Show HN: A curated library of venture capital investment pitch decks
chagency.co.uk
chagency.co.uk
We’ve needed this for ourselves since we saw these pitch decks pop up on LinkedIn every few weeks. We wanted a library with all these pitches curated, but what we found was either: not going deep enough or a 404 return of a now-defunct website.
Personally, that's what I find the most interesting: the early days. Not how big companies look like today and what decisions they take now — but rather what decisions got them there from the early days. Because when we start, we're in that position.
I hope it will inspire you but, more importantly, I hope you’ll do something with it.
That said, the fact that Theranos is in here without any commentary puts me off a bit. That's not a pitch deck, it's a fraud deck.
This is like putting Al Capone in a list of "inspiring stories about hardball entrepreneurs".
No, I don't think it's nice to do what they've done (or smart, for that matter). But you want to see both ends of a spectrum, otherwise we'll fall prey to the survivorship bias. Hence, we've put up the "failed" category and didn't really want to give Theranos a category in itself called "fraud".
Again, controversy aside, I think there are lessons to be learned from them. People can misinterpret what I'm saying here and say I'm pushing them to commit fraud, but from my end it's more of a "This is how you should not do it"
We need to know both ends of an interval
This is supposed to be a curated list of VC pitches. I honestly don't understand how Theranos, a company that raised and grew solely by spreading lies and then covering them up, can end up in a list like that, except if the authors of said list think that this is a good way to raise money.
I don't understand how it is that everybody agrees that stealing a painting from a museum is bad, but when you steal billions (!) from investors then suddenly it's "inspiration".
EDIT: I hadn't yet realized you're the author.
> but from my end it's more of a "This is how you should not do it"
This is a good point, and with that I think it makes more sense. But IMO it needs a much bigger "fraud alert! don't do this, these people are evil" note :-)
Elizabeth Holmes was the child of a well-heeled, well-connected family. Bill Gates' mom sat on the board of United Way with an IBM bigwig, with whom she set up a meeting for her kid to pitch to him.
The decks themselves are pretty boring and lack detail. It'd be much more helpful to figure out the network these people had that connected them to the money men.
Have a look at Buffer. Already had around 5 investors before going for a big round. Not dissing this at all. This is totally normal, but the less experienced might think one nice pitch deck will get you from 0 to Billions in one round.
Wasn't sure whether people would want it. Glad to read your comment and to learn that people do want it.
@Buffer — For MySQL or Monzo, for instance, we've added how it wasn't the seed. I understand what you're saying — I guess if someone does believe that they would... assume... by themselves that they're all "seed stage pitches"?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Sand-Hill-Road-Capital-ebook/...
It definitely made me more aware of the pros and cons of VC and what the relentless pursuit of growth above all else does to an entrepreneur emotionally. And it made me do a second take of the “Why”. I think about his story quite a bit actually, more than most of the bio books I’ve read.
There’s no chestpuffing or sugar coating at all :) Refreshing read.
Uber: $1.25M VC capital turned into $84.2B
They made a $84.2B company and started with that investment. Yes, the story is longer, multiple investment rounds were gathered but in a nutshell, we can look at it from this angle
In fact, even labeling some companies as failed doesn't help much. Might be more useful to see pitch decks from companies that failed to successfully raise any money.
What we put there would be eliminating the bias for... running a company I guess. Thanks for adding the comment, it was what I had in mind when we added Theranos.
In fact, maybe Theranos teaches us what kind of behaviour/talk "slips" through VCs, thus making us understand how we, the founders, will pick the VCs. I know, not a popular opinion for US to pick VCs — but we need to start spreading this idea of selectivity.
Not stupid selectivity ("I deserve this. Give me that"), but rather the one that makes us weed out those who don't have the acumen to tell between Theranos, a fraud, and a real startup
Sequoia didn't invest in Theranos. Index, Benchmark or Andreessen Horowitz didn't.
Maybe we can learn from Theranos' deck how we can pluck out those VCs.