4 Crucial Slides for Your Investor Presentation

(Source: Dilbert)

[Also published on Yourstory.in]

Earlier this week, I was invited to mentor the GSF Accelerator’s startups on Pitching & Investors Decks.  I thought I’d summarize what I said there.

I certainly don’t claim any special knowledge on what makes for a good first investor presentation.  There have been many books and blogs written about this.  However, I’ve seen hundreds of investors pitches over the past several years of coaching CEOs on IPO roadshows, raising capital as a founder and listening to pitches as an investor.  Heck, I’ve even been involved with investing in the leading presentation sharing company - Slideshare - which has helped accelerate a trend toward storytelling in presentations.

The first meeting is not about getting investors to agree to invest (although perhaps it is when you are looking at angel/micro-VC funding). The key is to start to develop the relationship and get them excited enough and intrigued enough to want to dive in deeper in a subsequent meeting.

You can greatly improve the odds of having a productive first meeting by telling a compelling story in a concise and hard-hitting manner.  Make it personal. Hit the main high points first to generate and assess interest. Then provide backup to your claims to cement the story.

Click here to see the 4 key slides (on Slideshare) that you need to nail.

After these four slides, stop and assess your audience by asking them what they think, their key concerns etc.  You should then be adept enough to address these concerns as you continue with the familiar series of slides on traction, product overview/roadmap/differentation, market sizing, business model, go-to-market, financial projections and funding requirement & milestones.  Finish by showing the Investment Highlights slide again and summarizing the key points.  Leave this slide up while you go through any final Q&A with the investors.

Some other guidelines and pet peeves:

• The point of the slide should be the title of the slide e.g. don’t say “Team” as the title of the slide. Instead, say “Extensive Team Experience in Adtech” if you are doing an Adtech startup.
• The meeting is not about reading out the presentation, it’s about your conversation and engagement with the investors, with the presentation as support material.
• No more than 2 minutes per slide. I’ve seen 30 minutes spent just on the first slide where the whole pitch is given with that one slide.
• You should be able to run through the presentation by yourself in less than 30 minutes.
• Place yourself between the investors and the projected or laptop-based deck. Otherwise you’ll have the tennis match effect of spectators swiveling back and forth between the presentation deck and you.
• Don’t leave the meeting without asking investors: “What do you think?”, “What are your main concerns?”, “What did you like specifically?”
• Know what your investors have invested in or said about your space before you meet them. The Web is your friend.
• Please don’t take the slide deck I’ve embedded above as an example of the colors, fonts or layout that you should use.

Why Lightspeed invested in OneAssist

Yesterday, we formally announced that Lightspeed and Sequoia invested in OneAssist, a company that creates and markets assistance and protection-oriented membership plans for consumers.  OneAssist was incubated and founded in the Lightspeed offices during 2011 by Gagan Maini and Subrat Pani.  We’ve known Gagan for almost five years and frequently traded views on business ideas and opportunities in the payments, loyalty and concierge space.  Gagan and Subrat have known each other since the late-90s, when they worked together at the SBI-GE cards joint venture.  They have each built new businesses from scratch inside larger companies – Gagan most recently started the Indian operations for CPP and Subrat built the credit cards business at Kotak – and we’re excited to back them in building a new company in this white space.

The thesis behind OneAssist is that consumers increasingly value peace of mind, convenience and assistance with respect to certain events that can disrupt or interrupt our everyday lives (such as the loss of a phone or wallet, health emergencies etc.).  This is driven by: (i) increasing time scarcity – especially in double income households, (ii) a cultural preference for ‘assistance’ (witness services such as Naukri’s ‘assisted’ online job postings, where sales reps hand-hold employers through the job posting process, JustDial’s assisted directory service, IRCTC’s agent channel for booking online tickets etc), and (iii) an emerging orientation towards protecting oneself from unforeseen future events (health insurance didn’t meaningfully exist 10 years ago and is a 13,000 Cr industry now).  And perhaps more anecdotally, a growing sense of taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family.

We believe there is a large opportunity to create a branded, consumer-oriented assistance and protection platform across multiple segments.  The initial use cases OneAssist will support are the loss (or theft) of a wallet (including cards, driving license, PAN card etc) and the loss (or theft) of a mobile phone.  In each case, the company takes on the chore of cancelling credit/debit cards (or remotely wiping and locking a phone), protecting against misuse of cards and/or data, providing emergency assistance (such as providing a replacement handset with data fully backed-up), and replacing essential identity documents such as a driving license or PAN card.  Each product also offers certain group insurance benefits to protect against financial loss.  Plans are priced at Rs 1,000 to 2000 per annum depending on the chosen package plan, which equates to just about Rupees 3-5 a day.

In addition to marketing directly to consumers, the company would also market their products through affinity partners (such as banks, telcos, retail, etc) and corporates who have large customer or employee bases and can offer such products as very relevant value added service or benefits for a fee.

This business model is notoriously difficult to execute against given the importance of delivering against the promise in ‘moments of truth’, the myriad of supply-chain partnerships and capabilities that must be developed and coordinated, the direct and partner-driven sales and marketing capabilities that must be built to achieve scale and the customer engagement strategies that must be deployed to ensure high customer satisfaction and loyalty. We believe that Gagan and Subrat are the best entrepreneurs to take on this challenge and wish them and their team the very best as they embark upon this adventure.

An Ecommerce Ecosystem is Emerging in India

(Source: Zen)

[Published in Medianama]

Ecommerce in India has gone through a cold spell, but there is hope for warmer days ahead. There appears to now be a clear focus on contribution margin and sustainability versus the previous race to buy topline. As Bejul explained in his post, customer lifetime value is a metric that Lightspeed believes is critical to measure and optimize.

The ecosystem is a key enabler of sustainability for an industry. For example, it is unviable for all ecommerce players to build end-to-end logistics and payments/wallet capabilities internally. Certain ecosystem trends are emerging which may help ecommerce businesses become more viable over time:

Capabilities of logistics service providers aren’t static

Logistics is where rubber meets the road, and ecommerce glamour meets the offline reality filled with dust, sweat and lost/wrong/delayed shipments. Some ecommerce specialist players now provide:

• End-to-end ecommerce solutions, including inward, racking, picking, packing, shipping and collection.
• Transparency into logistics company’s processes through APIs, which can reduce returns (and costs) and bring predictability.
• Variable warehousing bills (per order shipped) that help manage costs at lower scale, and a projection for reduction in per unit cost with increasing scale of the ecommerce business.

There are several new and old companies worth calling out:

• Dedicated ecommerce divisions within traditional players like Bluedart, Aramex, etc
• New ecommerce logistics specialists such as Delhivery, Holisol and Chhotu. These companies and teams tend to be more hungry, innovative and nimble than their traditional counterparts but are still building their capabilities. Also interesting is Mudita for bulk inter city shipments.

Payment gateways/aggregators are trying to address pain points

Payment gateway failure horror stories are common, with failure rates as high as 35%. This continues to be a lost opportunity, and a very expensive one, as it costs up to Rs 1,000 to get the customer to that point.  Here are a few improvements/innovations that are coming up:

• Wrapper technologies that work with multiple banks to minimize probability of transaction failure.
• Deep analytics and visibility into customer’s intent to buy: For example, ecommerce companies can track a list of failed transactions (with customer and cart details) so that their teams can follow-up and close offline.
• PCI/DSS compliant widgets which simplify the payment experience for consumers.
• Capability to handle payments originated over mobile web.

There are traditional names like Billdesk, CC Avenues, EBS, who are incrementally adding value but the new teams that are coming up quickly are Citrus and PayU, in addition to GharPay which collects cash from consumers’ doorsteps when no physical delivery of goods is involved (e.g. tickets, collection in advance of shipping).

The industry is maturing

Some of the more recent trends I see are:

No-poach agreements: After the initial land grab in the OTA space, Yatra, Makemytrip, Cleartrip got into such arrangements. Leading ecommerce players are now discussing these. It is good from a talent pool perspective too, as people apply themselves to fix hard problems versus moving to the next job.

CoD Blacklist: CoD is a key part of Indian ecommerce. However, high CoD return rates (upto 25% in some categories) cause operational challenges and working capital burden. Some players are discussing creating an industry wide CoD customer blacklist – this can drive significant efficiency for ecommerce / logistics companies and a better experience for genuine customers.

Trust from OEMs/Brands: Brands/OEMs are putting more trust into ecommerce now. Eighteen months back ecommerce was not strategically important to brands/OEMs, but brands are now launching their own ecommerce platforms, and/or have a clear strategy for ecommerce as a channel. Senior executives with years of core category experience are now excited about ecommerce and are considering opportunities in this retail format.

These trends are still in their infancy but if they continue the situation will be very different a few years from now. The key question is to what extent and in what time frame will these developments move the needle in making ecommerce sustainable.

Some thoughts for ecommerce entrepreneurs

My thoughts for entrepreneurs building ecommerce companies are to:

• Assess if you can derive value out of any of these services / trends: For example, compare if your current logistics / payment provider (in-house or outsourced) is competitive with the changing environment or revisit if you can bring in top talent from the domain into your team.
• Step forward to support the ones you find relevant: For example, you would take risk when you test a new partner in your order flow (logistics or payment), or when you commit to not hiring from competition, but these partnerships can pay off very meaningfully in the long run.
• If you are a new startup, identify and focus on your core competence: Logistics and payments contribute significantly to direct costs but they are only necessary and not sufficient for success.  So unless you plan to differentiate on these, leverage the ecosystem.

This list is by no means exhaustive, so please feel free to add more names / trends / thoughts in the comments section.

Social/Mobile Platforms have Changed the Game in the US (but not India yet)

[Published in Pluggd.in]

I was looking at some stats on growth of consumer social and mobile platforms between 2008 and now. Even though it’s an obvious point, the contrast is quite stark and shows how much the world has changed in a short time.  It’s almost hard to imagine a world where Facebook was a startup, LinkedIn and Twitter had very small user bases and iOS and Android each had less than 10M users. But this was the case in early 2008.

The numbers above are based on Crunchbase, SEC filings and news reports – I think they’re directionally correct although there may be some numbers that are not exactly right.

While all these above-mentioned platforms or quasi-platforms (and others I have not mentioned) have impacted startups in the US and Europe, I think Facebook and Android are the real game-changers in India as opposed to LinkedIn, Twitter or iOS.

Why Facebook and Android in India?  Here’s why: When I think of consumer platforms (a much abused term), I think of a few criteria:

1. a large, engaged and fast-growing audience (100M+ users)
2. a developer friendly culture and technology base
3. a monetization vehicle that is providing enough return to developers for their time

In my opinion, three platforms stand out today and meet this criteria – Facebook, iOS and Android – in many parts of the world.  However, they all fall down in India when it comes to #3 (monetization) and (for now) #1 (audience size).  I have no doubt these platforms will get to the right audience sizes in India in the next 12-24 months – Facebook claims ~50M users and Android has <10M in India. In the meantime, Google reigns supreme for reaching users.

So, the upshot is that now is the time to start companies leveraging these platforms in India.

[previously published on Nextwala blog]

Learning from Founders

(Source: Marttj)

[Published in VCCircle]

I have worked with the Slideshare team, as a user, investor and board member at different times, from 2008 till late last year.  After the Slideshare + LinkedIn announcement last week, I have been reflecting on how much has changed and how much (or little, depending on your perspective) I have learnt from this experience since starting out in the venture business several years ago, as well being a founder myself in the late 1990′s.

Here’s what I learnt from Rashmi, Jon and Amit about best practices of founders.  I appreciated their willingness to work with me and be patient.

Passion & Focus

• Passion about your userbase is contagious. It impacts the employees and their retention, it impacts your core user base and their retention, it impacts customers and their retention.
• Focus, focus, focus on honing the product – UX, scalability, security, data, analytics and more – but keep trying new product angles quickly to iterate toward high engagement and clear value.
• Focus on crystallizing value to paying customers – make it easy for customers to understand value (packaging, positioning, messaging), connect value to price, and make it easy to pay as customers receive value. To do this, understand who your super-user segments are and why.

Growth and (or versus) Monetization

• Be frugal (if possible) but keep innovating, so you are around when lightning strikes in terms of user growth, revenue or outcomes.
• It’s tough to balance growth versus monetization versus profitability. There is definitely a trade-off. Get lots of input on this from people who have made these trade-off successfully.
• Understand path from user acquisition to engagement to retention to monetization early on and track associated actionable metrics (a la Dave McClure’s AARRR). Especially for user-generated content, there’s no automatic connection between usage and revenue.

The Outside World

• Acquisitions and successful partnerships take time to develop.  They generally come from engaging over long periods of time. At the end of the day, it’s about people getting to know people.
• Keep tabs on competition, don’t obsess about them though – most companies die of self-inflicted wounds, not because of competition.
• Investors are people. Sometimes your investors and board members know what they are talking about, sometimes they don’t, hopefully more of the former.

Becoming a Better Board Member

Through hit (and miss), I also learnt some lessons on how to become a better board member over time:

• Be respectful w.r.t. founders – they known their business better than you do.
• Be patient – there’s no such thing as an overnight success – don’t get too impatient but still hold management’s feet to the fire
• Be thoughtful and have a high bar when suggesting workstreams for the company – their time is precious, don’t waste it.
• Focus on strategic impact – as an investor, focusing on daily management decisions (i.e. micro-managing) will not have a positive impact on the company (and may have a negative impact). Focus on strategic changes, such as building the best management team, making the right bets on monetization, making the right introductions to partners/acquirers, holding people accountable for outcomes.
• Conduct board meetings for the right reasons. Board meetings should not primarily be about reporting only but also about trying to solve problems together and laying the groundwork for scale.  The real action happens outside of board meetings though.
• Align with founders on outcomes. Understand your goals and risk-profile as an investor early on relative to goals and risk-profile of the founders & management team.  Align.
• Angels and VCs are not at loggerheads. As long as companies continue to build value in a large enough market, angel investors and venture investors are aligned.  All the media hype about the two communities being at loggerheads with each other is overdone.

(previously published on Nextwala blog)

All Termsheets Are Not Equal

[Published on Yourstory.in]

So, how long will it take to get a term sheet?

This is a question that most entrepreneurs appropriately want to know.  While there is no one size fits all answer to this question, the focus of this post is to ask what I think is an equally important question for all entrepreneurs – what does a term sheet really mean?

The reason this is important is because all term sheets are not equal.  Some firms issue term sheets early in their investment and diligence process (Firm A), while others issue them at the end of their process (Firm B).  While Firm A will be able to issue a term sheet more quickly than Firm B, there is likely to be a higher risk that the deal does not close as most of the detailed diligence is yet to be done.  Conversely, while Firm B might take longer to issue the term sheet, if/when when they do so, they will likely have a very high likelihood of completing the investment, thus providing the entrepreneur with a higher certainty of close.

Since most term sheets contain exclusivity clauses that restrict the entrepreneur’s ability to speak to other firms and evaluate other financing options, wouldn’t you rather accept a term sheet that has a higher probability of close, even if this takes a little longer? So next time you ask an investor how long it takes to get a term sheet, be sure to also ask what level of commitment their term sheet represents.

Presentation on Making E-commerce Sustainable in India

Here’s the presentation I gave at the IAMAI Digital Commerce event this morning:

India’s Mobile Apps & Services Industry is in a Slump…

I find myself simultaneously excited by the future prospects of India’s mobile value-added services (MVAS) industry and depressed by the current friction in the eco-system.  Overall though, I am cautiously optimistic – there is some hope on the horizon in the form of upcoming offdeck rev-share changes, smartphone growth, and the (rumored) Reliance 4G launch.

So, what is the problem?

Mobile operator ARPU in India has collapsed from roughly $10 in 2005 to $3 currently, compared to a steady $11 in China and $70 in the US.  There is over-competition in the market – good news for consumers in terms of voice prices but bad news for consumers in terms of slower rollout of broadband and high wireless data prices.

Wireless data in India is relatively early – it accounts for ~$4.8 billion in revenue (according to IAMAI and Analysys Mason) or 16% of overall wireless revenue of ~$30 billion.  MVAS (excluding data plans and p2p SMS) accounts for approximately half of wireless data revenue in India.  Contrast this to US data revenue of ~$70 billion in 2011 (approximately 35-40% of overall wireless revenue of $200 billion) and China data revenue of $32 billion (approximately 27% of overall wireless revenue of $120 billion).  There are approximately 50 million mobile Internet users in India out of ~800 million mobile users.

MVAS companies in India are not growing fast (or at all).  Since they have traditionally focused on building businesses inside the operator walled garden, they have been governed by the 25-30% cap on the rev-share that they get.  Recent TRAI regulation changes have not helped the vendors (although I think consumers have benefited from the elimination of spam and seamy billing practices).  Due to their whitelabel nature and lack of consumer branding, most MVAS companies are being increasingly commoditized.  They also have a high cost base given the rev-share constraint, content licensing costs and the fixed cost of managing operator relationships.

The leading MVAS companies like OnMobile, IMIMobile, Comviva and One97 have now refocused their attention outside India.  Beyond that, there is a long-tail of MVAS companies, none of which seem to have truly punched through $5-10M per year in revenue and many of which have now optimized for cash-flow at the expense of growth.

No alternative payments platform in place.  Operator billing is the most pervasive payment mechanism in the world, and in India (apart from cash and checks).  Some sort of alternative mechanism needs to come along, whether cash load networks or mobile wallets with integration to net banking/ETF/credit cards/cash load networks or operator billing aggregators.  18 million credit cards is a miniscule number relative to 800 million+ mobile users.

But I think there is some hope on the horizon.  Here’s what to look out for in the next 12-24 months:

1) offdeck rev-shares could be poised to increase dramatically from 30% to developers going up to 70% in the next 12 months, with Vodafone leading the charge (more on this in the next post).

2) over the next 2-3 years, as true smartphones (Android/iOS) grow to ~100 million installed base, from the current 10-15 million, consumers will have access to a global applications database and regular payment options.

3) Reliance 4G may disrupt on pricing and rev-shares to break open the market.  This might drive a data plan price war.

(republished from Nextwala blog)