For your team, show, don't tell

When you’re pitching your startup, don’t put the team slide first. Based on the most recent batch, it seems like YC is training to this, and it’s wrong. Here’s why:

? Is the team the most important factor in a startup’s success? Yes, emphatically. But we’re not talking about the team, we’re talking about the team slide.

? Every VC sees thousands of pitches, and every pitch has a team slide. Most of them fit into one of two categories: 1) for a young team, “my cofounder and I went to good universities, and we worked for a while at a big tech company,” or 2) for a more experienced team, “we’ve been execs at X and Y and Z.” Do I care which university or which company it was exactly? Not really. And if you didn’t go to a brand name university or run a business unit at Google, that’s ok too - lots of other successful founders didn’t either. Conversely, there are folks with good logos on their resumes who were in the room where it happened, but who weren’t the ones that made it happen. Caveat arbiter.

? So if the team is the most important factor, and the team slide mostly doesn’t differentiate one company from another, what does? The rest of the presentation. Content and delivery. Clarity of thinking. Self-awareness. What you’ve accomplished so far in this company, in the time you’ve been working on it.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a team slide. Just put it later in the presentation, where most founders do. I find that when we already understand something about the company, we often have an interesting and productive conversation on the team slide; whereas when it’s at the very beginning, all I’m thinking is “let’s get to the meat of the presentation.”

Also, your team slide should make it clear and obvious who is the core team - those who are full time in the company - vs who are advisors. As I’ve written before , we mostly don’t care about your advisors.

If you want, you can have a third category, which is folks who will join full time when the round closes. Note, however, that this will be met with some skepticism, as we’ve seen cases before where these people didn’t end up joining. If anyone in this third category is not replaceable, you’re going to want to bring them to the second meeting, or (better still) convince them to give up that cushy day job and commit ahead of funding. On the other hand, if they are replaceable, don’t put them on the slide at all. Remember, you’re trying to convince me that this deal is a sure-fire success and will be worth billions of dollars. Why make a big deal out of the fact that you have a buddy who knows you from way back and whom you haven’t yet been able to convince?

At the beginning of your presentation, with the title page showing, it’s good to introduce yourself briefly - 30 seconds at most. You’re not really trying to score points here; you’ll do that through your content and delivery and then reinforce it with the team slide later. But it can have value as a check for affiliation - do we know the same people, ie is there someone I both trust who can vouch for you, and vice versa? Also, it’s a polite ritual, and those have their place too!