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This past Friday, we had the opportunity to present Symtext at the National Angel Capital Organization’s Spring Co-investment Summit. As this was the first time I’d attended, I thought I’d follow up with this post to relate a bit about our preparations, the presentation and the aftermath.

The Application
Everyone running a startup has an executive summary, deck, business plan and financial projections. But that does not mean these are necessarily in good order, up to date, and readily configurable to VC or angel investment applications. I found myself doing a lot of revising and rewriting as I completed the Angelsoft form, from One Line Pitch (max 150 characters) to Describe Your Business Model (max 210 characters) to Describe the Solution You Sell (max 450 characters). This despite the fact that I have probably 50 versions each of business plans, exec sums, decks and projections. (And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Plans and projections and the underlying models that inform them are iterative in nature: as new information is gained, milestones surpassed or rendered needless, the documentation needed to express the business to investors and partners changes and evolves.) Anyway, what I liked about the application — beyond actually making the cut! — was that it produced a reusable 1-page distillation of Symtext’s fundamentals. Readers of the NACO guidebook saw 15 of these 1-pagers; brevity counts.

The Preparation
The presentation was structured to allow time for the angel champion to explain why they had invested, and time for the entrepreneur to pitch the business. NACO Executive Director Bryan Watson told us we had exactly 10 minutes. Not 11 minutes. Not 10 minutes, 30 seconds. Ten minutes. So Raymond and I agreed that he’d do a minute outlining his reasons for investing and I’d take the remaining 9 minutes to pitch the business.

Now, nine minutes is not a lot, given the information that needs to be shared. You have to describe the problem (how pervasive, how acute), and in an attention grabbing way. Then it’s on to how you plan to solve the problem (what you do, why your solution works, how you’ll do it, why you’re the right team for the job). The conclusion is the ask (how much you need, how you’ll spend it, milestones and outcomes.)

For us, the pitch deck ended up with this structure:
* intro
* problem description
* market size
* elevator description of our business
* screen shot w/ brief product description
* business model
* why we’ll win (positioning)
* competitive landscape (how we frame the market)
* projections
* the ask (use of proceeds)
* team

That’s 11 slides in 9 minutes, which is a ton of information to transmit clearly. Because of this, every uttered word has to be the most concise, illuminating way of expressing a given concept. And that means tons of practice to eradicate pauses, stumbling, odd phrasing etc. One quick note: we ended our presentation with the team slide — immediately preceded by the ask slide — to leave a margin of safety in the off-chance we were behind on our timing. For the record, the presentation went from 14 minutes of mediocrity on Tuesday PM to 9 minutes of not bad by Thursday PM.

The Presentation
Fascinating day, Friday. I was told that 300 people were registered and from what I saw in the halls and in the auditorium at Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management, I’d be surprised if there were fewer than that. I wandered into the auditorium to get the lay of the land: big room, big screen, big deal. Cool!

Everything was really well organized: we had a table outside for our stuff (in startup world “stuff” amounts to a laptop and CEO) and the third timeslot among the presenters. The speeches to kick off the proceedings were anything but the usual. One, apparently, was the final appearance of a “notorious” speech, along with the Minister who delivered it. By contrast, and given what I do, I found Sheldon Levy and his i-Everything strategy speech more my speed.

Speeches over, we moved on to heart of the day: the pitches. A few things struck me right away. The companies assembled to pitch the angel investors were a strong bunch. Beyond simply surpassing the threshold of $250k in previous external investment, almost all the companies were at revenue, and had fantastic ideas, patents, sales channels, deep teams… In other words, when people talk about startups being the engine of growth and industry, the proof was right there for everyone to see. And I noted that the pitch decks were in most cases uber-professional, with evident investment in brand and messaging.

What was also clear was that the NACO was dead serious about the 10 minute limit. Several times the angel champion spoke a little too long, leaving the CEOs with too little time to explain their business. This set up an amusing (for the audience) situation in which an NACO exec member would — in an exceedingly friendly way — slowly usher a still-speaking CEO away from the microphone.

Symtext up. Raymond did a great job, quickly, and then I did my piece — ensuring to ad lib the connection between Symtext’s digital media Liquid Textbooks and Ryerson’s digital media i-Everything strategy. It all seemed to turn out alright, judging from both the feedback and post-presentation discussions.

All in all, it was a great day. Seriously great work by the NACO, which all the startups hope to reward not just by our thanks, but by securing the financing needed to build some pretty spectacular companies.

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