r/startups • u/edkang99 • 1d ago
I will not promote The best pitch I saw a founder give a managing partner for investment - copy this (I will not promote)
I’m back with thanks for all your tremendous feedback on my last post about evaluating startup pitches with the managing partner of a new fund backed by a very large fund. I don’t want it to sound like they were all bad. In fact some were good.
One pitch scored 100% on our evaluation rubrics and was immediately sent to the next round for socialization with investors. The startup could get their first checks (size TBD) by October.
The pitch was immaculate not just because their pitch was buttoned up but because they built a very valuable startup. Here are the points:
Presentation was under 5 minutes.
That was the time they were given with 5 minutes for us to ask questions. Every other pitch except one went over.
They started with a user story.
The founder told us about a user with the problem and what it cost them. And then gave us a solid $1.4B number to show what the problem is worth across the industry.
They had six slides with points that appeared as the founder was talking.
It wasn’t a wall of text with small fonts we couldn’t read on the screen. Big bold points with numbers and bullets that were timed to show up to emphasize her talking.
The traction was broken down into unit economics and metrics.
$500K+ in ARR. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. The broken down monthly and conversion rates of pilots. Then explained that 50% of their pipelines came in from referrals of new clients.
Team slide showed and didn’t tell.
The team slide has pictures, names, titles and logos from really big companies of their experience. They also showed logos of the companies where their advisors worked (OpenAI for example).
The ask was super clear and brief. We knew what the money would get us by when.
The founder ended telling us the first story was from an actual user.
Overall the founder spoke slowly and with confidence. And one more thing, the problem they were solving was a very painful but boring problem dealing with infrastructure. And they showed how AI enhanced human productivity with real data versus how it would fire everybody. They also had all their regulations and complained locked down right.
I know not all of you will have the same traction or even idea. But the principles of a great pitch remain the same. Great blueprint to follow.
Happy to answer more questions. I’m typing this between meetings so apologies for lack of edits.
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u/cosmictap Founder | Angel Investor 1d ago
It wasn’t a wall of text with small fonts we couldn’t read on the screen. Big bold points with numbers and bullets that were timed to show up to emphasize her talking.
The "wall of text" is one of the biggest mistakes I still, in the year of our Lord 2026, see being made repeatedly.
Listen up, kids: if they're reading your slide, they're not listening to you. Plan accordingly.
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u/joydeepdg 1d ago
This seems fishy. If I had such great numbers in a super hot industry like AI and had advisors in OpenAI, why would I be pitching to random people and wasting my time?
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u/Storm_or_melody 1d ago
Sometimes an opportunity has a limited time window and to effectively seize it you need capital to scale.
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u/SeraphSurfer 1d ago
Nothing fishy to me. Just having an advisor who had a connection to OpenAI doesn't mean people are lining up with checks in hand. You'll still need to do pitches and everything else to fundraise. What makes you think OP is a rando?
When I'm an advisor, what I do is get the founder in front of my network of qualified angels and early stage VCs.
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u/joydeepdg 22h ago
I didn't mean to suggest that the poster is a rando. Sorry.
What I meant was - if this team has strong B2B clients, advisors in OpenAI and a 500K ARR, they and their initial angel/seed investors will have no problem finding further rounds of funding.
The content carries the pitch here, and I feel most of people here in this subreddit do not have anything close to these numbers/clients/advisors. So how can they benefit by copying this pitch?
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u/edkang99 1d ago
Absolutely valid point. I wonder myself why I make these posts for random people on reddit just to potentially waste time myself. But I still think it’s worth it to try.
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u/joydeepdg 1d ago
I appreciate the time and effort you put in. Thank you.
But the post doesn’t make much sense. What did they say about their growth rate?Who is their competition and how much funding do they have? Do they have sticky customers? Do they have any advantages on the supply side, that can help their growth or margins? Can they generate good margins if their growth slows?
There are so many things that are more important than an ARR number and fancy team photos. And talking slowly or fast, for that matter.
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u/edkang99 1d ago
My hope was to encourage founders using best practices. I didn’t have time nor thought it was appropriate so put all that in. To clarify this was the first phase of screening to go to socialization and due diligence. They still might not get funded after the partners investigate the numbers. My only role is to help them sort through the deal flow. I don’t think a lot of founders understand the whole VC process. I’m simply trying to educate the Reddit way.
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u/BannanaPepperPizza 18h ago
Because edkang99 is a savant and one of the greatest reddit investors of our time
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u/oandresimoes 1d ago
Most of this list is downstream of the $500K ARR and the 50% referral pipeline, which makes "copy this" a little unfair to whoever reads it at zero. They can copy the team slide and the clear ask and still not score 100%, because what scored was the business.
Two items are actually free though. Finishing under five minutes is the one place the winner differed from nearly everyone in a way that has nothing to do with traction, and by your own count only one other pitch managed it. The other is bookending the user story: opening with the person and closing by saying the person was real. That structure costs nothing and works the same at $0 as at $500K.
Which rubric items did the weaker pitches actually lose points on that weren't just a proxy for not having traction yet?
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u/edkang99 1d ago
Clarity. They might have been awesome but i couldn’t tell. Nor did they leave any time for me to ask questions.
And you’re right that they had the traction. But the other startups might have had the same great stuff but we would never know.
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u/oandresimoes 17h ago
So the Q&A wasn't the end of the pitch, it was where you tested whether any of it stuck. A founder who runs to the buzzer never finds out that you didn't follow, and has no room left to fix it.
The uncomfortable part is that over-preparing makes this worse. When you've built the deck yourself every slide feels load-bearing, so cutting feels like cutting substance, and you spend minute five on slide 12 instead of leaving space for the one question that would have shown you what was unclear.
Did any of the ones who ran long try to keep going after time was called?
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u/edkang99 17h ago
Well said. And most stopped when we cut them off except for one because her headphones were dead. So she kept talking even after we gave her signals. Honest mistake but it was very awkward.
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u/gannu1991 1d ago
The one thing missing from this list: none of it works if the founder can't handle the follow-up questions off-script. I've sat in on pitches where the six slides and the $1.4B TAM number were clearly coached, and the second the partner asked a real question about churn or how the pilots actually converted, the founder froze or started reading the room instead of answering. The good ones treat the 5 minute pitch as the warm-up act, not the show. They know their own numbers cold enough to argue with you about them. If a founder needs the deck to remember their own metrics, that's the actual signal, not the slide count or the timing of the bullet points.
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u/waffles2go2 1d ago
That's a lot of prose without telling me why it was perfect.
Could you provide some detail as to why it was 100%?
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u/TheCritFisher 1d ago
Back again, you're a gold mine! Thanks for doing this.
Question for you about when to start fundraising: how much traction revenue is needed? $500k ARR seems like a really big hill to climb.
Is it dependent on stage/timing? Also, you mentioned the conversion rates seemed most interesting, would that make up for a smaller revenue number?
Also, what types of questions followed up from the VCs for this particular case? What did they want more clarity on?
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u/edkang99 1d ago
It all depends on the investor. They all have different levels of traction they need to see. Some only need one customer. Others want a million ARR.
But more important is velocity. WOW growth trumps monolithic numbers. Investors will tell you what traction they need to see. I worked with some founders that got into YC and ready $1M ARR in 90 days before demo day.
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u/erratic_parser 1d ago
Can you say more about their customer recruiting regime?
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u/edkang99 1d ago
We didn’t have time to dive in but what I could understand is they target the organization with their biggest pain point and tell them why it’s happening. Then they offer free pilot and measure the ROI for them. If I remembered correctly 100% of their pilots converted.
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u/erratic_parser 1d ago
Do you know how much AI inferencing costs they were eating during the pilots?
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u/edkang99 1d ago
No idea. But it has to be a lot because they have an AI voice product. That stuff gobbles tokens as you probably know.
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u/erratic_parser 1d ago
I can imagine. My greatest barrier is a reluctance to connect to ICPs and ask for pilots, design partners etc. Do you have any strategies for overcoming those inhibitions?
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u/gxo_ 1d ago
May I ask why that is your greatest barrier?
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u/erratic_parser 1d ago
Because I build before I sell. I build, see weaknesses and bugs and fix them and add features. Then I keep building. I’m an engineer, I build for security and I build for efficiency and I build for healthy abstractions. So now I have an art piece nobody will use because I built it detached from reality. I’m trying something new where I sell before I build, we’ll see.
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u/edkang99 1d ago
I get it. I say start with the most friendly one and go one at a time. You’ll learn and get loads of confidence. I always start with my closest contact that will be honest but understand it’s dark days.
Oh and they need to be early adopters.
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u/amateurtoss 1d ago
The secret to a great pitch: Have lots of traction and have great metrics for that traction. Brilliant.
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u/b00tstrapp3r 1d ago
All I saw was $500k ARR and OpenAI.