3 good tips for when pitching VCs
Andrew Fife has posted a few tips based on his experience pitching VCs. This is advice I tend to give all of NVA’s clients who are doing fundraising, so it is worth relaying. View Andrew’s entire post here. Bookmark it too - you may think the advice is obvious, but you would be surprised at how often these little things make a big difference. The gist of his tips are:
- Never send your slide deck in advance of a meeting - to anyone. You’ll spend more time explaining or defending the assumptions the reader has made than pitching.
- Make the most of your meetings - even if you have a tough meeting and deal with many objections, you can follow up by showing execution of your plan and making sure the VCs see you are hitting your milestones.
- Timing is everything. Andrew has whittled it down to Wednesday at 10am as being the best time to pitch a VC. Idealistic perhaps, but a good goal. Many VCs have partnership meetings on Monday, which means catch-up on Tuesday, etc.
Another useful tip in this realm is to know whom you are pitching to. Sometimes just getting a meeting at a VC firm is a feat unto itself, and you are thrilled to have ANY meeting. Even so, make sure you know enough about who you are pitching to be sure you have the right audience. Most VCs are “on top of it” and route compelling projects to the partners or associates that are focused on that market, but there are always cases where you won’t realize until 3/4 of the way through a meeting you should be talking to someone else at the firm. Research the VC’s current portfolio, investment history, and market focus.
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