Get Backed

Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams

Evan Baehr, Evan Loomis

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781633690738
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

"Anyone who comes to pitch on Shark Tank should read this book first!”
—Barbara Corcoran, ABC's Shark Tank "I have seen literally thousands of companies trying to raise capital and know that a great pitch deck is critical. This book gives you the playbook for creating yours.”
—Naval Ravikant, cofounder and CEO, AngelList "I raised twice the amount of money I set out to in a mere five weeks. I’m naming my firstborn child after the Evans.”
—Slava Menn, cofounder and CEO, Fortified BicycleHOW DO YOU LAUNCH THE VENTURE OF YOUR DREAMS? Get Backed isn’t just about startup fundraising. It’s a handbook for anyone who has an idea and needs to build relationships to get it off the ground.Over the last 3 years, entrepreneurs Evan Loomis and Evan Baehr have raised $45 million for their own ventures, including the second largest round on the fundraising platform AngelList. In Get Backed, they show you exactly what they and dozens of others did to raise money—even the mistakes they made—while sharing the secrets of the world’s best storytellers, fundraisers, and startup accelerators. They’ll also teach you how to use "the friendship loop”, a step-by-step process that can be used to initiate and build relationships with anyone, from investors to potential cofounders. And, most of all, they’ll help you create a pitch deck, building on the real-life examples of 15 ventures that have raised over $150 million.What’s in the book?• The original pitch decks and fundraising strategies of 15 ventures that raised over $150 million
• Email scripts that will get you a meeting with angel investors, venture capitalists, and potential board members
• Pitching exercises developed by startup talent beds like Stanford University’s d.school and Techstars
• A breakdown of the 10 essential pitch deck slides, how to create them, and what questions you should answer with each
• An overview of the 5 main funding sources for startups, the pros and cons of each, and who the big players are
• A crash-course in visual and presentation design that will make any deck beautiful
• Templates for 4 stories every entrepreneur should know how to tell
• The story of one entrepreneur who showed up in Silicon Valley with no network and six months later had investments from Fred Anderson, Bono, and Peter Thiel Get Backed will show you exactly what it takes to get funded and will give you the tools to make any idea a reality.

	Part One
CREATE YOUR PITCH

“What if you could take everything world-changing about your venture and boil it down to a handful of words and images—a bundle of ‘ahas’—that you could pass along to people who could help you take your venture to the next level?”

1

The Birth of the Pitch Deck

• What is a pitch deck?

• A short history of startup funding

• The pitch deck as your first prototype

What Is a Pitch Deck?

A pitch deck is a series of words and images that illustrate a venture’s story and business model.

Pitch decks do three things: they get people to understand, they get people to care, and they get people to take action.

Entrepreneurs have used them to raise money, recruit employees, and close customers, partners, and suppliers. They are one of the most powerful tools early-stage entrepreneurs have at their disposal. They represent everything that is valuable about the startup—the vision, the team behind that vision, the core elements of its business model, and the insights into the customer that the venture plans to take advantage of and the industry that the venture hopes to disrupt.

There are two kinds of pitch decks:

1. Presentation deck. A visual to assist your oral presentation in an investor meeting or on stage at a demo day.

2. Reading deck. A more thorough and detailed deck that can be read and understood without you there.

A Short History of Startup Funding

If you were an entrepreneur in the 1960s, your options for funding were slim. Today, the startup landscape is overflowing with options.

It’s not just in tech and health care. In 2014, $24.1 billion were invested into 73,400 ventures in angel investment alone. Add another $48.3 billion in 4,356 deals from venture capital. Then, double that from friends’ and families’ investments. Simultaneously, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have opened the door for entirely new ways for entrepreneurs to fund and validate a business. With the passing of Title IV of the JOBS Act in 2012, almost anyone will be able to invest and receive equity in startups, not just the ultra-wealthy among us. We have moved from a few venture capital firms investing a few million dollars in startups to an almost infinite variety of funding sources collectively investing big-time money. The funding that many visionaries and entrepreneurs need is more available than it has ever been. You probably already know all this.

You also probably know something else: getting funded is hard. Depending on whom you talk to, it’s either way too hard or not nearly hard enough.

You can guess what an entrepreneur would say. Entrepreneurs hate being held back. For a founder struggling to get funded, the problem is that there isn’t nearly enough money to go around. Investors, on the other hand, hate losing money. Yet, they know that most of the startups they invest in will fail. For them, there aren’t nearly enough good startups to go around.

Both sides agree that there needs to be a better way for the startups that have the best chance of success to get in front of the right kind of funding. To get there, entrepreneurs and investors look for ways to date each other—opportunities to charm or size up those on the other side of the table. Often, though not always, this means entrepreneurs spend their time wooing the investor while the investor plays the role of coy mistress, oscillating between flirtation and outright rejection.

The Age of the Business Plan

For years, the de facto entrée into this dating game was the business plan.

Originating with companies like DuPont and GM that had large government contracts with the US Department of Defense during World War II, the business plan takes cues from strategic planning within the US military. After an exhaustively thorough analysis of the industry, the competitive landscape, and target and potential markets, aspiring entrepreneurs would create a play-by-play of the business from launch to exit, articulating every detail of the marketing and operations plans, year-by-year growth in revenue and costs, and, ultimately, the amount they expect the market to value the company when they sell it or take it public.

This “business in sixty pages or less” gave entrepreneurs everything they needed to execute the venture. All that was left was for the right investor to come along, see the value of the plan, and pour a ton of cash into it. The idea caught full steam in the 1980s when every business professor, consultant, and professional coach in the nation published books to get the everyday Joe to become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates through one simple tool: the busin...