Saturday, May 29, 2010

Talking to Angels - The Executive Summary

I said it many times in these posts, but it is worth repeating. If you want to communicate to Angel Investors, your challenge is to be brief and exciting at the same time.  Angels read dozens of plans and pitches a week, thus develop a short fuse stretched to its limit and a deja vu mindset. Every single word you use should be valued as an opportunity to break that fuse and lose your audience.  Furthermore, the specific words used must strike a balance between creating "excitement, belief, opportunity-to-change-the-world,  high expected returns" and projecting a perspective of "naive, smoke-and-mirrors, improbable deal, too-good-to-be-true".
Angelsoft is the software most angel groups now use to manage deal flow, presentations, investors collaboration, etc. They developed a great template for an executive summary. If you apply to present to a group that uses Angelsoft you'll end up supplying information in that format.
The same template, however is great for writing your executive summary of any deal regardless if presented to an angel group.  Here it is

17 comments:

davidsrose said...

Marco, thanks for pointing out the general value of the Angelsoft one-page summary, even for those companies not currently seeking funding from an organized angel group (virtually all of whom, as you noted, use the Angelsoft platform to work with their entrepreneurs.)

We spent several years working with dozens of angel groups to boil things down to those 'Perfect Ten' questions, along with the other information (current investors, amount invested, etc.) that angels need to know.

With well over 3,000 companies each month submitting their information in that format to the 20,000 angels who belong to 500+ organized groups, we're now able to quickly get to the heart of a company's value proposition without having to dig through a long plan trying to find the info we need.

Therefore, even for companies not submitting through groups, having the necessary information in a standard, concise format with which we're already familiar, make the life of an angel investor a lot easier.

-David S. Rose
CEO, Angelsoft
Chairman, New York Angels

(By the way, companies can use the Angelsoft web site (www.angelsoft.net) to create the standard one-pager at no cost, and download it as a PDF that they can print out or send to investors themselves!)

Unknown said...

Really nice format, I will use this for my angel pitch next week!

My original executive summary was much longer, I think this format will be much easier for any investor to digest.

Unknown said...

This is a great one page Exec Summ. Thank you!
Michael at Str.me
*Strme

Michael Brown said...

Marco, Thank you for this. I just launched WorkedWith.com and am lost in this process. This was a great help and I am starting to decipher how I can navigate this road.

Thanks again,

Michael Brown
WorkedWith.com

liblib said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Thank you very much. I put this format in illustrator and it is all editable! It saved my a lot of time. Thanks.

Unknown said...

Great executive summary here, thanks for sharing. Just wanted to mention that if anyone is interested in learning more about executive coaching, make sure you take a look at Ellis Strategies. Truly an industry leader.

- Susan
Rhode Island executive coaching .

Ahamed said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
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