Do you need a deck to raise from VCs? Not always

How to remove a founder from 16z ​​without breaking open PowerPoint

For everyone Focus on pitch floors (and more than 80 articles on the topic) for startups who think it’s impossible to get off the ground without angels or institutional investors. That is not entirely correct. This is the reason.

To adequately return to investment history, you need a comprehensive business plan to raise funding from institutional investors. Harvard Business Review has a great guide on how to create one. The exact details that go into a business plan vary but usually include history, market analysis, strategy, product and service descriptions, origin charts, competitive analysis, management team, financial plans and forecasts, along with all the research to support each section. .

That’s all well and good, but by the time you’re done with all that, your business plan has reached the pages of a novel—and that’s it. before They are included in all graphics and charts. Business plans are great for teaching the basics and dynamics of business, and mistakes in a business plan are a great way to show entrepreneurs how to prevent problems before they happen.

The problem is that before the ink dries, and before the “print” is hit, it will be a financial mistake. It’s not that startups operate differently than other businesses, but they’re basically the agile equivalents of the dinosaurs of old. Build, test, iterate.

Basically, startups are similar to how software is built these days: launch and fix the MVP version of the product instead of spending six months writing an entire product specification that goes wrong before writing a single line of code. Then.

There were a few advocates for doing business plans differently, including Guy Kawasaki, whose “you only need 10 slides” argument may have gone a little too far into deep minimalism, but at least it was more helpful in weaving a pitch narrative than 90-. Page business plan. In short: Pitch Deck was to the business plan what agile software development is to waterfall software development.

Since then, the market has evolved further, and some founders have chosen not to use any part of the ship.

“The story is extremely important,” said Tom Hakohen, CEO of webhooks-as-a-service company Svix, which recently raised a financing round without using Andreessen Horowitz’s deck. “Investors are not web hook experts, so they need to understand the story. To do that, we had to tell a good story—and when we did that, they started digging into the business. They understood our parameters and started talking to a good portion of our customers. At that point the deck is going to help me guide them through what they know.

Let’s see how we can tell your company’s story without relying on decks!