That site needs the base font to be bumped up by 400% or more.
Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#32Is "team" a measure of how good the team is in general, or how well-suited they are to the area they've chosen to build a startup in?
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#33I would say that absolute best predictor of getting a meeting is strong introductions. I hate to say this, but you'll have an easier time with a strong network. A trusted introduction can even overcome a bad deck in some cases. But there should be no reason to have a bad deck now-a-days as there is ample reference and knowledge share. First-time founders: Please don't pay for access. Services like this, in my opinion…
Best advice is just to be born wealthy so you can use your parents "connections," and then go to a top-tier business school to make more "connections." The startup scene is so boring because there's no diversity of thought when everyone comes from the same basic background.
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#34How do they measure team quality? Is it just number of elite school and FAANG alumni?
I would imagine they know the difference between a team full of "ideas" people who answer the question of "how will you solve this problem" by saying "easy, we don't need to code, were "business people" we will higher an offshore team in India for cents on the dollar to code this for us overnight."
Where software development is just an example of one of the skills you would need
Vs.
"We prototyped this ourselves based on our experience coding with best in class teams for scalability, performance and optimizing cost savings for scaling (lets say web platform?) web platform, and we have a working MVP with some customers onboarded and seem to be growing faster than we can handle due to demand, and even though we are all pretty good at running this platform ourselves, we know some key people we want to hire to take over the scaling our existing backend devops teams so we can focus on the UX/UI and feature development to respond to specific asks from our current customers because we know these will keep them on board with us vs our current competitors."
In general, they are looking for people who are realistically engaged with the resources it needs to implement the solution to the problem where many people have the attitude of "I have the idea, I will hire minions to do it for me, I just need $5million from you to do that so I can hand out tshirts and take credit for their work at conferences while my minions do the work, duh".
You may think this does not happen. It happens quite alot....
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#35Is "team" a measure of how good the team is in general, or how well-suited they are to the area they've chosen to build a startup in?
Everyone always says team without elaborating on what that means. It seems to me it’s generally a shorthand for how many of your founders/employees went to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. You can’t say pedigree these days because that doesn’t fit with the current Bay Area politics.
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#36I am not sure what value this post is besides a sales pitch for the poster. Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one factor is always customers. Do you have any? Also, How do you get more (cost of acquiring customers)? Market size? I suppose that's in the "underlying economics" section, but that's such a common question it should be addressed. VCs are looking for 100x return. Can you meet in person…
Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one factor is always customers. Do you have any? This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy (directly or able to raise funds from within their own network of friends and family). 15 years ago seed capital was exactly that - m…
Isn't this down to the rise of angel investors, though? I feel like that concept has exploded in the last decade, and established VC's have moved "up market" in response to it--hence their first look is now more like a Series A than a seed.
Has available seed capital declined overall or is it just coming from different places now?
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#37I wouldn’t trust these data, not because there is anything wrong with the analysis but because the inputs are inaccurate. What VCs say was the reason they were interested is not necessarily what made them interested. It may be what they tell themselves or tell you, but I think the decision criteria are rarely that objective or explicit. Decisions are made, then back justified with a plausible explanation.
100% agreed. Most VC funds are necessarily good at very specific skill: convincing people who control lots of money that the VC is smarter and better than their competitors. The easiest way to sell that is to truly believe it, and then perform that belief convincingly. That's not something one switches on and off, so their answers here are likely to be skewed in the direction of things that make them look valuable. T…
In general I agree with you, but I would say that alot of VCs either
1) diversify their investments amongst many areas in tech (or maybe some non tech things, not stereotyping all VCS but for this example I'll say diversity of problems being solved using technology/software etc) and thus see commonalities of problems amongst teams in their experience despite whatever the specific niche industry is. I think it is pretty important to agree the cofounders are important. Specifically I've heard from CEOs of startups I use to work for they are really good at hunting out "weaknesses" in the bonds between cofounders.
Basically, they don't want a good idea to fall apart because two cofoudners fundamentally don't see eye to eye, which will make it hard for any decisions they make (whether good or bad) to come to fruition and indicates future struggles with the company, in addition to weak leadership/unified approach when hiring new people, who might be disoriented at understanding the direction the company is going in.
2) Focus on particular niches (a startup who focus specifically on funding AI startups, for example) often they will even fund competitors knowing that if one of them dies, they are almost gauranteed to reep benefits from the remaining on in the niche field. This also means they keep a close track on the variations between two or more companies approach in a specific industry and why one failed and the other didn't.
Someone from Marc Andreessen's team recently published a blog post going into great depth about 5 factors amongst ten or so AI teams that indicated their levels of success in the field, and most of the tilting factors are not what I would say is common knowledge amongst AI startups.
They may have their biases, but they also have unique experience in understanding or seeing repeated dynamics in what could make a relationship (between cofounders) fail (like seeing that one bad relationship where the couple can't see it but it is so obvious to you because youve either now been through it or seen it happen before, imagine this for VCs looking at cofounders over and over again for ten years...) and otherwise have lost lots of money over failed business ideas, so I would say they are incentivized to be as objective as possible with themselves, even if just selfishly for the benefit of their own bank account.
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#38I wouldn’t trust these data, not because there is anything wrong with the analysis but because the inputs are inaccurate. What VCs say was the reason they were interested is not necessarily what made them interested. It may be what they tell themselves or tell you, but I think the decision criteria are rarely that objective or explicit. Decisions are made, then back justified with a plausible explanation.
The following passage addresses your concern.
We analyzed the results of our first 500 reviews and calculated the correlations between high marks in categories like team, problem area and business economics with the number of requested intros from our reviewing VCs.
In other words the individual factors were graded, and the VC chose whether or not to meet. They are correlating the ranking of the components with the likelihood of asking for a meeting. They are not relying on the VC explanation of why they asked to meet.
I am curious who graded the proposals and how consistent that was. It would also be nice to see what good vs bad looks like in each category.
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#39I wouldn’t trust these data, not because there is anything wrong with the analysis but because the inputs are inaccurate. What VCs say was the reason they were interested is not necessarily what made them interested. It may be what they tell themselves or tell you, but I think the decision criteria are rarely that objective or explicit. Decisions are made, then back justified with a plausible explanation.
When interviewing people and giving feedback there's a non-trivial percentage of people that react with hostility to even the most constructive criticism.
We're actively recruiting now and it's amazing the amount of hostility we receive sometime when someone is rejected.
There's a HIGH false negative rate on our end. Meaning, we're going to screw up and walk away from candidates that are amazing - but we're unable to realize it in time.
Yet, people will still react negatively.
If I was a VC I would probably quickly learn to just keep my mouth shut.
Re: Analyzing pitches to find what gets VCs interested in a meeting
#40I am not sure what value this post is besides a sales pitch for the poster. Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one factor is always customers. Do you have any? Also, How do you get more (cost of acquiring customers)? Market size? I suppose that's in the "underlying economics" section, but that's such a common question it should be addressed. VCs are looking for 100x return. Can you meet in person…
Don't mean to be overly critical, but really the number one factor is always customers. Do you have any? This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy (directly or able to raise funds from within their own network of friends and family). 15 years ago seed capital was exactly that - m…
>This is 100% true and 10,000% annoying. Effectively it blocks anyone who has an idea for an idea for a business that needs seed capital from competing unless they're already wealthy
There's your startup. Get some money and invest it in all those teams that need initial funding.
You may also want to establish an online forum for young entrepreneurs and engineers to hang out and discuss news and ideas so that they know about you and approach you once they need the funding.