Venture Hacks

Ho Nam (@honam):
“The blockbusters are oftentimes the ‘ugly ducklings.’ Cisco is probably the best example in the VC world. Everyone passed except for Sequoia. In the book world, almost everyone passed on JK Rowling.
“It’s just hard to predict the future looking into the rear-view mirror, yet everyone wants to pile onto the brand names [VCs] [...]

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Simeon Simeonov:
“You have to understand that you are not competing with an abstract notion of what a good investment is. You are competing with the other teams that saw the investor that week.”
This is why investors often don’t have good reasons why they’re passing. Maybe your company is good, but the competition is simply better. [...]

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Thanks to FastIgnite, a startup advisory firm, for sponsoring Venture Hacks this month. This post is by Simeon Simeonov, the firm’s founder and CEO (and formerly a partner at Polaris Ventures). If you like it, check out Sim’s blog and tweets @simeons. – Nivi
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Niels Bohr, [...]

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“Your first stop if raising money!”
– Adam Smith, Founder of Xobni
The rumors are true. You can buy Pitching Hacks in paperback, for $19. And you can still buy the good old-fashioned PDF for $9. Get them here.
So far, we’ve sold about 700 copies of Pitching Hacks and gotten great reviews. But we want to sell [...]

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We’re teaching our first ever online workshop about “How to pitch investors” on eduFire — a platform for live video teaching online. Sign up here. I’ve taken classes on eduFire and it works really well; here are some recordings of their classes.
(Update: This class is full so I’ve opened up a second class. Sign [...]

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Pitching Hacks is here. The PDF is $29 and you can download it immediately. 83 pages. Buy it here.
Samples
We’ve raised $100 million for startups like Epinions, invested another $20 million in companies like Twitter, and advised many others. Pitching Hacks shows you how to apply the simple lessons we’ve learned along the way. Check out [...]

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Raising money is like finding a black swan.
It seems like you will forever keep hearing “no”, “let’s keep talking”, or “find a lead.” Or worse, you sign a term sheet and it blows up before you can close it.
It seems like you’ll never raise money, until one day—boom—you meet the right investor, he says yes, [...]

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Summary: Pitches usually fail because they answer the wrong questions. The right questions depend on the stage of your business—for example, some businesses are just getting started with an idea, while others are printing money. Focus your pitch on the key questions for your stage and if you keep getting non-key questions, something is wrong [...]

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Don’t try to cram cogent arguments into the slides of your deck. Keep the slides simple, visual, and minimal. Put cogent arguments, talking points, and prose in the notes that accompany each slide.
How? Check out Dan Cook’s Laws of Productivity (pdf) for a great example:

(If you don’t see the embed above, see The Laws of [...]

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Watch the master pitch man, Steve Jobs, analyze the market for NeXT workstations in Part 1 of his Chalk Talk. He explains:
“Who is our target customer? Why are they selecting our products over our competiton’s? And what distribution channels are we going to use to reach these customers?”
Steve covers a handful of the slides that [...]

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