false precision

Entrepreneurs, my advice - bury the team slide.

Since the beginning of the year I have probably seen 15 different "pitch" decks for new startups. There is definitely an art to building these presentations. Get people excited about the opportunity, explain what the product experience is, and entice people to learn more – that's the mission. Twelve slides should be enough, if you have more – try again, you shouldn't need them all.

Curiously, Entrepreneurs that have had past success sometimes lead with a slide (or it's in the first three slides anyway) about who they are, what an amazing team they have attracted, and a story about their past success. I hate that. To me it seems like a crutch, like – I have this idea, it's a little out there so listen here I know what I'm doing "look who I am". Lame.

I think the "team" slide is the last slide in the deck. If you got the meeting in the first place, why lead with how cool you are? You apparently had enough juice to get the meeting. If you don't get the meeting no one sees the slide anyway.

I suspect I know why entrepreneurs are tempted to do this. It's hard when you first start pitching your new idea, you don't tell the story as well you would like to and you may not have a lot of data on how to get the message across – so the temptation is go for the crutch.

My experience is there is no credibility shortcut in your pitch deck, bury the team slide.

VCIR 2009 – A few of my favorite things

I'm up at the Venture Capital in the Rockies Conference today taking in this year of companies presenting for new investment rounds of finance. Several interesting companies presented this year but for me the ones that stood out were:

Alliance Health Networks who build social information vertical web sites that allow people with various medical conditions to collaborate about their affliction but also connects companies marketing to these people a vehicle to their audience. Having spent a good deal of time watching readers interact with publisher web sites I know that medical conditions are a high collaborative effort between site visitors to share ideas. Super intent means super engagement.

Iggli is an interesting idea to remove the barriers to facilitating event ticketing for groups of people. People tend to want to attend concerts and other ticketed events in groups but this always leads to the problem where one person has to foot the bill for everyone and then ends up with not enough or too many tickets (the loser friend syndrome). Iggli leverages the social behavior of scheduling these events in common social tools to facilitate a transaction that everyone can buy themselves but are tied to together for seating. It's cool.

Justin's Nut Butter is a natural peanut butter product in an innovating single serving packet. I think based on the niche they found they will be the next Izzy and the team that Justin has put together suggests that's exactly what he intends to do. Distribution deals with health food staples and Starbucks make this investment look awesome. Plus Justin is really fun to watch talk about peanut butter.

Cocona has built a strong brand for an early stage company producing fibers and now cloth that are built from carbon sourced from Coconut fiber. There are a lot of reasons why this is advantageous but what I like is the strong branding they have done to date. They are following the Goretex model where the material brand eclipses the clothing brand and that provides for a strong annuity stream for the future.

Aspen Avionics builds glass cockpit line replaceable units for existing private aircraft. Their stuff is very affordable and provides greater safety for these pilots. Plus if you know a private pilot they like cool stuff they can afford. Their stuff, installed - is less than 50% the cost of the closer competitor and Aspen is seeing growth in the market downturn.

There were a lot of interesting things I saw today but these are the opportunities I would pursue, IF I did that for a living, which I do not. Personally I think the ideas were stronger than last year. Lot's of fun.