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by vidarh 1098 days ago
> but many really bad ones.

Indeed, having spent 4 years at a VC where we all took part in initial filtering of decks, the typical reasons decks failed to even make it to our investment committee, were:

* Not describing the team, or not having a team, or thinking you could outsource key functions (e.g. we once rejected a "tech company" where the entire tech function including the CTO were outsourced to a consultancy with no link to the founders)

* Not clearly explaining the idea.

* Not setting out the size of the opportunity clearly.

* Not setting out unit economics.

* Not setting out a long enough plan (some might want 5, we wanted 10) that sets out an optimistic but possible case to a huge exit. If you go to an angel, they might be ok with a case for a 10m acquihire, but for a VC putting in $5m+, you better have a path towards a $100m+/year revenue business even if it's a long shot. It doesn't matter if the opportunity is huge if you plan to take a conservative approach that will hardly get you any of it.