The deck is done. That was never the hard part.
Eleven days out, and the rehearsal keeps going the same way it goes at two in the morning.
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What is actually happening
Everyone helps with the deck. Slide order, the market slide, how to handle the competition question. It is the part that can be worked on in daylight, so it is the part that gets worked on.
Meanwhile the thing that actually decides the room is not on any slide. Experienced investors form a judgment about the founder inside the first couple of minutes, and it is not about the numbers. It is whether this person is in command of their own situation, whether they can hear a hard question without defending, and whether what they say about risk sounds like someone who has looked at it or someone who is hoping nobody asks.
Investors do not fund decks. They fund the mood of the person holding the deck, and that is legible long before slide four.
You cannot fix mood by rehearsing the script more times. Rehearsing it alone tends to make it worse.
What becomes possible
What you want is to walk in and be the calmest person in the room about your own company's problems, because you have already met them.
That comes from having been asked the hardest questions somewhere it was safe to answer badly. The valuation question. The one about the co-founder who left. The one about why the last two quarters looked like that. Once you have answered those out loud a few times, they stop being ambushes and start being conversation.
The founders who close are rarely the ones with the best slides. They are the ones who can be questioned hard and stay in relationship with the person questioning them.
One story
A composite, braided from several founders we have worked with. Details are changed.
Seed extension, eight weeks of runway, second time raising. His deck had been through four advisers and was genuinely good.
In practice he was fine until anyone asked about churn. Then his voice changed, he got faster, and he started explaining. He knew the churn number was the weak spot, and he had built an elaborate answer designed to move past it quickly. Every investor in the room could feel him wanting to move past it quickly, which of course made it the only thing they wanted to discuss.
We did not improve the answer. We worked on him being able to sit inside the question without needing to win it. What he eventually said in the real meeting was close to: that number is bad, here is what we now understand about why, here is what we have changed, and here is what I will know by December.
He told me the partner leaned back at that point and the meeting changed temperature. They led the round. He is fairly sure the churn slide is why.
To walk in grounded, and to close.
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