Situation: Nailing the first 90 seconds of your pitch
Before you begin a VC pitch, you want to set the context. We call this the B-Button Pitch. When you hit the B-Button on your slide deck, your slides will blank out and the VC will look at you. This is the time to set the context.
This is critical. There are several hidden cues that a VC is picking up on during a pitch. What you write in your slides is literally less than 10% of the information a VC will go off of. 90% is your nonverbal language and other cues.
As explained in our Fundraising Philosophy, you need to answer these two hidden questions a VC is always thinking to “hack” the fundraising process:
(A) Are you any good?
(B) If you are so good, why are you talking to me?
That is, you need to signal STRENGTH and ACCESS.
The time to do this is at the beginning of your presentation, before you start talking.
Here are some examples:
SIGNAL STRENGTH
As you may know, we are part of the Alchemist Accelerator. We are not starting our fundraising process until our Demo Day in May.
OR
We have not formally started fundraising -- we have been heads down in customer development mode and sales, having just closed our first three customers.
OR
I was most recently the head of business development for Google. I have just left Google to start this new venture with some of the brightest engineers from Google that I had worked with. We are not planning on fundraising until Q3.
OR
As you know, we have been heads down on customer development, and this is our first time we are talking to investors. We have just Demo’d from Alchemist, and have been overwhelmed by investor interest.
SIGNAL ACCESS
However, Ravi spoke very highly of you and suggested we meet.
OR
However, the founders of the VC’s portfolio company spoke very highly of you and suggested we meet.
OR
However, we are big fans of your blog / investments, and wanted to get your advice on our company.
OR
However, we met your colleague / partner Jim last week to get his advice on the business, and he suggested we come in for a follow up meeting here.
Unearth Biases
The beginning is also the time to unearth any VC prejudices, as a VC has very little incentive to have you dislike them, and won’t reveal their prejudices easily after the fact if they in fact were triggered by something you said.
To that end, Get your biases from your VC upfront by saying during the B-Button Pitch:
I know your time is precious, and I want to make sure we address any key questions you have before our time is up. At a high level we’re doing [GIVE A BRIEF DESCRIPTION] -- just knowing that, are there any key things you want to make sure I address?