Solid insights on how to pitch a VC by
@dunleavy89. My main quibble is weighting: startups need to spend 80% of their time on #11 (getting warm intros) and 20% on everything else. In my experience, the number one indicator of fundraising success was quality (ie "warm") shots on goal.
After fielding a few hundred messages from teams, I wanted to give a few brief notes on best practices for engaging with VCs. These are my personal thoughts but I imagine most VCs would echo these. Mostly unfiltered thoughts below.
For Projects Pitching VCs:
1) Sell me your product in 1-2 lines MAX to start.
2) Following, tell me what your product actually does, why it's important, and ideally, why now is the right time for it. 1 paragraph.
3) Give me a handful of bullets on why I should REALLY be excited about you. Product features. User traction. Partnerships. Key Investors.
4) Always include your terms. Based on if you are raising a $3m or $30m round you will immediately exclude a certain set of investors.
5) ALWAYS include a deck or investment memo. If the above hooked me I am going to ask for it anyway.
6) Ideally, all of the above is in a TG blurb I can forward to my team or other interested investors.
7) Moving on to the deck. The deck should include at minimum: product overview, tech overview, business model, traction and GTM plan, team bios, competitive analysis, deal terms and investors, tokenomics (if applicable), runway and financial metrics.
8) Ideally, your deck is 15-20 pages. The rest of the details are for the data room.
9) Prob unpopular but the visual quality and attention to detail in your deck matter alot. I see 20 decks a week. If it's obvious you made your deck in Claude vs have some clean awesome new presentation or visual I've never seen before, it is going to stand out regardless of the product. Not the end-all, be-all, but not worth ignoring.
10) DONT be pushy for a call immediately. Don't follow up after 24 hours. If a VC is interested they WILL follow up. If its been a week that's fair game to give a friendly nudge. Most VCs have dozens of deals in multiple stages of review.
11) Warm intros >>> everyone. Find someone who I know who can vouch for you.
12) Know the background and firm you are speaking with and what they are interested in. If they have never invested in your vertical and you saw they bashing it on a podcast prob not going to be the ideal investor for you.
13) I would probably love to meet you in person but only if we have already established interest on both sides. More likely we meet in person if there is a warm intro. More likely if we are both attending the same event already.
14) TG is generally the best place to get in touch with most investors. Emails are slow for discussion. Whats app/signal are mostly for your phone. Linkedin and X DMs are 99% spam and often unchecked.
15) Focus most of your initial efforts on your lead. 90% of investors won't commit until there is a lead or may be interested and back out if they dont like the lead or teams.
16) Unpopular one again but angel investor clout has basically lost all relevance unless the angel has some leverage they can provide your project. List less angels, less I think you are degen play screaming for CT clout.