Venture Beyond with Trevor Loy

Entrepreneurs are my heroes.  Great entrepreneurs focus primarily on how to build businesses that delight their customers with amazing products and solutions.  Of course, building those businesses often requires financial capital, advice, and relationships in addition to great products and technology.  For many entrepreneurs, raising capital seems like a medieval labyrinth constructed by mischievous VC investors, for which secret tools and tricks are the key to success.  Like most professionals who hide behind jargon and mystique as a way of hopefully amplifying their power, venture capitalists often perpetuate the mysticism of the fundraising “pitch.”

Luckily, it needn’t be that way.  As it turns out, being an entrepreneur is highly correlated with being human.  And, as it turns out, pretty much all humans already know how to tell stories.  And, as it turns out, making a presentation to raise VC investment is really no different than any other form of storytelling.  

I wrote a long post in 2011 about how I evaluate entrepreneurial businesses, and how entrepreneurs can best use well-known methods of storytelling to present their businesses to me.   As a courtesy to both of us, please review that post before we discuss your business.  Whether you are a good fit with the way I evaluate investments or not, I wish you the best of success. Thank you for your courage in following the entrepreneurial path, and for creating your own story.