Example startup pitches

Here is a nice collection of early-stage startup pitch decks that managed to raise money successfully.

There are some common concepts in all of them:

• Most importantly, they are actually great ideas. LinkedIn, YouTube, AirBNB now look like totally obvious concepts, but back when they started out they were not.
• They explain clearly what the company/product actually does, often via a demo of screen shots. Many startups omit this important part of your pitch (surprisingly).
• Often, there is a very powerful traction slide inside. If you have grown your business from nothing to millions of dollars in 6 months, investors will pay attention, and forgive you if the rest of the slides in the pitch deck are not that good.
• All these decks are email friendly, you get the idea without the need for a presenter to explain it to you. (That is now actually the main type of presentation I design for my clients) 

Full circle

Every pitch starts with an informal, but often very good, story/conversation. Then we start to complicate things with slides, templates, storylines, structures until we get to some slide deck. Then, it is often useful to step back to the very fundamental investor questions:

1. What is it they are trying to do? (Often not clear in a presentation)
2. Will anyone want to use it? (Rational logic, emotional gut feel)
3. Can you make money from it? (There are many good ideas that do not deliver a profit)
4. Can this team pull it of? (Probably most important question)
5. (Can I construct a good deal given valuation, cap tables, Board seats, etc.)

Basic presentation template organization

Years of experience with client presentation templates have confirmed that there is basically only one way to lay out a corporate template.

• Title at the top left. Some templates have a huge corporate logo getting in the way there
• If you want to put a logo, put it at the bottom right to compensate for the "weight" of the title in the top left. Logo on the top right eats space for the headline, logo at the bottom left makes it harder to put footnotes
• Page number in the top right (bottom right is taken up by the logo)
• Which leaves space for footnotes at the bottom left.

You might notice that my presentation app SlideMagic uses this layout.

One science is harder to explain than another

Most of my client work involves a presentation with a hard/difficult business or scientific issue to explain. All science is complex, and it requires someone to study for years to understand it. But in some scientific disciplines I can get away with things.

Take medicine for example. Here is what you can do to make things understandable to the layman:

• Micro focus on one very specific condition/disease, and omit all other 35,000 medical issues a student usually has to go through
• Simplify, eliminate complex / long / Latin names
• Abandon commonly used diagrams, and instead make your own, completely non-standard drawings that are solely aimed at explaining a phenomenon.
• Shrink all the statistical proof into a footnote. It is important for peer-reviewed research, it is not needed to understand the basic mechanism of a drug

This can work in other disciplines as well: economics for example. But it does not work everywhere. Mathematics for examples requires a broad understanding of concepts that are all stacked on top of each other, depend on each other. And there is no easy to simplify formulas. 

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No patience for backgrounds and market trends

Some of my client work is for managers of business units in a large organisation who need to convince the corporate centre to make a politically charged decision. Some mistakes I encounter in the briefing document:

• Most decks start with backgrounds, market trends, history of the unit, all information that is not directly related to the issue on the table. Only in the back (or on the last page), buried in a bullet point comes the central point of the meeting.
• The overall pro/con arguments are not well laid out, you need to distill them from the pages, or sometimes it requires verbal explanation
• Critical arguments that could be backed up by facts are not.

In these type of meetings with a busy senior executive I like to get to the point early. Lay out the options, and summarise why you think your preferred one is the best. Then dive with charts to support the points, where ever you can backed up by facts.

Presentation text = headlines

When you add text to your presentation, you are writing headlines. And headline writing is completely different from writing prose. Take the mind set of a headline writer when designing presentations.

• Space is limited, so keep it short:
  • Avoid filler words
  • Active, not passive verbs
  • Find synonyms for long words
• But.... keep them meaningful. Abstract, vague, generic text is a waste of space
• Take typography and layout into account. If things don't fit, re-write the headline
  • Watch weird line breaks
  • Keep things balanced: 2 super short category descriptions followed by a long one means either making the first 2 headlines longer (yes), or - more likely - cut the 3rd one
  • Watch out for orphans

Typography is a valid reason to re-write a headline! Try explaining that to your colleagues when the entire meeting room has settled for a slide title after an hour debate, and you say "sorry, does not fit in 2 lines"

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Description versus story

They are different

• A description is an exhaustive, dry representation of a concept. It is what education uses. It is better to add too much information, rather than being incomplete. Description have a standard format, structure (inside, outside, etc.). Descriptions are wordy translations of what can be transferred using an image in one second.
• Stories get to the point. Anticipate the audience's obvious questions, take into account the audience context, build on what the audience already knows, use surprise and tensions, and a flexible structure that is not always the logical, standard one.

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Pitch at the right level

It is hard to put your pitch at the right level. I often see two types of mistakes:

• Far too small: an entrepreneur pitches a device or a product without putting it in an overall context of where humanity is going. (I.e. a device that can help old people without talking about the greying of many Western societies).
• Far too big: millennials, online video, global warming, mobile devices, the gig economy, Moore's law, everything gets put in the first 20 minutes of the pitch to show what a huge opportunity this product is, being at the centre of all these seismic changes in the world

The best pitch is somewhere in the middle.

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Raising money with 5 slides

It happens. Some startups can create one slide that shows a line from 0 to 100 million users or $500m revenues in 1 year. Some startups can show a slide with clinical data proving they have the cure for cancer.  If you are not one of them, don't listen to pitch advice by these startups and have some more backup information.

The tricky point

The bar is rising in presentation design. More and more people know how to design decent slide, more and more people know how to explain a business concept visually.

The challenge that remains is often a very specific point. In most cases, this is the answer to an "elephant in the room" question, a very specific answer to a question an ignorant but intelligent layman might have.

Most people burry these super important points inside a "standard" slide. "Oh, that is the point I make verbally when we present the competition slide."

I tend to make these points more in your face. Dedicate a specific slide to it. Even sometimes putting things straight in the headline ("No, we are not another Google").

These slides can be hard to design. The best approach is to listen really carefully when you explain it verbally to someone. "There are 3 groups of products, 1, 2, and 3, but none of them address y". "Gasoline engines can do x, but with electrical power we can do this.". "Up until now you could not see at nanometer level, but now it is possible". Look at the sentences and see what they do. Divide things in groups (boxes), contrasts between two options, "From to". Your language gives clues about what visual concepts to use. They don't have to be sophisticated, they just should be clear. 

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Editing Instagram photos

A quick post written on my iPad while enjoying my vacation here in beautiful Vietnam. I make a lot of Instagram snaps and here is the way I edit photos in the application. 

I do not use the pre-installed filters, they are random permutations of image adjustments that distort my photo too much. Instead I go in edit mode. 

The most important adjustment to any image is its composition: use zoom in/out, move left right, make sure the horizon is straight with the left most edit function. Then, on to brightness and contrast. Move the sliders and see whether your image improves or not. Next, highlights and shadows. That's it. 

You see the functions I don't touch: saturation, color overlays, structure, blur, etc. etc. 

People like to be told what is beautiful

I have been touring the city of Rome for a few days with my son which was great fun. It is amazing to see how tourists gather around sights that guides and guide book say are famous or beautiful. I snapped the double helix Bramante staircase in the Vatican museum (picture below), my guide was surprised I wanted to see it and he had to look for it. You can see on the picture that not many other people were interested.

Overcompensating

Each pitch has a weak spot to overcome. How to deal with it in your presentation?

• You can ignore it, sweep it under the carpet. You will have had a very pleasant meeting, but you are unlikely to land the deal
• You can mention it, and support a very shallow case why it is not an issue. (Vague analyst quote)
• Overcompensating, give 15 different possible analysis that triangulate to the most likely market size number. This just might scare your audience. If 50% of you time/charts are about this issue, this must really be a big deal.

Better: admit the issue is there (you scored some realism points in the process). Give an honest defence, but don't burry the audience in analysis (yet). Wait with that for the 2nd meeting which might have that issue as its sole agenda point.

Some thoughts about colour

If you use colours correctly, there is actually no need to put your corporate logo very prominently on each page to remind the audience what company they are listening to. Colours will give the page the recognisable look & feel instantly.

Make sure you use the correct colours instead of PowerPoint's default colour scheme. Your marketing department should have the brand guidelines with RGB codes, and if not, you can "steal" them from a logo image using a colour picker. Try saving them as a template in PowerPoint so you don't have to go through this exercise for every presentation you start.

You actually do not need many colours for a page to look great. (My presentation design app SlideMagic only allows you to use one). It is important to think about the relative importance of colours. Which colours can you use often, or for large surfaces, and which ones are meant as accent colour only. 

Throughout the presentation, try to use the same colour for the same concept. Everything to do with competitor A is always green. The results for the drug are blue, the control group is orange.

Colour can be a powerful tool to group things together on a slide. Especially if objects are far away from each other, using colour is a much better tool than trying to draw connecting lines.

Watch out with the colour red in financial results. Even a huge profit will look like a massive loss when set in bright red.

A light colour is a much better way to give a box contrast than drawing a dark line around it. I hardly ever use lines around shapes.

If you have dark colours at your disposal, try using them to colour text, especially in diagrams, it will look nice.

Test colours not just on your own screen. Printers and poor quality VGA projectors can wash out subtle colour shadings, making a whole page look unbalanced. Sometimes you might have to design your page specifically for the VGA projector, making them look bad on your usual monitor.

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Fewer posts in the summer

Like every year, I will be spending less time at the computer and more time with my family over the summer. Blog posts will be less frequent. I am publishing all my posts almost instantly and don't use a large buffer of content (going against good social media practice). I hope all of you are having a good summer break.

Different types of clients

Client 1:

• I want you to make it look great, like Steve Job's slides
• Can I buy 15 slides from you, maybe 20?
• How many hours would 15 slides take you?
• I am actually a pretty good presenter, if I may say so. We just need the final 5% of extra punch.
• Can you already include 3 slides in your project proposal?
• I will put you in touch with Harry from corporate communications, he will be your main contact point throughout the project

Client 2:

Every time I pitch my company gets confused with this other technology. On the surface, they have a point, but we need to dive really deep into science to kill the issue, in 10 minutes. Can you help, I really need it.

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Column titles

I add them when they mean something. It is important to know whether the data is about 2015 or 2016 for example. On the other hand "description", "item", "option", "date", "comment", "scenario" etc. are not always necessary. See if you can do without them

Tone down the ambition

Below is a professional print ad for Audi, trying to convince us that its heritage of cars is still present in today's models.

The concept is a very simple one. The way it is visualised is highly complex. To pull off something like the above requires a significant investment in a designer who knows what she is doing. Any attempt to DIY it will make your slide look amateurish.

But if you are not a global car brand with a million dollar advertising budget, you can still get that visual concept across.

• A simple time line of cars
• Overlapping circles with car images
• Shapes around the current car with images of vintage cars

You can relax the ambition level of the type of visualisation you want to use. You cannot compromise on the professionalism of your slide.

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SlideMagic just got more minimalist

We deployed a new version of my presentation app SlideMagic that eliminated the TEMPLATES menus. It makes things even simpler. Templates are now more integrated in the workflow

• When you click INSERT SLIDE HERE, you get presented with a number of pre-designed layouts in addition to the 3x3 blank grid.
• In your file browser (the DECKS menu), you have access to a number of featured presentations at the top of the page. These are example presentations designed by me that you can duplicate.
• In the STORY mode, you can import individual slides or entire presentations (including featured presentations) into your own presentations

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The one big question

There are a few levels you can go through as a startup with a VC:

1. Basic fit. "Sorry, your mobile gaming app is not really a good fit with our biotech focus"
2. Does the idea make some sort of sense. If the VC thinks not, you are likely to get very generic feedback from the VC, "too early for us". There are simply too many things wrong with it that the VC does not even get started to get into it.
3. No obvious hygiene issues. Difficult cap table. Unfriendly co-investors. Questionable IP. Lots and lots of follow-on investment required. VCs will usually give straight feedback, unless the issue is for example a really toxic CEO they don't like, at which point they might say "too early for us".
4. Then there are the real, gentle difficult questions. Is there really a market for this? Will the regulator agree? The VC really wants the answer to these to be "yes", but needs backup to convince her partners.

Once you have reached stage 4, the VC will tell you what the issue is. And this is the main issue that needs to be cleared. All the other slides in your presentation have been bought into already. You can give a great presentation, but if you did not manage to convince the investor of the Big Question, then you are not going to land the investment. Trying to hide the elephant in the room is not an option.

The interests of the entrepreneur and the investor are aligned. You want the answer to be "yes". A good VC might even hand over data sources, give access to people to talk to, to help you make the point. Hopefully it is the start of a long cooperation together.