Pitching your early-stage startup
I&#x27;m a VC, and this list is great. At a high level, VCs care about three things: team, product&#x2F;idea, and market. Every VC cares about all of these things, but their prioritizations vary.<p>Most of Patrick&#x27;s excellent advice can be lumped into these three buckets. Specifically:<p>1) You have to establish the credibility of the team: you&#x27;ve done impressive things before; you have a deep understanding of what you&#x27;re working on now; you can read your audience and know how to communicate effectively; you can get a strong intro (nice-to-have); etc.<p>2) You have to establish the viability of the market: it&#x27;s big; it has a real problem; the existing competitors are not doing a good job in a clear way; etc.<p>3) You have to establish the quality of the idea&#x2F;product: you have a unique insight or approach relative to competitors; the prototype&#x2F;early validation is strong; etc.<p>A lot of the pitches become mediocre when founders are handwavy in one or more of these areas. For example, if the founder spends a lot of time talking about the market and the product idea, but not enough time explaining why the team is uniquely&#x2F;extremely qualified to succeed. Or the founder has good answers to product&#x2F;team&#x2F;market questions, but their answers show they don&#x27;t know how to read the audience or explain their idea. (Example of not reading the audience: the investor is non-technical and the founder, who is productizing their PhD thesis, spends 90% of the pitch geeking out about technical details.)<p>Also, I&#x27;ll add a few tips:<p>- Don&#x27;t exaggerate or mislead. An investor will pass if they doubt one of your statements (&quot;silverware is a $150 billion dollar market!&quot;) or realize that you&#x27;re spinning facts (e.g. you say Dropbox is a customer, but later it turns out you meant that one of your free users has an @dropbox.com email). If it turns out that one statement you made is false, then investors will assume there might be more.<p>- Understanding risks is better than sweeping them under the rug. If your competitor landscape is missing key companies (mentioned in Patrick&#x27;s post) or you dismiss some $1b+ company as a competitor without any rationale, your audience will become very skeptical. Admitting something is a problem and explaining how you will address is it much more compelling.<p>- Really know the ins and outs of everything about your company -- at least relative to the audience. If I ask a question or make a product suggestion that the founder hasn&#x27;t considered, that&#x27;s a yellow flag. Someone who has been living and breathing their startup for several months should have a much, much deeper knowledge of their domain than an investor who is hearing about it for the first time.