How to pitch your startup to investors - Best 15 Insightful Quotes

If you are a startup founder and are looking to pitch to investors for raising funding, you are going to absolutely love these quotes. I have compiled these 15 quotes from seasoned investors and entrepreneurs across the world to give you useful insights into making your startup investor pitch more compelling.

 "She (an entrepreneur) will use the first 5 minutes to earn the investor’s attention for the next 15 minutes, which in turn will interest the investor enough to listen for another 30 minutes." - Aaref Hilaly, Sequoia Capital 

“80% of the presentations… you don’t even know what the problem is till 15 minutes into the presentation.” - Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures 

"Never dismiss your competition. Everyone—customers, investors and employees—wants to hear why you’re good, not why the competition is bad." - Guy Kawasaki, Venture Capitalist 

"Your goal is not to give facts, but to fascinate your investor." - Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

"The goal of your first pitch deck is to get a 2nd meeting with the investor. You are not trying to explain everything about your business that you think is interesting and important. You definitely are not expected (or wanted) to explain the gory details of how you will conduct your business, or to offer long-term detailed (and unsupportable) forecasts. You have to edit yourself to intrigue the investor sufficiently that they will agree to look more closely." - Dave Richards, Unitus Seed Fund 

"On Demo Day each startup will only get ten minutes, so we encourage them to focus on just two goals: (a) explain what you're doing, and (b) explain why users will want it." - Paul Graham, Y Combinator

"Open with your investment thesis, what prospective investors must believe in order to want to be shareholders of your company. Your first slide should articulate the investment thesis in generally 3 to 8 bullet points. Then, spend the rest of the pitch backing up those claims and increasing investors’ confidence in your investment thesis." - Reid Hoffman, co-founder LinkedIn

"Authenticity is important in your pitch, it cannot sound like you were reading it off a script. It has to sound natural, like you are saying the things you are saying the first time. However, you can be sure that you will fail miserably on the stage if you don’t practice beforehand because you think “Oh I will just come up with things on the stage and this way it will sound natural”. - Juhan Kaarma, Entrepreneur

"One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when pitching to angel investors is bombarding them with data and boring PowerPoint slides instead of inspiring and engaging them." - Carmine Gallo, Communications Coach and Author

"Experienced investors know there are always risks. If they ask you about your risk factors and you can’t answer, you lose credibility because they assume you are either dishonest or dumb." - Reid Hoffman, co-founder LinkedIn

"My advice for first time founders who want to raise funding is almost always to put that thought aside until you have good traction. Instead, focus completely on traction. Focus on product/market fit. When you have good traction, it becomes much easier to raise funding." - Joel Gascoigne, co-founder Buffer

"People like stories. Our brains are wired to respond them. We recall facts better when they are embedded in narrative. Hollywood is the proof of their value. We pay lots of money for stories. Entertainment is a much bigger industry than venture capital because people like stories. Even a crappy game like Mass Effect 3 sells a million copies because it tells a story. So you should try to tell one, too. Why did you start your company? What do you want to achieve? Then drape the facts around that skeleton." - Peter Thiel, Author and co-founder PayPal

"There is nothing like a perfect pitch deck. People have their individual style, so don’t get stressed about finding the formula that fits all. However, the deck should capture the power of your idea and the potential value of your business and your capability to create this business in a very short concise manner — that is the perfect pitch deck." - Vani Kola, MD Kalaari Capital

"If you are an early stage company, at an angel stage, your financial plan only makes sense to you and nobody is going to believe it." - Rajan Anandan, VP Google SE Asia & India and Angel Investor

"The first and most important element of your presentation is not a slide: it’s you. Most investors base their decisions on the passion, charisma and clarity of the founder and the rest of the senior team. If you don’t demonstrate true fervor for your idea and opportunity, don’t expect anyone else to, either." - Bing Gordon, Partner - KPCB

Laptops Down!!! - How to truly engage your audience while presenting?

This is a guest post by Sridevi Sarkar. Sridevi leads Consumer Insights & Strategic Planning for automotive practice in Google India. She blogs at sridevisarkar.co.in.

I have attended countless sessions and conferences, big & small - both within the companies I worked & outside. I have noticed mainly 3 categories of presentations that one makes:

1. Shares one’s work (may or may not be one’s passion points)
2. Shares one’s personal experiences/passion
3. Shares information collated for the audience to know

Most of the presentations fall in the category 3 above. In many instances, the presenter or the organizer asks us to focus on the session by saying ‘this is a laptops down session’ (or these days ‘mobiles down’), but only occasionally I have come across presenters who are able to command the audience enough so that the audience won’t get distracted to their phones or laptops.

My learning from observations & experiences is that:

• The presenter is the key, not the slides. The presenter is there to present something, the slides are not there to present themselves. Slides are meant to just be a guide to the presenter.

• The key attribute while presenting is the eye-to-eye contact & the presenter is able to maintain the same only when he or she is not totally dependent on the slides.

Some of the benefits of maintaining eye-to-eye contact, which add to the presenter’s commanding the space are [you = presenter]:

1. Audience keeps looking at you throughout the presentation, avoiding any distraction. This leaves a great impact on the audience because they see the interest (& passion) in your eyes. The audience is very likely to be bound by a small amount of guilt on the idea of taking that phone call, and would try & avoid it.

2. Audience’s curiosity remains and they ask you for details, and won’t try to read & interpret the slides themselves. This helps build reliance & trust on you, even if anyone wants to get back in future with any questions or for any discussions, they would remember you & quote you. You would remain the custodian of the information.

3. You can have the slide represented in a manner that you like. Since you solely know & plan how to deliver the content, you are free to build the slides that best suit you & guide you when you present, for you to be able to do your best in achieving your objective.

4. Audience understands exactly what you want to convey to them. The only way the audience hears is when you speak, there is no other source for them to know any information during the presentation. This makes sure they hear exactly what you tell them and nothing else.

5. Audience takes notes. When you & your speech are the only source of information during the presentation, the audience would tend to take notes & there would be a high chance that they would refer to the notes later. This allows them to remember you more, recollect what you said; and the next time they notice you are presenting somewhere, there is a high likelihood that they would like to attend & popularize you.

Below are some guidelines that can help you achieve your ‘Laptops Down’ objective. These can be kept in mind while preparing the slides too. They are:

1. Never read from the slides. Have a piece of data or information or anything to guide you, on the slide & share the insight verbally as a story.

2. Never say what is coming in the next slide. I have come across multiple instances where the presenter says, “....that is what my next slide is..” and then navigates to the next slide. As much as possible, navigating & speech should go hand in hand.

3. No acronyms, dates etc. of the information on the slides. Acronyms should never be there, and the audience can always ask the presenter for the date.

4. Never say anything that you don’t exhibit. Long back I went to a ‘Time Management’ session which started 20 minutes late because the presenter reached late :)

5. Never say “This slide is self-explanatory”, then why are you there?

So, are we all ready to command “Laptops Down”?

 

The views expressed in the article are of the guest author and not of Jazz Factory. If you too want to contribute articles to our blog, contact vivek at jazz factory dot in.