How one founder raised from a16z without breaking open PowerPoint
Haje Jan Kamps
21 hours
For all the focus on pitch decks (and more than 80 articles on the topic), you’d think that it’s impossible for startups to raise from angels or institutional investors without one. That’s not entirely correct. Here’s why.
Going far enough back into the history of investing, you needed a comprehensive business plan to raise funding from institutional investors. The Harvard Business Review has a great guide to how to create one. The exact details of what goes into a business plan vary but often include history, market analyses, strategy, product and service descriptions, org charts, competitive analyses, management team, financial plans and projections, along with all the research to back up each section.
That’s all good and well, but by the time you’ve completed all of that, your business plan has ballooned to a novel’s worth of pages — and that’s before you add in all the graphics and charts. Business plans are great for teaching you business basics and dynamics, and mistakes in a business plan are a great way to show would-be entreprene …
