Do You Need A Deck To Raise From VCs? Not Always

With all the attention on the front of the account (and more than 80 articles on the topic), you'd think that startups couldn't raise money from business angels or institutional investors without them. This is not entirely true. Here, because.

If you have a big enough investment history, you will need a comprehensive business plan to secure funding from institutional investors. The Harvard Business Review has a great guide on how to build one. The exact details of what is included in a business plan vary, but often include history, market analysis, strategy, product and service descriptions, organizational charts, competitive analysis, management team, financial plans and projections, and any research support for each. . head

That's fine, but by the time you're done with all of this, your business plan will have ballooned onto the pages of a novel, and that's before you've even added all the charts and maps. Business plans are great for learning the basics and dynamics of your business, and business plan mistakes are a great way to show future business owners how to avoid problems before they happen.

The problem is that it will run out before the ink is dry and the financials will be inaccurate until you hit. It's not that startups operate in a different dynamic than other companies, but in fact they are the agile equivalent of an ancient dinosaur. Build, test, iterate.

In essence, the startup was similar to today's software development; instead of spending six months writing a full product specification that would be wrong before writing a single line of code, you run a simplified version of the product MVP and edit from there. . .

There are proponents of writing a business plan differently, including Guy Kawasaki, whose "you only need 10 characters" argument is perhaps a little far from deep minimalism, but at least it does more to create a narrative in that vein. 90's business plan page. Simply put, it's an agile software development business plan for waterfall software development.

Since then, as the market has continued to grow, some founders have decided not to use a deck at all.

"This story is very important," said Tom Hacohen, CEO of webhook-as-a-service company Svix, which recently secured a non-funding round from Andreessen Horowitz. “Investors are not webhook experts, so they need to understand the story. To do that, we had to tell a great story, and when we did that, they really got down to business. They understood our standards and started interacting with most of our customers. At that point, the deck will only help guide them through what they already know.

Let's see how to tell your company's story without leaning on a deck.

Need a stack of VC raises? Not Always Haye Jan Kamps was originally posted on TechCrunch

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