How to present your team in emails to VCs

Welcome to the final section in this module. So far we’ve provided you with an extremely comprehensive view of how VCs look at teams. We’ve covered everything from the two criteria investors use to judge teams, to the norms they expect teams to follow, to how to use your presentation style to improve how they perceive yours.

However, whilst providing you with all this knowledge we’ve missed out one really important thing. We haven’t explained where all of this stuff shows up during your fundraise.

Should you tell stories about how scrappy your team is in your blurb or should you save these stories for face to face meetings?

Should you emphasise your domain expertise in your deck or simply focus on how impressive your team is?

We’re going to answer these questions across the next three lessons. We’ll go through the blurb, the pitch deck and the meeting itself and explain what information about your team to include in each of them. In the remainder of this lesson, we’ll be covering the blurb.

Let’s start.

The Blurb

Blurbs are often the first thing VCs see about a startup. Their main purpose is to get investors excited enough to spend more time looking at a company. If a VC reads your blurb and likes it, they’ll be happy to read your deck or take a first call with you. If they don’t like it or they find something in it that disqualifies your startup, you’re getting rejected.

Because blurbs are used to ‘screen’ deals, they don’t just need to be exciting, they also need to be short (less than 300 words) and comprehensive (i.e. cover Team, Product, Market Size and Traction). These two requirements mean that they provide very limited space to make your team sound amazing. At best, you have room for one or two sentences per team member.

So the million dollar question for founders is, “how do I get VCs excited about my team with just a few words?”

To answer this, we’ll start by listing all the things that make investors love teams and then we’ll exclude those which aren't suitable for a blurb.

When it comes to teams, there are four things that consistently get VCs excited:

1. Team members with impressive backgrounds
2. Domain expertise
3. Stories about scrappiness
4. Stories about how great your company is at recruiting

However, for our current purposes, #3 and #4 are useless because there isn't enough space to tell stories in a blurb. Therefore you’ll need to rely on #1 and #2 – impressiveness and domain expertise.