What's the playbook for a first investor call?

Do not mess up these first impressions and do your homework. So, let's walk you through what that homework looks like. Why is it important to find those points of relatability? This is probably the most important question asked, "Why did you take this call?" If you're talking more than 60-70% on a call, you probably lost. I'm going to give you in this video to make sure you land that first meeting, but not only make that first meeting, but you get that second, third, fourth meeting that ultimately lead to a check. Hi, I'm Jason Kirby. I'm a serial entrepreneur, investor, and mentor to founder-led companies. And with over four exits under my belt and over 135 million in transactions, I want to share my secrets on how to nail your first investor meeting. It's not just about showing up and having a conversation with an investor. It's about having a proven strategy every time you get on that first call, whether it's a Zoom, a phone call, or in-person meeting. There are certain strategies to make sure they're leaning in and wanting to know more, and that's what we're going to cover today. So, let's start with the most important thing. It actually It happens before you get on the call. It's knowing who you're talking to and if they're the right person you should be talking to. So, let's just say you nailed the opportunity to get the meeting. That means you messaged the right person, got the right intro. That's a separate video. But now you have that meeting on your calendar. You have 3 days from now to hop on a call. What are you doing to prepare for that call? There's only so many investors in the world that actually care about what you're building and have the ability to invest in the company that you're building. So, do not mess up these first impressions and do your homework. So, let's walk you through what that homework looks like. So, first, you should be Googling them and researching their LinkedIn. Google because it might show any current or relevant events that might pertain to their firm or to their the leadership there. Any kind of recent events will be important to be known before getting in whether it's good or positive news or recent deals. It's good to show that you did your homework and highlighting a recent event for them. Two, look at their LinkedIn. Look at their history. Who else do they know? Are you talking to an associate, or a principal, the managing director, a partner? Knowing those details will should change ultimately how you conduct your meeting. So, the first step, do your research, get an understanding of who you're going to be talking to, and come in well prepared with talking points of points of relatability with that person to have a better conversation. Some of my favorite things to know about an investor before I hop on that call is where they went to school, where they live, who we might know or interacted with before, whoever made the intro, making a point to bring that up in the conversation. And knowing their investment thesis. What do they actually invest in? Knowing what it says on their website versus maybe the deals that they've done. So, you've done your homework. Now, why did I ask you to do your homework on these people? Well, at the end of the day, you need to build a relationship with these investors. Investors do not want to be asked for money. The end of the day, that's what everyone comes to them for. They know that's obviously why you're there. So, skip that part and just go into straight building a relationship with them. Trying to understand who they are. What makes them tick? Do they have kids? Do they not have kids? Do they go to the office? Do they not go to the office? Do they work from home? Are they in, you know, San Francisco? Wherever they are. Try to leverage your homework on that point of relatability. And in those first few minutes of that conversation, be sure to weave in the fact that you did a little bit of homework. It's always flattering to them, makes them a little bit more obligated to give you a shot when you show that you've done homework. If you go straight into I'm the CEO of ABC company and I'm going to change the world, blah blah blah blah blah, they're going to go straight on the defense and they're not going to be ready to lean in because like, "Whoa, whoa, slow your horses there. Let's not get married straight away. Let's you know, make sure, you know, we're both cool people." So, you done your homework, you present yourself as a likable person, you show that you've done their research you know, research on them. Now, you have that little small talk back and forth. It only be about two, three, maybe five minutes or so. If it's going well, it's going for a couple minutes and then you can cut into transitioning over to them giving their background. So, you always want VCs to start with sharing their thesis and who they are. It's pretty default, it's boilerplate statement for most of them. They rehearse it all the time. They usually like to get it out of the way first. So, just let it happen. That means you now get all the data that maybe their website didn't disclose, might change some of the key talking points that you want to bring up. But, this is really important to being able to control the narrative of the meeting by having them share a little bit more about their investment thesis and their process. Now, they may or they may not share this. And if they do not share this one question answer this one question, you need to ask. This is probably the most important question ask, "Why why did you take this call?" So, as a founder asking an investor, saying, "Hey, out of curiosity, why did you take this call?" And pause. Don't sit there and elaborate. Don't run on and you run on sentences. "Hey, why did you take this call?" Make them actually think. Was it your deck? Was it the fact that their boss told them to meet with you? Was it the fact that a very reputable introduction came in and they're just giving you a shot? Did they do their homework on you? Maybe not. I've had some situations where VCs didn't even look at your deck before hopping on the call. They just felt obligatory to to take the meeting. So, this will help you understand how serious they are about the call and how much catching up you have to give them. Like if they haven't really done a lot of homework on you, they're not really impressed, you need to maybe start with some of the basics. If they're like, "Hey, we read the deck, we we get the model, we're heavily invested in this industry, we know all about it." Well, then don't talk about the industry. You know, talk about what makes you special and differentiated. They talk about you know that they've got a warm intro, then you might need to kind of give them a little bit more of the you know problem you're solving, the vision that you have for your company, the solution, and you know, you know, some of the education on the market. You have to kind of go through some of those talking points. So, once you've gone through this stage, and now you have context as to why they're taking the meeting and now you should be mentally capable of running the show on this meeting. Now, assuming it's only 30 minutes, which is the average, you should now be focused on giving them your background. Not the company's background, your background. Why are you qualified to be building this company? Why did you start it? Why are you passionate about this particular problem? You should be hitting on key points around your unique background that makes you qualified for what they call founder market fit. You want to kind of check that box as early as possible. Tie in your background and interesting points about you. From there, you want to talk about what you're doing to the industry. What are the industry changes that are happening that brought you to solving this problem and ultimately demonstrating the value of your solution. Quick plug for founders looking for an edge raising capital. Companies on thunder.bc have gone on to raise over a billion dollars since joining our network. It's absolutely free. Just go to join.thunder.bc to get started. And if you leave a comment on this video down below with your company's name and the problem you're trying to solve, you'll be entered to win a free coaching session with me. Okay, that's it. Just comment down below. Now let's get back to the show. Now it's always going to be better to show not tell, but do not pitch your deck. Okay? Founders, this is what will kill you immediately in a meeting is if you sent a deck and then you go and present that deck on the call, you're pretty much not going anywhere. Uh if they ask you to present the deck, then maybe sure, hit a key point, you know, a couple slides, but don't go through the whole, you know, spiel. Have a quick, you know, 3-minute version that you can kind of knock through. Don't be spending 25 minutes on a call walking someone through your deck. You've already lost it. That's the point. So be sure to cover your background, get into what makes your business unique and how you're competitive, and what you're doing in the industry. Talk about your big picture vision, but you should not be presenting that deck. Plain and simple. If you need a reference a slide as a visual support or you want to do a demo, totally fine. If it really wows people to kind of see a visual for your product, by all means share those on these calls, but do not walk through the deck you had sent prior to the call. It will all automatically, you know, disinterest them because they odds are they probably read through it and they're up to speed on that stuff. You don't want to be wasting that time. In fact, what you want is you want to encourage them to ask questions. This The best dialogues that I've seen between investors and founders is usually 50/50. That means on a 30-minute call, the investor's talking for 15 minutes and asking questions, sharing their thoughts and ideas, and you're talking for 15 minutes. Something acceptable might be like 70/30 where you're talking 70% of the time, but if you're talking more than 60/70% on a call, you probably lost. And they're probably not interested. They're probably not going to follow up. They'll probably say, "Yeah, sure, give us access to the data room." But they probably won't look at your data room cuz they're just not that into you. Uh that clear sign of indication that they are interested in you is when they are constantly going back and forth or riffing ideas with you. They're trying to understand something more about the business. Um or they're saying, "How do we move forward?" So, you get through your presentation essentially or you're talking about what makes your business special. You're having a little bit of back and forth dialogue. You got about 3 minutes left in this call. You either have one or two options. This conversation's going phenomenal, and you say, "Hey, we're running in we're running out of time in about 3 minutes. Uh do you guys have more time to keep talking, or do I need to wrap things up?" This one shows you're acknowledging and respecting their time. You're not putting them in an uncomfortable situation. They respect that. They might want to keep talking to you, but they do maybe have something very important they have to jump to. Some cases, they will be canceling the next meeting because they really want to, you know, prioritize you. In some cases, they'll say, "Yes, I have to stop." And what you want to do when you have to stop and they say, "Yes, I have a hard stop." is to basically take those last 3 minutes and walk them through your process. Don't let them dictate to uh to you what their process is. You should have already gotten that in the beginning stage of the call. So, this is where you say, "Hey, it's been great meeting you. It's been great having this opportunity to present what we're doing. Uh I'd like to get another call on the books where we can kind of walk you through a demo." And give you a full-length uh you know, not full-length. Yeah, don't say full-length. That might scare uh Uh, give them a demo of your product and show them what your product's actually capable of. Maybe walk them through a couple case studies. So, at that last 3 minutes, like, "Hey, I would love to just go ahead and schedule a follow-up call. Only need about 20-30 minutes of your time to give you a demo. That should really give you a great idea of what we're doing and why our product's so unique uh and has a chance to win the market." Um, and you want to book that call on the call you're on. You don't want it to go to where they're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, send us an email and we'll figure it out." You might lose them. If you don't get that follow-up call booked while on the call, either again, they're not that into you, uh they were distracted and weren't really paying attention, again, not that into you, or they say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, we're free on Monday at 1:00 p.m." It's like, boom, they're interested. And now you need to maintain momentum. So, we're not going to talk about, you know, all the other steps that come after the first call, but in this first call, you need to land that next meeting and have it already in the calendar before you hang up. If you lose that opportunity, the odds of them staying engaged and wanting to continue moving on have dropped probably by 60-70%. So, not impossible, but it's going to be a lot more work for you to get them to the table uh if they don't book that call. So, your number one priority in pitching the the first investor meeting is to establish a relationship, establish some relatability and connection to them beyond just your pitch. Two, make sure they understand your business, have a dialogue, make sure they're asking questions, they're engaging. And the third most important priority is that you're not trying to get their investment on a first meeting, you're trying to win more time. You're trying to get them to invest more time into getting to know you and your business, cuz it can take, you know, somewhere between five to 10 meetings before you actually get a term sheet. You know, unless you're the hottest thing in the market right now, like, it could take several meetings to get investors interested, especially a lead investor that's is to be the one doing the underwriting. So, when you get into those meetings, make sure you're booking that next call by the end of the meeting. Otherwise, you know, your shots are limited. So, that's my advice on how you're supposed to run your first investor call. Now, if you thought this was great advice, let me know down in the comments. If you thought this was terrible advice, maybe you're a VC and you say, "I hate when founders run in this process." Be sure to let me know in the comments. I'd love to to hear what you have to say. But, if you like the video, make sure to give it a like. If you want to stay tuned for more content, we're going to be pumping out more of this stuff in addition to our weekly podcast and our weekly weekly newsletter, which you can learn more and subscribe to at join.under.vc. But, otherwise, be sure to subscribe to this channel, like the video, leave me a comment down below, and that will encourage me to continue to produce this this content that I usually reserve for my clients and never actually share this stuff publicly outside of maybe a couple of written pieces. But, this time I'm trying to up our game on the the video quality and and the content that we produce for our audience to to help founders further that, you know, may not be able to get the time with me one-on-one, where I share this advice on a regular basis with every single one of our clients we take to market. We're giving them constant coaching and advice and feedback on how to run their calls, and this is, you know, taken from those those lessons. So, hope you enjoyed it, but be sure to let me know if you did down below. Till the next video. Thank you for watching today's episode. As a reminder, I'm your host, Jason Kirby. I have built and sold multiple companies with over 135 million in transactions as either a founder, operator, or investor across multiple industries. I'm currently the managing director and founder of thunder.vc, where we help companies and founders at all stages navigate what capital to raise and who to raise it from and help improve companies' odds of raising capital. If you need help, reach out to us at help.under.vc. If you liked today's show, please share with your friends, give us a like or comment down below. As a reminder, this show is published weekly. To get notified new episodes and our newsletter, be sure to go to our website at join.thundervc. And if you sign up today, I'll send you a few freebies on how to negotiate a term sheet, how to get a free list of relevant VCs, and much more. That's it. 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