You’d never find your soulmate, make a friend, or hire someone based on a Powerpoint—so why find someone to invest in your company that way?
—
(from This is going to be BIG!)
Charlie’s recent post to Stop Pitching made me feel like perhaps this whole “one hour - 30 slides - go pitch!” process should just come to an end. Every good fundraising process I’ve had didn’t start with a powerpoint deck. It started over coffee/lunch/dinner and a conversation about life, our industry, and, yes, the business I am building. I’ve always seem to manage to explain the business even if it wasn’t in exact order with charts and graphs.
I do everything I can to keep the first meeting a conversation, almost never bringing out a powerpoint deck. Every time a VC has tried to force a formal first meeting I’ve pushed back. And the few times I have acquiesced seem to always end badly. Looking back at those meetings they always felt forced, they put me on the defensive, and it didn’t let me learn nearly enough about my prospective investor.
Were I a VC (and thank god I’m not) I would do everything I could to make that first meeting an authentic conversation. As soon as the lights go off and the eyes turn to the screen, the conversation stops. Without conversation, there simply is no way to build mutual understanding and trust, and that makes finding the right investor/startup all the more difficult.
