What investors ACTUALLY want to see in your PITCH DECK.

hey guys before you create any pitch presentation you need to have these eight or it's more like seven eight specific slides so that's what i'll talk about today all right everyone welcome back to my ninth video in my 100 day youtube challenge and today i wanted to talk about some just you know there's so many videos out there about different slide presentations and you know there's everything that you want to know but um i just wanted to make a very brief presentation today and talk to you all about the eight bullet points that you should

try to answer when making any presentation whether you're pitching live or this is just a presentation you're going to share with people who are interested in your company all right you're wondering why do i know what i'm talking about well i've been a venture capitalist for several years in london investing in two unicorns farfetch and vestier collectif which only recently became a unicorn and also i run an investor accelerator in oslo norway where i taught investors people who wanted to learn how to invest in startups how to invest in startups and also of course i've

run my own company and i've also sold one so i think i'm relatively qualified to talk about what to look for and what to include in a pitch deck so today i'm just going to go straight to it you know no fanciness straight to the point of the eight bullet points that you have to answer when creating a slide presentation all right let's get into it slide one uh this is a one that's often forgotten or overlooked specifically because uh you know hopefully when the world unlocks and you're pitching live again if you're pitching at

a demo day or you know you're at any event and you're sort of you know pitching in an order of 10 to 20 startups right one of the slides that stays on the longest is the opening slide because you know you're gonna walk on stage the other startup walks off stage is that there's a handover of mics and things like that so the one slide that often stays on to the audience seeing the longest is your opening slide it's your slide that's your logo and your one liner so that first slide is really important because

you want to associate your startups branding and logo with what you do right so you need to be immediately understandable so it's really important to have a sexy one-liner i'll give an example of what i used to have i'll link it up right now it was lunacorn a mobile media brand right so immediately i'm associating our company color profile our logo with what we do so the audience immediately connects with what you do and the reason that one's important is because those investors or those people in the room who are interested in that industry um

will immediately go i should listen to this pitch because you know the last three have been in fintech and i don't i'm not interested in that but i'm interested in media and the lunacorn is a mobile media brand so better pay attention right so you're just immediately kind of filtering the audience to those who should actually listen that's number one number two selling the problem and you won't have to sell the solution right you've probably heard this one before but if you are pitching a medical technology company to an audience that aren't medical people you

should sell the problem because they probably won't understand the issue that you're trying to solve right so it's very important to sell the importance of the problem because i've had examples of that where people pitched presentations to me and it was a nurse talking about an incredible product but i'm not a nurse and i don't understand how um you know er's emergency rooms work so they were just pitching to you know a completely ignorant audience it was a brilliant idea but it was lost on all of us right so we didn't invest and you know

we lost out on a great company because the pitcher didn't know their audience so you should always know your audience and sell the problem to them try to show the importance of that issue even if it's a complex one try to break it down in a way that i would understand so there's a rule of thumb i always tell founders and i've always used myself you're pitching specifically when you're talking about the problem to a room of um 10 year olds right so they have there's not so much of a language barrier they speak english

but there's a vocabulary limit right so you can't go in there throwing buzz words that are like industry specific you want to go in there and just be as obviously understandable as possible all right number three is the solution right what are you doing to solve that problem right now there's a really important element here which is sort of the the power of persuasion and the power of yes uh where you basically psychologically convince the audience that they're right because you sell them a problem and obviously now you're going to tell them the solution right

so and it's a win-win because if your solution is an obvious one then they're like oh you know why didn't i think of that okay brilliant for these guys and girls why are they doing that and oh you know now i have questions are they the team to do it what's their traction like right um but even if it's a if it's a solution that isn't obvious you're gonna surprise the audience and actually you might put yourself in the seat of basically uh you know brilliant people who have come up with an inventive idea that's

never been thought of so either way whether your solution is obvious or not you're going to win the audience onto your side so think about that one and again same as selling the problem uh sell your solution in a way that's easy to understand um you know whether it's just using simple diagrams simple graphics um just remember specifically when you're pitching live that people's attentions are mostly going to be on you and then visual stimulation on so you know your presentation should be a visual stimulating um support of what you're saying verbally don't read the

same thing as the presentation don't put too much content on the presentation because the presentation ultimately is meant to be there as a visual aid to support what you're saying all right number four there's a problem you sold them on you've convinced them that your solution is the winning solution but what's the size of the market so number four is the size of the market now i call this the market opportunity slide because you want to engineer the slide to convince the audience that your market is growing um investors invest in hot teams and hot

markets right so an example of a hot market is fintech or for example blockchain those are hot markets in hot sectors right now the reason that you can show that they're hot is their growth rates so there's one simple term you can include in your presentation which everyone understands in the start of industry but for those who haven't seen it before it's alienating it's kaggar let me know in the comments if you've heard of kaggar before it's compound annual growth rate what it means is basically over the next 10 years your industry is going to

grow at 25 percent every single year so you know year one it grows at 25 year two it grows at 25 on last year's 25 so it's compoundingly growing every single 20 um 25 every single year now this shows that the market has momentum it's going in the right direction right so this is what you want to get people in the audience or actually just reading this presentation to go huh wow this industry is really growing i should consider looking at this company and looking at this industry now there's a hack to this doing research

to try and find out your numbers because founders you should always know your numbers trust me um i want to ask a few probing questions specifically when i meet founders and i'm interested in investing whether from a vc perspective or a personal perspective you should always know your numbers because if you don't know your numbers then i'm thinking like have you really done your diligence your due diligence into this this industry do you know how fast it's growing who are the players all right so i wanted to share a hack with you to find the

compound annual growth rate and the momentum figures for this slide as i said you might have some competitors you should know who they are go on their websites see if you can find presentations that they've given previously at different demo days and events and things like that a lot of videos online about this and then they would have probably done the research for you they would have found those facts and figures so before you go and do uh you know acres and acres and acres of research look at your competitors and see what they've done

all right slide five is the traction slide now this is a super important one because what the traction slide basically is it's a startup buzzword which i have in my startup buzzword dictionary yes i wrote the dictionary on um startup buzzwords um i'll link the the shop below cartoon illustrated book of startup 23 startup buzzwords from bootstrapping to exit all you need to know anyway so what traction basically means is it's momentum and it's proof of execution in your team and what you've done so um traction over time is basically just you know you've you're

growing over time right so the gold standard of traction is basically revenue or customer growth right those are the ultimately the things you're out there to try and get but um often i have early stage founders and come to me and say hey you know we just started um we don't have any traction but no uh it's about phrasing the traction so um traction obviously the gold standard is revenue and customers and month or month growth week and week growth and all that kind of stuff right if you don't have that kind of stuff then

traction is basically that you've found the perfect co-founding team that's traction you said we've gone out there to find two co-founders we we knew the known unknowns we knew that we didn't have a technical co-founder we knew that we didn't have a marketing co-founder we went out and found those people we brought them in that's traction you put a willing team together um traction is also sort of the early stage conversations with your audience whether you've um commissioned a research report whether you've gone out there and asked 2 000 people or 200 people or just

20 people what they want in this product area what they're using so you've gone that's traction that's showing that you as a team are executing over time because ultimately investors invest in great teams that can execute what's the best way to show that a timeline simple timeline so i'll give an example of a timeline i use in a presentation two years ago you know basically you know i want to see that over a reasonable time frame that you're showing momentum that you're you're delivering on what you're saying you're gonna do in the long term goal

of what you're trying to sell me to invest in right and number six the one thing we've forgotten to mention already is how do we make money right so the business model is an important one if you leave it out people will always ask that question so i do want to give you one tip if you're pitching live and you have a complex business model um or you know you just find it very difficult to explain that in an easy way leave it out because that's the first question you're going to get when you're pitching

live they're going to be what's the business model because then you have engineered the questions you're going to get which means that you're ready and prepared with great answers for them right don't give me a financial model that's five years forecast and your company's one years old that's all just forecast right so and just give me a realistic understanding of what industry you're in and how you can monetize on that industry do not give me a discounted cash flow do not give me a five year forecast that's broken down line by line 20 lines on

a single slide when i want to see your financial models i will ask for it right so just give me some highlight figures that you're being ambitious that there is a business case here so that's actually what you're trying to prove in a business model slide there's a business case here that eventually after a year two three four five this company will turn a profit and will be a profitable business basically all right this is probably the most important slide uh this slide i've seen people open with after their one-liner you know logo pitch vision

slide um is the team so in this slide it's so important to show that you are the right team to solve this problem right now here's a tip if you are a single founder trying to find those people that's a known unknown something that investors who are um well educated look for is also founders who also know their weaknesses right instead of pretending that they know it all right so if you're a single founder or a double founder who have the same background talk about the fact that okay well we know that we're just two

finance majors or whatever um so that's why we are trying to hire people in the fields that we know we have a weakness in right one thing you can convince me of that you're a great team is that you've already found some candidates but you obviously need to raise the money to be able to hire them right so you've already been active to find the people uh you know to solve the known unknowns because the last question i asked myself before i make any investment whether when i was when i was a vc and it

was 10 million or when it's now personally and it's ten thousand dollars i asked myself this question if anyone is gonna do this and if anyone's gonna pull this off is this the team that's gonna pull it off that's what i ask myself before i make an investment and even if that's a single founder i'm like is this individual enough of a magnet um has the grit the perseverance to attract great people and convince them um or is this team do they have the the balance that's needed to be a really strong team to hire

and attract people basically so um that's my tip on the team and then the last on the eighth one is obviously a simple one like the first one it's sort of a half slide really it's the ask think about it this is a story right what's the punch line at the end of it what's the conclusion and you've gone through everything from you know um what's the problem how you're gonna solve it why the why the market is growing what you're gonna capture in that markets and why you have the right team to capture that

now you're like okay but what what can you do for me what's the audience what's the individual looking or reading that these slides can do for you what are you missing do you need to are you looking for just people in the audience or reading this to connect you to industry um you know are you looking for expertise are you looking for investment what can they bring to the table so always finish with an ask a strong ask startups forget that too often they just go thank you so much goodbye and then connected thank you

so much you know i'm the team why do startup founders always pitch in bloody company branded clothing because you're connecting a name to a person so you know whether you're pitching live and then afterwards you go in a mingling session you're connecting hey we're the guys in the blue tops where the girls in the in the yellow tops you know whatever it is you're connecting a logo and a color to a name to a person so that people will come up to you afterwards um anyway so that's really simply my eight bullet points you have

to include when making any presentation whether it's physical or digital presentation i hope you enjoyed this one thank you so much for watching i'll see you in the next episode please think about subscribing to our channel and i'll see you tomorrow in tomorrow's vlog thank you oh ciao