Which team members should you talk about in VC meetings?

Join 500+ founders, get weekly fundraising insights, and access free fundraising resources including a library of 30+ pitchdeck examples.

In this module so far we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how to present your team to VCs. Previous lessons have covered how to take yourself and your team members and:

However, so far we haven’t discussed which team members you should actually talk about. Do you talk about all 20 of your employees or do you only talk about yourself as the founder and CEO?

The answer to this question is quite complicated, however, by the end of this lesson you'll know what to do for your own startup.

How many team members should I talk about?

While the team technically includes everyone you’ve hired, it’s an atrocious strategy to provide VCs with bios of all 74 of your employees. VCs have neither the time nor the attention to sift through all that information. Therefore, it’s your job as a founder to decide which team members to present.

When picking who to mention, you need to balance two competing priorities:

  1. The limited time you have
  2. Making your team sound amazing

These two factors are in tension for one simple reason, the best way to make people sound amazing is to spend more time talking about them. To illustrate this, let’s assume you have two minutes per meeting to talk about your team.

  • If you mention two team members – that gives you 60 seconds per person
  • If you mention ten team members – that only gives you 12 seconds

60 seconds is more than enough time to convince investors about the depth of a person's skillset, mention their domain expertise, and talk about their most impressive achievements. Meanwhile, 12 seconds is barely enough time to tell a VC a person’s name and job title – let alone impress them.

This cruel, hard maths is why I recommend talking about as few team members as possible. The more people you mention, the harder it is to make them sound impressive. And remember, the main thing VCs are judging your team on is how impressive it is.

Which team members should I talk about?

In light of these time constraints, your default approach should be to only talk to VCs about yourself and your co-founders. Founders are the only people on your team that it would be strange not to mention. So, given that you have to talk about them, you should devote all of your energy to making them sound as impressive as possible.

That being said, there are some cases where it makes sense to talk about people who aren’t part of the founding team. There’s one scenario where it’s suicidal not to mention non-founders and three more where the pros of talking about them can outweigh the cons. Let’s go through these.

You should always mention a non-founder teammate when they are the only person with the skills to actually build your product. Like we discussed at length earlier, VCs will often reject startups that don’t have the talent in place to build their product. Therefore, whether the person who has the necessary skillset is a founder or not, you need to talk about them.

Meanwhile the three other scenarios where it sometimes makes sense to mention non-founders are as follows:

  1. When they possess a trait that VCs love (e.g. domain expertise)
  2. When they have a senior role and are extremely impressive (see here)
  3. When the fact that you hired them is proof that you can attract strong talent (see here)

In these three optional scenarios, it’s up to you to balance the benefits you get from mentioning these non-founders with the amount of time you’ll need to spend talking about them.

Should I talk about my advisors?

When it comes to mentioning advisors, the bar for including them should be set even higher than for non-founder employees. Except in very specific circumstances, bragging to a VC about the advisors you have is a complete waste of time. The main reasons for this are as follows:

  • VCs know that advisors typically aren’t hands on
  • VCs have seen hundreds of advisors contribute absolutely nothing to startups

Even having prestigious advisors doesn’t help very much. Experienced investors will ask themselves why these prestigious people, if they believe in you so much, didn't join your team or invest in you.

In light of this, you should only really talk about advisors in three situations:

  1. Where you can point to significant contributions they’ve made to your business (e.g. intros to customers or real product work)
  2. Where they have domain expertise that you need
  3. Where they have put their money where their mouth is and invested in you

Even where an advisor satisfies these conditions, it still isn’t always the best use of your time to talk about them. However, if you choose to do so, then make sure that the quality of their contributions is clear. Otherwise VCs will just roll their eyes.

Conclusion

The takeaways from this lesson are pretty straight forward. When it comes to picking which team members to talk about, opt for fewer people and more impact per person. This means that by default you should focus on your co-founders and limit discussion of other team members and advisors to situations where talking about them provides a large benefit.

In the next lesson, we’re going to cover the six norms VCs expect startup teams to follow. This way you can avoid breaking them and creating red flags that make investors reject you.

Join 500+ founders, get weekly fundraising insights, and access free fundraising resources including a library of 30+ pitchdeck examples.