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With Andrew Beebe

Pitching is like Wordle (seriously)

How to pitch VCs like a pro with Andrew Beebe, Managing Partner at Obvious Ventures.

Ah, pitching. Perhaps the most widely discussed fundraising topic, it excites as much as it terrifies. After months of prep, it’s just your team and your potential investors in a room; everything riding on a great first impression.

To get some perspective on what makes for a compelling pitch, we sat down with Andrew Beebe, Managing Partner at Obvious Ventures. This piece is specifically NOT about making a perfect deck, or getting in the room with the right investor, but rather the way in which the story is delivered.

There is no prototypical pitcher

First and foremost, pitching is for everyone. Whether you are an introvert, an extrovert, a nervous wreck, or something in between, know that, with the right strategy, you can walk into a room and raise money. While it’s true that charismatic extroverts have an easier time, stick to the strategies below and you’ll be fine.

Let it 🔥

No matter how many times you revise your deck and practice your pitch in the mirror, your initial investor meetings will likely flop. Knowing this, start your fundraise by meeting with VCs that are not the best fit for your climate venture. These “burner” meetings will provide real pitching experience, sharpen your nerves, and help you tweak your approach, all in a lower stakes environment.

Pro tip: Bring a colleague to burner meetings and have them read the room. They can focus on investors’ questions while you work out your pitching kinks. Or if that’s not an option, see if you can record the meeting so you can critique it later.

The 4 T's: team, TAM, timing, and tech

An effective pitch nails 4 elements in a succinct narrative: team, TAM, timing, and tech.

  • Team: Especially in your early days, your team is the most important component of your pitch. Make sure that you can articulate why the people around you are uniquely positioned to execute on your vision as a founder. Talk about “collective strengths” and highlight the intentionality and humility driving your personnel decisions — “We built this team because we (the founders) were missing these things.”
    • This is a good place to bring your authentic self and tell the origin story of your company. Make it personal and real; don’t try to tell investors what you think they want to hear (they get that all the time).
  • TAM: TAM, or Total Addressable Market, is a metric used by investors to assess how big of an audience there is for your tech. Make sure you clearly define your actual TAM and the steps you will take to secure your piece of the market. This is a time to lean into transparent assumptions, especially around evolving unit economics as your business scales.
  • Timing: While timing isn’t everything, having good timing can be transformative. Tell a story about broader conditions that enable your success. Maybe a new policy has been enacted in California that dramatically changes demand for your type of product. Or maybe a large community of corporates have adopted net-zero targets which could be a boon for your corporate ESG SaaS platform.
  • Tech: Investors don’t expect you to walk through the door with a perfect product. Show excitement and conviction about your progress to date, but be honest about the current and future limitations. This is a great opportunity to be authentic and build trust. Be clear about your product/service, but resist promising something that you can’t build.

Pro tip: Initial meetings happening on Zoom? Prep on Zoom! Have a friend or advisor sit through your presentation so that you can practice in the element. Record the call and review it after the fact.

Embrace your inner Wordle

Before we dig into some go-to pitching tactics, consider a helpful high-level metaphor brought to you by Wordle, everyone’s favorite word game.

  • In Wordle, players often play the same opening word everyday. This opening gambit helps you ease into the game and establish a few key truths (presence of vowels, word structure, etc.). Take the same approach when you start a pitch to investors. Lead with the same joke, compelling anecdote, or quick overview of your company story — whatever gets you in your comfort zone.
  • After word one, Wordle becomes a two-way street, with the game providing clues to inform future guesses. Pitching follows the same trajectory. Your opening move will spur countermoves from your potential investors (e.g. questions) and, from there, each side will need to riff and continuously adapt. Relax, have a conversation, and make sure you use real words 😁.

🏆 Tactics

A great pitch can take many forms, but here are a few tips to up-level your game:

  • Be authentic: If you’re not a hotshot Silicon Valley founder, don’t act like one — no one expects you to! Be yourself, display your passion, integrity, and intelligence, and make clear that you have been hard at work profitably growing a business. The investors who like you for who you are will be the ones most likely to take a chance on your climate venture. In particular, let your authenticity shine in the later stages of a pitch, when structure gives way to spontaneity.
  • Keep it simple: A concise pitch that is easy to understand demonstrates to investors that you have a firm understanding of your product and customers, and are able to communicate the complexity to non-expert audiences (which is important for your business anyway). That said, avoid talking down to investors; no matter how complex your tech is, remember that no one likes to feel stupid.
  • Never be inappropriate: A pitch is an audition for your value system. A stray crass comment is an easy excuse for an investor to show you the door. You’d be surprised how often this happens.
  • Bring teammates to the pitch meeting: Bring anybody to the meeting that is going to help you close the deal. A cohesive team that communicates its mission effectively will leave a better impression on investors than an alpha, one-man-show CEO.

Andrew Beebe is a Managing Director at Obvious Ventures. For nearly two decades, Andrew has focused on clean technology and clean energy solutions. He started down the clean tech path with Energy Innovations in 2003, which he grew from a business plan to a major solar developer serving customers like Google, Disney, Sony Pictures, and British Telecom. After selling the company to Suntech in 2008, Andrew served as Chief Commercial Officer at Suntech as well as Vice President of Global Product Strategy. During his tenure, Suntech became the largest solar company in the world. After leaving Suntech, Andrew spent two years as Vice President of Distributed Generation for Nextera Energy, the largest clean energy developer in the U.S.

Obvious Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm for startups reimagining trillion-dollar industries through a world positive lens

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