Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures is a seasoned investor and entrepreneur. He has seen hundreds of startup pitches and in this 25 minute video he has shared his wisdom. What mistakes startups make while pitching for seed funding (or early stage funding) and what is the best way to present to investors. I have put together some key takeaways from his valuable talk. Pitch the way Venture Capitalists think What is your goal? The most important goal of your presentation is to engineer an email. Let me explain. Once the presentation is over, the investor will shoot across an email to his partners. The investor (your audience) will write a few sentences to his peers (colleagues at the investment firm). What will the investor write? Your aim is to write the email for him. Plant some key messages during your presentation. What is the company about? Why it is an exciting business? The words and tone of his email determine your fate. Less is mo...

As a founder of a young startup, you will be attending startup meets and conferences. There is Launch Festival and TechCrunch Disrupt . There is TechSparks and Startups Unpluggd . There are many such events a founder goes to and presents his or her idea. If you have 5 minutes to talk about your startup idea, how will you do that? In this post, we will look at what Liquidity did at TechCrunch Disrupt. The startup Liquidity won the  TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 . Its founder Victor Hwang gave a very energetic pitch at the event. I have presented the crux of the entire pitch below so you need not watch the presentation (though I highly recommend you do watch it here ).The entire presentation was just 6 minutes 25 seconds. Crisp, clear and awesome! Step-1 Introduce the problem 10,000 people will die today because of these micro-organisms (shows the villain; a bacteria). 1 billion people do not get safe drinking water because of them. This statement makes you care and also ...

Recently I interacted with a few investors who work at large venture capital firms in India. I talked to them at length about what they really want in a startup presentation and what is usually missing from most. If you are preparing your funding pitch, here are 9 killer tips for you. 1. Every investor sees many presentations every week. He really has no time to go through every slide properly. You need to get the investor excited about something within the first 5-10 minutes of your presentation. Figure out what is the one thing about your business that will excite the investor. Put it up right at the start. 2. You should have a summary slide at the start . Share basic information like the industry you are in, your uniqueness, traction, funding you need, etc. It helps them put you into a mental box quickly. They want an overall picture before your movie starts. 3. You must show that your key metric will double-triple in a few years . All that the investor needs to see i...

We are in the midst of a startup revolution. Every day scores of new startups come up across the world but most of them fail and only a fraction find success. In this TED talk Bill Gross tells us why he thinks startups succeed. Which factors are more crucial and which are less. If you work in a startup you must watch this well presented talk of 6 minutes. If you don't, watch this talk to see how clean the slides look and how well he uses PowerPoint. I will show you some of his slides below. When it comes to such slides, I follow the same style to Bill. That's why his presentation appealed to me. Have a look at his slides here: Here is how the same slide looks to someone sitting in the audience. Looks quite nice I say. Also note that each image (also known as an icon) comes one after the other as he speaks. All the icons do not come at the same time, else the audience will jump and read ahead. Here are two more slides from Bill. In this one, he sh...