How one founder raised money from a16z without opening PowerPoint
all Focusing on the pitch deck (and the 80+ articles on the topic), you would think it would be impossible for a startup to raise from angels and institutional investors. that’s not entirely correct. Here’s why:
Throughout the history of investing, raising funds from institutional investors required a comprehensive business plan. Harvard Business Review has a great guide on how to make one. The exact details of what is included in a business plan vary, but often include history, market analysis, strategy, product and service descriptions, organizational charts, competitive analysis, management team, financial plans and forecasts, and supporting each section. Includes all surveys. .
That’s all good, but by the time it’s all done, your business plan has ballooned to a page’s worth of novels. Before Add all graphics and charts. Business plans are great for teaching the basics and dynamics of business. Business plan mistakes are a great way to show would-be entrepreneurs how to avoid problems before they arise.
The problem is that the ink expires before it dries, and the financials become inaccurate long before they “print”. It’s not that startups operate with a different dynamic than other businesses, but they are essentially the old dinosaur equivalent of agile. Build, test, repeat.
Fundamentally, a startup is the way software is built these days. Instead of spending six months writing out a complete product spec that could be wrong before writing a single line of code, launch and tune a lean MVP version of your product. From there.
Guy Kawasaki’s “you only need 10 slides” claim might be a little overdone with deep minimalism, but it helped weave the narrative of the pitch more than at least 90-90%. Page business plan. So the pitch deck was a business plan in the same way agile software development was waterfall software development.
From there, the market evolved even further, with some founders choosing not to use decks at all.
“This story is very important,” said Tom Hacohen, CEO of Webhooks-as-a-Service company Svix, which recently raised money from Andreessen Horowitz without a deck. “Investors are not webhook experts, so they need to understand the story. To do that, we had to tell a great story. They understood our metrics and started talking to quite a few customers, at which point the deck helps explain what they already know.”
Let’s see how you can tell your company’s story without relying on a deck!
