How To Create The Perfect Pitch Deck

okay hi everyone thank you so much for coming to our webinar my name is Kara I'm with hustle fund and here on a screen we also have Eric Vaughn who are

our featured speaker one of the founders of hustle fund and also an investor at hustle fund awesome a big thing you carry for helping to put this together

and then also a huge thank you to everyone here today for joining so it's 11 o'clock Pacific my time that made this to 2 o'clock p.m. Eastern Time

probably really late in the night in Asia and other places that you might be showing up to so my apologies in advance for the next hour where you could be doing basically anything else besides

listening to someone like myself talk about pitch decks so my goal is to make this very informative and also entertaining too so a little bit of

background just before we start on who I am and what we do at hustle funds so I'm one of the cofounders of hustles fund I spent about 15 years as an operator

before I launched this VC fund with my co-founder Elizabeth and my other GP she and about 3 years ago so I've had a lot

of horrible experiences as a founder just like many of you have had in pitching so you know early on when I was just during my career as a founder had

no idea what I was doing had all sorts of assumptions about what investors were actually looking for when I came to the materials I put together

I was communicating my narrative etc and what I wanted to do today was a you know spend some time with you to walk through it I think my mindset because I can only speak my own truth but hopefully to

speak the truth of a lot of my colleagues as well about what it means to put together a really good pitch deck perfect is a strong word I know that's the clickbait title that we use to draw

you into this but let's just say pretty good would be a nice outcome for today a bit about hustle funds so we're a venture capital firm based in San Francisco and Singapore were

seed stage investors which means that our most favorite co investors into is really aa curly tranche of capital tends to be your Uncle Bob your mom and dad maybe a couple of angels maybe a couple

of friends very few VC funds but we love being with the founders really early and we believe that in a really core thesis and our

fund that we're trying to prove in our model and the founders that we support is that great hustlers look like anyone and can come from anywhere . regardless of what your background or

. regardless of what your background or pedigree or whatever you have if you know how to execute well and with high velocity and our building software where we'd love to speak with you so let's put

that all aside now and talk about the topic at hand so all right i'd like to begin by going through a persona

exercise so for those of you who may have experiences and building products or work like a product matter like I did earlier in my career personas are a

really good way to start to think about this process of building a great pitch deck so the idea behind that is you want to create some sort of mythical

character ogre an ideal intended target for the solution or service or product that you're trying to build so let's say that I was creating like a reasonable

coffee mug company you know maybe I want to have a persona of like someone that's like Kara you know a woman in late 20s

and more kind of hip you know comes from like a place in like Southern California whatever I'm not going to provide to me details but for his backstory right but

that's something that our team can then use as like a design archetype that we can solve towards when we think about the website think about whatever we're

trying to do to sell this delicious mug of coffee right now which I'm going to take you to very soon so in this case let's talk about the persona of the

investor whom you're going to be pitching to so I know the camera plays a little bit of tricks but I'm actually kind of a short dude I'm like five foot

seven so imagine the guy like me who's like three inches maybe four inches taller right so like basically the height that I always wanted to be

like let's call like 511 or something or six feet tall probably a white or Asian man because let's get real like this is a very myopic industry of metric

capitalist and let's talk about the VC persona specifically instead of this really cool hustle fun branded t-shirt there's a Patagonia vest that's covering

it okay and then you can't see my feet right now but I am actually wearing all bird shoes so but that's kind of like the uniform like Patagonia vest

Albert shoes okay in addition to that you know let's say that I have a really strong traditional background that every

Asian mom would be pregnant right I graduated from a top Ivy League school I worked at McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group or one of those really fancy consulting shops were maybe

Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan well those great things after two or three years I decided to apply to business school I went to Harvard Business School right or Stanford Graduate School of Business and

then I graduated I was able to land in an awesome associate level post MBA VC role at like an NEA or Sequoia or any

number of top firms and maybe I was able to work myself up to partner maybe at some point I decided to break off and start my own funds and Here I am right

now in my imaginary persona office I got this beautiful minimalist desk in front of me it was some sort of like rare wood right I'm in Sand Hill Road perhaps or

maybe in South Park which is where we are right now in San Francisco and I'm sipping on my this coffee literally cost me $4 in 80 cents this morning and all

it is is just a freaking cup of coffee okay so now RD I can go into like why that makes me so like if ya already so alright I'm drinking this coffee let's

say that in Sand Hill Road and I starting in a rap with this persona exercise it's Thursday afternoon 4:30 p.m. okay right down the road on

4:30 p.m. okay right down the road on Menlo Park is this hotel called the rosewood and the rosewood has a bar called Madera so if you know anything

about Madera bar on a Thursday night it is straight poppin for its happy hour that night there's a lot of reasons some of you are actually calling it out in

the chat I'm not gonna say those words because it's inappropriate for me to say but let's just say it's a good place to meet people maybe those who are in a more vulnerable States that you know you

would like to get to know better I have been married for a long time I've been with my wife for 20 years I do not know anything about that life I promise you be if you're watching I swear I've never

gone to cougar night okay all right I said the words so okay 4:30 okay happy hours about to start in one hour all right so all I'm thinking about imply guys I'm

rubbing my Patagonia this and this the very very soft rear wood of my desk is like all right I wanna get to inbox zero let's get to I'm going to my superhuman email clients because that's the best way to get to

inbox zero I actually do this as well and like let me clear up the next 50 emails in the next 40 minutes so I can head on over there you know and then buy

a $17 cocktail right maybe it's a little bit more at this point I swear I have not been to career night okay so at this

point I'm looking at my email inbox and I have 30 pitches 40 pitches they're just in order you know of like you know I got I want to just clear this out so

you the founder are sitting in my inbox maybe from a war referral maybe like Kara is a partner in another clan distilling you know you must talk to my friend Joe you know we've been friends forever here's a warm introduction to

Joe Joe sends the email deck or whatever and sitting in my inbox I'm thinking about cocktails in the bar I'm thinking I only have 45 minutes and I have 30

emails to go through 30 pitch decks so here's the thing to think about persona I know that kind of I like to get a little bit I follow to this pit of describing this person

too much lately but the first thing to think about is the reality of what the VC is doing in that role in this position this is actually not that far removed from what happens every day like

we're not drinking every day but like there's a huge queue of founders deals that are often sitting area in box we need to clear out so the first assumption is persona exercise based on

what I described is do not assume anyone's going to read your deck and we're going to talk about that more the second thing though is assume that

you only get 30 to 60 seconds maybe 90 seconds or two minutes if you're like really interesting per deck review so me as a VC is I'm sipping my $4 80 cent

coffee you know again ready for the night like I'm gonna spend like a minute at most looking at your deck and this relates to why you don't read the deck okay so let

me pause here because I just described this persona I don't know if this is a good time Kara to highlight like a question or two but I'm going to sort of transition into how this relates to the

construction of putting together your pitch deck because this persona I think that I think is something that not enough people think about before they actually begin putting pen to paper or

fingers to keyboard and constructing their assets yeah Kerri I see anything irrelevant in terms of what I just said and most of the questions are specific to the actual construction of the deck so I say dive

in okay let's do that so okay thanks for bearing with me for that last ten minutes of craziness so let me actually start by talking about

like a really quick anecdote here even more to go down this but I swear this relates to the pitch deck construction so very briefly in my career I worked as an analyst at the Boston Consulting

Group so I was one of those guys who also graduated from one of schools and went to work at Wendy is consulting shops as well I only lasted three months before they basically fired me that's a longer story we talk about that or

drinks that Madera bar at some point so what happened though was in those three months I learned a really important lesson when it comes to the fray first principle of pitch deck construction so

in my first attempt to create pitch decks and my job was primarily to build these long decks for executives to present to their All Hands meetings at these top tech companies or something

like they're around Lee being criticized by my team's like this is terrible until they actually told me the secret to really good deck from from this

consultant work they said you only need to focus on the headlines okay assume no one's going to read the contents of this slide is only about the title headlines

of the deck okay now if you guys have to leave right now for whatever reason of this webinar you've essentially have gotten 70 percent of today's like takeaway which is this is all about the

headlines so let's talk a little bit more about like what what actually is like the headlines house-trained to do and why this story even is relevant to what you guys are doing in pitching

these these these so a couple thoughts here the first is that I was taught that

a good headline is a standalone sentence okay the sentence in itself is directing the point of the slide okay all the content below the headline that title I

use title the headline interchangeably by the way throughout this all that is going to be all the content is going to just be supporting evidence to whatever that's head listening okay and when you

read the titles of the slides and just scan title title title title title I'm drinking my coffee in Rosewood or whatever is like the UI should be able to get 70 to 80 percent of what your

company does and why it's unique just from that alone okay that is like a 30 second exercise of just reading headlines so headlines are a standalone sentenced

when you read the headlines one after the other it should read into a cohesive paragraph that essentially describes what you are

doing okay and I want to start with an exercise and talking about this this email like three artifacts actually in email deck which is like a summarized version maybe teaser deck of what you

guys do a a blurb which is like a couple sent description of what you can include in like affordable intro email which we'll talk about a moment and then a longer day which I'm going to actually talk to

least about and I'll explain why in a moment so let's bring it back to this persona I just described like I actually believe that in a interesting cognitive

science theory that I remember reading in college was which basically concluded that people who are similar to you you're going to be attracted to so

example is like my wife and I like we're both Korean and have like immigrant stories so there's probably natural affinity towards each other because we can just automatically understand our

backgrounds right or maybe like Kara is a super huge San Francisco Giants and I like the Giants - so we're attracted to each other because we talk about baseball as well right whatever it is

now the cognitive science here that applies to the persona just described is VC with this very specific kind of career trajectory pedigree is there's a very high likelihood that a good number

of the VCS you are going to be pitching come from this persona that just talked about and we're trained in the exact same way of constructing constructing a

pitch deck so my theory that I'm going to just like seed for you to for you all today in the audience is that when you can construct a pitch deck that is modeled after the exact same way that

people at McKinsey Boston Consulting Group Goldman Sachs were trained in constructing their own pitch decks when someone that just opens that up with this background that's going to produce

an edge for you because the I think the internal dialog is gonna say like oh my gosh like this person is just like me right and I think that's where the

initial attraction is gonna begin when you just like the first thing that I do when I look at it because I just I don't need to read anything I just like scroll really quickly to show see if I can get it just based off of like the pictures

or it's like some keywords and so forth but from that initial 10 seconds I think I can see people who are just like me I can pick out someone who has trained at

Boston Consulting Group just like I was in like about 10 seconds so initial attraction okay so so okay hopefully that makes

sense so far around like how the persona ties to the pitch deck construction and why I think that actually produces some basis for our higher levels of attraction and I think that actually it

does yield into a higher level of conversion on edges over time right like so if you can find ways that like give you a 5% edge over other people that compounds over time it makes the whole

fundraising process much easier okay so let me move on here let me talk about like an actual example of this so let me

give you the most common pitch decks that I see every day okay and this is where the email pitch deck and what we can talk about the blurb and then we need a longer talk a little bit later if

there's time so the most common cash tag is like this slide one team slide two problem slide three solution slide four

market side slide traction those are the headlines of each of those slides so as I'm wearing my kind of going investing like rubbing myself because it's very

fluffy and then I'm drinking my coffee do you think that just on this basis is loan from this review I can just read the headline to understand anything what you do right and the answer is

absolutely not right you've given me no concept now you are forcing me to do work so let's take a step back on the cognitive science part there's something that lately I just reading reading a lot

of cognitive science because that I discovered that should major there's a part of your brain which is a little bit more reptilian that is about like you know basically placing stereotypes on

people like oh yeah like this thing that cares talking to me about is like this or she's referring to this argument that's right it's a really lazy kind of Center for survival that takes very

little energy for me to do like I can just like sit back relax and there's very little brain function happening when you're forcing me to go to higher orders of thinking in my brain which is like generally where the neocortex is

that requires more expenditure of energy from your body and as a result naturally humans do not like to be forced to move to the neocortex do really critical thinking whenever they can be lazy

already when you think about that persona you know if I'm sitting back beautiful table kind of going a best all birch is sniffing like my $4 ice and coffee and then thinking about the bar

like I mean I'm not in a mode where I'm actually ready to engage my neocortex right so when you give me a headline like that problem-solution market

traction you're making me read now you're making me trying to actually do critical thinking on like what does the content actually now on these slides like how what is this like entire story about that I have to construct myself

through through analysis right but I'm actually doing real work which IV see through it could be doing but that is a recipe for failure because laziness will always beat critical thinking at

least at this stage now later on when you have the engagements and interest of the VC you know like sure they're gonna put in plenty of hours together like you as well as the VC to really understand

the businesses and the nuance but this initial kind of attraction is really what matters all right now I think you guys are ready to hear an example of a

good pitch deck right and yeah but someone asked if you could give an example of a headline aha thank you very much for that whoever said that because that's exactly what I

was gonna do next so I gave you examples of terrible headlamps like these ones when were like calm solution market traction so let's go through this exercise I'm going to make up an entirely fake company it may

exist I'll no I'm just making up right now okay let's say that you that you and I audience member are the founders of a

company that basically monitors infant sleep to prevent SIDS so I'm a relatively new dad I got young babies when I had my first kid I was obsessed

by SIDS since stands for our sudden infant death syndrome and it's basically the the phenomenon the you what will you walk into your baby's room and then they're dead the next morning because

they just stopped breathing in the middle of the night it's random it's kind of crazy and it's like every new parent's worst nightmare by the way the theory behind why this happens is

possibly your baby rolls over before he or she is able to roll back and stuff the case or there's a stuffed animal or pillow you should never put any of those objects in a baby's crib before they can actually turn over and so forth

so what SIDS is crazy and there's a period of your life as a new parent we're just like kind of obsess over this for like a week or two right before you just like well life is what it is so

we're we created a product let's say it's a wearable sock that you can put on like an infant's foot and then you'll monitor vitals and like you'll send off alarms it's like something's going wrong

especially related to breathing okay that is the product so let me give you an example like what I think this email Dec pitch deck should look like so I'm going to make them all the stats all the

numbers I have no idea what this industry is or how big it is so problem is in my first slide it's gonna be every year 32,000 brand new infants suddenly

die in their sleep from sudden infant death syndrome okay so I'm sort of laying out like the scope of the problem of like wow there's like

tens of thousands of babies that are dying right so let's talk about market slide next so that's it like it'd be

something like in the next year there's gonna be 1.6 million new American parents having their first child and

they are freaked out about preventing sudden infant death syndrome right so very large market so we did problem

market solution next okay which is our team has created a simple wearable stock that tracks the vitals of infants and let parents know in real time if issue

happens or breathing problems happen okay traction let's do that next

last month we have we ran a Kickstarter and got 42,000 pre-orders of our products even before we started the manufacturing so they're showing like oh

my gosh there's real crack marketers there's there's so much Proctor or a proc pol there and then finally team which is

you know the three co-founders spent ten years building high-tech wearables at Under Armour prior to solving this

problem with saving babies okay so if you feel like they're so just based on those headlines alone you should be able

to like get a good sense just by reading laughs together what the team composition marketing traction is right not in that order specifically and I think you get basically 80% of the

nuances of this business right you know exactly that we're solving this very specific kind of market area problem around into death you have a good sense that we actually are real builders and maybe mechanical engineers with all his

experience in the car element company and so forth and the goal is when an investor is looking at your email deck and trying to make a basis of whether

this is interesting or not it's not a decision of like I'm ready to invest now that shouldn't be the goal the goal is actually I want to learn more and just a

response that says like let's set up time all right so that's it let's set up time okay so I'm sorry I'll carry it

looks like you have a something for me here yeah let them let's clarify a couple of questions that a lot of people seem to have question number one earlier

we talked about keeping the content relatively short those sentences felt a little long for some folks can you address that yeah so first of all they're pretty long because I just made

them up into kind of crabby but the second is like I think that there's a general rule of thumb that if it looks if you run the exercise with like a friend or someone else and they can

generally read pretty briskly let's say 30 seconds through all the headlines that should be okay for something like an email are at that email deck perfect the second thing too is like for me and we do this with our own pitch decks like

when we fundraise like I think that two lines of text on a headline is perfectly fine now if you can tell your story and even shorter more pickier way ignite it it's even better all right so sure the better but I think

two lines is totally fine but don't like include a paragraph description at the header right this is again like email deck is not necessarily something where you want to be

comprehensive you're just trying to show I think the strongest points of like the main pillars behind the right pitch deck so what do I mean by the main pillars and this is something I probably should they're really explicit about and this

gives me an opportunity to use the blue white bar pen that I brought with me today so by the way I sold this for my son so he's we really angry would see this video later there's only five

things that you need to talk about and a good email deck right so the first

aspect is team problem solution market Yukie and traction

so team this is a this is basically like you know is there is this team like here's what I'm thinking about when I'm looking at the museum all that or does any deck really is like does the team have the relevant skills to solve the

problem or be in this industry that they've chosen right so a good example would be like I was a mechanical engineer at Toyota for 10 years building like artificial intelligence now me and

my my buddies are creating a fully autonomous vehicle startup like that's not something I would invest in but like it's I can see why there's relevance in terms of like you guys have built stuff together

you understand this space and have like the requisite knowledge to proceed problem this is a important one so you know this is a succinct description of

the exact calm day trying to solve in the case those seed investments I thinks it's like it's not allowed enough to just have a really good problem statement headline it's also very important to understand and how that leaves a back pocket explanation of how

did you arrive this problem so for example if Kari and I are sharing a service for uber for families like we want to be able to let kids under two years old with their parents like right around town very easily without the car

seats that sounds cool it sounds like something I would use but I'd like to understand how you arrived to actually this is a problem did you feel like customer development interviews how many people did you speak to right like what

what mechanisms did you do did you did you use to just like isolate this into like a very very specific problem solution is a product or service that

you're providing so good opportunity show a screenshot show some like really use case or testimonials and so forth markets this is a sizing largely a

sizing opportunity for you to show that this is something that is venture practical so ideally your market is measured in the billions of dollars and you can make the case that is large enough to support a venture back people

outcome whereby if I accept your money as a founder I can turn it into extra amounts of money for your investors for you and of course myself as a founder and then finally traction this was

actually the most optimal one for us at hustle fund so there this one really varies from firm to firm but if we're doing precede stage investments or where the like we're in decimal

outsider mom then I don't really think it makes we're not gonna have very high expectations you're already hitting leave $100,000 monthly revenues or even 10,000 or possibly even 1,000 that tends

to come a little bit later some firms get really hung out on this dough and so if they do and you know your audience then you may want to show something that around user acquisition sales pilots

logos like Google's are a design partner or something like that okay so this is essentially like the underlying framework like a good email deck is just hitting up these five things in fact the great emails that could just be five

slides but again do not submit just these one words turn these into sentences just like the wearable socketed monitoring company we just created

hopefully that clarifies it guys it does and Eric you touched on two things that I think we can cross out two quick questions one is this might be kind of a small

detail but our investors looking for those words that you've listed behind you to be on the slides or could they just run our founders simply replace those words with the headlines that you mentioned before yeah this is a great

mechanical point you don't need to include these words at all right I think so long as you understand the pillar they are trying to answer in your deck that's fine just don't don't include it

fully get perfect and then our most uploaded question so far has related actually to one of those pillars which is this in precede founders are generally a key part of the

decision-making process what do you look for in the pitch deck on this front and how can it stand out yeah so I'm really glad Christine asked that question asked this question

because if I were to stack rank like the most important città least important let's start with the least important attraction I think it's least important for us it might be different for different funds you'll have to do your

research on that problem and solution like are more important for me but still kind of the lower end I mean like a problem a great calm statement is a great problem statement and there's

always ways to manufacture crude reasons for how you came to this right sometimes it's a good example so for a problem sometimes a good to need to share like a personal narrative so there's a company in our

portfolio that does 3d prosthetics for example and the one of the founders lost a leg earlier in life and that you know was pretty interesting from my personal perspective

solution is whatever you build so far team it's really all about team so if I were to say that like how we're Sakurai getting 60% of our decisions going to be just from the team slide all right so a

couple couple things out about that so one is just like if you guys have a strong team that should be slide number one noise right why waste time I'm sipping coffee of my Patagonia vest why would make me wait till the very end to

learn by your team when it's the most important thing anyway at least perceived X now the quick set aside if you're doing like a growth stage attack which is not what not what we're talking about today I think the team actually matters a little bit less is still

important but you have numbers it's like look at her five years of trailing profitability and even on like it's going over to the right and you know like okay like this is like a spreadsheet exercise it's not even like

a pitch so what makes a good team slide okay I think there's really two things that I think are critical so the first is and the cat touch has relevant skills

so this one's a little bit hard to define but I can only share it with like the example of like the stock company so if I see that you have like a mechanical engineering degree you've worked with textiles and fabrics you know like

you've actually been to a mill where like these underarm wear smart clothes are created and have all the distribution relationships what's it like fancy schools even maybe in some cases we don't care about that as much

at all some fun then that really makes sense but let's say it's like me and Cara and we're both like customers or like like customer success managers at like a software business what she and I

are now starting at Thomas vehicle company that seems like too much of a leap and that will be noticed right because we don't have engineering degrees and we might have great ideas and we still could be successful but

it's just there's too much of a logical leap there so that's relevant skills the second is history so not every VC

fund is going to obsess over this but I actually increase the employing more and more focus on this which is if there's co-founders and it's okay if you don't have co-founders that's fine this is less relevant but if you do have

co-founders its to really create when you can demonstrate that you built rocks together or build companies to be up together before or at least have some sort of longevity of the relationship

the allergic reaction I have are marriages of convenience where maybe you solve her skills like care as a super dope mechanical engineer in like autonomous vehicle space before this

let's say I was like a like the top salesperson for like Tesla or something right like it sounds great from like a skills perspective to build that kind of a company but we don't have any history

of working together that Tibbie is a recipe for co-founder breakup mismatch of personalities and co-founder breakup is actually one of those how causes that we see of teams breaking up so when

you're thinking about constructing your team slide I think a headline that speaks to relevant skills and history is good so in our case that hustle fund when we push ourselves we talked about a

couple things we say first that every single General Partner has built a company and scaled it and sold it okay so I'm not Ampera phrasing I'm actually give me an exact headline the second thing that we say is that we've been

friends for 20 years so I met with Elizabeth and she and my two other GPS about 20 years ago of my freshman year of college

alright so that essentially is my way of positioning hustle funds team on the headline on skill and longevity of

working relationship I hope that answers the question it does thank you and and you also answered a lot of other questions about you know solo founders

versus co-founders do you think another question that I'm seeing is what about a board do you think an advisor is is this something that founders should consider

including so yeah I got two thoughts on that so if you have really fancy logos just full stop of like you know fancy play see work school or you work for or your schools or whatever that's always

good to include advisors are kind of a similar version of the logo right so it's like like a Bill Gates or something is like closely advising you you know that's that is something it's now let me start taking a slightly

different turn on this question it's just like at pre seed and seed stage I really don't hope you have the board right it's okay death advisors I don't I really hope you don't have a formal

board because it's way too early for that this is like pure R&D stage this is your time to be extra free to the next experimental you haven't found pocket market fit yet and I think that board is more appropriate for maybe series and

Beyond where like you're now like professionalizing your business and so forth so don't position it as like a board of directors even if it's really informal on that kind of a slide because that's

like that signal kind of like a weirdness for like most early stage founders at least in this looking by context and Eric what if what if the

founders don't have fancy degrees and what if they haven't worked and that fancy company what if they don't haven't really worked much at all what would you recommend there so these are are in some

ways some of our favorite founders that we support at hustle funds now like we have plenty of people with like two million degrees and pedigrees on stuff too in our portfolio and that's

perfectly fine as well but the I think showing a history of hustle in some capacity is is important so let's say that you're like you're fresh out of

college right you haven't had real work experience yet maybe it wasn't even like those Ivy League schools or whatever right that's totally fine but it's like

still demonstrating a track record of your ability to hustle and be a super resourceful and produce huge was also can be helpful so a good example that is like let's say that you were in charge of the student entrepreneurship

conference in college you know what did you do to like land a sponsorship money how much was it like do you have a teammate who's a co-founder now that you guys are working together how big was the event it was a press coverage you

know it takes a little bit more massaging but if you just show that you have great adaptability growth mindset and some history with their co-founders if you have some I think that's basically all the strengths that you've

gotten and this is actually one of the cases where I mean I should with the team slide to lower right it's not to say that you're weak because you know you still have to make the investment on the team but maybe you can build up the narrative

while you're building first before showing the team because frankly it's not going to be as strong as what a lot of other VCS are going to be looking at in the next email or the next email or

the next film again this is something that I really want to harp on which is like what I didn't understand is the founder is I thought like and this is such a loaded term but like I'm going to

say it's like I thought I was like a unique snowflake right I was just like this is this really singularly interesting person working on the singular interesting industry but the

reality is my pitch deck was stacked 10 above and 10 below other emails and I had 30 seconds to 60 seconds and I never really put enough effort into trying to make myself stand out because I didn't

understand that as well and maybe I couldn't have ever stood out right so just know that like it's not you that's being judged for you as being you just from the other 20 people I just saw and the next 20 convincing afterwards as

well all right so think about that framing is long when it comes back to persona if it's cool to carry I'd like to actually talk about really quickly at least the blurb in conjunction with this

email deck in the lumber deck okay so and Eric is this the blurb that people will send in an email with their short deck yeah you got it

okay so uh I remember my very first date with my wife I went and again I met her 20 years ago and I knew immediately that this is the person for me sidenote she

was dating some other jackass at the time and I had to wait three years for her to break up with him but then I swooped in and then finally we got together right so you didn't need to know that but just want to share that so

my first date with my wife was actually our junior college and then I took her out to like some sort of like noodles bar or something in Mountain View

California and that first date was really fun and I remember it because you know I was attracted to her I think she was attracting me I hope and then but it

was a we were both like nervous and excited at the same time so you know we try to present our best self I shower to put on the nitrous or maybe it just hasn't nice to kind of any investigative and then you know it was a

good kind of first date impression and then we built them there so the reason why I share this is like when you think about your artifacts you need to think of it by progressive discovery stage now on

day 1 when I was dating my wife I didn't share with her over a bowl of noodles that like there's a history of mental illness in my family I proclivities toward certain kinds of cancer on my dad's side like you know I'm in debt and

like you know I think way more I have a gambling problem or something that like that's not something that is sexy to share on the first date you know you need to work up to that progressive

discovery and I do think that these artifacts actually map to like a different kind of progressive discovery for your your OBC as well so the email blurb which we'll talk about in a moment

is is like the introduction that shows one or two of the most interesting highlights of your business okay and the goal for that email deck when I for that

along as you're a DC to another VC or another angel investor is a response that's just simply interesting tell me more okay next I'm going to send the email

deck sometimes that's actually included with the blurb itself that's very often practice and then it provides a little bit more context the team problem solution market attraction right now I

can get like a 60 70 % understanding of what this business is all about the goal for that response is cool make the introduction right again like blurb and

email they're kind of the same things in law cases now and then finally this is longer debt which we're not really going to talk about today that there's an extension of all these things right this is where you can provide a lot more nuances about what this business is all

about and so forth and the headlines is still important there so do the same headline exercises I just described with like complete sentences but in that case you are controlling the narrative hopefully you're presenting this over a

zoom conference in person in a big room you have a whiteboard too like me to draw stuff and then the goal for that

artifact is can you or like can someone put a comment there that just like maybe laughs right actually it's hyper inappropriate but I have to give you props for putting that in public forum

but the goal for that longer deck is actually you know we in dust right so progressive discovery right highlight the strongest stuff first a little bit more context and then

full context that leads to the investment I do so I think a mistake that a lot of founders are making is that they trying to jump to the investment thing there's like make an

intro here's my full deck and hopefully I think that you know hopefully you'll be able to make a decision in the next week or something to invest I get a lot of those actually and it's it's generally a little bit too much most

most investors will have a hard time with that again like it's kind of our neocortex activity when I'm looking at a 50 slide deck I'm just trying to put together like what is this entire like universe here alright and can actually

make a beta basis to decide what this is all about so so let's talk about the blur for a moment here so we talked about the headlines and how they should

read essentially as like a full paragraph of back to back right so the blurb is you can take almost like the headlines themselves but maybe even more condensed into a very simple paragraph

that describes what you do so again pick one or two the highlights they think are presenting your business in the most favorable way that could draw initial interest so some

description of the business maybe like focusing on like the market or focusing on the traction or the team whatever it is and then generally a contact information at the very bottom right now

the goal is blurb and so this isn't like something that I want to talk a lot about but the golda blurb blurb is that is a very important artifact in fact maybe the most important one because

it's meant to be forwarded along so let's talk about like the appropriate etiquette for forwarding your insurer the goal is to make your investor or

someone in your network that wants to support you to not do any work so if fabric Kara whom I love like wants to like get some introductions for me and she just says Eric Kia introduced me

to you like if some of your favorite investors for my company and that's it that's like a lot of neocortex work I'm just like like who what am I going

to say right like like you're making me feel like you know three minutes of typing sooo for each person copy/paste like that sounds like a lot of work and it is a lot of work actually especially since venture capitalists

have to make dozens of introductions a day like that stuff really doesn't add up so instead if Kara said to me Eric I'd like to introduce you to introduce me to

Elizabeth just forward this email along and it just shows like that paragraph and it says like hi Elizabeth like this is the company here's how that reach me and then I can just forward that with a

note that says interested question mark way better now another thing about these intros is there's another mistake that I just mentioned in that first example like you're just asking me for

blankenship anyone that is a recipe for inaction when you ask someone to say to do something like hey just for this alone to any person that might be

interested in my company most people are gonna be doing nothing with it it's not that they don't want to help you it's because it's hard and a lot of work to think about who are like the dozen

people that'd be perfect for this we made the exact same mistake when we were fundraising our first one in the same thing like we had people who invested in us so in case small check some cases large checks but no one would respond to when we included our blurb

and said like he just passed this long day and one whose interests in your network then we discovered a different kind of trick that produced a near 100

percent response rate it was instead of cursing in tricked like for this work to anyone in your network she's changed it to say Araki for this email to one

person in your network who would be a great fit for Caroline or for care company right that was utterly game-changing for us instead like asking

for the universe you asked for one person so it still requires a little bit neocortex work but it felt psychologically like a small small ask okay

and that small ask yielded so many more investor introductions for us same thing needs to be done with you all right don't make people work don't make people think and only ask for one thing

okay not the universe and I think that this will actually ironically accelerate your from it's quite a bit more at least the leads I can't guarantee the convergence that's up to you but at least it leads before

we start uh wrap up here Kira to just like exclusively talk about the Q&A because I want to make sure we reserved a lot of time I want to start sharing my Lasser perspective on pitch decks okay

you'll notice that I didn't prepare a pitch deck for you today I'm just looking at the camera and we're speaking like this okay whenever we go fundraising with our own fine metal husband we actually

prepared we don't bring a pitch deck I usually like to sit down and say like hey you know I have a technical parrot but what if we just talk like real people here and I can explain my journey

I want to hear yours and then let's just have a real conversation and I'll just send you that stuff later right so when you get to your in-person meeting after you've made it through your blurb after

you've made it through your email email deck you know in the meeting setup and now you're sitting in the boardroom this isn't going to work for everyone but I challenge you all to not go into them to go to that meeting without any

materials and just say like don't taking notes I'm going to send you all the context in the dayroom later on let's just talk like real people the power dynamic is gonna change quite a

bit because one very few founders do this okay it's a little bit gutsy the second thing though is you know when you're in a room let's pretend this is

like a TV monitor then hooked up in my presentations running and I'm sending off to the side here right a couple problems right now like the first is like you're gonna pay attention to screen where they're gonna pay attention

to me right I'm also going to pay attention to the screen becomes like this very easy crunch for me to like talk like this right and I'm not reading the room at all the VCS are also sitting

down and chair as well you may be just standing up talking and it's a really easy the phones right in front of you is really easy for me to sit back be like what is you know you know what's going on here just blah blah blah look at my

Instagram tik-tok whatever it is now so you are losing a lover egde and power dynamics I think just by being presenting now

that's not to say that you can't like do what I just said and crush it and like go out leave like a zillion dollars from Softbank like that happens a lot too but I'm challenging you to say like know your

materials so well know that you need to just hit these corpses Hocking points and make sure that they're covered in like the in-person meeting and you'll feel that like the the asymmetry of power of the people on one side of the

room and you feels a lot more balanced right so that's something that that I wanted to challenge you about and why I actually like doing this presentation on pitch attacks without any deck to

hopefully try to demonstrate some of that value maybe I did it poorly you guys can tell us the survey later on let me stop talking though Cara I see the the chat is blown up with questions so

would love to you know focus on that for the remaining time awesome thanks so much Eric that was great so we've got on our Q&A we've got a bunch of questions like 50 questions here so why don't we

rapid-fire some of these in the next ten minutes let's do it I can get through a bunch okay how do you explain a complex technical product in a pitch deck to

non-technical investors that's a freaking awesome question and I guess my response is this would you let's go back

to the persona that person I talk to you know this is gonna sound like pandering because it's a pandering statement okay so prepare yourself for a pandering statement from a pandering venture

capitalist right now which is VCS aren't very smart most of them are okay now there are some brilliant ones who are like hyper specialized like yes I know everything about automotive it's like

artificial intelligence because I spent 35 years like like like building the theories around this Harvard and then like putting into practice em whatever like yes okay there there are funds like that we're like they'll keep you on your toes because

they have such technical Denisha expertise and I hope that you can find ways being introduced to those but if you're talking to the generalists like us with your mostly software the first issue is actually the first problem with

this question is actually already talking to the wrong person right so like if you're trying to get funding for a hyper technical problem that you think is going to be just really really

complicated to speak to you to the investors to get them to come along then you're like not really talking about the company but actually just giving a lecture so you're losing I think a lot of the leverage of this conversation by just spending a

disproportionate time in teaching the concept before you actually even pitch the opportunity so selection bias I think is really important here make sure that you are talking to investors who

seem to have the right kind of relevant skills to understand your business that's part one the second thing is this let's say that you still go ahead and do it because money's money right like who cares it's like Eric is dumb but if he's

gotten lots of cash that coming out of his ears then like let's take some good rule of thumb is like you know my I'm a big red eater if you like to read a community and one of my favorite subreddits is explain it like I'm flat

like I'm five explain it like I'm five excuse me so that's basically like this thing where they're like oh explain like the theory of relativity that like a five-year-old learn status and like people comfortably lose pretty amazing

examples right that's kind of like the level maybe explain it like I'm 15 is probably the right level of sophistication you try to solve for for this kind of complicated thing so I

don't have a really good answer a few other than like again the two takeaways of selection bias make sure that you do some research on funds that have competencies especially on the furnace trip skills have to understand this so

you don't have to spend time explaining concepts and the second thing too is like if you do go ahead and pitch to like a journalist unlike us that you can just think about that persona with the

Patagonia vest and all virtues but they're 15 years old now okay and I think if you can like solve for that kind for Sona you'll have a better chance of success awesome thanks Eric

here's another one so apparently a lot of the folks who have tuned in have companies that really take advantage of network effects but when they present

their jacks or send their decks to investors the feedback is that the unit economics probably aren't good enough but the founders believe that they are because of the network effects how can

they prove their unit economics in a really quick way in the deck without compromising the actual deck or

providing too much information yeah another good question and like frankly wand I don't have like a really clear response to other than this which is I

guess speaking like a lot of Protestants Robert kind of perspective first so there's good news and bad news for today's vintage of founders so back in

2010 everyone that lost their mind and what I mean by that is like Softbank came and they're like we have this thesis where if we plow money into like like a crazy amount of money into these

companies we can create monopolies and squelch out all competition and produce unicorns like a factory right the sins of that era are now being reaped right so you're seeing like softbank's pieces

time to collapse in many use cases really good work out who knows but like I don't think it will now the good news bad news is that profitability is sexy

again so oh my gosh this like a very basic concept of economics that a business is meant to be a going concern is back what is it going concern more money

comes in than leaves right I don't think that's changed for like several thousand years but in Silicon Valley we get sidelined by science experiments and other kinds of things well no this

doesn't apply to every classic company like if we're building like a the next generation of spacecraft to like bring people to Mars like I don't know how to

first of all don't apply to us because we have no idea how to assess that but second is just like yeah I don't expect you to be like you know operating a really clean profit and loss statement every quarter right like it's gonna take

years of losses before you know thirty billion dollars a year thirty billion dollars invested you've actually achieved like some trouble milestone that unlocks like sure there's an opportunity right but when it comes to

things like you know economics like it still needs to be distilled down to explain it like in fifteen kind of thing to right and I think like the the point that you're trying to drive across is that we're on the path even with these

do you know economics towards becoming a going concern right whereby like you know at certain inflection point with a certain amount of resources it doesn't

flex we're like this becomes a scalable business right and then serve like when you have these conversation with with investors here really rattling under stuff he needs to come back to

that principle and remind them over and over again it's like let's take a step back and like the thing that like we really just want you to take away from this meeting it's like that like we have a really simple and clear path into

becoming a going concern and here's like how it we map like are you net comes to that right so explaining all those nuances in the pitch deck is really difficult again like I think that the core

principles of like to sling things down in sentences and all something the email that it's gonna be important again there's a little bit of progressive discovery here but there's also some costs they can play with so some classes actually one of my favorite economic

concepts and I might be actually interpreting it in the wrong way but like the way I interpreted is actually what happened to me on Saturday so I took my kids grocery shopping and I picked because maybe it the the longest

line and I thought shortest at the time does longest and there's something like old people in front of me and that's ages for me to say but like they're taking forever right and so like all these other lines around me were going

faster and faster right all these people were gain checked out and I was looking at them and I was like should I leave it's like oh crap I've already invested like three minutes into this line I cannot leave right

ssam costs also plays into this founders this this this psychology as well as IV sees the more time that UV sees to spend with you and quickly think about your

company the harder the more and more that they're trying to champion it I think or time right like that's kind of the more glasses half-full perspective maybe some people have a very different perspective like the stringing me along or something but if they're really

spending time with you and you can get them across like a couple lines just like the concepts exciting the team seems exciting not quite sure about you in economics but they serve how like a like a like a perspective right now and

then and then you get them to like later meetings where you can really walk through the nuances I believe just from some cost like I've already so invested and trying to become your champion let's

just get this done right so think about that again like I basically avoided your question but hopefully did something you can get in that just like a good right

that's exactly right okay let's talk about a couple of things that people are wondering if they should include in their deck the two that I'm seeing over and over again is one their

financials financial models financial like future finances where they think the finances are gonna go should they include those in both decks one deck not

at all and then also business model is that important good question so did you not put it in any deck so my thinking is that those are one of those things have become raffle discussions where you're

in a pitch deck and then to like wait was this chart line 22 says this like that seems like kind of like an odd perspective on goodwill right and really

right so the deck should included at least at the seed stage not for a growth stage company like Series B or C it becomes much more interesting like you literally can pitch a growth stage company a Series B or C with the Excel

spreadsheet it's just like have your analyst look at these numbers and come back to us with money wait there's nothing to say really right in the case of seed though it's more about narrative and storytelling all right you got

actually what people who can get them excited about the vision more than anything else before you show them like the progressive discovery of the kitchen sink and so we're I believe them business mile financials why is actually

in the data room so you you have like the artifacts emailed Eckler glare BML deck lung deck and then at the right time maybe after you do the full pitch

in the meeting with that's when you follow up with data room a drop box a box whatever it is Google Drive you've been to that team that provides some of

these details it has been requested okay so like I'm kind of speaking I see you like a question about like are you saying thank don't cluded like financials and like I like to look at

that stuff definitely right but I'm just saying don't provide it unless it's been solicited because I think it really raffles now because you know financials at the seed stage and business not the

seed stage is a ridiculous concept right it's good to have a sense of like where you're heading I don't dispute that but do I think that there's gonna be micro pivots or even larger pivots or new things that you learned especially at

the seed stage before hip hop artists it absolutely absolutely is that going to affect your financials your forecasting your business all absolutely so I'd rather not have those kinds of distracting conversations at

least at the seed stage for the founders perspective unless it's explicitly asked okay and then a follow-up question to that and this might have to be one of our last questions but it's in here in

this list of questions is the vision for the future of the company now in a seed stage or pre seed company the vision for the future is like happening right now right because they're right at the

beginning of the company but um in terms of like the long-term vision should our founders be including that in their decks both of them just one of them and if so like how would you as an investor

want to see that information so I think the future vision I get a little bit nervous about this isn't as well as my allergic reaction isn't as stark as like financials like don't include that but I

also kind of feel the same way which is like it's great to have a perspective about where you're gonna be heading and I want you to have that kind of clarity or at least a hypothesis about it right

but it also can become a distraction because you don't want to commit to the hypothesis analysis that there's so much learning and iteration to be done right I think that some of that future vision could exist in your total addressable

market or market so I you know as you're making the case of like we're here right now it's a little bit more niche but we're going into more macro kind of market that's where you can maybe insert

a little bit more around like the future region right but I think again like depending on the artifact like if it's like an email deck I probably would not

include it if it's like the longer deck where you're in the room controlling the narrative or at least actually previewing the narrative before you share the longer deck it might be more appropriate especially if it's been like

a bit explicitly discussed during the course of that meeting so that's great Eric thank you so much and I know we just hit time and there are like 55

questions that we didn't get to so those of you who we didn't answer your questions I'm sorry we'll try to answer some of them and send you the responses if I can snag some Eric's time later

this week but thank you guys all so much for participating for being here and for Eric thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge with us Thank You Kara for putting this together and I'm a huge thank you to our

the folks who came in and logged in today I know you're very busy you're taking time out a lot of you Lobby from your sleep or from your work and it really means a lot to our team that you

gave us a chance to begin this kind of engagement with you and hopefully this can turn into a relationship where we can work together as founders and your VC so if you ever want to explore that

further we look at every single deal that's being sent to us hustle fund at VC in that ingestion form that you can click on us as we're what are you hustling so please click that button and I very much hope that you give us

opportunity to learn more about you so thank you so much for that I all take care