Startups

VC Lotti Siniscalco shares dos and don’ts in the Pitch Deck Teardown at TC Early Stage

Comment

Perfect pitch, a singer’s ability to produce any given musical note without a reference tone, is a rare phenomenon — only 1-5 people out of every 10,000 have it. While your odds of creating a perfect pitch deck that captures coveted VC interest aren’t quite that dire, they’re not exactly in your favor, either.

Venture capital shattered records around the world in Q4 2021. The number of startups seeking funding increased 33% YOY, and the time investors spent looking at individual pitch decks dropped to an all-time low: 2 minutes and 28 seconds. That’s a 12% decrease from the previous year.

When competition for investor time and attention is this intense, you need a stand-out pitch deck. It’s the most powerful tool you have to convince investors they should schedule a meeting to learn more about you, your product and your company. 

The road to a perfect pitch deck is paved with countless revisions, and a source of constructive, expert feedback can be invaluable. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Carlotta “Lotti” Siniscalco, a partner at Emergence Capital, will lead an interactive session called Pitch Deck Teardown at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 14.

During this session, Siniscalco will dissect and critique actual work-in-progress pitch decks submitted by audience members. She’ll call out which elements work and which ones fall flat — and she’ll explain why on both counts.

Siniscalco is the first female partner at Emergence Capital, and she earned that distinction as a result of the extraordinary impact she’s had on the firm, the team and EC’s portfolio companies. She invests in early-stage enterprise software companies, and her portfolio includes Convex, High Alpha, Oyster, Talent Hack and Whistic.

Prior to joining Emergence, Siniscalco served at Advent International — a large global private equity fund — as an investor in financial services and financial technology companies and also as an observer on the Transunion board.

Her early career, which began as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, includes a stint in the BizOps group at Nerdwallet and as an early-stage investor at Ribbit Capital, a fintech-focused VC.

A pitch deck has but one job: get the meeting. It’s the entry point for everything you want to come next. Take advantage of this opportunity to look at pitch decks from an investor’s point of view. Join Lotti Siniscalco and learn the mission-critical dos and don’ts for building a perfect pitch deck. 

TC Early Stage sessions provide plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. Register now before $249 founder tickets sell out!

More TechCrunch

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats; unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Beslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in the town, and it’s from Instagram…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools

European Union enforcers of the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), said Thursday they’re closely monitoring disinformation campaigns on the Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter)…

EU ‘closely’ monitoring X in wake of Fico shooting as DSA disinfo probe rumbles on

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can…

Spoor uses AI to save birds from wind turbines

The key to taking on legacy players in the financial technology industry may be to go where they have not gone before. That’s what Chicago-based Aeropay is doing. The provider…

Cannabis industry and gaming payments startup Aeropay is now offering an alternative to Mastercard and Visa