Don’t send VC a cold deck ever again: Start sending video pitches

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Tuesday, July 06, 2021 By Walter Thompson and Annie Siebert

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The numbers don’t lie.

According to DocSend, the average pitch deck is reviewed for just three minutes. And if you think a senior VC is reviewing the presentation your team crafted for months as if it were a Fabergé egg — well, you might be disappointed.

Even if you are lucky enough to land a meeting, it’s more likely that a junior person went through your pitch and ran it up the chain.

“The biggest lie in venture capital is: ‘Yes, I read through your deck,’” says Evan Fisher, founder of Unicorn Capital and Minimal Capital.

“Because those words are immediately followed by, ‘ … but why don’t you run us through it from the beginning?’”

According to Fisher, the pro forma pitch deck is a thing of the past. Instead, the founders he’s worked with who made video pitches netted two to five times as many investor meetings as people who sent traditional pitch decks.

They also received up to five times more in terms of investor commitments from the first 20 meetings.

“Even if the only benefit was that other investment committee members heard the story direct from the founder, that alone would make your video pitch worth it,” says Fisher.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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In an interview with Brian Heater, Nothing founder Carl Pei claims that the wireless earbud market is “screaming for differentiation,” which is what led to the creation of the transparent Ear (1).

He talked to Brian about the delays in getting the earbuds to market (not, surprisingly, pandemic-related supply-chain issues); why earbuds were the right first product to launch, and what “Nothing” means to him.

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Will Didi’s regulatory problems make it harder for Chinese startups to go public in the US?

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Last week, just days after its U.S. IPO, cybersecurity regulators in China banned ride-hailing company Didi from onboarding new members.

Over the weekend, authorities called for Didi to be removed from several app stores due to “serious violations of laws and regulations in collecting and using personal information.”

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“For China-based companies hoping to list in the United States, the market likely just got much, much colder.”

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Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of CRO consultancy The Conversion Wizards, walks through an A/B test showing how research-driven CRO (conversion rate optimization) techniques led to a 79% increase in conversion rates for China Expat Health, a lead-generation company.

“Using research-based CRO principles to optimize a landing page for PPC (pay per click) traffic produced a 79% conversion lift, dramatically reducing the cost per lead for the company,” Kuria writes.

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3 guiding principles for CEOs who post on Twitter

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Did you hear about the CEO who made misleading claims about a funding round and got sued by the SEC? How about that pharmaceutical executive whose taunts to a former secretary of state led to a 4.4% decline in the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index?

In case it isn’t clear: Startup executives are held to a higher standard when it comes to what they post on social media.

“Reputation and goodwill take a long time to build and are difficult to maintain, but it only takes one tweet to destroy it all,” says Lisa W. Liu, a senior partner at The Mitzel Group, a San Francisco-based law practice that serves many startups.

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