Member-only story
I used to meet with my cofounders a few times a week. We were each working on parts of our business plan. “John” was working on the engineering model, “Jim” was working on the marketing model, and I was working on the overall financial plan.
After about two months of staring at each other across the kitchen table, I was itching to get started. In our case that meant raising money.
You think you’re ready to launch long before you’re really ready to launch.
I was working on the pitch deck in parallel. I had a pretty good idea what I thought was necessary for a good pitch deck, so it took me maybe a day to put the deck together.
Because I was an EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) at San Francisco based VC fund at the time, we did a rehearsal pitch to Dave and Alain, the two partners I was working with, first. And of course, we bombed.
To put it nicely, our pitch was horrible. We made every mistake in the book.
There was too much text, Worse than that, I don’t think we really explained what we were doing until around slide 5.
Dave and Alain were gentle in their criticism, but they were also to the point. They pointed out, slide by slide, exactly what we needed to…
