You have it. The perfect idea for a company is crystallizing in your mind. Early research indicates that the journey you are embarking on could be both fun, challenging, lucrative, and engaging. Things are coming together beautifully. And now it’s time to raise some money.

This book is focused on the pitch process; it is a guide to how to put together an extraordinary pitch. It will help you create an excellent narrative for your potential investors. But it is much more, too. It will help explain what parts of the story will be most potent in how you can raise money. It will discuss different ways of thinking about how to craft your story and how you can catch your target audience by surprise.

As with all great storytelling, you need to know your audience. You have to understand how investors think and what the driving forces are behind making an investment. To successfully raise money from institutional investors, you need to understand how venture capital (VC) works (Chapter 2). You need to know how to structure your fundraising story (Chapter 1). And you need to have the documents that back up your pitch and fundraising deck (Chapter 20).

Fundraising is a complicated process with many moving parts. Buried deep in the intersection of the people you’ve attracted to help build your business, the market you’re going to be operating in, and the problem you are solving, there’s a story. You are going to move the world from where you are today to the universe you can imagine in the future. To do that, you’re going to deploy some resources, including money.

A startup fundraising pitch is designed to do one thing exceptionally effectively: paint a comprehensive picture of your company and the economy it operates in. Your potential investors will look at your pitch deck and listen to your pitch. A compelling story will make investors lean in and hitch their wagon to your dreams. An excellent presentation anticipates everything an investor will want to know about your venture. Both the great—the things you are better at than anybody else—and the not-so-great. In this book, I will dissect all the slides that typically appear in support of a pitch deck. I will talk about the things that throw up red flags for investors and about the things that are positive indicators for fundraising. I will take you behind the scenes of the decision-making process investors use to help you craft the best story possible.

The truth is that pitching is brutal: Laying your whole business bare in under 20 minutes means that there’s no space for “fluff,” and there will be very little to hide behind. Investors see dozens of pitches per week and are extraordinarily attuned to how this format works. If you are padding or beating about the bush, if you’re lucky, they will call you on it. If you are less fortunate, the investors will tune out and mentally write you off long before you make it to the end of your story.

When I do pitch coaching, the “nowhere to hide” aspect becomes apparent all the time. Sometimes, when a founder stumbles over a slide or a part of the story, there’s a simple fix. Perhaps a point needs to be set up earlier in the presentation. Maybe the story is cleaner if you don’t delve as deep into a particular aspect of the business.

Surprisingly often, though, working with founders on their pitch decks doesn’t show the shortcomings of the presentations. Instead, it reveals cracks in the foundation of the company itself—flaws in the go-to-market strategy and/or weaknesses in the team. Market dynamics that don’t pan out or obvious flaws in the pricing or business model that prevent the business from being viable. A book can’t cover every eventuality in where your company goes wrong—that’s where my coaching practice comes in—but I will teach you the thought processes to help you self-assess.