How to present your team to investors

The founding team is a one of the most important inputs in a venture capitalist’s mind when she decides to invest in your startup or not. For a large part, an investor will size you up during the pitch by judging how you present and how you answer questions, information that is not written down anywhere on a slide.

Still, the team slide is a crucial part of any VC presentation. It is difficult to put CV information in a slide. There is lots of information, and CV entries require lots of text (long university, company, and position names). So I usually end up designing 2 versions: one to go in the front and one with full details to go in the appendix (the latter is meant for reading, not presenting).

You should adopt the design of your high level team slide, depending on what you want to say:

• We have many of years of experience, a very long time line
• We have worked together before, multiple time lines circling the overlap in your careers
• We worked for big name companies: company logos
• We have complementary skills, some sort of (slightly cliche) puzzle that shows what skill set the individual team members bring to the table.

And if you can:

• Put in high-quality head shots of the team members
• Or even better: an energetic group picture.