Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

While I was a VC I put together a list of “pitch tips” for entrepreneurs pitching their businesses to venture capital funds. Of course, I probably should have glanced at them when I was helping Prasad pitch Pixily! To help me be a bit more organized the next time around I’ve compiled all of these tips here, with links to my original posts.

VC Pitch Tip #1 – Turn off your screen saver
VC Pitch Tip #2 – You won’t be eating much lunch during that “lunch” meeting
VC Pitch Tip #3 – Get to the venture capitalist’s office early
VC Pitch Tip #4 – You don’t need to wear a tie to meet with an early stage venture capitalist
VC Pitch Tip #5 – The Venture Capitalist will want to hear a lot about your team
VC Pitch Tip #6 – Bring a USB drive with your pitch saved on it
VC Pitch Tip #7 – Format your financial model for printing
VC Pitch Tip #8 – If you are going to use WebEx to during your venture presentation, send the slide deck over email ahead of time and have a direct phone line available
VC Pitch Tip #9 – Don’t show the VC the IRR they will get
VC Pitch Tip #10 – Technology venture capitalists love demos
VC Pitch Tip #11 – Keep the actual slide deck short but sweet
VC Pitch Tip 12 – Be able to complete your entire fund raising presentation in 10 minutes

Even me, who has seen a bazillion pitches from the other side of the table, totally forgot to get to the VCs office early enough for one pitch to comfortably set up the projector. And the first time, I almost sent off our financial model without formatting it to print – a huge NO NO.

Ah, well. Maybe for our next round I’ll be smarter.