
Standard Treasury's Series A Pitch Deck - zt
http://blog.zactownsend.com/standard-treasurys-series-a-pitch-deck
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7Figures2Commas
I've seen far worse, but if anything, this demonstrates just how far the
Series A has fallen in today's market. A couple of examples:

"Series A Financials" (slide 14) shows a lot of money going out, but doesn't
detail how the founders think about money coming in.

"Risk & Mitigations" (slide 16) is really lacking for a $10 million Series A
raise, particularly one that involves setting up a new bank. "It takes longer
to ship our software"/"speed up engineering hiring" is particularly amusing if
you've been in software development for any length of time. "If we can't find
the right people"/"work with headhunters and use contractors, as needed" will
be equally amusing to anyone who has had to hire in today's market.

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devanti
I agree. It seemed more like an angel round deck. A startup asking for $10M
series A should already product validation, meaningful traction, and starting
their growth phase. This had none of that. The only thing they had going for
them was YC and a strong brand of previous investors.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
To be fair to Standard Treasury, the pitch ("we're building a new kind of
bank") is an unusual one for traditional technology investors, so product
validation, traction, etc. are probably going to be less important to the
investors who are interested in evaluating this further.

But even so, the detail is quite lacking and there's not a lot that instills
confidence that this company has what it takes break into a highly-regulated
market dominated by institutions with billions of dollars in capital and more
and better technology resources than the founders would like to believe.
Building a viable new bank is not a $10 million proposition, so as an investor
my first question would be: how much are you going to need to raise in the
next several years for this to even have a shot?

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britknight
When I try to find the Standard Treasury homepage to get a better idea of what
it's trying to accomplish (by following the link from OP's blog), all I see is
an empty blog site. Is this because they are trying to keep a low web profile?
It seems a little odd to me.

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morgante
I get a certificate error. That's pretty egregious for banking software.

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joeschmo3732
My understanding is that Standard Treasury's Series A raise was unsuccessful
and the team was acqui-hired by SVB.

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morgante
Shouldn't that be disclosed in this post?

If that's true, this deck is more an example of what not to do than what to
do.

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snowmaker
I found this fascinating, particularly the discussion about why the US market
is so unfriendly that they decided to start in the UK. The way the team shared
their full thought process going through all the alternatives I found very
compelling.

Thanks for sharing, Zach

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deet
I'd like to thank zt for posting this and wish him and his team the best of
luck in whatever is happening. Hopefully this helps offset the negativity
regarding the deck itself and the uncertainly about the upcoming announcement
being reflected elsewhere in this thread.

This type of release, especially if it accompanies either a retrospective or a
post-mortem (as appropriate), can be very helpful for the rest of us in the
community and should be encouraged.

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pbreit
It's a shame there aren't any forward-enough-thinking US banks that would make
a reasonable partner for this type of effort. In the long run, owning the bank
is a better asset but I wonder if a more prudent strategy would be proving out
the value first. Maybe like a Tesla or PayPal strategy.

