Pitch Advice for Entreprenneursr

At Greylock, my partners and I are driven by one guiding mission: always help entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or whether we’re casually meeting for the first time.

Entrepreneurs often ask me for help with their pitch decks. Because we value integrity and confidentiality at Greylock, we never share an entrepreneur’s pitch deck with others. What I’ve honorably been able to do, however, is share the deck I used to pitch LinkedIn to Greylock for a Series B investment back in 2004.

This past May was the 10th anniversary of LinkedIn, and while reflecting on my entrepreneurial journey, I realized that no one gets to see the presentation decks for successful companies. This gave me an idea: I could help many more entrepreneurs by making the deck available not just to the Greylock network of entrepreneurs, but to everyone.

Today, I share the Series B deck with you, too. It has many stylistic errors — and a few substantive ones, too — that I would now change having learned more, but I realized that it still provides useful insights for entrepreneurs and startup participants outside of the Greylock network, particularly across three areas of interest:

• how entrepreneurs should approach the pitch process
• the evolution of LinkedIn as a company
• the consumer internet landscape in 2004 vs. today

—Reid Hoffman

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context

In 2004, the consumer internet was just beginning to rebound. Friendster was at its height, strongly battling MySpace after raising its premium round from Benchmark and Kleiner in the fall of 2003. Facebook, by the way, was not yet on most people’s radars in the summer of 2004.

Friendster’s valuation set the tone for the entire social networking space. Friendster and MySpace had millions of users, a ton of engagement, and all the press attention they wanted. Press and analysts characterized LinkedIn in one of two ways: “LinkedIn is an interesting niche that might be worth paying attention to” or “LinkedIn is the Friendster for business”. Neither is a particularly good backdrop for trying to raise capital, because

1. we weren’t the natural leader of a market or technology trend that everyone was paying attention to,
2. we didn’t have substantial organic growth, and
3. we had no revenue.

Advice

Investors see a lot of pitches. In a single year, the classic general partner in a venture firm is exposed to around 5,000 pitches; decides to look more closely at 600 to 800 of them; and ends up doing between 0 and 2 deals. The goal of an entrepreneur is to be one of those deals.

First, understand your audience. Research prospective investors thoroughly. What kinds of businesses are they looking at? What model/criteria/triggers do they use to judge whether a project will be successful or not? If you don’t have some sense of their points of view, your likelihood of making the pitch go well is more random. You may happen to emphasize the right points that pique an investor’s interest, but you shouldn’t leave your financing up to chance.

Second, understand the broader financing climate. In 2004, investors regained interest in the consumer internet again. Friendster raised a big round in 2003; MySpace started gaining traction. But with so many investors still licking their wounds from the dot-com bust, many focused on proven business models, such as advertising or e-commerce. As a result, we knew that our pitch would need to steer into investors’ biggest concern: the lack of revenue.

Context

In our first slide, we answer three questions:

• What is LinkedIn? The graphic we chose emphasizes that it is a network of people.
• Why is it valuable? Because you can find and contact people you need.
• How is this different? Because unlike Google search or other means, it involves people you already trust.

Although we knew that the recruiting space would be our initial business opportunity, we believed then — and know now — that LinkedIn is more than just a recruiting business. Thus, our pitch framed LinkedIn as a platform for finding the people you need, which we called “professional people search 2.0″, making the parallel to Google because investors understood that Google was valuable. (On slide 5, I begin explaining the importance of pitching by analogy.)

If we framed LinkedIn as only a “jobs/classifieds” website, most smart venture capitalists would not have invested because that seemed to lack the potential to be a broad platform that could sustain a large business. Ultimately, Greylock’s investment thesis was that LinkedIn would be a great recruiting business with an option for more.

Advice

Open with your investment thesis, what prospective investors must believe in order to want to be shareholders of your company. Your first slide should articulate the investment thesis in generally 3 to 8 bullet points. Then, spend the rest of the pitch backing up those claims and increasing investors’ confidence in your investment thesis.

For example, if I were pitching LinkedIn’s Series B today with what I now know about successful pitches, the investment thesis would be:

1. Massively valuable properties will be built off networks.
2. There will be different networks for different domains.
3. The professional domain will be one massively valuable network.
4. We are the leader in the professional domain with viral growth.
5. Great businesses can be built off this network, starting with matching talent and opportunity.
6. It’s a network effects business, which means it has inherent defensibility with a network.

Clearly articulate your investment thesis so investors can offer feedback that helps you refine it, eventually getting to a place where you both agree on it. Any disagreement will likely cause serious problems down the road.

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