All in order?
Newsletter #2: Docs, International Expansion, Funding down? Winning Corporate Customers, Investors Pitching Founders
How ready are those raising? (documentation wise)
Takeaways:
- Almost all businesses raising have a pitch deck (90%)
- Data room readiness is low across most stages (when these businesses use shipshape.vc)
- Larger fundraises are more likely to have full documentation
- The biggest discrepancies are with Business Plans and Data Rooms - significant variations based on the size of round being raised.
Pitch decks and financial models show a steady increase in readiness as investment sizes go from below £500k to £5m plus.
Nearly all companies seeking over £500k have pitch decks ready.
Financial model readiness jumps from 64% to 77% between sub-£500k and £500k-£2m.
Business plans tell a similar story, with a 10-15 percentage point increase in readiness between sub-£500k and larger amounts.
The outlier is data rooms, which peak at 59% for £2-5m raises and decline slightly for over £5m.
International Expansion Preferences:
What are the most popular countries that companies want to expand / move to?
(This excludes continents, e.g. 'Asia', or constructs e.g. 'GCC / EU')
Funding drops across stages
In a 20VC episode with Jason Lemkin, Jason claimed that Seed rounds were more active than ever.
Whilst there may be a recent increase (post drop), this doesn’t appear to be true, and whilst our data is not perfect or complete, I’d love to know where Jason got his data*.
Carta data shared by Peter Walker (1, 2) also seems to show a similar trend to the patterns we observe.
*There’s a lot to admire about Jason by the way… but on this point I think the data shows he’s wrong!
Investors Pitching Founders?
Yes, you heard that right.
Sign up here with discount code: SHIPSHAPE for £10 tickets (otherwise £45).
Pitching Corporates and Large Brands?
This is a shout out to a friend and advisor, Ken Valledy, who alongside Eamonn Carey, co-authored a very helpful book for founders starting out, called ‘The Startup Lexicon’.
He’s running a session for founders on pitching to Corporates.
We all know pitching to investors is important, but big Corporates are possibly the most complicated, because there are multiple individuals to sell to, to make one sale.
Founders who want to learn from Ken can sign up here.
Sessions are paid. We don’t take a fee, we have enough B2B startup founders in our user base, so it feels like a good thing to alert you to!