Immad Akhund (YC W09): How to write a killer deck and get funded | Hacker News Reader

Immad Akhund (YC W09): How to write a killer deck and get funded

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85 pointsaston23 comments

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.

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

I put it there; thanks for the suggestion.

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

Different investors need a different approach :)

VCs do mostly require some sort of deck.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I often start with "did you check out Heyzap" or maybe a one line sentence about Heyzap. It depends on the situation but most investors have at least seen your front page and the team/market help a lot in framing who you are and your idea.

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

No but I smiled :-)

Did anyone not? That was awesome.

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

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.

Nice article/slides.

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

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?

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.

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