Christoph Janz, co-founder and managing partner at Point Nine Capital, on how to put together a bulletproof fundraising deck.
You’ve spent hours in PowerPoint, toiled over spreadsheets, drafted and redrafted copy, created beautiful charts. Your fundraising deck is ready to go.
Yet no matter how much time, energy and love you pour into it, it’s all too easy to put off the very investors you want to appeal to. Since VCs spend hours studying decks, they have finely tuned BS antennae and can spot an error or exaggeration a mile off.
The following tips and tricks are easy to implement and should help you to bulletproof your deck.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
There are so many ways to twist the truth when it comes to statistics. Heck, there’s even a book called ‘How to lie with statistics’. And when it comes to charts in your deck, with a little creativity it’s possible to convey different messages with the same dataset. For example, you might be tempted to disguise a lacklustre growth curve by compressing the X-axis and stretching the Y-axis. Still not steep enough? Cut off a part of the Y-axis. Or what if your chart for new signups per month doesn’t look great? Just show the number of cumulative signups instead. These are some of the sneaky tricks people get up to to flatter their numbers. I wouldn’t recommend it....