide it's a teaser, right?
You need to then jump in and set up the problem and explain your solution. Don't try to tell everything in the first slide.
Okay, keep it high level. And you really don't want them to start asking you questions about it.
You want to get through that slide so you can get to
this stuff. Does that makes sense? Okay?
Good
-Sorry, haven't you just said about the text on the slide? Is this not too much?
It is a lot. No. I agree, it is a lot of text.
Some people might just show a picture of
a frustrated consumer and a mobile detailer, you know, putting an ad in the newspapers. Like, I don't know
what visual would work. And then you could talk to this. It depends on your
presentations, on what you're comfortable with. Now one secret of
Powerpoint and Keynote is the fact that you can have a notes field.
Okay, so I really don't have much in the way of notes here, but this is the view that I'm looking at right now.
Okay, and there's the slide that's up here.
Okay, here's the slide that's up next and I could have all the notes, I can have a script there.
Okay, or I could just have, you know, the key talking points. I can have this text in there in just a picture.
Right?
Now, that requires more practice and it's harder to do, but if you can do it those can be awesome pitches.
But you also need to know
investors. Just like you're not letting me get through my presentation, no investor...
That's a joke. No investor is going to let you go through your pitch uninterrupted.
Okay, so, it's good to have a script and be well rehearsed,
but you also got to be able to dance on demand.
-So if you ever do something like that and just have visuals and talk to them. Would you recommend a different version that has more detail to that performing?
That's a great question. So yeah, I mean,
I think that's a good practice to have. I would generally send less information in, you know, a teaser deck.
Not because they're going to do anything different with it, but you just want to get them interested
with that teaser deck, right. What you might send any email or what you might ask a friend or colleague to forward on your behalf.
But yeah, that needs to stand on its own.
Yeah, if you just have a bunch of pictures they can be like "what the...?" All right?
Thanks.
So, you don't have to do that. It depends on what deck you actually want to present with.
I don't want to go so far as to tell you "only have pictures." I think that is the pendulum may be swinging too far,
but I will say, you know, think about the less words you can have on the slide the better.
So, makes sense?
Yep.
-Did you say it would be a good idea to set an example of when consumer is using the service to just display the... present the problem? Is that ok?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, if this was something that
helped bring clean water
to, you know, children in South America you could have a picture of a
thirsty South American child, you know, or a diseased pool of water, right.
I mean, I'm serious. And then you talk to it. You say, you know, every year
10,000 people in Bolivia die from dirty drinking water.
Okay, right, that's that's powerful and then we have an image that backs it up. Not everyone can deliver that kind of pitch.
Okay, but if you can, yeah, that can be very powerful, yeah.
-I was told that I should have two different decks. One for when I'm standing and presenting and one for sending.
Yeah, that's just the question that, yeah, so...
You can do that.
You don't have to do that, but you can. I do think it's a good idea to have the one you send shorter and
one that stands on its own.
Okay, so,
this is the solution slide. This is okay. In that I like how it frames the
benefits to the, they have a what's called a multi-sided market, right. They have two different customer sets like Linkedin does, right,
Facebook, or Google all are multi-sided markets, right? We all use Google and Facebook and Linkedin, but none of us pay for it.
Right, they all rely on advertisers. So that's their customer right, and we're their users.
So, we're their consumers and their advertisers, and consumers and detailers in this example. So, each of them have different benefits.
Now, the way that they
position this, the benefits almost looked the same. So, I would have liked to have them show me the money.
Right, what does saving time and money... how much money are they going to save me? how much time are they going to save? In the average,
you know, you set up the problem that normally takes
two hours in our research for a customer or consumer to find a detailer and
we can help them do it in five seconds with Gleamer, right. That's saving them a lot of time. If they can
get it at a lower cost because there's, you know, kind of you're competing for your business.
Right, if I just go to the car wash and,
you know, and I'm there and I say how much does it cost to detail my car.
They know I'm there, they don't have competition. Like it's some less likely because I'm lazy to leave.
Right, so, they may charge me any dollars on them. On an online marketplace I bet you the price is lower.
Okay, and same thing for the detailers. How much time you're going to save them? How much money you're going to save them on advertising?
Okay, so you need to know how much time and money your customers are spending
to show knowing what you with the economics of your business how much you can save them.
Okay, that's a compelling and quantifiable value proposition.
Okay, now, notice the difference between the solution and the product.
Right, the product talks about the product, the solution talks about the benefits.
Okay, so don't get into the weeds of what your product does.
Okay, loose them on that. First lead with what are your benefits and then show
with amazing screenshots how your product works.
Now, I'll anticipate someone's questions. What about showing a live demo?
Live demos are great,
but they crash, you know, 34.6% of the time, even though they worked the past 100 times.
So, it's always good and most VCs won't
totally ding you on that. You know, there is jokes about the demo gods, right?
Did you pray the demo gods before you walked into the pitch?
So, it's good to be able to have something like this and then you could show a live demo or show a video,
but you should have multiple things, right. If you are a live mobile app or a
website, you should be able to just pull it up and you will likely be asked to.
Okay, but it's also good to have something like this, so, you could first kind of, you know, show quickly what it is and how it works.
And you could imagine, you know, just a little, you know, about this product. What could be on the, you know, you browse available detailers,
compare and review prices, select, book, and pack, right. Boom, boom, boom you can explain the flow of how it works
really quickly, and, you know, show what some of the features are.
And maybe you don't have to do a live demo.
Maybe they've already downloaded your app already if you're in the market or they visited your website, right?
You should assume that they have if you're live.
Okay?
But I say the "two patents pending" like right you don't have to have that, have an intellectual property slide,
but if you did have patents pending,
okay, you can drop that in, but be prepared to talk about it. You should be prepared to talk about anything that you put on the slides.
Okay, so
this revenue model talks about their unit economics, right. We charge detailers a 15% transaction fee.
Right, so, on a $75 job the detailer gets $63.75, Gleaver gets $11.25.
Okay, it explains a little bit more about how it works here.
What's missing from this for me is the unit economic dimension of this. How much does it cost them to deliver each customer?
Right, what was their their cost of acquiring that customer and do they have...
Now it's probably very low for business like this. You know, there's the marginal cost of
more people using your rap is pretty low, right. You get really good economies of scale that way.
But if there were some physical cost, what are they on a per unit basis, all right?
So, you know, you don't have to be profitable at this early stage, but I want to know are you or are you not?
So, in this deck as you'll see in a second there's two ways of looking at the market. This is
what we will call a top-down way of looking at the market, right. So, in this case the entire
auto detailing market is a 36 billion dollar market. You can see that, that comes from some reputable source.
This isn't a school, but you, you know, if you are quoting someone else's data
it's good to help establish your credibility. If Gartner group said there's a 36 billion dollar market
for auto detailing in the US, okay.
Now, that's the total addressable market. There serviceable addressable marketing. In this case is what they've called mobile auto detailing.
Okay, mobile meaning the people that actually go and do it at your location.
Right, so, those are the people who are the potential or the detailers or the potential for that market.
Okay, now they did is something that I think is a little unconventional here.
They then just took 15% of this number
and they said that's their market opportunity. That's kind of making stuff up. What I would rather have seen
was then for the mobile, okay, what percentage of this is in the target market that they're going after? Maybe they're just starting out in California.
Right, because people care more about their cars, everyone drives
everywhere even in LA, even in the cities people drive, right. So, it's a different lifestyle.
And so, maybe their initial market opportunity might just be California which might be 1 billion-dollar market.
Okay, but then ultimately if they grow this is the market that they could ultimately go after.
Now that's a top-down way of looking at it.
This is what's called a bottoms-up way of
building your market opportunity, okay. There's 270 million autos on the road,
one third of those get detailed every year, one third of those are mobile. They cite the sources for those.
The people who get mobile detailing get it done on average six times a year.
Total mobile details per year means it's 180 million dollar,
180 million detailings per year in the US and an average price of $75.
That's a 14 billion dollar market and again, they're making this 15 percent leap. I'd rather see them segment it by the customers
that fit into their target profile than just by saying the 15 percent is arbitrary.
Okay, don't fall into that trap.
It actually annoys investors they here and so often. If we just get 1% of the market we're a billion dollar business.
Ok, well, how are you going to get that one percent? It sounds like just 1%, but how are you going to get that 1%?
Okay, so this was good up until that point.
So, say, you know, and then it was well, then, you know,
10% of these are in California that's a 1.4 million dollar marks because we're focusing on California. It doesn't have to be geographic.
We're just giving you
some kind of example. So that was nice, save that.
Now competition is a tricky one. Yes?
-Let's go back to your point on marketshare. What are some strategies on calling it out? Coming up with a realistic estimate of what your marketshare could be?
I think doing it more from this bottoms up. Well,
I don't think you can estimate what your market share is going to be in five years.
So, you want to suggest that it's a big enough market
that you can and then demonstrate how you're going to get a meaningful piece of it then by just saying we're going to get 10%.
-Do you have to be exact at that number?
No, I don't think you do.
It's crystal ball, yeah, as soon...
Now, if you can show
because you've already had a hundred thousand customers and your average cost of acquiring customers was
five dollars per unit.
Right? And, well, and we're going to be, you know, we were able to get that down from ten to five
dollars and we believe we can get it to four. And so, now we're going to spend four million dollars on acquiring customers
which is going to get us, right. You can start to piece together the puzzle for them.
But, you know, the further you extrapolate it out the less meaningful the numbers are. But that's why having some of that
traction up front is really important because then it helps validate
the kind of front end of your funnel, your growth funnel. Does that make sense?
Okay, so there's generally two ways, and I think I'm going to show one here, that
people generally present competition. There's the two by two matrix as you see here
and then there's what I call the consumer reports model. Dows everyone know what consumer reports model is? Right, with the circles and the half circles.
Right, so, you'll see down one side there will be some long list of features that your customers value.
And then they'll be some list of competitors across the top and then they'll have checks or
full circles, half circles, empty circles, or something like that on. And, you know, your company always checks every box fully and
everyone else sucks.
Okay, same thing here in this one everyone else sucks, and you're over here and up and to the right.
Just don't overstate. There's no, no one is better than the other. Just make sure
that you're really doing this whether it's two by two or consumer reports on
the dimensions that really matter to your customers.
And you probably should have done a good job of establishing that early in your presentation
when you stated to what the problem was and why your solution solved it?
Okay?
But don't overplay your hand here.
Okay, by showing something like this with no one else in this quadrant
and you all the way up here and everyone else way down here you're not really as
credible as you might think. Yep.
-We are talking about muilti-customer detail, how do you approach that on the competition slide?
Good question.
So, that's harder to probably do in a two by two.
Maybe, that fits better into the consumer reports style.
Maybe you have some of the criteria there for the consumer, some that are for the detailer.
You know, the other thing I should have, but I almost forgot
this, is don't fall into the trap of only comparing yourself to people who are using the same technology approach as you.
Okay, so who are Gleamers competition?
-Carwash?
No, no, I'm sorry for the auto detailers.
For the auto detailers.
I mean, how as a consumer might I learn about a detailer?
But so, what tools are the detailers using to advertise to their customers? Let me ask you more bluntly.
Google, right, phonebook,
newspapers, right, right. So, it's not all technology-based. Some of it might be real old-school stuff. It could be, you know,
posters on telephone poles.
Right, so, and if that's working for them then they're your competition.
Okay, to give an example I've used in other context. We had a team that was working on hemostatic gel.
Okay, for those besides Raj that means something that actually stops bleeding.
A gel derived from plants that stops bleeding. Actually, it's pretty amazing stuff. It really works, and it works in three seconds which is amazing.
Okay, when I asked them about their competitions, they're a successful company now, and I asked another competition like six years ago
they said "oh, we don't have any."
Like, really? Like so vital to the hospital? There's just people bleeding all over the place?
They have no way to stop bleeding? No. Who was their competition?
Band-Aids or gauze and pressure.
Okay, they were defining themselves by, you know, gels and foams. It turns out there were other gels and foams that they to know about at the
time. But putting that aside, okay, what's the challenge for them
with gauze and pressure and Band-Aids?
It's cheap. It's really cheap and
even the janitor knows how to do it, you know, to be a doctor,
to know how to stop bleeding, right. If your son or daughter, or friend
got a cut, you know, we all know what to do.
Okay, so you don't need their hemostatic gel for first aid, you know, because it's not free.
And I don't know what the cost is, but if it was $5 per application,
well, you're not putting that on to stop a little cut here.
Right? So, they would think about how your customer solves the problem, not what is the technical approach that you're using?
All right.
So, this is the weakest slide in the whole presentation because this talks about
how they are going to acquire their customers, but doesn't give me any sense that they actually are
doing it or know how to do it, right?
This is the weakest slide. And I could have come up with this slide for this business
and you wouldn't know the difference. And as you'll see in the next slide, this is a ompany with real traction.
Okay?
Right, that this just makes it sound like they don't know what they're talking about for marketing.
So, this next, the following slide is more credible. So, I want to know
what you're using to, what you're doing today? What's working? What you've tried?
Maybe tell me about what didn't work or what you've learned along the way? What techniques
you're using? How many leads they're generating? Make it real, make it tangible.
Okay, don't just say "oh yeah, we're going to advertise and we're going to do PR."
Tell me what you've done and what's working.
Ok, quantify to the extent you can.
Okay, so this deck I like,
but tables like this are really hard to process.
Charts like this are great.
Ok, the best deck I've
ever seen, I can't find it for the life of me, was one of the companies we invested in called Number Fire and
not so much important what they they did, but they showed
four charts on one page.
They had one chart that showed visits to their website going up into the right like this.
They had another chart that showed...
I'm kind of making this up, but go with me.
You know, like time on site, like number of page visits per visit and that kept going up into the right.
Okay, and then they had,
you know, time between visit and that was going down.
And then they had cost of acquiring customer that's going down.
Okay, so, like everything was trending in the right direction.
That got me excited.
It goes back to what I talked about before. If you said you have 10,000 users today a
9,999 a month ago, not very interesting. Get a thousand a month ago. That's very interesting. So how can you
paint the picture that there's a trend? And, by the way, if you don't have a slide like this
then your presentation comes off like an idea, and you don't want that.
Okay, and if you can't tell a story like this
then you're going to have a hard time raising money to be honest with you, okay?
So more of this, less of this, show it in a chart.
Charts are, you know, are great at telling a story.
For those who don't know, LTV is lifetime value.
CAC is customer cost of acquiring a customer. Your LTV needs to be greater than your CAC.
Right, the amount of money you can extract from a customer must be more than the amount you spend to acquire them.
Does that makes sense?
Okay, so there's no magic number five to one ratio
might be very good in this industry. So, this is nice,
but it's unsubstantiated. So, either be prepared to talk to that in detail or have backup data. Actually, that's a
good point to make is
you can't tell them everything in your initial pitch deck.
Okay, so having 8 to 12 slides is,
I think, a really nice number to try to aim for.
You could have 237 backup slides.
As long as you're adapted in Powerpoint getting to those back, you know, someone asks you for more information about your competition or your patent.
Oh, one second. You pull up your slide which talks about the claims in your patent or whatever it is, right,
whatever that is. You can have a million back up slides.
Okay, don't try to tell them everything because you want the Q&A to be needed.
Okay, a good team slide is good. You shouldn't have, you know, paragraphs of biography, right.
Something like this or the logos of the companies you work for.
Schools aren't that important, but to the extent that,
you know, you can use that as a way to connect with someone.
You know, you know there's an NYU alum in the audience well, then you should definitely put your NYU logo in your slide deck.
Okay, it could just be a conversation starter, a way for that one person the audience to feel a little bit of a shared connection with you.
Tim you had a question?
-Yeah. That previous point in terms of... So, when you have a presentation that you have a story to tell
that obviously should involve investors so that they interact and ask questions. Would you imagine a
would you best to answer the question and dive into the slide deck and go off your story or kind of just answer the question and then get back to your story?
It depends. It is the truth. It's hard to generalize about that.
You'll get more depth at this with practice. And it really depends on, you know, it's okay to say
"can you hold that question I'm going to get to it in a few slides."
And maybe they say okay. And they might say no. I said no, I really want to talk about that right now.
Then you deal with it, right. I mean, remember if you're trying to, if they were a customer
and you're trying to sell them a product,
the customer is always right, right? So, that mindset you should try to work with that here.
You know, most people aren't going to be really rude to you.
But sometimes it really happen to them that they have a burning question or issue that they want to discuss. Some people are really pushy.
That's just the way they are. Some people are like yeah, sure, whatever, you know.
So, you got to kind of read your audience in your room, but be flexible and adaptable.
Okay, so, I'm not a big fan of putting advisor up on.
It makes your team actually look bigger than it is. And if you're a small company
you actually don't want to make it look like you have a huge team and a huge burn rate.
Okay.
So, I wouldn't put it. The most you can talk about who these people are.
Most investors know that most advisors are window dressing and they see through that.
If you're going to put you know Sue Smith's name on here
you better be able to talk to when was the last time you spoke to Sue and how she's helped you.
And if it was three to six months ago, then she's really not an advisor.
Okay.
I thought this was actually a nice touch saying, you know,
after we raise this round the first person we're hiring is the director of customer service or right now
we're trying to hire a director of a customer service. Do you know anybody? I mean, you don't have to ask them for help, but
it shows you're being honest and real about. You know what your needs are, so I like that in this one.
So, this is decent. This explains how they got to where they are right now.
They bootstrap for the first six months. They're raising a two million series A.
They're targeting to clothes, okay. That's nice.
I don't know if I really care about that, but in fact, they have six hundred thousand committed. It is good.
Be careful as I'll come back to you on that point. Be careful about overstating that, yeah?
-Really quick on that team slide. So, what if that situation with the team search is that's actual co-founder.
-Would you say that in the pitch? Because I know a founder that is in a competition and they have this situation.
Well, then they're not a co-founder. If the company's already founded, and they're not there then they're not a co-founder.
-So, they executed a lot, but not as many as someone you know full-time time. It's not a higher rate?
Well, if you don't have the technical person that you need
to execute in your business you have a problem. A lot of investors if there's not a full-time
CTO, VP of engineering, whatever you want to call it on the team, they don't even want to look at it.
We, can talk about that more, so,
I like this. It kind of talks about the high-level goals of what they're going to do with the money.
Okay, that sounds ambitious, but I'd
rather see that than just, say, we're raising two million dollars.
To do what?
Okay, I'd like to know how long that's going to last, kind of that cues the conversation, what not, that you need to raise more money.
And then I end with this slide. I don't have to go through it and sometimes
I find is awkward to go through slides like this.
But you just leave this up there.
And then you say "any questions?" Right? This kind of the highlights are up there and while they're thinking or while you're talking
maybe they're reading that and it reinforces your most salient points of your pitch.
Okay, so that was 13 slides. Remember, there were two market slides. I would have had one.
Now, let me comment on this. We can come back to this if you want by going through some of my pet peeves.
Okay, so...
There's a spectrum that entrepreneurs like to dance on, right. Everyone when you're pitching wants to accentuate the positive, okay?
And you should and that's good.
Okay, but you also want to be honest, okay? And you don't want to be caught stretching the truth,
let alone exaggerating, and
definitely never lie and obfuscate, okay? So, you're trying to build trust with your investor.
And this may be the first time you've ever raised money, this may be the 1000th pitch
they've ever seen and the 50th or 100th time that they're going to invest in the startup.
They know the things to look for, they know the games that entrepreneurs play. And I don't mean that in a negative sense, but
be careful going too far in this direction, okay?
Because it will come back to haunt you. And these are real things that have been put into email or said to my face.
Okay, we're signing a huge contract next week.
Okay, unless it's signed you're not signing a huge contract next week.
Okay, because
you're with all due respect a first-time inexperienced entrepreneur. These big companies
drag entrepreneurs through the mud without even meaning to do so, okay. It's always going to take longer.
I've never heard anyone say we're signing contract next week that actually signed it next week.
It always takes longer, so be careful of overstating that, you know. We're over 500 accounts already.
Okay, you sold to 500 accounts?
You've demoed to?
Okay, that was a gross overstatement.
We're increasing our top of funnel sales leads by 10x.
That sounds like great jargon, but they actually know what the jargon means. And if they start asking questions, you've got to be able to
back up data like that.
Okay, really. How are you doing that? How much is it costing you? What's your cost per lead?
Really? How many... So you increase by 10x,
so you have how many are in the funnel right now? A thousand? So you had a hundred last month?
Okay, you got to be able to back that up.
Okay, they're not just going to let things like that fly. And part of the
interrogation and back and forth is validating your credibility.
Right.
This one I hate.
When you start doing due diligence, and they tell you other investors aren't asking for this information. Well,
I am and I need that to get to my investment decision.
Okay, now, if I'm asking you for something that is really going to require a ton of work, okay, maybe.
But that should not be the way if you answer that question.
-I guess it's safe to say that most startups are like in a going around that kind of situation.
So how do you go around that, you know? Because I'm sure someone somewhere else,
someone is building the next Facebook, for example. How are you going to tail that?
So if you're saying this to me, okay?
Then you're, no, no, but then you're here, you're off, you're skating.
That's what I think. I'm like this, why won't they give me this information?
Okay, that's what I infer from that, okay?
This is great, but it better be true.
Okay, to say that people are funding means that there's money.
I've been told this line too many times to count
to say that other people are already... some people tried to, you know, to break the logjam, break the ice, get the money flowing.
Because often once one investor funds then the other people will start to fund.
And if I know who some of those other angels are I'm going to pick up the phone and call them
asking about the company. And when they tell me that they haven't funded yet,
then I know you just lied to me.
Okay, don't be caught in that trap.
A round is almost fully subscribed.
Okay, that's great if it's true. Don't say that if it's not because next week I'll know that it's not true or is.
Okay, we have three patents. That statement says to me patents granted.
But it doesn't mean provisional patents, that doesn't mean patent applications.
Okay? And then our CTO is full-time. That's another great one, right?
Meaning they're recruiting a CTO
who's, you know, who took a look at their code and said it's crap and said when you're funded I'll hire you.
You can hire me. Yeah?
-When you are looking to validate you  you find across your experiences or talking to VCs. Are they looking to like, so they are starting at hundred I want to fund you and then try to pitch you or...?
No
-are they like, I want to get interested?
No, but I mean, they're not they're not trying to knock you out,
but they're, you know, doing their diligence, and they want to make sure is this person a straight shooter?
Do they tell the truth, you know? Are they going to tell me
what's wrong with the business now?
Because when the shit hits the fan a year from now and sales are 50% off are they going to obfuscate that too?
So it's beginning to test how you behave.
You know, so the reason why I say
these are lies are first hells, because these things will come back to haunt you. They will bite you in the ass.
So, this is the best image I could come up with but it wasn't a
medical image of someone who was bit in the ass.
And I didn't want to share that, so, hopefully that scares you a little bit.
-But some of these can be used to grab attention and then explain if it's true.
If it's true yeah. Then if it's true, it's all good.
Right, but you better be able to substantiate every single one of those.
Right, if you say other angels are funding ready, and then I say who? and you go uh... oh... a...
Okay, so another pet peeve is off target pitches. I kind of already substantiated that one I.
Don't waste my time sending me a pitch.
And, you know, particularly in my role here at NYU if someone sends me off target pitch
no matter how interesting in it
I'm not going to take the time to really look at it or read it.
And I'm not going to refer to someone else just because
I have nothing better to do with my time than read
random pitches that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for to help someone else make money.
It's just not what I'm going to do, so don't waste my time.
Don't pitch me on ideas.
Okay? This is why that demonstrating that you have traction is so important and the
disproportionate number of pitches that
angels and seed investors see probably are really at the
idea or advanced idea stage and you need to differentiate yourself from them. So, make sure you do.
I'll let you read these for a second
But these things matter.
Okay, you know,
typos, poor grammar. I love this one.
You know, being really long-winded
or using a lot of cliches or a lot of jargon.
You might have a, you know, a PhD in Molecular Biology,
but, you know, don't assume that everyone who's reading your plan does.
There's a balance between dumbing it down so much and sounding like you don't know, you're don't know your shit, but
you need to strike that balance. Now, on this last point about being long-winded, right, avoid the big wind-up.
I mean, I just got a pitch deck this morning
that they didn't describe what they did until slide 12.
They spent 11 slides defining the problem and,
you know, it was a beautiful deck. It was really it was a gorgeous deck, nice graphics of photography and typography. But it was
like, you know, on slide 5 I'm like what the hell do they do?
Right, so, you want to kind of
explain the problem or challenge that you're addressing really quickly and get to your solution.
Okay?
Also this is my way of saying don't be all things to all people.
Okay, pick a target customer and focus on him. There's a tension there between,
you know, coming across as though you're serving a niche,
but remember you can start out serving a niche.
Right, who or what was their niche the Facebook first-served?
-College students?
Harvard students.
Right, that's it teeny little market.
Okay, but they crushed Harvard they got
95% of the undergrads using it in like two months or something crazy like that.
And then they expanded to Yale and Columbia, and Stanford, and then they expand to the rest of the Ivy League, and then
and so on, and so on. Today, right, your grandmother's using it, right? So that's great.
By the way, for the record, Mark Zuckerberg did not envision the Facebook that we know today.
He just thought it was going to be the best
Facebook for college students across the country, which may have been a good market.
Okay, and that was probably what he was pitching back in whatever it was, 2004.
So, you can paint the the larger market that you want to go after, but what's the path you're going to take to get there?
Right, as the great startup philosopher
Yoda once said "the key to success I know not, but trying to please everyone the key to failure is."
Okay, so in those early days it's really important to focus.
Okay, also beware of the no competition trap.
Everybody has competition. Even when you're at the top of the food chain we all have
competition whether define that by how your customer solves the problem not the technology.
And also, beware of outsourcing.
Okay, I've seen more startups
struggle and ultimately die from trying to outsource their product development than I've seen succeed. I've seen some succeed, but they're few and far between.
Okay, the reason for that is simple. Even though it might be very economical to outsource to
India or Poland, or Uzbekistan, or wherever,
okay, you're not going to be able to iterate as rapidly as you can when your CTO is sitting next to you, okay?
And the guys in Uzbekistan are not going to have any insight into
solving your customer's problem. They're going to do exact what you tell them to code.
And you're not, I don't mean it only goes forth
so you're not going to get any creativity at them,
but you're not gonna get the same creativity from your CTO or engineers who actually engage with the customers like you do.
Okay.
So, it's just really challenging and a lot of
investors won't look at a at a startup that is not doing at least a majority of its development in-house.
Now that said, our most successful startup
Brooklinen doesn't have a technical founder on a team, but they're an e-Commerce company.
They were able to build their entire thing at Shopify.
Okay, so that's maybe an exception, right. We have another team that's
doing a marketplace for theater props, and they're building it on top of Magento.
Okay, so there are maybe cases where you don't need that, but in most cases you do.
And, you know, manufacturing
physical products may be similar.
You may not have to manufacture it, but you probably need to design it, right. Apple doesn't actually manufacture much, anymore
but you notice what it says on their products. It all says it is designed in California made in China.
Okay, so they design everything, they're designing their own chips now. I'm not saying you have to go to that level,
okay, but what's your secret? What's your advantage? What's your secret sauce? Is it your part of it? Is it your engineering or design
capability? You know, manufacturing
physical products, it may make more sense to do it overseas, it may not. Then go another one of our portfolio companies, right? They...
Actually this is a true story. Brian the founder was a Stern student. He went over and stopped the
folks at the robotics club over at Tandon
until he found his co-founder. Then they were able to track someone else. They designed and hand-built their first few,
then they got a local contract manufacturer, okay, to make the next
dozens, and then they scale to another contract manufacturer who made the next 500. And now they're just looking at bringing it
to another contract manufacturer that has both domestic and international
manufacturing capabilities. So, they start to get into the thousands of units, then maybe it makes sense to move it to lower-cost production in Asia.
Okay, so anyway, it's probably more than you want to know about that.
No one is going to read your business plan, and I mean that. Doesn't... I'm not
saying don't waste your time with a business plan though I'm not a big fan of them.
-So why is everyone asking?
Who's asking you?
-I don't know, everyone.
You will not hear a professional VC fund ask you for a business plan.
They'll say send me your pitch deck.
Okay.
-Yeah, they did not say that, some other people did.
Yeah,
they probably don't work there. Now, then writing a business plan can be a useful process for you.
Okay, but you get diminishing returns as you start to improve your grammar and add beautiful fonts and charts and all
that kind of stuff, okay?
So, it's more about what goes into it then the actual product itself.
Don't send large files.
Okay, remember, I actually read a lot of my email on my cell phone.
And I'm, you know, in and out of the subways and on the trains and coverage isn't always great.
I can safely get a 5 or 10 megabyte file onto my phone or my iPad, or my laptop if I'm on the train.
But 550 megabytes, it'll take me hours.
So, there's a feature in Powerpoint, and I assume Keynote has the same, to compress images,
compress the hell out of them.
Ok, so that your file is as small as you can get. They'll open it quicker. That sounds like a good thing. Yes, Tim.
-The question I have isn't related to business planning.
-After you captured interest at several meetings as due diligence, right, is that,
-I don't know, is it written? Is it phone called? Is it more meetings?
All of the above.
-All of the above? So, sometimes the written, like a business plan does come in?
No, usually not. They might ask for written information like if you have anything written, like you've done a competitive analysis,
or maybe you got a business to do it for you. Can I? Yeah, sure share that or
patent applications, those are written, or you did a grant application, or
stuff that you have written, or, you know, I want to sit down with your CTO and better understand your architecture.
Okay, well, then your CTO should have a technical deck that explains what your thing is and how it works if that's what they want to know.
Okay.
You know, you don't have to tell them everything on the first pitch, but be careful of coming across as secretive.
Okay, so, you may have, you know, certain, you know, an algorithm that you don't want to show them because you not have patent it
until you're under non-disclosure. And that usually doesn't happen till very late in the process with an investor.
But know what you can talk about without compromising your IP and
know what you can't. And there's, you know,
people will respect that if you come across as open. If you come across as very closed and don't want... I literally had
an entrepreneur who wouldn't explain how his product worked and
wouldn't actually show me the data that proved that it worked.
I'm like, well, then I'm glad you got other angels to invest, but I can't invest in that.
I like you, I believe you, I trust you but, I cannot invest the University's money on that basis. Sorry.
You will get challenged
intentionally or unintentionally as part of this process. Don't be defensive.
Take the questions and the feedback, hear them, if they're questions answer them, okay?
If you start arguing with the VC it's the bad thing.
Okay?
It's hard to, this is really hard to do. This is your baby,
you've been working on it for two years, and they're challenging the things that you believe in your heart, and you believe are true.
Okay, they may be right, they may be wrong.
Arguing with them is not going to help even if you're right. It's not about being right.
Now, it's not saying
capitulate and say you're right, but there is some middle ground, okay?
Don't be unresponsive.
Okay, I'm not saying you have to answer an email within five minutes of receiving it.
But if you get an email from a VC
and they ask you a question or something don't wait days to answer it.
It says you're not serious or you're not paying attention or I don't know what.
Okay, I'm not saying it's, you know, when I say jump, how high?
But you should be
responsive and engaged in the process.
Okay?
I hate useless animations.
And I also hate difficult to read colors and fonts.
Okay, this actually does not look nearly as good on here as it does on my computer.
So, find a shitty projector somewhere and see how your slides look to make sure that they're readable.
I made this intentionally difficult to read to prove my point.
But animations and transitions and all that keep it simple. You can use builds
to make points if you know how to do that in Powerpoint or Keynote.
But otherwise focus on keeping it simple.
The other thing you'll say is I hate slides like this.
Okay, long list, lots of reading and this could be a lot worse.
Okay, so this is just the the points of the pictures that I just showed you. So, I tried to actually illustrate the point I
was making before, right, you know, if these were all
pictures, right, I could talk to these, right, okay? I'm not saying you have to do that, but it's useful.
Right, and I could have had, I wasn't, but I could have had very detailed notes here that I was reading and
I had your attention. You were focused on me because you could process this slide in a second.
It's nothing to read.
Okay?
So, questions?
-So, the following part, you kind of make your pitch, you said that when you mail how soon will you know that they are not interested?
If they're telling you they're not interested. That's the best clue.
-If they are straightforward.
If hey stop responding.
So, here's a nice trick is, you know, if you write to them and
they don't respond, you know, wait three, five, seven days.
If they don't on Monday respond to something you  sent on Friday, still about three to five,
seven business days. And just write
what I call the thin veneer of guilt.
Right, so one line. It says just want to make sure this didn't slip between the cracks.
You know, can we speak again next week?
Or let me know what the next steps are, or I'll call you on, you know, whatever.
Just some kind of next step and that brings it back to the top of their inbox
and just kind of reminds them that they blew you off as
politely as you possibly can.
Okay?
And if they don't respond to that, I mean, every VC I know lives and dies on email.
They're, you know, as obsessed as anybody with responding to emails. It's the lifeblood of their business
So, they saw it
just, you know, how many...
Now, then they're busy, and they're not sitting around hanging on, you know, your every key type.
But if after, you know, a couple of weeks you haven't heard back from them
you can maybe send the thin veneer of guilt twice.
But after that you're you're wasting a bit sometime. 
-It's six o'clock.
You know, the other thing that you can do or if they do respond and they say No,
you can ask them for feedback.
Just be really clear in both your words and your
style that you're not trying to change their mind.
Okay, say, you know, any
feedback, so I can improve this as I pitch other investors? Some people will still not,
okay, some people might.
Don't get into an, you know, if they say you're too early
don't write back and say, what do you mean?
And then you're going to start to annoy them.
But try to, you know, if you have specific questions that you think they can answer. And you're going to be pitching to a lot of
them, so hopefully you'll get some feedback. You can also back-channel through contacts.
Right, in fact, a blog post I read this morning that actually suggested that
another investor that you know might be, or an entrepreneur that you know who knows them, might be willing to tell them.
Well, I didn't like him because I thousand three-piece suits.
[Laughter]
-Excuse me, a question about funding. Do you want to put it all, or actually do you want to put a specific funding goal?
Or what you are looking for from that VC? Or is that, I mean, that kind of varies?
Well, no, I think as I showed you in the example pitch. I think you should have, you know,
what you're at, what you're asking for.
You know, something like this.
You also remember is, I might then take this deck,
you know, we had a good meeting, and I got a show, you know, show it to one of my partners or an associate and,
you know, I want the majority of the information to be there for them.
I mean, I probably will send a note along with it, but don't make more work for me
Yes.
-In terms of presenting your team and like the slide for your team is it great to say that you have that many years of experience in that particular firm.
But say, you are a team of undergrad students and likely you don't have that experience. What should you focus on?
So you should certainly mission where you go to school.
You probably have had some internship experience, right. You can highlight that, I would say
courses are not necessarily all that valuable to highlight. You know, if you were in,
you know, the summer Launchpad accelerator at NYU you could mention that.
I wouldn't say you went to startup school, but, you know, if you were in a program or something that was hard to get into.
You know maybe you, you know, got some kind of scholarship. You know, it shows that you're really smart, you know, you got to find proxies.
You test it with someone else to see what's meaningful or not.
But I get the challenge, right. You're a first time  entrepreneur, I figure you're young.
But, you know, or I mean, also if there are,
you know, if let's say, you're the the CTO and
you know, you could say you were a hackNY fellow and you won the NYU hacks competition or something like
that showed that you have some credibility in that regard.
-If your team is full of like really technical people are all grads and they normally do well in their field and then you're, you know, not.
-You're like, you 're an undergrad, right. So, how do you play that without getting him you know, kick him out?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
-If you are like the least experienced member of the team the kind then like how do you portray that in a good way?
Think I'd have to... You have advice?
-I was just going to say that you probably have a different skill set than those people that you want to advertise. Say, you are really good at marketing.
Like you may not know how to build a website, but you can advertise really well, talk to people.
That's good advice. Okay, last question.
-If you've got a couple of meetings with a bunch of investors and none of them got back to you. Do they usually give feedback?
No.
-So what is the next step?
Well, you can ask some of them for it and they may or may not...
You know, as I mentioned you can try to get some back-channel comments on it.
And then, you know, if...
Well, you should talk to us, and we will probably listen your pitch, and we'll get you unvarnished feedback.
So, that's what I would do. And or, you know, if you're not here and this is 10 years from now,
keep trying or try to find someone who can give you feedback even if they're not necessarily really going to invest in you.
Maybe they're a friend, maybe they're a VC,
but who doesn't focus on your industry or something like that, who can give you someone unvarnished feedback.
