investors, venture-capital, pitch, seedI have been asked to provide an investor deck to a larger venture capital firm in order to be considered for seed funding. I am assuming the deck will be an initial consideration to see whether they are interested in finding out more info, organising a meeting or even allowing me to pitch. However, I am unsure about how much detail needs to be included in my investor deck.
My understanding is that the difference between a pitch deck and an investor deck is that a pitch deck is a lot more visual as it is to be used when pitching and thus is explained by your own verbal words in your pitch.
Whereas an investor deck, which is usually shared via email, contains more text to back up the visuals as you will not be present when the potential investor is considering your deck to verbally explain your deck.
Am I correct in my thinking here?
If so what sort of structure should a pitch deck take vs. an investor deck and what sort of detail should I go into?
Our investor deck and pitch deck were quite different.
Investor deck is far more explicit. Has text on it where the pitch deck is highly visual because I don’t want people reading my slides while they should be paying attention to what I am saying.
Also each pitch is different, as you are doing it for varying reasons to varying audiences.
Our investor deck had the following pages:
The above isn’t all necessary for a seed raise in detail. but if you can show you have at least considered these things it will help
In this context, I would consider a pitch deck and an investor deck the same thing. However, a pitch deck is different for different people. Are you pitching an enterprise as a customer or a partner? Are you pitching an investor? So an investor deck is just a pitch deck made for investors. The investor is not going to know whether you changed the deck for them because you are sending over email, so ultimately it is your decision whether you want your main pitch deck to look a little different when sending over email to an investor.
Remember that at this early stage, the main thing the investor is looking to invest in is an interesting team. They are vetting for technical skills and decision making skills.
-What is the team experience? How well do they work together?
-What is the problem? How big of a problem is it? How is the problem being solved?
-How are you going to make money? Does it make sense? How long will it take for the company to make money?
After you answer these questions, the rest is just about showing off. Do you have a product? Can I touch it? How many other people are using it?
Once you have convinced the investor regarding all of these questions, they may want to have the deck to help them convince the rest of their team that you are a good investment (typically it is a group decision championed by the VC you speak with). If they decide to pass, they may just want the deck so they can track your progress.
PS: My experience is that I raised about $1m for my current startup at 25 Y.O.
As far as I know there is no difference between a pitch deck and an investor deck.
I think you mixed up a pitch deck with regular pitch slides. It's true that regular pitch slides (which you use to present your company to an audience) is more visual and doesn't include a lot of details.
Perhaps you should check this out: 40 Best Pitch Decks Of 2017
Hope this helps, good luck!
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