VC Deal Lawyer

On November 10, 2009 I attended the inaugural FashInvest conference in New York entitled “From Concept to Capital.”  Karen Griffith-Gryga and David Freschman, the founders of FashInvest, put on a wonderful event and are definitely heading in the right direction to bring venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and branded and fashion company executives together under one roof.  The conference had a great panel consisting of:

• Jon Brilliant from the Atelier Group;
• Adam Burgoon from KarpReilly LLC;
• Shira Sue Carmi from Launch Collective;
• Mark Friedman from Trilea Partners;
• John Nowaczyk from Milestone Partners.

The panel was moderated by Robin Harris from Luxeology.  The panel did a great job covering a lot of topics and answering direct questions from the audience.  The panelists themselves were diverse in their investing models, which proved for a more exciting program.

Prior to the panel’s presentation, David Rose, Chairman of the Board of the New York Angels, Inc., gave a speech entitled “Delivering an Effective Investor Presentation.”  Clearly drawing from his years as an angel investor that sat through countless pitches, the “Pitch Coach” as they call him gave some excellent pointers.  To start, David said that you need to demonstrate the following qualities when pitching to angels or else it’s a non-starter: 

• Integrity- people can smell bull**** 20 feet away.  Keep it real or else save everyone’s time and skip it;
• Passion – as an investor, you either sense the passion for the business or you don’t;
• Experience – they age old saying that no angel want you learning an area off of their nickel;
• Knowledge – you have to demonstrate some domain expertise.  Don’t show up with 5 executive team members sporting insurance industry experience to pitch a consumer products business;
• Skill – self-explanatory;
• Leadership – must demonstrate an ability to lead;
• Committment – you must be fully engaged and committed to the business.  It’s like charging up a hill in battle.  No matter what the obstacle, no matter how many times you trip and fall, you get up and keep going.
• Vision – self-explanatory;
• Realism – you must present a realistic business model and plan;
• Coachability- everyone can improve their skills, and entrepreneurs that want to get funded cannot come off like know-it-alls that cannot take outside advice.  Angels want to know that you will take constructive advice in how to improve your pitch, business plan or whatever else it takes.

As for your Powerpoint presentation, David suggested that a good approach is to use short bullet points, a better approach is to use headlines and the bestapproach is to use images.  You want to achieve emotional resonance with your audience, and images can do that (as he so adeptly demonstrated during his presentation).  Finally, in your presentation you want to first say and talk about a concept before you actually show the slide for it.  He suggested two books on presentations:  (i) Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, and (ii) Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte.

David wrapped things up with his top 10 list of things to do/not to do during your presentation:

      1.   Never, ever look at the screen.  Look at the audience.

      2.   Don’t ever read your speech.  Know it inside and out and present like that.

      3.   No live demos – they only fail at the most important times.

      4.   Always use a remote to move your slides.

      5.   Hand-outs should not be copies of your presentation.  Do not hand them out in advance (because then people stare at the presentation rather than you).

      6.   No jokes.

      7.   Don’t stroll and fidget.  Project and command.

      8.   Pace the presentation, keeping it smooth and even.

      9.   Check your equipment to make sure it is working.  Show up early and do a dry run.

      10.  Only the CEO can give a pitch for money.

David suggested that if you’d like more of his helpful pointers, you can go to the site for Rose Tech Ventures.