Khosla’s Adina Tecklu breaks down how to nail your pitch

Pitching is perhaps the single most important skill that any founder needs to hone, so not surprisingly, we kicked off our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 — Marketing & Fundraising event with a deep dive on all the tips and tricks required to get the most out of pitching and slide decks. On hand was Adina Tecklu, a principal at Khosla Ventures, and who formerly built out Canaan Beta, the consumer seed practice at Canaan Partners.

We talked about the importance of knowing your customer (aka your potential investor), focusing on story, typical slides in a deck, the appendix slides, formatting, and then alternative formats and which to avoid in a pitch deck.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

Know your customer, in this case, your investor

We kicked off our discussion with advice that remains as valuable as it is obvious. Even today, despite the wealth of resources available on the internet to background research potential investors, founders regularly walk into their pitch meetings like deer in headlights with no sense of that particular investor’s interests, tastes, stage of investment and more. Don’t be that founder.

Key number one is know your audience. The best founders understand their users, whether that is an end consumer, or an enterprise customer. They’ve done the research to understand what motivates their customers, how they make buying decisions, and also what their customers like and don’t like as much about their own product. When fundraising, your VC essentially becomes your customer. And so before you begin pitching, or even building your deck, it’s really important to do your research beforehand to understand the firms and the partners that you intend to pitch. (Timestamp: 2:25)

If you do that right,

That knowledge allows you to proactively address any concerns that they might have. And really make sure that you position your business in a way that is both authentic, but in a way that will be well received by the VC. (Timestamp: 3:20)

Story-driven, not data-driven

Data is the most important source of wisdom in Silicon Valley, or so the belief holds. But the reality, particularly in early-stage investing, is that the data can only paint a partial picture of a startup and a founder’s ambition. Don’t let a dense copse of trees occlude the wider forest, which is what investors are really investing in.

A common misconception that we see all the time is that founders will say, “Well, VCs really love data, they love numbers. And so I’m going to present a lot of data to you on a bunch of jam-packed slides,” and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you do that. What you want to do instead, is you want to tell a cohesive story, and leverage data to substantiate your story, if and when that data is available. (Timestamp: 5:40)

Not surprisingly,

The first couple of minutes of the presentation are the most critical. Within the first one to two minutes, an investor has in most cases decided, is this something they’re going to lean into? (Timestamp: 9:00)

What slides should be included in a typical pitch deck?

So what’s a good flow? I’m going to caveat this by saying that there is no one right way to do this. But I would say that a high percentage of the top pitches that I see have a slide on each of these points in roughly this order. (Timestamp: 9:40)

Tecklu then went over each slide that a typical pitch deck includes:

  • Title
  • Problem
  • Solution
  • Why Now?
  • Market Dynamics
  • Competitive Landscape
  • Business Model
  • Bold Vision
  • Team
  • Financials
  • Ask

Tecklu discussed in-depth a bunch of these slides, but I’ll highlight a few interesting tactical nuggets.

First, with the Problem slide, she argued that this is an important one to get right, since it sets the tone for much of the rest of the deck that follows.

It’s so critical to frame the problem from your perspective. And I also think that this is a really great opportunity to introduce emotion to really build a more compelling story. (Timestamp: 11:00)

Second, with the Competitive Landscape slide:

I encourage all founders to address competition head on. [ … ] There are definitely categories that are noisier than others. There’s some categories where there’s sort of a “king” or “queen” of the category and then a long tail and that king or queen of the category is often the white elephant in the room. And I’ll see founders just try to avoid it altogether, or react really defensively. The best thing to do is to present the competitive landscape: Who do you perceive to be both direct and indirect? Compare competition, and react offensively. (Timestamp: 13:53)

Third, with the Team slide:

Sometimes, I see founders just sort of skip over the team or sort of include it as part of the checklist. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes that you can make, because particularly at the early stages, so much of what we’re investing in is the team. And it’s not just logos and headshots, but it’s really giving us an understanding of why is this team, the best team to tackle this problem, of everyone in the world? (Timestamp: 15:11)

We had lots of discussion on each of these points, so definitely read the transcript or watch the video to get all the tactical advice slide-by-slide.

The appendix is your best friend

One of Tecklu’s key arguments is that the main pitch deck should be incredibly narrative focused, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share any key data as part of a presentation. Instead, use the appendix slides to communicate key data around areas of a business that receive more skepticism or concern.

The appendix should be your best friend. You want to be concise on what you include here [with your main pitch deck]. But for any sort of points of skepticism that may arise in your business or any questions that the investor will have, you want to use an appendix to be able to address each of them. You’re able to actually jam-pack those slides with more data and more information, etc. on the appendix side. So please, please, please use that as your sort of secret weapon. (Timestamp: 19:23)

Formatting is absolutely critical

Now, for perhaps the most interesting or shocking part of the presentation. Tecklu argued that while the high-level narrative and data was critical for pitch success, it’s actually the very small formatting details that can rapidly derail a presentation.

I think founders would be shocked to know how much we pay attention to the formatting, whether they’re using the correct punctuation, whether the color scheme makes sense, whether there’s enough margin and whitespace on the deck. I have one partner, if there is not enough margin on the slides, he’s checked out, you’ve completely lost him. [ … ] There’s so little data that we have to go off of, and so we’re looking for signal in other places. [ … ] So please, please, please, double, triple, quadruple check all of these things. (Timestamp: 20:22)

Different formats of pitch decks and when to use them

We took some questions from the audience, and one of the questions zeroed in on the proliferating number of formats of pitch decks and when it makes sense to use each type. Tecklu said:

There’s typically a couple of different decks. There’s one deck that you’ll typically use for the first meeting with an investor at a firm and the goal of that one is to get the investor interested enough to lean forward and want to do diligence and spend more time. That deck will also be quite similar to the deck that you will probably use whenever you’re presenting to the entire partnership — at the end of the diligence process, usually, to sort of get final confirmation and hopefully get a term sheet. Oftentimes, during diligence, there will be another deck that is less of the storytelling and has … a lot of the information that you’re seeing in the appendix slides. (Timestamp: 25:06)

That said, don’t be annoying and create very short formats that don’t allow investors to make any sort of decision about a startup.

I think the teaser deck, or refusing to show the deck, is oftentimes more frustrating than it is effective. (Timestamp: 26:46)

But there is balance between giving too much information and not enough. Tecklu noted that key intellectual property of a startup doesn’t need to be included, particularly in the earliest decks.

You definitely don’t want to put the most proprietary thing about your company in the initial deck that you send out. (Timestamp: 29:40)

Finally, we talked about video presentations and demos much later in the discussion.

I think those kinds of things, the video pitches, the investment memos, not creating a deck, those can work for some founders, but I would say for the vast majority of founders, I still think the pitch deck is the most effective type of delivery. (Timestamp: 31:31)

Tecklu is a fan of pitch decks, except for product demos, where they can be done live once you have built up a rapport with an investor. However, that advice changes at the final stages of fundraising:

When you’re presenting to the partnership, right before you’re at the term-sheet stage, I actually encourage a lot of founders to do a video recording of the product demo and speak over it. (Timestamp: 31:04)

In other words: don’t blow it at the last moment!

You can read the entire transcript here.