Pitching is the single most important skill a founder needs to refine to be successful in building a startup. You can’t attract a co-founder, teammates, customers or investors without a well-crafted pitch about your product and vision, and so learning how to pitch and communicate effectively tends to be the first gateway to early entrepreneurial success.
While books and talks galore have been published on pitching, the reality is that the art of the pitch deck is a constantly changing fashion. The pandemic last year upended notions of how to draft a deck, given that founders had to pitch virtually on shared screens. As always, those aesthetics continue to change: VCs are busier than ever, seeing more companies than ever, and have to wade through ever more decks in their quest to find the next startups to back.
As we enter a hybrid investing world with a mix of online and in-person pitching, getting the pitch deck right has changed again — and remains just as important as ever.
That’s why we’re excited to be hosting Mar Hershenson, the founding managing partner of Pear VC, on one of our most perennially popular panels — How to Craft Your Pitch Deck, which will happen on the Extra Crunch stage at the all-virtual TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 coming up this September 21-23.
Hershenson has been a longtime venture capitalist and has consistently invested at the founding stages of startups. She has backed IPO’d companies like Guardant Health and DoorDash, as well as startups such as Aurora Solar, BioAge and Branch. Perhaps most importantly, in our survey of founders last year, Hershenson was one of the top-ranked VCs in the world in terms of founder recommendations.
Her background is as a technical builder and entrepreneur. In addition to nabbing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, Hershenson co-founded three companies before heading into venture: Barcelona Design, Sabio Labs and Revel Touch.
On this panel, Hershenson will discuss what’s changed when it comes to pitch decks in 2021, how she evaluates pitch decks in her day-to-day investing work, and whether and how pitch decks evolve and expand from first connection to final pitch meeting. We’ll also be taking questions from the audience to ensure that we cover all the strategies and tactics you have questions on about this critical skill.
So come join Hershenson (and all of our other fantastic speakers) at Disrupt 2021 online this September 21-23.
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