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I generally don’t like to speak about fund raising in a frothy market. I think you can get the gist of it from my presentation although some slides don’t quite tell the full story. I think you can get the gist of it from my presentation although some slides don’t quite tell the full story.
It is simply the most important way to proactively control your career development and how the market perceives you. That was fine with me – the market is the market. That was the market. In today’s market you can prove your worth, in 1991 that was a bit harder. It is neither. She was paid 15% more.
I spent my days meeting companies, figuring out what areas of the market interested me and trying to get a sense for how VCs thought about fair valuations. I started showing my partners more deals that I found interesting and doing loads of analysis on the future of markets I thought were ripe for disruption. The market had tanked.
Because if you’re truly that early / novel there’s a good chance that you’re too early and will spend lots of time / money educating the market. The “competition slide&# of your investment deck is such a great opportunity to talk about how you’re positioned (premium product vs. economical product?
This involves a person who leads a PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter feels more comfortable racing through pre-practiced slides and rattling off charts & bullet points than having a discussion. The VC might have tried a few times to prompt a discussion and you didn’t take the queue but in stead reverted back to slides.
My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. Ok, well not that pretty since I do my own slides and often at 1am. But my slides are linked above and you can also download from SlideShare.
For extroverted people I recommend that entrepreneurs have an “executive summary&# slide up front that cuts to the chase. Don’t dwell on this slide for ever. If I have an hour with you I want to maximise the time we have a discussion so I want to get through the slides quickly. OK, I understand your market is big.
It’s a marketing deck and nothing in it should reveal some “secret sauce” that your competitors could magically copy and destroy you. If you have another 15–20 super detailed slides they should either be in an appendix after you get through the main presentation or in a separate deck that you may or may not get out. Compelling.
If they did they would be in constant violation because VCs often see 3-4+ companies in every market that they operation. They are also looking for a well-defined market opportunity, evidence of your success to date and ultimately most are looking for a large addressable market as this is the only way a VC drives returns.
A perfect round number is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Most advisors will tell you to write the business plan first (20-30 pages), then distill the key points into a set of Microsoft PowerPoint slides for standup presentations to potential investors. Marketing, sales, and partners.
A perfect round number is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Here are the ten slides you need: Problem and market need. Make sure to communicate the relevance of your product / services to market needs. Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates. Executive team.
Almost always the CEO plus members of his or her management team including tech, marketing, sales and/or product. Assign out slides: The best way to involve your team members is to assign out slides they will own. But I find when you don’t assign slides that each person owns often the quiet team members get silenced.
Benjamin Joffe (the author), a Frenchman who runs a consultancy in China that tries to help non-Asian investors understand the innovation occurring in Asia as a way to bring ideas to their local markets. slide 29). Larger online game market ($1 billion) than Japan despite 1/3 population and 1/2 GDP per capital (slide 99).
Too many sales reps walk into customer meetings with their pre-canned sales decks and proudly squawk through 30 of their favorite slides without engaging the customer in a discussion. And then there’s the key transition slide, which I call “What We Find” (WWF) or some variation of this. Just watch Mad Men and you’ll know that.
The metrics, and how they relate, are captured in his slide: Note the relationship between retention/referral efforts and lifetime value. Another thing that Dave has done well is to look at the value of different marketing channels: There’s a lot of value in this presentation. This isn’t a simple, first-cut acquisition pipeline!
And they’re easy to remember because they all begin with an M: management, market, money and above all else momentum. If you have beta customers, new pricing plans, different positioning, more market insights, good press coverage – whatever – these are all signs that the ball is moving forward. during your meeting.
But with its growth and success it will encourage many people to enter the market who will lack 5 critical success criteria for earning positive returns. It’s the same with business – choose a market in which you have better odds at winning because you’re playing against less sophisticated players. Unfortunately that’s a myth.
If you want the full SlideShare deck with many slides not in either post it’s in this link –> The LA Tech Market. Has it begun to mature or is it just better marketed than in was say 5 years ago? Given how efficient markets are when a large market like LA starts to blossom it attracts capital pretty quickly.
.&# It was my investment philosophy that observing teams’ performance over time was far more insightful than reacting to how good of a product demo they do, how good they present Powerpoint slides or how great tech blogs say they are. Market Opportunity. But what about markets? But your exact long-term “market?&#
She is a go to person for me when I have questions around technology or early stage marketing and branding. I've been President of my marketing, branding, creative and advertising firm for, yikes, 30 years. I need to get you into both the Southern California Tech Central and the B2B Marketing Zone. Maybe ten years.
I decided we''d patent a sliding mechanism on our Bluetooth, and use 3D printers to take pictures that people send to us, and my company will design a Bluetooth based on their picture, on our 3D printer. This is a crowded market. What''s your competitive advantage against others in the headset/accessories market?
Steve Blank , January 25, 2010 10 Tips for Adding Game Mechanics to a Non-Gaming Service - ReadWriteStart , September 21, 2010 Startups & VCs: Learn How to Design, Market, & Eat Your Own. - . - 500 Hats , February 1, 2010 When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication? First Principles.
Start by defining the problem you’re solving – I see way too many early-stage entrepreneurs who start their companies with a product definition rather than a market problem. I covered this a bit in my post about the market definition slide in fund raising. Here’s my take on the topic: 1. You should, too.
In business, entrepreneurs hunt for new innovative solutions to problems, new ways of beating competitors, new markets, and new customers. They love the continuous hunt, for investment capital, resources, talent, and new markets. Only a few of these slide into farming, as the company grows in employees and products.
According to the firm, its app--available on the Android Market for $4.99--brings the firm's software to Android 2.2 Chumby's software runs mini apps for viewing stock quotes, weather, video clips, slide show, and other information. ,/p>.
So now you’ve got your key USPs written down and you’ve worked them into slide format to get them across to your prospects. And of course you also need your outbound marketing campaigns to emphasize your USPs so that prospects are already asking about them before the sales reps even start their meeting. So what’s next?
And having frameworks is a useful way to standardize your customer studies so that highly intelligent, inexperienced young people can crank out PowerPoint slides with such authority and beautiful consistency. We called it “integrated strategy.&# I actually think from a marketing perspective it could have been brilliant.
That’s a reason why some are quick to portend “a new bubble” but this post sets out to show that would be a misunderstanding of the market and in fact by historic levels this may be amongst the best times to invest in seed and early-stage funds. More on that later. If you look even more closely you’ll see just how skewed the data really is.
If you have ten minutes, that means no more than ten slides. I’ve seen several presentations that never moved past the first slide before running out of time. I outlined what investors expect to see in an old article “ Adding Slides Does Not Enhance Your Investor Pitch. Then match your pace to cover all the material.
Perhaps buyers cannot obtain attractive financing in the current market. Widen your search to include companies with products peripheral to yours, where extension of their product would seem logical, especially if you plan to be successful early in making sales into their market.
These are captured fairly well by his slide: The beauty of what he's defined is the relationship between retention and referral efforts and lifetime value. The other thing that I think he's really done well is his look at value of different marketing channels. R : Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time? Great stuff.
So here goes … As much as I like to occasionally make fun of having been a consultant early in my career (although I built computer systems rather than just PowerPoint slides), I realize upon reflection that I did learn a lot of great management practices from working in such a large and well-structured organization as Accenture.
Just because a product has a patent, deep complexity and an obvious competitive advantage does not mean that it can fly by itself into the market. had two occasions recently to review products which had clear market leadership. Personally, I don't like weighty board packs and I do not wish to inflict slide preparation upon anyone.
My original thinking from Oct ’09 was, while I didn’t (and still don’t) have a crystal ball I worried that: consumers were over-stretched with debt (and make up 77% of the economy), unemployment would continue to rise, which in turn would drive the stock market south and cut the rate of M&A activity and VC investment even further.
What they do with the money is add more engineers and maybe hiring a marketing person. What if that time could go into thinking through the companies most important strategic issues, talking early with investors about their views and adjusting the strategic discussion slides rather than the update deck? Act your stage.
Initially that means a creative, collaborative toolset for visual communications, allowing users to develop really compelling slides, print materials or social media posts that are more visually compelling and easier-to-build for those who aren’t naturally gifted as visual story tellers.
I know all of this because every VC knows this because we’ve all either funded companies that have marketing technology or we’ve seen a pitch with a company that does this. Your pitch deck should really be your best marketing tool Your pitch deck shouldn’t contain your deepest, darkest secrets and plans. What should be in your deck?
And we know that being stubbornly tenacious without the “street smarts&# to know when market conditions are changing and then “pivoting&# when they are changing is a recipe for failure. You want that key marketing resource from Google but he’s on a fat salary that you can’t match.
If you have ten minutes, that means no more than ten slides. I’ve seen several presentations that never moved past the first slide before running out of time. I outlined what investors expect to see in an old article “ Adding Slides Does Not Enhance Your Investor Pitch. Then match your pace to cover all the material.
When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve.
An entrepreneur pitches using a deck with no slide for competition. Perhaps buyers cannot obtain attractive financing in the current market. If you are raising funds, list “do nothing” as a viable competitor in your slide deck. We investors see this all the time. When asked (as we always do,) the response is “This is new.
As per my video, think about the data in the following slide. Not just in Silicon Valley but in LA, NY, Seattle and other major tech markets. I think this is a really powerful concept and can be built right alongside the Redwood trees. And a Final Note on Whether Silicon Valley Opportunities Remain. “ And my fear?
Because they’re street smart, most great entrepreneurs tend to prefer getting out and talking with real customers rather than sitting in a cubicle all day doing beautiful PowerPoint slides. He told me that when the markets soured they were no longer hot. He was at a startup that was in a super hot sector. I’m sorry.
As startup entrepreneurs we all want to work with them because having their name as reference clients makes it so much easier for marketing, PR, selling to other customers, fund raising and even recruiting. Have minimums but a sliding scale. Large companies can be strange sometimes.
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