How to Give a Strong Startup Pitch

Hey, I'm Chris Gardner. I'm a partner here at BC and I'm going to talk about how to give a great pitch. And giving a great pitch for me is really about storytelling. What you're trying to do is create a narrative around your business that you can explain to investors that really gives you the who, what, when, where and why of why you've started this business. And I think the best way to tackle that is to actually write it down. And by write it down, I literally mean write it down. You write the five words down that you put under the title slide that describes what you do in a sentence. You write a couple sentences you might tell somebody in an elevator if they ask you what you do for a living. You write a short form paragraph that might be a description on a brochure or an event for what your company does. And then you also write in long form the narrative that would go along with your slides. Write the whole story from beginning to end, from from the vision to creating the company to who you're solving a problem for, what your solution does, how you're pricing it, everything. Write it down. And that will prevent you from ending up in a situation where you're just a startup coming in to talk to a VC and you're just reading bullets on a slide in kind of a chopped up narrative instead. Create that storytelling arc. So creating the storytelling arc, first thing you need to do is figure out what your hooks are. Some people call it special sauce, some people call it vision. The way I like to think about it is it comes right out of the value proposition that you're driving for your customers. But why is it that you started this company? Did you work at a company where you witnessed the problem firsthand? You had deep experience in a certain area? Did you read some data online that pointed towards a problem that needed solving? What spurred you to do this? Have you started a company before? Have you always wanted to start one? Did you meet a founder that had a great idea and you wanted to just kind of jump into the startup game? That's part of the beginning of the story. But when you create the whole narrative, you need to cover a lot more than that. You need to cover who is the team? Who are these people that have created this business? You need to talk about who your initial customers are and what pain point you're solving for. You need to talk about the solution you imagine that alleviates their pain. You need to think about how big the market is that you're tackling, how you might price this service. You also need to talk about what your competition might be. All of that needs to be part of the arc and ultimately part of the presentation that you create from your story. There's only one way to get really good at pitching, and that is practice, practice, practice. Some people that have spent their life or had to go to grad school or did lots of presentations in schools are very comfortable pitching or standing up in front of an audience and telling a story. For others, it's really hard and you actually just have to work at it. You know, my advice is always to practice every chance you get. And I think the great thing about the VC and startup ecosystem these days is there are tons of opportunities to do that. There are formal and informal pitch contests. You literally can go to events where you could bump into somebody at a cocktail party and you've got two or three minutes to kind of tell your story for each one. And one of the things that you'll find, and this is very important, is that you will get better every time you tell the story. And that's because there's a feedback loop in there. You'll start to tell the story, someone will ask you a question or ask for a clarification, and you'll know that's something you may need to adjust the next time you pitch. And that is absolutely true in pitching. And that's why repetition is so important. That's why we also coach founders to schedule their pitching or their fundraise in such a way that your most important conversations happen after you've had a whole bunch of reps, talking about your idea and pitching to other people. Don't rush into it because you get so much feedback, especially in the early days when you're a little rough around the edges, that you're way better off getting those reps and getting those practice pitches in before you play the super bowl and pitch for a partner meet at a venture capital firm. I think one of the things about giving a great pitch that's a challenge is that if you Google, you will find 10,000 templates on what a slide presentation should look like. And they're all some different flavor of certain things that need to be included. I think that one misconception is that you need to answer every potential future question by having a slide somewhere, if not in the main part of the deck or in the appendix. Personally, I think pitch decks should be 10 to 15 slides. That's it. And that you should be able to think on your feet enough to kind of answer questions on the fly and be comfortable doing that. One of the other misconceptions is that you have to use slides. Increasingly, we're seeing presentations come over in the form of a document, whether it's a Coda document or a notion document, or even a Google document sometimes. That actually maps very nicely to my contention that you want to be storytelling and you can actually have your entire presentation be a story with graphics and other sorts of elements and data in a document itself. So it doesn't have to be just a slide deck. The best pictures that I see tend to be ones that are concise and that you can get most of the data by scanning the deck ahead of the meeting. And then when you come in, it ends up being a conversation with the founding team. You know, we had one just this morning where everybody had read the presentation and we were able to kind of jump from slide to slide with specific questions, and the founders could think on their feet and answer the questions. Even more importantly was the participation of the whole founding team or the management team that's part of the presentation. It's always a little bit of a red flag if there's multiple people in the presentation, but only one of them does the talking. But super high marks when you've got a management team or a founding team that seamlessly flows. Some people answer some questions, some people answer the other questions. And you can actually start to infer the working environment among these people and how they pass the handoffs between questions. And you take this, and I'll take that. That's actually very impressive when you see it working live.