Pitching your early-stage startup

Most of Patrick's excellent advice can be lumped into these three buckets. Specifically:

1) You have to establish the credibility of the team: you've done impressive things before; you have a deep understanding of what you're working on now; you can read your audience and know how to communicate effectively; you can get a strong intro (nice-to-have); etc.

2) You have to establish the viability of the market: it's big; it has a real problem; the existing competitors are not doing a good job in a clear way; etc.

3) You have to establish the quality of the idea/product: you have a unique insight or approach relative to competitors; the prototype/early validation is strong; etc.

A lot of the pitches become mediocre when founders are handwavy in one or more of these areas. For example, if the founder spends a lot of time talking about the market and the product idea, but not enough time explaining why the team is uniquely/extremely qualified to succeed. Or the founder has good answers to product/team/market questions, but their answers show they don't know how to read the audience or explain their idea. (Example of not reading the audience: the investor is non-technical and the founder, who is productizing their PhD thesis, spends 90% of the pitch geeking out about technical details.)

Also, I'll add a few tips:

- Don't exaggerate or mislead. An investor will pass if they doubt one of your statements ("silverware is a $150 billion dollar market!") or realize that you're spinning facts (e.g. you say Dropbox is a customer, but later it turns out you meant that one of your free users has an @dropbox.com email). If it turns out that one statement you made is false, then investors will assume there might be more.

- Understanding risks is better than sweeping them under the rug. If your competitor landscape is missing key companies (mentioned in Patrick's post) or you dismiss some $1b+ company as a competitor without any rationale, your audience will become very skeptical. Admitting something is a problem and explaining how you will address is it much more compelling.

- Really know the ins and outs of everything about your company -- at least relative to the audience. If I ask a question or make a product suggestion that the founder hasn't considered, that's a yellow flag. Someone who has been living and breathing their startup for several months should have a much, much deeper knowledge of their domain than an investor who is hearing about it for the first time.

I've also worked in VC and would add that you really need to understand the motivation of the potential investors you are pitching.

Early stage Founders often waste a lot of time by pitching anyone who says they make investments.

This will save you a lot of time and energy focusing on funds that you believe can add more than money to your business.

Also, funds with a proven track record are important. I've witnessed outright fraud from a VC fund that claimed to have $50MM to invest and signed contracts to invest over $11MM when in reality they had no money at all.

Don't start hiring or otherwise committing your company to expenses just because a VC fund signed some paperwork.

Wait till the money is actually wired over to your account.

You want to vet your investors as much as they are vetting you.

The OP is significantly about applying to YC: From what I've heard, YC doesn't much like sole, solo founder startups!

Why should no VC need call? For my startup, a PC server from $1500 in parts kept on average half busy 24 x 7 should generate well over $200,000 a month in revenue. Thus there would be plenty of cash for more PCs at $1500 each. Even $10,000 a month in revenue would yield plenty of cash for more servers.

SUSA Ventures claims to want "technical founders". Alas, it doesn't look like the SUSA partners are very technical!

"Warm introductions"? SUSA and many want "warm introductions": But VCs and I do not have associates in common. So, I can't get a "warm introduction" to a VC, and no VC can get such an introduction to me. E.g., I might be able to get a "warm introduction" from one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisers, at one time President of one of the world's best known research universities especially famous for their STEM field graduate programs, including computer science and AI. However I doubt that that person knows any information technology VCs. E.g., recently Tom Magnanti, Dean of Science at MIT, gave a technical lecture on the foundation of the Internet at a lecture series named for Professor X. Well, Professor X was the Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee; maybe I could get a warm introduction from him; but likely he knows no information technology VCs. Net, my background is technical, but VCs are not qualified to be my technical colleagues or associates -- VCs don't measure up.

For the people I know, the best form of an introduction is a good peer-reviewed paper of original research in a STEM field, preferably applied math complete with significant theorems and proofs. It appears that there are few or no such information technology VCs anywhere in the US and similarly few who could accurately evaluate such a paper.

SUSA Ventures claims:

"We seek out highly defensible companies that leverage data, economies of scale, or network effects to build value and achieve longevity."

"Seek out"? My experience is that SUSA ignores such things even when they land in their e-mail inbox.

IMHO, for the OP again, all the advice on pitching information technology VCs is noise and filler and useless except just one word, "traction", preferably in the form of after-tax earnings significantly high and growing rapidly. But for a sole, solo founder startup, by the time the business has traction enough for a VC to write a check, the founder likely will no longer accept such a check.