advice Archives - Carlos Eduardo Espinal

The Perfect Team Slide And Why It Matters

Originally posted on Netocratic.com on July 2, 2014

When an investors considers your company for investment at the earliest stages, who you are is so much more important than your idea. Your team is such a crucial part of your company’s success, and yet many teams omit their team slide or bludgeon it because they don’t feel they have anything interesting to add other than team photos and a job-title.

What’s worse is when pitching, founders usually just point to the team slide, and say something like – here is our team, we have lots of rockstars or something generic like that. And that’s it…

Wow.. way to undersell who you are!

Let’s look at what the major selling points of a team slide should be:

1. To show a team’s capability to deliver

Basically, does your team know anything about what you are doing. If you are a healthcare company, do you have a healthcare background? If you are making something for the financial industry, have any of your team members worked there? What companies have your team worked in that can validate you? If you’ve worked at Google before, for example, it would be worthwhile to put that company logo up on your team slide because the image of the brand would speak faster to your audience, than any number of words you could say in the same time frame.

2. To show a team’s capacity to deliver

Are you effectively complete or incomplete as a team? Is your team mostly business people but lacking the technical capabilities to deliver or is your team well rounded and able to execute? If your company industry requires an amazing specialist, do you have that specialist? By the way, do not assume that it is a bad thing to admit you are looking to hire for specific functions you don’t currently have in an early stage startup, it shows maturity and your team’s self-awareness, although you don’t have to state it as part of your pitch (just saying, in case it is asked as a question).

3. To show a team’s culture & communication style

What is your company like? Is it a fun place to work in or is the tone more serious? What ‘titles’ do people have? How many of your team are outward facing and how many inward facing? These details are all items that an investor can pick up on based on your team slide.

In terms of where your team slide should be… there is not hard and fast rule, but I’ve found that if you are building something born out of a personal experience at your prior job or of interest.. it makes for a decent early slide to explain the background to your story/pitch. If you are building something that isn’t part of your background story, then where the slide sits is more about flow. Focus on telling a good story that is complemented by your team slide rather than the other way around.

So next time you are doing a presentation in front of investors… ask yourself, are you doing your team slide justice?

The Fundraising Mindset

Originally posted on Netocratic.com

Fundraising is not easy. It is one of the most frustrating and time draining activities you as a founder will have to do as part of your company’s growth strategy. Unless you are really lucky and investors come to you, it will likely involve taking many meetings with investors of all kinds, both good and bad before you ultimately succeed in finding someone who believes in you.

You will likely meet many types of investors along the process of fundraising, including:

Investors that doubt you as a founder/ceo, and your capabilities to execute.
Investors that are just meeting with you because they want to invest in your competitor.
Investors that don’t have the money to invest but want to be seen to be active by the ecosystem.
Investors that will want every inch of detail about what you will be doing for the next 5 years, when you both know your projections will be speculative at best and hogwash at worst.
Investors that don’t get what you do at all, but will have an opinion about your product because their child or spouse has a view on what you do.
Investors that are amazing and give you insanely relevant advice, but unfortunately say you aren’t far along enough traction-wise for their fund’s investment focus.
Investors that provide you with great feedback and would help you greatly if they were involved, but will only invest if someone else leads the round.

…And then… there is the one investor who ultimately believes in you and backs you. That’s all it takes. Just one.

The earlier the stage your company is in, the more that successful fundraising is about personal human connections and story telling. At the early stages of your business, as much as some investors will want to know your projected numbers (revenues, traction, etc), because there is so little to go on, it will always come back to your inherent abilities and vision as a founder. As such, fundraising meetings are mostly the way that founders can assess investors for value-add to their startup, but also for investors to see if they can work with the founders and to see how they think.
Because of this mutual assessment by both founders and investors during fundraising meetings, an analogy that people use frequently to describe the fundraising process is that of dating. As funny as it may seem, I do think the comparison works well…

Dating and fundraising

For example, in dating (as with fundraising):

You have to be willing to put yourself out there to meet anyone in the first place.
It’s a numbers game: you have to meet many people, this can be at in-person at networking events, parties, or online.
Connections usually happen in the least likely of places and are strongest when they come through a trusted 3^rd party.
Being a good story teller gets people to laugh, open up, and remember you.
Chemistry matters.
Sometimes its just plain luck: being at the right place at the right time.
The better you prepare yourself, the better your odds get.
Being too eager to get back to someone or waiting too long can end things prematurely.
You have to go on several dates with several people before you ultimately feel someone is the right one for you.

Therefore, the fundraising mindset is really about four core things:

Understanding that fundraising is a process and that it will take time. Only a very few are lucky to have it be quick and painless.
You have to embrace rejection as part of the process and not take it as a personal rejection.
Treat every meeting as a form of practice that is merely making you better for the next meeting, rather than putting the full importance of any one meeting on your shoulders and beating yourself up if it goes badly.
Analysing what was said during your meetings and learning how to improve on your mistakes is the most crucial aspect of reducing the time it takes until you find the right investor.

As you will likely never know where, when and how you will meet your future investor… as you go through this process, just remind yourself: Good news, Bad news – you never know…

The Fundraising mindset from Carlos Espinal