Kevin McCann tells founders to stop pitching the product and start pitching the money. VCs want to know how you'll spend their capital, hit concrete milestones, and who will buy you or take you public. Most founders miss this and lose deals to competitors who don't.
I would say when pitching to a venture capitalist, remember that you're talking to the money people. When in Rome, speak to the Romans, speak about the money. Talk about the business of building a business. Tell them what you're going to do with your money, with their money, right? What you're going to create, what benchmarks and milestones you will achieve and how you're going to get that money back. Talk about the exit, who's likely to buy you. In very rare instances, you get to go public. So who's going to buy you, right? How quickly will you be able to sell this company and make some rational decisions about what the projections are going to look like? And the first thing we do is take the rose colored glasses off and we rerun the financial projections and often these. While the entrepreneurs have not spent much time on the business building the business, but rather the business building the product. So we cut them some slack on that. But if you want to be ahead of the herd, learn about that business of building the business.
