How To Make A Good Investor Presentation
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Every time you have a meeting with a venture capitalist you should be prepared to present a stock PowerPoint presentation that explains your business. You will definitely be expected to deliver a PowerPoint presentation in your first meeting and may be expected to present it again at future meetings when pitching to new partners or diving deep into a particular topic covered by one of your slides.
To clarify, your executive summary is not an appropriate document for these meetings. The brevity of the executive summary makes it only suited for getting you the meeting, the PowerPoint presentation is used to provide more information about your company in meetings thereafter.
While the PowerPoint presentation should address all of the same topics of the executive summary, there are differences between the two documents.
First, the PowerPoint should be largely graphical, where as the executive summary should only include text. Graphics should be used where ever possible to communicate your message as these slides will most likely be delivered by you or your partners, meaning that someone will be able to explain them. Too much text can distract the investors from listening to you and your team or, even worse, lead them to ignore the slides all together. Nobody is going to bother to read paragraphs projected on a wall.
Second, the PowerPoint slides should provide more depth about your business plan. Where the executive summary provided a brief sentence or set of bullets describing the pain point, product or competition the PowerPoint presentation should provide more color. Use statistics, visuals or even several slides to provide investors with a deeper explanation of the dynamics surrounding your business. Be careful not to go overboard, however, the typical slide deck is only 10-20 slides with some slides as backup.
Lastly, the slide deck should provide a dimension of your business that was excluded from the executive summary: how you will build this business. In order to explain the how you will likely need to describe the relevant business ecosystem, illustrating how your business strategically fits into the marketplace. You will also need to describe operational aspects of the business, such as how you will build your product (e.g., who will program or build it) and how you will sell it (e.g., a sales or marketing strategy? What are the details of the plan?).

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