Every founder thinks their pitch deck is good, until the silence hits. Priya, a second-time founder out of Melbourne, sent her polished Canva deck to 20 VCs. Not a single reply. Not even a “No thanks.” Why this matters Most Aussie founders are terrible at pitch decks. And that’s okay, you’re meant to build companies,… Read more »
The following section is an excerpt from The Fundraising Blueprint by Abhishek Maran, focused on crafting your narrative and structuring your pitch deck. Fundraising is an emotional process, especially at the early stage. You need investors to feel a certain level of affinity towards you and your startup to stand a chance. Some people are natural… Read more »
The truth is, a lot of the startups undertaking a capital raise don’t meet the minimum investor expectations for their chosen funding pathway. Rather than reflecting on their readiness or taking responsibility for this, many founders blame investors instead (I wrote an article on it here). But here’s the reality: raising capital is a process,… Read more »
Imagine presenting in a pitch meeting and your audience is stifling yawns, checking their devices as you talk, and finally they walk out of the meeting with deafening silence. It is in these meetings that the power of storytelling has often been overlooked. I speak from experience having been in the audience of these presentations.… Read more »
This time last year, Chaz and I were in the closing stages of our $7m Seed round. From the outside, raising capital may seem… exciting and sexy? That’s the Instagram version, you know it well. The reality is it’s an all-consuming and exhausting grind with zero margin for failure and the potential of changing an… Read more »
Imagine walking into a room of investors feeling confident, calm and certain that you’ll put your best pitch forward. When the stakes are high – and one meeting could make or break what happens to your business next – it can be challenging to feel this way. The key to feeling confident is preparation, and… Read more »
I coach founders every week on how to hold more effective investor meetings, and there’s one recurring problem: founders wasting time chasing investors who don’t fit. Sound familiar? Success isn’t pitching your startup. The path to fundraising success starts with making sure the investor is right for you. You have the right – and responsibility… Read more »
Ask most startups why they want to scale and the answer is often the same – to make a bigger impact. The hard part is ‘how’. Early-stage startup NanoCube Health has a global vision: to early detect and treat cancer using cutting-edge nanotechnology. Their innovation has the potential to save lives. Follow founders Lisa Milani… Read more »
I often hear founders say “Australian VCs are so conservative, they all want traction before they’ll invest! You have to go to the US!”. While the idea that you must go to the US for funding merits a longer write-up, let’s talk about VCs asking for traction. VCs, like most people, can be bad communicators.… Read more »
For better or for worse, some small things can make you look like a beginner when pitching to VCs. During my time at Square Peg as a senior associate, I’ve seen plenty of things founders and startups do well, but also don’t, during their pitches. So here are my top five things to avoid –… Read more »
Our lives are becoming increasingly data driven. Our phones monitor our time and internet usage and online surveys discern our opinions and likes. These data harvests are used for telling us how well we’ve slept or what we might like to buy. Numbers are becoming more important for everyday life, yet people’s numerical skills are… Read more »
The team at Sydney VC firm Folklore are sharing some of their insights on the investment process to give founders, particularly early founders, an insight into how to approach VC engagement from your first conversation through to what to expect from your VC after receiving your first cheque, or even rejection. In part one of… Read more »
Before you start pitching, roleplay the investor perspective Pitches need to be given from the perspective of the investor. These things are too often forgotten The investor’s job is to make a financial return for their investors. They get thousands of pitches per year. This means they are distracted and also that they’ve probably heard… Read more »
At an accelerator demo day, nobody comes planning to invest in all the startups in the cohort. The goals are to sort the wheat from the chaff, and to consider whether to begin a dialogue with the best of the startups pitching. What if you don’t believe you’re the best in your cohort on the… Read more »
Dr Vikram Palit is a paediatric doctor and the founder of Consultmed, a digital referral platform that’s shaking up the system of paper referrals in the healthcare system. He writes for Startup Daily about his mission to axe the fax. In the time of COVID-19, we have seen a transformation in the way healthcare is… Read more »
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