As a Venture Partner at a VC fund, I've reviewed hundreds of pitch decks in my time. In fact most funds will receive thousands of decks a year, with only a small fraction leading to conversations and even fewer resulting in investments. With those kinds of odds, your pitch deck needs to be exceptional - think 8 or 9 out of 10 - to stand out.
Back in 2005, I wrote my first book—and learned the hard way why traditional publishing isn’t for everyone. The book, one of the first on CSS design, was published with Apress and turned out well, but the experience of working with the publisher was anything but fun.
As a startup founder, shutting down your business will be one of the hardest decisions you'll ever have to make. However sometimes it's also the smartest option. Especially if you're able to close things down gracefully, give folks a good severance package and potentially return some unused funds to investors; not to mention gaining back some valuable time. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs refuse to admit defeat and keep pouring resources into a failing endeavour. The tendency for people to double down in the face of growing negative evidence is known in behavioural psychology as "escalating commitment to a losing strategy". In this short article I highlight a few of the common cognitive biases that help make this happen.
As a newly minted Venture Partner I’ve seen a few hundred pitches and pitch decks the past 12 months. While this is nothing compared with some of my peers, I’ve noticed a few clear patterns start to emerge. Patterns which, if founders were better prepared, would significantly increase their chances of securing investment.
As a Seedcamp Venture Partner, start-up advisor and occasional angel investor, I’ve found myself looped in to an increasing number of investor updates of late. While I’m by no means an expert in managing investor relations, I’ve spotted a few common patterns that make these updates a joy to read from an investor perspective, while allowing founders to get the most out of their investor and advisor networks. Let’s start with the basics…
While investors seem to be going all in on Web3 at the moment, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend that has its roots firmly in the Web 2.0 era — namely the Multi-Player Web. Before exploring this trend in more detail, I thought it would be worth taking a quick step back to explore where it originated from.