The first meeting will be more like a pitch based on Jack Fuchs' outline. It's fine to keep the pitch short, and largely based on what was already covered in the Alchemist Demo Day pitch. The pitch should be kept to 10 slides and 20 minutes. But you want to have a thick appendix, so you can dive into the areas that the VC's will have questions in.
Good examples of this from VC firms can be found here:
Canaan Partners: http://www.slideshare.net/canaanpartners/canaan-pitch-workbook
The main point will be to answer the VC’s questions to see if they are comfortable enough to champion to the partnership for a follow-on meeting.
These areas should be included in the appendix, if not covered in the core deck. Re-read Jack Fuchs' lecture:
Team
Unmet Need You are Addressing
Target Market and Segmentation
Market Dynamics and Competition
Positioning and Differentiation
Your Solution
Unfair Advantages
Business Model: Unit economics
Go-to-market and Sales Strategies
Financial Projections and Key Metrics
Status and TImeline
Here is an example of SETTING THE CONTEXT:
[GREETING]:
Hi John, it’s good to meet you -- [XX] speaks very highly of you. Before I begin, I wanted to set the context for who we are.
[SIGNAL STRENGTH / SCARCITY]
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.
[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.
[PROBE FOR INVESTOR’s HOT BUTTONS]
We want to be vigilant with your time. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to review our site / materials before this meeting, but at a very high level, we are building a next gen mobile enterprise CRM platform.
Knowing just that, are there any key issues you would like us to address before the meeting’s over?
They may say “no, let’s just go through the deck.” Or they may give you some clues like “We’ve seen 10 companies in this space. I really want to understand how you are differentiated.” or “I don’t know if this is a big market, would like to hear your thoughts.”
Regardless of what they say, use that to inform how you want to cater this pitch. Is this someone who knows your space or not? What level of detail do I need to get into?
When in doubt say as little as you can to get them to ask questions, and then have that lead you on.
We like thin decks [10 slides, 20 min pitches, 30 size font] followed by THICK appendixes to go deep into the areas they bring up.