Josh Kopelman on targeting your pitch to an investors' criteria

Josh Kopelman offers an extensive tutorial on matching your pitch to an investor's "analysis framework". I am just coming off Om Malik's WebEx seminar, so more analysis on this later.

Lately I've found myself in a number of pitch sessions where I've quickly realized that the entrepreneur's pitch did not correspond to the framework I use to analyze a company. All investors have some type of mental model and set of proxies that they use to help them evaluate a company and how it fits into an overall market. This model will often drive the types of questions that a VC will ask. This is not rocket science - rather, just some common sense. For example, if you are entering into an existing market with entrenched players, a VC will place a lot of importance on understanding the competitive landscape.

To really deliver a knock-out pitch, an entrepreneur should have an understanding of how the model works, and frame their presentation squarely within it. This allows them to anticipate the questions that the VCs are likely to ask before they ask them. Although these mental models can vary from individual to individual, there are some basic fundamentals that apply across the board. The first step is...