How to raise funds for a business? Where to look for investors and what to put in a pitch deck? Take a look at the preparation for a VC meeting in the article below.
The Main Tips on Preparation for a VC Meeting
Entrepreneurs who are looking for investment in the development of their products often have to write cold letters to venture capital funds. Usually, this ends in nothing – serious investors receive too many similar offers. What you need to focus on in order to stand out in the flow of projects and letters, and what you should not focus on. Take a look at the main steps in preparing for a VC meeting:
- If you want to catch an investor, you need to think like an investor. It is better to understand in what context it is.
- The VC has to do hundreds of meetings that don’t result in investment and read at least ten times as many emails asking for a meeting.
- Venture investments are mainly carried out by funds or eminent business angels.
To raise money from a venture capital firm, a corporate fund, or a business angel, startup founders have to consider everything – both the confusion that can reign in corporations and the preferences of investors. In most cases, investors who receive a lot of emails from startups with offers of deals make a decision in a matter of seconds.
Venture capital funds often prevent getting too close to large corporations because, firstly, they do not believe in them and, secondly, they do not understand their role as value-added investors. It is fair to admit that not all corporate venture funds keep their value-adding promises. But when they behave decently, it serves as a powerful impetus to accelerate the development of a startup. It’s funny that while some VCs say they’ll “never” accept corporate funding, others say “always.”
Advice from the Gurus of the Venture World on a VC Meeting
Investors are constantly meeting with entrepreneurs, and they evaluate even more presentations remotely. Perhaps the meeting with the startup was scheduled several weeks in advance due to a tight schedule, or the project was rejected early and then resumed negotiations. You should not take to heart the situation when an investor looks at a project as if seeing it for the first time.
During the pandemic, there are many wealthier people who want to become venture capitalists than before due to the increasing fashion for everything digital and the decrease in the profitability of traditional investment vehicles. Venture capitalists, especially early-stage investors, often base their decisions on personal relationships. Surely, startups have heard more than once that investors treat their obligations like a marriage and that they choose long and carefully with whom they are ready to connect their lives.
Investors can be divided into two categories: business angels and large venture capital funds. The former invest in companies at an early stage, while funds are looking at projects at a more advanced stage of development. In the next few years, there will be a growing need for products and services to help corporations improve the accuracy of their data mining. For example, in the past, employees had to manually copy data from damaged and poorly scanned documents and transfer them to a corporate database.