Perfect Your Fundraising Pitch

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Hi, I’m Michael Skok. We’re here at the Harvard i-lab tonight to talk about getting behind the perfect pitch. This session is designed to do three things.

First, it’s a framework for you to understand how to put together a great pitch to a VC.

Second, within that framework, it covers a number of the elements that you might consider key to putting your business plan together. So that’s everything from your value prop to your business model to your go to market.

And third, and perhaps most importantly, giving this as a VC, I’m trying to share with you the insights on what we’re looking for that’s really behind that pitch. Because in the end, it’s all about you and what you’re bringing to this pitch and this business proposition that really counts.

The most important thing about this session to me is to make it worthwhile to you. I hope to get to understand what you’re looking to get out of the program, and in particular what I can learn from you in terms of the challenges you have as an entrepreneur getting a business started. This is going to prove to be a framework for the series as a whole, because a lot of the things I’m going to cover in putting together the perfect pitch are actually going to be things that we’ll go into in depth in the workshops around what it takes to build a business.

We’ve created a website with all this content on it, so you can skip straight into the content if you want to by going to mjskok.com. All the slides are up there. They are being improved and modified all the time because I’m giving these presentations a lot. You can engage right there and give me questions and feedback on the site, and obviously I’ll follow that up.

In terms of what we’ll cover specifically today, the agenda for the workshop is to give you a checklist for putting a pitch together. That’s the easy part in my opinion. If you filled out this template, you’re going to cover all the right bases.

But the more important thing we’re going to do is pick out a couple of the important areas that people get stuck on in their pitch. For example, we often see people spend too long demonstrating their technology and not enough time explaining how it’s actually going to get to market. Then the most important thing for today is to try to get behind the pitch and actually understand: what is it that a VC is looking for when they’re hearing you pitch? What are the key things that you should get across, and indeed what are we evaluating as we listen to you? Because in the end the pitch is just a basis on which we want to get to know you, to understand the business opportunity, and to think about what it is you’re trying to do. We’ll leave plenty of time at the end for Q&A. The only thing I want to warn you is that this is not a class on how to present. That’s a whole topic unto itself.

Startup Secret: This is a dry subject unless you have a story. The good entrepreneurs I see, if not the best entrepreneurs, always come in with a story. They come in to talk about how it is that they came to find this opportunity, what it is that they see as uniquely their basis on which to prosecute the opportunity, and they tell it in the form of a story that you feel engaged in throughout. So I feel like I need to do the same, because I can’t just give you the template for the pitch.

My story is simple. I went on a journey, and it was to a foreign land. This is not Massachusetts in the fall. Many of you will recognize very quickly from where these pictures are taken. The thing that was fun about this journey for me was it had many new learnings, and that’s part of what I think is great about my job: I get to learn a lot. I use this as a parable to say: bring a story. Mine is going to be this journey that I took. Whatever yours is, bring it to life, make it yours, and try to make it authentic when you give your pitch.

Your agenda slide. The first slide I’m going to suggest you put up is a really boring one, but an incredibly important one: what’s your agenda? And I’ll start with something obvious, which is: what are you trying to achieve with your pitch?

Some people will come in with a pitch so long that it covers soup to nuts how they’re trying to build their business. That might be appropriate if you really are trying to get your entire business plan across and you want your audience to understand every aspect of your business. But if all you’re trying to do is get a VC to take a meeting with you at your company, you probably don’t need to do that. Or if all you’re trying to do is get the first commitment to learning more about your business, then again you probably don’t need to put all of that in there.

For tonight’s purposes, I’ve put pretty much an entire framework together, because in a lot of instances VCs don’t have the time to read a full business plan and actually are expecting to get all the essence of your business from a presentation. It’s just become the way of the world. This framework, covering everything from team, business overview, market opportunity, value prop, go to market, business model, and financials, is a pretty good proxy for what most VCs will want to understand before they think seriously about engaging with you and investing in your business.

That does not mean you should always put all of this in every pitch, in every situation. Think about what you’re trying to get done, what the next step is, and then use this. In particular with VCs, it makes sense to tease each step out. For example, if you really do think one of the most important things you’ve got is a lab that they should see, then give them just enough to get them excited about what you’re developing to get them to the lab. Don’t try to go all the way into depth about everything that’s going on in your lab and the entire formula behind it, because you’re going to do a better job of that when you get them there in person. So the point here is: pick the basis on which you deliver the pitch right up front.