If you’re pitching investors, one of the easiest ways to improve your deck is swapping out blank interstitial slides, or the dull logo cover slide, with pictures of your product in use or in context.
In my role at a VC firm, I have the privilege of seeing the pitch decks of startups as they set out to raise new funding. In the main, they’re masterful, but I’ve seen a lot of founders making a similar mistake—including quotes from random users in their presentations.
These are the liquidity events that give the impression that startups are a great way to “get rich quick,” even though building a saleable company often takes the better part of a decade. Less often discussed, or championed, is a third option — the “get rich slow” method of building a company and making millions of dollars in profits, for years or decades.
How do you become humongous with humble financing? There are a few principles that seem common.
In 2007, Groupon took in the first million dollars of what would ultimately be $1.4B of venture capital, raised with ambitions of reshaping shopping. For a while, it looked like group buying, social commerce, daily deals, or whatever you call the practice of time-limited sales paired with social pressure was really going to change buying behaviors in a big way. In the space of four years the category exploded:
There’s a widespread belief among founders that venture capital is a precursor to success. It is true that VC is a common denominator of the most successful tech startups, but it isn’t a prerequisite, especially at the early stages.