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I Boiled Down Hundreds of Successful VC Pitches to One Winning Formula
After seeing thousands of pitches over seventeen years, this formula is the one that I know works.
In my 17 years as a professional storyteller helping all kinds of companies reach their funding goals, I’ve reviewed upwards of 30,000 pitch decks. That means I’ve also seen just about every mistake it’s possible to make with investor decks.
To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, every bad pitch deck is bad in its own way — every great pitch deck is built the same way. (I did say paraphrasing…) Most people understand the importance of a great pitch deck, but far fewer people understand how to build one.
My clients come to me because they have an awesome company or product to sell, and they don’t know the best way to convince other people. My answer is always the same: tell a story.
Humans have responded to storytelling for all our evolutionary history — we’ve been passing down oral history and painting tales on cave walls for literally thousands of years. When you want to nail your pitch deck, the best way is to lean on that common love of stories we all have — and the fact that stories are far more memorable than facts, figures, data, numbers, bits and bytes.
Although each successful pitch deck is unique because every story is unique, the successful pitches all have the same elements and structure in place that make them a compelling story; this is what every successful pitch boils down to, according to me.
Give Them the North Star
You already know what makes your company amazing. But you’d be surprised how challenging it is to boil that value down to a single line. That’s where you have to start — hit your potential investors with a powerful value statement. And it’s not just what you are doing now — it’s “who will we be when we grow up?” What will have shifted massively in the industry when we realize our vision.
This is what Silicon Valley investors call the “North Star.” This is your opportunity to give investors the big picture of your company or product, connecting what you do in practice with a bigger cause, vision or revolution they should care about and…
