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It’s really hard to overemphasize how much early stage VCs focus on Team, when evaluating startups. Assessing Product and Market Size tell an investor whether an investment is rational. Product answers the question “could this work?” while Market Size answers the question “will the outcome be meaningful to us if it does?”. Team and Traction, however, are used by investors to judge a business’ chances of success - they answer the question “is this likely to work?”. Team has this role because VCs believe that great people make the chances of achieving great results much higher, while Traction is viewed this way, because nothing is more likely to grow rapidly than something that is already growing rapidly. When evaluating an early stage business (Series A and earlier), Team has to do the heavy lifting because Traction is often too small to be meaningful.
VCs recognise that, no matter how good your idea and market is, building companies the size of Google is an impossibly hard task. As a result they really want to invest in people who look like they have a track record of doing impossible things. This is why they constantly talk about ‘pattern matching’ (investing in founders that look like other founders that have been successful), pay double the money to invest in founders who’ve previously had an exit, and have armies of junior staff that harass ex Klarna employees on LinkedIn the minute they change their job title to founder.
VCs want to feel like you are the best team in the world to build your business. They judge this superficially based on your ‘pedigree’ but once you’re in a conversation, they listen carefully to what you say about your backgrounds. As a fundraising founder, it is in your best interests to present your team in a way that makes VCs feel like you are capable of amazing, impossible things. However, most founders end up describing their teams with statements like these:
“Our CTO has 10 years of experience as an engineer across various tech firms.”
“I have worked at startups for the last 5 years in management roles”
How can anyone be impressed by that?
When talking about a team member explicitly your job as a founder is to:
Doing this well does not come naturally to most founders for two reasons. Firstly, founders tend to vastly underestimate just how much importance VCs place on team and secondly, most founders find it uncomfortable to ‘brag’ about their accomplishments to the degree necessary to excite investors.
This post is designed to remedy this. By the end of it you should know how to talk about your team in a way that VCs find compelling, getting you a step closer to a successful fundraise.
To show you what talking about your team members effectively sounds like, this article provides an example of how I would present my background to VCs, followed by a detailed explanation of the techniques that make it compelling. At the end of the essay, I’ve added a cheatsheet which walks you through how to construct a bio that resonates. By the end of this post you’ll be well equipped to pitch your team to investors.
Before we break down what makes this bio work, I want to highlight that it is a little longer than I would recommend using. Especially, if you need to talk about multiple team members. In practice, I would save time by cutting out one of the three paragraphs. However, I included them all here to make sure that there were multiple examples of each of techniques I plan to show you.
Speaking of which, there are four techniques that I've seen founders use to great effect to sell their teams - which I have packed into my above. We're going to explore what makes each of them work and how to do them but it makes sense to list them here first.
Let’s dive in.
“Credit Suisse, one of the largest investment banks in the world”
“I joined Infarm, a German Agricultural Tech Unicorn”
“…some of the best VC funds in Europe. To be specific LocalGlobe and Creandum – both of which have invested in over than 10 unicorns each”
VCs are absolutely obsessed with pedigree. They don’t know if you are impressive (they’ve never worked with you) but if they are impressed by your previous employers (or institutions you’ve been part of) they will assume you are.
As a result, if you’ve worked for well-respected companies, it is far more effective than it ought to be to namedrop them on calls with VCs. In general they are most excited by successful tech companies (hot startups, unicorns and FAANG) but experience from industries or employers that have reputations for being very selective or rigorous (consulting, investment banking, PE / VC, hedge funds, elite law firms, the military etc.) helps significantly.
If where you worked previously is not obviously impressive, i.e. people outside your industry wouldn’t understand its significance, you aren’t screwed. You can ‘educate’ VCs by explicitly telling them why your former employer is a big deal. A surefire way to do this is to immediately provide a few words describing the institution in a way that highlights its significance right after you mention it.
To illustrate this, here are two examples of this technique in action. One where the founder is explaining that their employer is a big deal in a geography that the investor might not know well - “I worked at ICA, the largest supermarket in Sweden” – and another where the founder, aware that their industry is pretty niche, establishes their alma matter’s position at the top of their field - “Skanska, a $10bn construction company and one of the largest in the world”.
Your aim is to position the institution as the biggest, most successful, or most innovative in its industry in a couple of words. In order to do this convincingly, it’s extremely helpful to use one or two pieces of evidence (numbers or facts) that signal that the institution is a big deal. For businesses, talking about things like revenue, market share & position, and valuation works well. Meanwhile if your pedigree comes from academia, it might make sense to associate your institution with breakthroughs by saying something like – “my department is the leading institution in the field of computational biology and is actually where <breakthrough technology X> was developed.
“I built financial models and materials used in several tech acquisitions and fundraises”
“I worked closely with the Head of Strategy and the CEO, built the majority of the financial materials…”
"I worked on 20+ pre-seed and seed deals"
You would be shocked by the amount of times I’ve left a call with no idea what a founder really did in their previous roles, even though they spent five minutes of the meeting talking to me about their team. This is due to the habit that many founders have of describing themselves and their teams with infuriatingly vague statements like “I’ve had several of roles across tech”. This type of intro leaves a stupendous amount of open questions – Were you junior or senior? Did you run teams? Did you code? Were you a PM or an engineer?. Even more damningly, it is guaranteed to undersell your team’s experience. If I have no idea what you did, I can’t be impressed by it – it pays to be specific.
Being specific, however, isn’t always enough. Often I’ll hear founders say something like “I was a claims adjustor at Legal and General, a leading insurance company” and stop there. While specific, statements like this have a high risk of falling flat because the role title is too niche for a generalist audience. There is a high chance that the VC listening has no idea what a “claims adjustor” is because they know nothing about insurance – leaving the founder with no credit for doing a hard thing. To avoid the risk of your role being lost in translation, it makes sense to describe the work that the role entailed doing rather than just stopping at the job title.
Even where the job is well understood (e.g. “I was an accountant”) - I generally advise describing the type of work you did anyway. The goal is to impress, and titles (especially ones below C-Level) do not convey much information about the difficulty of a role or your level of responsibility. Saying you were an accountant and stopping there doesn’t tell me that you were the best accountant in the world – and as a VC I want to invest in the best accountant in the world.
By describing your role, you get the chance to show the investor that you have a track record of doing hard things, making them more likely to back you. Here are some examples of activities you can bring up when talking about what you did that make you sound impressive to VCs:
One final benefit of actually describing previous roles is that it gives you a natural opportunity to include specific highlights and achievements and, as we’ll see below, these can really move the needle.
“A core part of my role was preparing portfolio companies to raise money from later stage investors and it’s actually my experience doing that which led me to start PitchDoctor. I wanted to create a product that made this process more efficient”
Domain expertise is where you have an in-depth understanding and knowledge of a specific industry or sector. You understand your customers intimately as well as the difficulties and dynamics in the industry such as regulation and competition. Most VCs adore domain expertise because they believe that, if a founding team is deeply familiar with an industry, they are likely to:
Points 1 and 4 are especially important to VCs as many of them have been burnt by investing in startups that sounded good on paper, but failed because of mistaken assumptions that industry insiders would never have made.
If your team contains a domain expert, the point where you talk about your team is an ideal time to make that known. If there are aspects of your previous roles or even your childhoods that give you an insider's understanding of your domain, make sure to mention them and don't be afraid to explicitly make the link between your experience and the business you are running. This is pretty easy to do when describing your roles, here a few common ways to do this naturally:
Even if you don't want to be this explicit, where there is an overlap between the industries or roles you’ve worked in and the type of customers you are serving / problem you are solving, it definitely makes sense to mention it when you talk about your team.
One thing to note is that your to team doesn't stop being assessed after the team slide. So if there's no room to talk about your domain expertise here, another natural place to talk about it is when you discuss the problem you're solving. Describing your problem in a way that's painful often involves telling a story, and what's more compelling than a personal story from your perspective as domain experts.
“Led a project on unit economics which resulted in a business model change that reduced costs by 20%.”
“I built financial models and materials used in several tech acquisitions and fundraises including the ~$100m acquisition of the largest payments company in Australia”
“I worked on 20+ Pre-Seed and Seed deals including Laka and Payaut, which have gone on to raise €20m and €12m respectively”
Highlights are extremely useful when it comes to making you or your co-founders seem like the type of people that VCs want to invest in. While investors are happy to assume you are impressive based on the clout of the institutions you’re associated with, in the back of their minds they understand that this is an assumption. You could have simply been a witness to people doing great things rather than the cause of greatness.
Highlights solve this problem, if you are able to point to specific impressive things you did or were part of doing, investors will give you even more credit. A good highlight allows you to position your experience at places that might come across as mediocre as impressive. I may never have heard of the firm you worked for, but the fact that you sold $1m worth of contracts in 6 months will impress me regardless. Plus they are easy to incorporate naturally as you talk about your team by simply weaving them into how you describe what you did in your previous role.
There are two core types of highlight narrative:
Below I’m going to run through how to craft your own ones.
For an institutional highlight to work the listener needs to end up believing two things:
Impressive is hard to define, however, in my experience there are four categories of achievements that consistently resonate with venture capitalists:
Once you’ve identified your achievement you need to make sure that it sounds impressive; the best way to do this is to use numbers (this also applies to talking about traction). Here are some tips on how to do this when talking about the achievements in the four categories above.
An important thing to note when using metrics throughout your pitch is that not every metric is created equally. Investors often won’t have an intuitive sense of whether a business specific metric is impressive or not. Saying something like “our department sold one hundred thousand books in our first year” sounds great, but it’s hard for someone unfamiliar with publishing to know exactly how excited to get. As a result it is often better to talk using numbers pertaining to users, money or time –a statement like “our department made $1m in book sales in our first year” is much more likely to resonate with VCs.
When it comes to showing your part in the institution’s success story, it's not enough to say something like "Infarm became a unicorn". This won’t tell me whether you had any role in bringing about that outcome.
Yes you’ll get clout for being part of an impressive organisation, but VCs won’t give you the credit due to someone who had an active role in making Infarm a Unicorn. To ensure that you are associated with the success story – you need to be explicit about the role you played in it.
In my example I want it to be crystal clear that I joined Infarm before it was a unicorn and that my work contributed to the company achieving that status. Therefore I make it explicit that I joined at the early stages by stating that I arrived “just after they raised their Series A” - the implication is that I was part of the hero’s journey.
For sales achievements and technical breakthroughs you can take this a step further. There’s a large difference between saying "I worked in R&D at GlassCo, a company that built the first ever glass 3d printer" and "I worked in R&D at GlassCo and was a part of the team of three that designed and built the world’s first glass 3d printer”. The latter clearly places you as a contributor to the success.
If you or your colleagues were involved in teams that achieved amazing things, it’s your job to explicitly say so, don't leave it to chance whether VCs give you the credit you deserve.
Personal highlights follow similar rules to institutional ones but are easier to explain as you are automatically included in the story. The main thing is to remember is that they need to sound genuinely impressive. Below I’ve included some common types of narratives that work on VCs:
Like with institutional highlights, once you’ve chosen your highlight narrative, using numbers and facts is key to making it actually sound impressive. Once again metrics should typically revolve around money, users and time as these are universally understandable. Quantify, quantify, quantify.
Before we finish this section I want to briefly talk about false highlights. Many founders present achievements that they think are impressive which typically fail to resonate with investors. Most of these false friends would be impressive at a dinner party but they are generally ignored by VCs as they don’t directly display that you did something difficult or correlated to building a valuable business. Here are a few examples:
I would strongly recommend deprioritising these types of highlight narratives in favour of the types shown above.
In this article we’ve learned how to position our team in the best light when talking to VCs. We’ve shown you four tried and tested techniques that you can leverage to convince investors that you are the right type of team to back. My hope is that this enables you to have much more successful conversations with VCs about the topic that they find most important. Now as promised, below is a cheatsheet that will help you create bio for yourself and your team members from scratch.
When I create team bios with founders – the process involves three simple phases. Firstly, I ask them a bunch of open ended questions about their backgrounds, especially their employment history to figure out what past experiences to include. Secondly, I introduce them to an information dense structure for talking about one’s experiences that is designed to excite VCs. And lastly, together we weave the chosen information into this structure optimising for a compelling narrative. This cheatsheet runs you through how to do this without me.
Select up to three institutions (typically former employers) that you want to include in your voiceover. If you are spoilt for choice, I would prioritise between them by focusing on:
Once you have chosen the institutions you want to mention, go through them and think hard about the most impressive thing you achieved at each of them and save it for later.
Optionally, identify any really impressive achievements that sit outside of these institutions. This is optional but of great value if you don’t have any really compelling highlights from the institutions you’ve chosen.
Now that you have all of the ingredients, you need to package them in a way that makes it easy to talk about to investors. A foolproof way to do this is to go through each institution you chose using the following structure for each firm:
Once you’ve gone through all of them, finish off by adding any achievements you identified which aren’t directly tied to your time with a specific employer. This results in a bio with the following shape:
Now that we have the structure and the information we need to combine them into a compelling narrative. This is the key part as the whole point of this exercise is to convince investors that you are God’s gift to entrepreneurship. Below I have provided advice on how to handle each part of the structure above in a way that is likely to resonate with VCs. This should cover the vast majority of scenarios.
If you follow this processes for all of the people you mention on the team slide you will be well on your way to convincing VCs that your team are the right people to make the billion dollar company they want so badly.
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