A Powerpoint Business Plan for Pitching Venture Capitalist

I raised $8 million from venture capitalist starting with seven core slides. When we were pitching venture capitalists we really only needed one item for the initial meeting, but if the firm was serious, they often requested many items.

To pitch a venture capitalist on your early stage company all you need is a Powerpoint business plan; mine had about seven core slides and three appendix slides. They covered:

1. An Introduction. A slide with three bullets: what we do; information about our team; and amount of money we were asking of investors.
2. The Mission. A short mission statement to frame the company.
3. The Problem. The second slide framed the problem in the market place today.
4. The Solution. The third slide included bullets on how our solution addressed the problem.
5. The Market. The fourth slide was about the size of the market we were going after.
6. The Competition. The fifth slide addressed the competition and how we were different.
7. The Financials. A three year projection with bullets on the key assumptions to the model.

The Appendix slides were to support any questions that came out of the main presentation.

1. The Business Model. Our impression sharing model was a bit different, so I created a slide on it if it was confusing to anyone.
2. Marketing. This was a high-level plan about how we were going to market the product.
3. Technology. This slide was about the core technology we were creating.

After I gave this presentation and was invited back to the partnership, I gave it again to the entire partnership. From there, depending on the firm, they requested many different documents.

These additional documents included.

1. A formal business plan
2. An executive summary. This came in handy for several events. So it's worth doing.
3. A marketing plan
4. Competition matrix
5. Resumes for every founder
6. References for every founder; two to three per person.
7. Business model for three years. This needed to be highly detailed.
8. Employee vesting schedules and expected additional grants.
9. Organization chart for three years that includes legal, contractors, and bank information
10. Exit Deck. This includes valuations of public companies, and possible companies that could purchase the company.
11. Patents. Documents on all patents
12. All Corporate documents
13. Signed forms to agree to background checks