Investors don’t look at pitch decks for very long

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/lessons-from-a-study-of-perfect-pitch-decks-vcs-spend-an-average-of-3-minutes-44-seconds-on-them/#.fmsjk4:mTM4

by replicatorblog • 11 years ago

44 34 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

malanj• 11 years ago

Average time could be very misleading here. I would assume that it's a bimodal distribution (or something similar), with many decks that get almost no time and some that get a lot of time.

So assuming a VC will spend ~4 minutes on your deck would be a bad idea. They'll probably either toss it out more quickly than that or take a decent amount of time to go through it properly.

jules• 11 years ago

A natural distribution in this case is the exponential distribution. In the first minute 80% gets thrown out. In the second minute 80% of the remainder gets thrown out, etc.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

A bimodal distribution is way more likely. People just do not behave in free of context ways.

ftio• 11 years ago

The bit about financials slides mattering most because investors spend more time reading them seems misleading, especially in light of the evidence that "only 57 percent of successful decks have this section."

Investors spend more time on financials slides because they're information dense (there's literally just more to read), because they often receive less design consideration than the "softer" slides (slap a table on there because it looks like something an accountant would make), and because they're calculating runway and evaluating business-savvy — not because they necessarily "matter more," whatever that even means.

pcrh5• 11 years ago

I suspect it also has to do with traditions in finance. Due diligence, audits of accounts, etc, are a integral part of how education in finance is conducted. Also, it is easy to do the basic arithmetic and see if proposals "add up". So people are more used to examining financial documents in detail.

When it comes to markets, people, sales, etc, people are more used to going with their "domain knowledge" or "gut instinct", which takes only a few seconds.

reagency• 11 years ago

IOW they bikeshed the financials.

frandroid• 11 years ago

because they're calculating runway and evaluating business-savvy

I would agree that if that's what they're doing that on that slide, then it still does "matter more".

ar7hur• 11 years ago

Remembering pg's great advice before demo day, a pitch has only 2 goals:

- Capture the investors' attention -- they'll have to remember your company among dozens

- Make them curious to hear more -- you want them to reach out and ask for a meeting

None of these requires a big number of slides, or for that matter, time to go through the pitch. Most entrepreneur do a simple mistake and try to put everything that's relevant to their project in the pitch.

morgante• 11 years ago

Many of these decks are actually used for step 2—after investors have heard the initial pitch and are now interested in learning more.

eterm• 11 years ago

I'd like to see those graphs redrawn with the outlier who contacted 300 investors removed.

erikb4• 11 years ago

The four outliers on the two y-axises could be excluded as well.

pcrh5• 11 years ago

Simply removing "outliers" just because you don't like them isn't a rigorous approach.

ddebernardy• 11 years ago

This says mountains on the importance of good titles.

sago• 11 years ago

I guess then I'm not the only one to think the interpretation of the data in these slides is consistently poor.

e.g. The slide with the correlation scatter plots - who devised the model to draw those trend lines? That's just awful statistics.

e.g.2. The slide that judges the important pages in the deck based on the length of time they're looked at (important? why? why not 'complex' or 'difficult to grok'?)

e.g.3. Observed slide order actually says 'team is never in the middle', but then averages the team to be in the middle of the deck.

Hmmm. What an awful piece of data analysis on potentially interesting data.

beat2• 11 years ago

Zero is an even number.

Two is an even number.

The average of two even numbers is an even number.

Therefore, one is an even number.

EliRivers2• 11 years ago

The average of two even numbers is an even number

In which universe is that true?

minimaxir3• 11 years ago

e.g. The slide with the correlation scatter plots - who devised the model to draw those trend lines? That's just awful statistics.

Since the tool appears to be ggplot2, the line (generated via geom_smooth() ) is likely LOESS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_regression

However, they deliberately removed the confidence interval provided, which is misleading.

erikb4• 11 years ago

Does anybody see how the red lines in the "Strive for Quality, not Quantity" diagrams were generated? Looking at the data I don't get the impression that either one looks like it follows the data. Both lines seem to be as good as the other one in either diagram. I'm no expert but from having so many dots on the left sides and nearly none on the right sides I'd say the data is inconclusive. What do the data analysts say?

coherentpony2• 11 years ago

"DocSend, a startup that provides people with a secure and private way of sharing files like offer letters or legal agreements, studied more than 200 pitchdecks ..."

If it's private, how were they able to study them?

conanbatt• 11 years ago

When I was younger, my mother had bought a condo to move into when I was living with her without me even getting to check it out.

Before going to it, she said "You'll even have a private bathroom".

When I see the apt, it turns out she had a suite bathroom, and I had the other one: the guest bathroom. To this day she still claims it was my private bathroom, since she never got into it.

TLDR; private for whom? :)

chaselee• 11 years ago

Companies opted in. It's on slide 2 of their findings -> https://docsend.com/view/p8jxsqr.

coherentpony2• 11 years ago

Oh I missed that! Thank you.

ActVen• 11 years ago

This is why we used an legal-sized PDF infographic for our initial pitch document. We only raised 400K...but the round was full in 20 days.

pedalpete• 11 years ago

I was thinking of just this for our 'send around' deck, and then if we were doing an actual in person pitch, then to use a pitch-deck.

Any chance you can share your infographic? I'd like to see how it wasy laid out.

Investors don’t look at pitch decks for very long

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