‘Stay in touch means no’: Five VCs reveal what they really think about your startup pitches

Photo credit: WOCinTech

The following is an edited excerpt from The Entrepreneurial Bible To Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from the Leaders in the Startup Game, a book written by Andrew Romans. The excerpt is provided by McGraw-Hill Education. You can buy a copy here.

Matt Rosoff, former West Coast Editor for Business Insider SAI, conveys some venture capitalists’ feedback on pitches:

• Introductions matter. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital says that the person introducing the entrepreneur is a big deal. If he doesn’t trust the referral, he won’t even take the meeting.

• Keep it short. Rothrock has seen more than 10,000 pitches, and the best ones are short and to the point. Kopelman also told about his successful pitch for Half.com, which gave users an online marketplace to sell used books. He simply asked how many people had read a book by a popular author. Nearly every hand went up. Then he asked how many wanted to read it again. Nobody raised a hand. Done. The rest was details.

• Answer questions quickly without getting defensive. Both Rothrock and Bill Maris of Google Ventures said that entrepreneurs need to answer questions quickly and simply. VCs are trying to assess risk, and if you don’t help them, they can’t help you. Maris is particularly turned off by people who get defensive during Q&As. He ends up concentrating on their attitude instead of their company.

• Be a good storyteller. Kopelman says that most successful entrepreneurs are great storytellers. They have to be able to get investors to believe in their crazy idea, and then convince employees to sign on and the press to write about it. Senkut agreed; it’s easy for entrepreneurs to inspire their first few employees with stock options or founding titles. But inspiring the 50th or 100th employee requires a great story.

• Avoid buzzwords. Lots of buzzwords are immediate death, says Kopelman. As he put it, he didn’t pitch Half.com by saying it was an online peer-to-peer marketplace for monetization of underutilized printed matter assets (or words to that effect). If he had, it wouldn’t have worked.

• Know the people you’re pitching. Rothrock said that entrepreneurs should know everything about the VCs they’re pitching: where they live (“as long as you don’t drop by”), their dog’s name, their hot-button issues. Senkut agreed: do your research and try to make personal connections.

• Don’t forget the financial info. This may seem obvious, but Rothrock said that he sees a lot of pitches with no financial information about the company. Big mistake. Think big or don’t bother. Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital points out that VCs need to be convinced that they’re investing in a company that has the potential to be huge. A business might be perfectly successful if it gets to $80 million in revenue in five years, but it won’t help the typical VC fund return its investors’ money. If you can’t convince yourself that your company has huge potential, seek money elsewhere.

• “Stay in touch” means “no.” So says Maris.

• Forget saving the world. One audience member asked whether VCs give a little slack to startups that are trying to do good. “I discount them,” said Maris. It’s not that VCs are all individually callous, although some are, but their job is making good investments for their limited partners. For this goal, there’s only one fair way to measure the value of a company, and that’s the discounted value of expected future cash flow. There are other sources of funding, like the Gates Foundation or Google.org, for companies that are more socially oriented.