How To Pitch to Venture Capital

I got to work on demo software this week that was used to pitch Dev Khare, who works at Venrock Associates.

Dev (pronounced just like DAVE) sees about 2 to 3 presentations per day and they’re mostly in the area of mobile computing.

What are your thoughts on pitching to VC?

Here’s what he said he likes to see in a pitch using just 5 slides:

1. Your team, their skills relevant to the product you want funded, and who’s missing from your team.
2. What market will you be serving? EG Our market is 50 million people and they all eat popcorn, but they have no way of telling people about popcorn. Here are the studies that back this up.
3. Product slide: Here’s how we’ll do it. Also here’s what we don’t know yet.
4. Here’s how we’ll sell to our first 100,000 customers and make $1,000,000 in 1 month. This is the example slide where you show how you get your customers through your product. (Show product demo.)
5. These are our competitors, and we’re better than them b/c we have
   a blackbox for understanding popcorn.

Say thank you. Take your prospective VC out to dinner (just kidding). That’s it. 5 slides.

Dev said that you’d be surprised at how many people have 40 – 50 slides. You just need 5 because if the idea is compelling enough they’ll do the research and check your numbers.

What do you think of Dev’s advice?