My take after 6 months in venture and seeing hundreds of them June 9, 2004, at 6:02 p.m. Jeff Bezos sent an e-mail to his team with the following subject line “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.” The decision was made to avoid laundry list presentations that ppt makes so easy to create. Presentations that lack a narrative might be okay if you are here to present and create the narrative. But when you share your deck for the first time to get a meeting or a call, you are almost killing all your chances. At DN we were reviewing between 60 and 100 propositions per week. This combined with the fact that a VC fund is constantly looking in details at 5 to 10 companies results in limited time per deck received. In order to help you get to the next stage I have decided to share with you what VC look for in a deck? Going back to the basics of rhetoric No need to read Aristotle, but a lot of great thinkers have put some thoughts on . There are five well known canons of rhetoric and three are relevant in the case of a pitch deck: how to win the minds through discourse Invention: developing and refining the reasons why we should meet Arrangement: organizing your arguments (the progression), i.e what is the most persuasive and logical order and what should be the narrative Style: traditionally it refers to figure of speech, in the case of a deck it has more to do with visualization, illustrations… What VC want to see in your deck should tell the name of the company, the round, how much you are raising and where it is located. The first slide should ( in classical rhetoric) with what is the most impressive about your company: amazing growth, A+ team, a technological break-through or anything else you think is amazing about your start-up. Almost everything happens here, if you manage to attract the benevolence of your reader and get him excited, you are almost certain to get a call or a meeting. Your second slide capture attention Captatio benevolentiae Then the investor wants to understand : are you building a must have or a cool to have? what pain-point you are solving, or what opportunity you are enabling The next logical slide is : how big can it be? The bigger the fund you contact, the larger the market must be (your business must be able to return the fund at scale). Avoid dropping a number you find on the space you operate in. , isolate the addressable base and to get to a Total net revenues addressable market. the size of the opportunity Segment the market use your own pricing If the opportunity is big enough, a VC will then want to now why your start-up will be the winner or one of the winners: (for instance using diagrams, matrices, sentences) and explain . It is also key to explain why your and how easily it can who do you compete with why you are better business is defensible scale. The opportunity is big and you have compelling arguments on why you will win the market, there isn’t one way to do so. Depending on what your company does it can be a video, diagrams showing a process, screen-shots, customer interviews… And if you are still very early stage, give them a sense of your roadmap. now show us the product: This is one of the most important slide: . There are different ways to get to the same audience or the same position. It can be selecting an initial niche and expanding from there, implementing an innovative business model (think Zenefits or Rent the runway for instance), using smart channels (for instance Tinder)… Show them that you have cracked the way to capture your market. go-to market strategy / the sequencing Now that they know everything on your market and how you plan to own it, explain how you are going to make money: (except if already covered in the sizing or the go-to market strategy slides) what is your business model Eventually it is time for use the KPIs and data that are relevant to your business model and space you operate in (mobile, SaaS, enterprise, marketplace, E-commerce…) and show some numbers, curves. If the team wasn’t your first slide, . Your reader already has a good understanding of what you’re after and will more easily relate the different backgrounds to the the project. time to show why the team you have assembled is relevant to achieve the vision you presented Making sure that you have a narrative Ideally your deck could be translated into a text that would look for instance like this: “ . (Your company name) is based in (x). We are raising a (round and amount targeted) . (slide 1) We have assembled an amazing team t (slide 2), o address this major pain point (slide 3), that x million businesses face, resulting in a 1.4Bn market opportunity (slide 4). We are not alone in this space but we have built the strongest product. We enjoy network effect making our business defensible and we have automated x% of the process, making it scalable. (slide5) . Here is the product we have assembled, our customer reviews are excellent and we plan to release this feature to increase stickiness in two months (slide 6) . To capture this market we are first targeting this niche as we have strong relationships with several players and believe that we will easily expand to these adjacent segments from their (slide 7). We have chosen a subscription based business model with 3 different plans (slide 8) . We already see great traction. Our current MRR is (x) and we are growing (x)% month-to-month. Our blended CAC is (x) and the monthly churn c. (x). Customers payback in (x)months with a CAC LTV ratio of (x)x. (slide 9) If you have comments or questions, please share them. I am happy to help or enrich this post with your insights is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . 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