
Immad Akhund (YC W09): How to write a killer deck and get funded - aston
http://vator.tv/news/2010-12-14-how-to-write-a-killer-deck-and-get-funded
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pg
Immad is one of the best at fundraising of all the alumni, so whatever he has
to say about the topic is worth listening to.

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brlewis
Should this deck deck be on the library page?
<http://ycombinator.com/lib.html>

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pg
I put it there; thanks for the suggestion.

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joshu
I hate seeing decks. Especially the "market size" slide. Curiously, I invested
in Immad's startup -- but they never showed me a deck :)

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immad
Different investors need a different approach :)

VCs do mostly require some sort of deck.

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joshu
:)

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khafra
I guess "when not to use a deck, and get funded" is the next lesson.

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netcan
Any suggestions for dealing with holes?

What if the team is incomplete? What if the traction isn't there yet or isn't
exponential? What if the market is smaller, vaguer or harder to quantify? etc.

Any strategies? Skip that slide? fudge? brutal honesty?

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immad
No one is perfect so there will be some holes in all things.

Don't skip over slides or avoid the truth but deal with emphasizing the
positives. So if you have been growing 50% per month for 3 months but you only
have one inexperienced founder, put the team slide at the end and talk about
the traction early and how you have got there.

Also generally every hole will drop a certain number of investors and decrease
the overall valuation.

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ig1
It's a shame that so few "real" decks are out there, I'm in the process of
writing a deck at the moment and am thinking about making a public (maybe a
"review my deck"), but I'm not sure if the amount I'm going to have to redact
will make it worthless.

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ryanwaggoner
Does the sample deck given presume that the investors already know what the
hell you do? Because it would annoy me to have to wait until we were several
slides in (to the demo) to find out what the product is.

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fatemayasmine22
1st slide: what makes you the right person to execute this idea.

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ryanwaggoner
Yes, but what is the idea in question? Paul Buchheit could dazzle investors
with his background and accomplishments and even detail his expertise in the
email or social space and still be no closer to telling them what he plans on
actually building.

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mark_h
I'd still be pretty close to funding Paul Buchheit if he was pitching me!

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ztan
"Internet high five. Place hand here" Did anyone else actually touch their
screen after seeing that?

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suhail
No but I smiled :-)

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rokhayakebe
Is there a company that did not get funded because of a horrible deck?

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zacharycohn
I'm sure plenty. Even if a company has a great idea and an awesome product, if
they can't sell it to someone, they can't sell it to them. If you are
presenting a deck to someone, it'll reflect on the whole company and product.

Awesome deck = maybe an awesome company. Crappy deck = they couldn't spend
time making it nicer, probably not worth your time.

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Nate75Sanders
Nice article/slides.

One correction: Slide 4 says "more then" -- should be "more than"

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guynamedloren
That deck is so fucking generic it's not even funny. I actually laughed out
loud at the hockey stick line. What ever happened to creativity and
innovation?

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immad
Hard to not be generic when covering a broad subject within 500 words and to a
generic audience. Happy to give specific advice if you have questions.

