marketing strategies and plans

VC Fund Raising Manual - 2 Documentation

When you are preparing documents for VC fund-raising, the one piece of advice you will be given by a lot of people is that you need a ‘business plan’ document that you should send to the VC firm. You are also supposed to have an ‘executive summary’ that you can send up front.

Don’t.

That doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t have a business plan, but I suggest you don’t email that to a prospective investor. There are several reasons for this:

1) VCs don’t read business plans, they are long and boring

2) Neither a business plan nor a business plan summary achieve what you need to achieve at the point of first contact

3) The business plan will start floating round the start-up scene, I have seen many dozens of business plans that were not intended for me

The documents that you should prepare for the fund raising should be alinged with the phases of the fund raising process. In my experience, the following is useful (I will elaborate on a few docs later on):

1) Pre-pitch phase: 2-3 page teaser document

2) Pitch: 15 slide (or so) PowerPoint presentation

3) Due Diligence: Depending on your business, you will need to present the following documents:

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