How to make your team shine in VC meetings
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Welcome to the last part of this section and the final lesson in our entire Team module. In the previous two lessons, we focused on incorporating information about your team into your fundraising materials (the blurb and the deck). In this lesson I'm going to teach you how to position your team in the best light in actual meetings with VCs. To do this we're going to draw on everything we‘ve learnt in this module so far.
Let’s start.
In actual VC meetings, there are two ways that investors form opinions about your team. The first is obvious, most pitches have a dedicated section where the founder explicitly talks about their team. While the second is more subtle, VCs are constantly updating their view of teams throughout the rest of the meeting. They do this based on two things:
- How the person presenting comes across (see here for a guide to presenting well in meetings)
- The stories they’re told during the pitch about things the team has done or achieved
We’ll start by covering how to handle the team section before explaining what to do during the rest of your pitch.
Handling the team section
When you’re face to face with investors you have a lot of more time to ‘sell’ your team than in your written materials. This gives you the space to do much more than just impress VCs by reading from your team’s CVs. You actually have the time to paint the perfect picture.
So as you plan what to say in your team section, the key question for you becomes “what does the perfect team look like to VCs?”. Luckily for you, we’ve spent the majority of this module answering that question.
From a VC’s perspective, the perfect team:
- Has all the skills in place to build and sell its product
- Is full of people capable of achieving the impossible
- Contains three additional traits they love – (domain expertise, the ability to recruit strong talent, and scrappiness)
With the exception of scrappiness, the team section of your meetings is the ideal place to convince VCs that you fit this description. The real challenge lies in structuring what you say in a way that does this effectively. So below, I’m going to walk you through a framework you can use to create a ‘script’ that does just this. It’s not the only approach, but it does guarantee that you’ll hit all of the points above.
Phase 1 – Mapping the relevant information about your team
Before we begin writing our script, it first makes sense to map all of the relevant information about our team members. You can do this by following the five steps below:
Step #1 – Open a blank document
Step #2 – Write down the skills your business needs to have to succeed
These skills should always include the ability to build the product and the ability to sell it, however, in deep tech or niche industries, your business may require even more skills.
For example, if you are creating a startup that offers invoice financing to businesses, you might need someone who is an expert at calculating lending risk.
Step #3 – Write down the names of the team members you plan to talk about
If you need guidance on who to include, read this.
Step #4 – Group these team members based on the skills they have
Take the skills you identified in Step #2 and map the team members you identified in Step #3 to the relevant skills.
It could look like this:
Ability to Sell → Tunde Adekeye
Ability to Build → Maisy Chico & Laurence Carty
Step #5 – Gather information about your chosen team members
For each person you picked in Step #3:
- List the things that make them sound impressive – for guidance on what VCs find impressive see here
- Make a note of whether or not they’re a domain expert
If they aren't a founder, make a note of whether the fact that you recruited them is evidence that your team is great at recruiting
The end results should look something like this:
With the planning process complete, you’re now ready for Phase 2.
Phase 2 – Crafting your script
It's now time to transform the information we just gathered into a structured script. To help you do this, I've created a four step guide to writing it below:
Step #1 – Tell VCs that you’re going to talk about your team
This is simply a way to transition from whatever else your talking about in your presentation to the team and should sound something like this:
So about our team… At its core there are four of us…
Step #2 – Introduce all the people you’ve chosen to talk about while linking them to the skills your business needs
This step is vital as it allows you to explicitly show investors that your team has people who can both build and sell the product. By doing this you make it crystal clear that you satisfy the first of VCs’ two main criteria.
Here’s an example of what it could look like:
On the technical side, we have Maisy and Laurence, while on the commercial side, we have Tunde
Step #3 – Describe each of your chosen team members in detail
Your primary goal with these descriptions is to make the person you're talking about sound impressive. As a result, each person’s bio should contain three elements.
- Their name
- Their role in your startup
- The most compelling two or three sentences you can think of about them. These sentences should be packed with things that make them sound as impressive as possible (for guidance about what impresses VCs, check out this lesson)
Here is an example of what a bio for one of your team members could sound like:
Tunde, our CFO, used to lead the finance and strategy team at Infarm, a German AgTech Unicorn. While there, he worked closely with the Head of Strategy and the CEO, built the majority of the financial materials used in their $100m Series B fundraise, and led a project on unit economics that reduced costs by 20%.
Once you’ve made a bio like this for all your chosen team members, you can move on to the fourth and final step.
Step #4 – Upgrade the bios to showcase positive traits
Once Steps 1 to 3 are complete, you’re faced with a choice. You now have a script for a team section that meets VCs’ two main criteria. It shows investors that 1) your team has people with all the skills your business needs and 2) it makes your team members sound impressive. This, when done well, can be enough to convince VCs that your team is worth backing.
However, there is more to making VCs fall in love with your team than simply impressing them. There are two traits that VCs love to find in teams that our current script does nothing to showcase, namely domain expertise and the ability to recruit strong talent.
If you have these traits and don’t show it, you’re selling yourself short. So in this final step we’re going to show you how to adapt the bios we just created to showcase them. If your team doesn’t possess either of these traits, then skip this section and finish your script at Step #3.
Showcasing domain expertise
Adapting a team member's bio to show their domain expertise is fairly straightforward. Here’s the bio we created for Tunde earlier.
Tunde, our CFO, used to lead the finance and strategy team at Infarm, a German AgTech Unicorn. While there, he worked closely with the Head of Strategy and the CEO, built the majority of the financial materials used in their $100m Series B fundraise, and led a project on unit economics that reduced costs by 20%.
If we wanted to update this to showcase Tunde’s domain expertise, all we would need to do is add something like this to the end of it:
Tunde also worked as a VC at Icebreaker, where a core part of his role was preparing portfolio companies to raise money from later stage investors. This experience is actually what led him to start Pitchdoctor. He essentially wanted to create a product that made preparing to talk to investors more accessible to founders who didn't have a VC to help them.
When demonstrating domain expertise, the trick is to talk about a previous experience that is relevant to your startup, and make the link between this experience and your startup as obvious as possible. Subtlety isn’t your friend here because it can lead to VCs missing the relationship between your team members’ backgrounds and your business.For a full discussion of domain expertise and how to show it, revisit this dedicated lesson.
Showing that you're great at recruiting
If you find yourself describing a non-founder team member with an extremely impressive background. It often makes sense to not only talk about their background but to also tell the story of how you got them to join your team. As we’ve already discussed – investors love to back teams who are capable of “punching above their weight” when it comes to attracting top talent.
The best way to convince them that you’re hiring wizards, is to tell them stories about how you’ve already managed to hire impressive people. So if you have any of these people in your core team, use their bios to not only show how amazing they are, but also to make investors aware of how remarkable it is that you were able to get them to join you. You can do this by adding something like the below to the end of their bios.
How we actually managed to recruit Tunde is really interesting. We were looking for people with experience from both the startup and VC worlds. So we did a hyper targeted LinkedIn search and came up with a list of 20 people. We then used our mutual connections to get warm intros to as many of them as possible.
That's how we got in contact with Tunde. Our conversation with him went so well and he was so excited about the opportunity to work with us that he accepted a 40% pay cut.
For more colour on using stories to show how great you are at hiring, check out this lesson.
Example script
With this fourth step complete you should now have a fully formed script for your team section. The end result should look something like this:
So, about our team… At its core, there are three of us: Maisy, Laurence, and me. Maisy and Kieran are responsible for building the product and all things technical, while I’m focused on the commercial side of things.
I'm the CEO. Previously, I was a Vice President at Credit Suisse, where I worked on multiple $1bn+ M&A transactions in the insurance sector. I then served as Chief of Staff at Lemonade, a $2.4bn InsurTech that IPOed in July 2020. My time at Lemonade gave me extensive firsthand insight into the problems and bottlenecks in the insurance industry and is actually what motivated me to start this company.
Maisy is our CPO. She spent several years at McKinsey, first as a Data Scientist building custom machine learning models for insurers, then as a Senior Manager leading and selling $10m+ insurance engagements to enterprises. Maisy also holds a 1st Class Master’s in Engineering from Harvard.
Finally, Laurence is our CTO. He was formerly Principal Engineer at HyperExponential, an AI InsurTech that raised over $100m. Before that, he co‐founded a startup at Entrepreneur First and led engineering teams at Netflix, working on recommendation algorithms used by over 300 million users. His deep experience with large‐scale, data‐driven systems is exactly what we need to build a cutting‐edge platform for insurers.
With that done, it’s time to finish off the lesson by talking about how to make your team shine in the rest of your meeting – i.e. outside the team section.
Handling the rest of the meeting
Outside of the dedicated team section – how VCs perceive your team is primarily affected by two things. 1) How you present and 2) the stories you tell them about things your team has achieved. We already covered these topics in depth earlier in this module, so here we’ll only recap the core principles.
Influencing VC perception – Presentation Style
It doesn't matter if you have the best CV in the world, if you turn up to a job interview and bomb, you aren’t going to get the job. VC meetings are the same. If you present poorly, it will erase any positive impression investors previously had about your team. On the other hand, presenting well can convince VCs that a team which looks average on paper is amazing.
To help you present better, we dedicated a whole section of the module to the five most impactful things you can do to improve how you come across in meetings. As a quick refresher, here they are:
- Know your numbers
- Deliver you pitch energetically
- Answer questions well
- Deliver you pitch confidently
- Be honest
Each of these tips has its own dedicated lesson packed with detailed guidance.
If you want to improve your presentation style, my best advice is to follow these tips and to practice.
Influencing VC perception – Telling stories about things you’ve achieved
Telling stories is one of the most effective things that founders can do to shape how investors view their teams. Every story you tell has the potential to improve how VCs perceive you.
Stories give you the ability to take something impressive that your startup achieved – whether it’s rapid user growth, or building a product, or something else – and use it to make your team seem stronger.
To illustrate this, let’s compare two examples of a founder talking about their growth. Here’s the first one – it contains no story, just numbers.
We launched our MVP in May and got 500 users in a month
And here’s the second one, complete with a story.
We launched our MVP in May. To make the launch work, we ran a street campaign where all three of us founders went from office to office in San Francisco – delivering pizzas and getting people to try our product. We got 500 users by the end of the month.
Both of these examples have the exact same facts at their core and are great proof of traction, however, only the second one shapes how we feel about the founders. Because the traction is wrapped in a story, we get the sense that the team is not only creative but also are willing to do difficult things to succeed.
Storytelling – or, more specifically, talking about how your team achieved things – is a tool you can use all over your pitch. Whether you’re discussing your traction, product or something else, you can shape how VCs perceive you by enriching the raw facts of what you’ve done with colour on how you managed to do it.
If you’re willing to plan, you can weaponise this to great effect. As you design your pitch, deliberately look for one or two stories that showcase the traits which you want to convince VCs that your team has. Then put these stories in your pitch. If you want VCs to know that you’re really smart, tell a story about how you solved a really tough problem. If you want them to believe you're hard working, tell a story where you achieve something by working really hard.
If you’re unsure what traits to use your stories to show – then your default should be to go for scrappiness. As we discussed earlier in the module, it’s one of the three traits VCs love to find in teams and it’s the hardest thing to show in the dedicated team section. For a detailed guide on designing a story that makes you come across as scrappy, check out this lesson.
Conclusion
And with that done, you have all of the information you need to present your team in the best light in VC meetings.
You now know how to design a script / narrative structure that:
- Proves you have the skills to build and sell you product
- Makes your team members sound impressive
- Showcases traits that investors love like the ability to recruit strong talent and domain expertise
Plus you know how to positively influence VC perception in the other parts of your meetings with them. Both through:
- How you present
- The stories you tell them about how you've achieved things
Next steps
Congratulations!
You've now completed the final theoretical lesson in our Team module. However, to help you really turn this theory into practice, we have one more chapter. In it you'll find footage of multiple founders describing their teams combined with my analysis of what they're doing right and wrong.
By seeing footage from real pitches, you'll crystallise everything you just learnt and gain a deep understanding of what good looks like that you can't get anywhere else in the world.
Join 500+ founders, get weekly fundraising insights, and access free fundraising resources including a library of 30+ pitchdeck examples.