Dr.

Philipp Wähler
IB2680 – Venture Capital
Spring 2025

Opportunity Evaluation,
Pitches and Plans
Who am I?

Houlden Research Fellow

PhD from Warwick – Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group

Teaching: Entrepreneurial Finance Markets (year 3) & MiM

Entrepreneurial Finance

Research: Innovation (Knowledge Dissemination via Social

Media, Knowledge Evaluation, Experimental Research
Designs) & Entrepreneurship

Industry Experience: Siemens, Consulting in the Netherlands

Contact: Philipp.Wahler@wbs.ac.uk
Recap: Last Session With Simon

• How the venture capital industry works

• VCs evaluate opportunities only within defined sectors
• VCs rely on their network to provide the highest quality deal flow
• The VC process is designed to reject non-deals early
• They focus on Value Creation
• They focus on the Exit
• They back A Grade ideas with A Grade teams
 Today‘s Agenda:
Business plans and pitching to
investors
What is a business plan for?

What do you think?

Business Plans versus Pitches...

• The Business Plan: For the team

• Evaluate the opportunity
• Decision to pursue
• Agree strategic goals/ roles/ resources / business model
• Agree budget

• The Pitch: For the outside world

• Convince investors they should invest
• Convince suppliers/ customers to do business

Different things for different audiences

The Business Plan: Testing the opportunity
• What is our product?
100 ideas
• How do we solve a problem?
Recognise • What is the size of the market?
• How do we create value? (Business Model)
33 Market opportunities • How do we grow? (Scalability)
Evaluate • Quantify it all! (Financial projections)
• Do we have the right team?
10 Business opportunities • What investment do we need?
Capture • How do we deliver an exit

e.g. Stevenson & Spinelli framework

1 Realised opportunity
It’s not an opportunity unless you can capture it…
External use permitted
Is a Business Plan worth the
paper it’s written on?
What does the research say?

Yes
• Facilitates faster decision making
• Managing supply & demand for resources
• Identifies action steps to achieve goals
No
• Business plans take 200+ hours to develop
• This would be time better spent elsewhere
• Planning is pointless in uncertainty
 A way to evaluate
opportunities:

The lean start-up approach

Lean start-up “Scientific method”

IDEA
REFINE BUILD

DATA PRODUCT

TEST
 We discussed the business plan…

Now for the ‘pitch’ – how to communicate

your opportunity to potential investors…
What do you think matters when
talking to investors?
The sad news about pitching first …

… there is a lot of inequality and biases involved in

who receives finance
But … training matters!
Why does training matter?

Pitch training helps entrepreneurs convey ideas more precisely

(Clingingsmith and Shane, 2018 in Management Science)

It helps entrepreneurs to prioritize key elements of business ideas in

the pitch deck (Clingingsmith, Drover and Shane, In SBE, 2023)

An accurate pitch makes evaluations of ventures by investors easier

“Pitching is an acquired skill, not an innate talent… it takes practice”

(Guy Kawasaki, 2016)
 Let’s Practice a One-Line Pitch
Classroom Task

External use permitted

Life is a series of pitches…
The one line pitch…

At a conference
At a networking event
In a bar
At a party…

Credited to Luciano Oviedo, Los Angeles

Tech Entrepreneur and WBS DBA
candidate
The one line pitch

• My company (company name)

• is developing (a technology/ product/ service)
• to help (a target audience)
• solve a problem
• with secret sauce

Credited to Luciano Oviedo, Los Angeles

Tech Entrepreneur and WBS DBA
candidate
Tips for a successful one line pitch

• The technology/ product/ service needs to be

short and understood by everyone like a website,
a mobile app or device
• The target audience is the initial target group
that you will market to
• You need to solve a problem that is understood
by everyone such as ‘reducing time to collect bill
payments’
The one line pitch

• My company Wavespark
• is developing a mobile application
• to help mothers aged 25-35 years
• to find university courses
• by providing real time availability on part time
degrees
Now take 5 min to develop this pitch for
your own idea and write it down…
The person you gave your one line pitch to turns
out to work for a VC fund and seems interested,
so you move to the 60 second pitch…
The 60 second pitch

• My company (company name) is developing (a

technology/ product/ service) to help (a target
audience) solve a problem with secret sauce
• Our (product) is (more detail here)
• The (opportunity) is (more detail here)
• Our (status/ progress) is (more detail here)

Credited to Luciano Oviedo, Los Angeles

Tech Entrepreneur and WBS DBA
candidate
The 60 second pitch
• My company Wavespark is developing a mobile
application to help mothers aged 25-35 years to
find university courses by providing real time
availability on part time degrees
• Our app is updated in real time by the
admissions offices of all universities
• The opportunity is currently worth £10m per year
and is growing at 20% per year
• Our MVP is launched and generating 10,000 hits
per day Credited to Luciano Oviedo, Los Angeles
Tech Entrepreneur and WBS DBA
candidate
Now take 5 min to develop this pitch for
your own idea and write it down…
They agree to invite you to present your
plan to the VC team…

You are in!

(Remember warm contacts are best…)

Let’s have a short break ☺
You are about to pitch to the investors…

but what do investors look for?

What do investors look for?

• Potentially huge market

• Top rate team
• Protected idea
• Ability to create value
• A clear path to doing so…
Aim to disrupt global markets
Build value
Building value… a refresher
Company A
•Large investment needed
•Later break even
•High growth potential
Start-up Sell Business

Company B
Cash flow

•Early break even

•Low investment needed
•Limited growth potential

Generating value is
not the same as
generating profits
 Building value:
Be needed by or feared by
global corporations
OKAY, …. but how to structure a pitch deck?
 Structuring The Pitch Deck
• Say what the business is UP FRONT
• Then immediately give team team bios…
• Lay out the problem / the market size
• What is the solution – product or service
• Outline the business model – how does it make money / create value
• How is the value protected (barriers to entry)?
• What milestones have you achieved to date?
• Provide a brief slide on financial projections
• Say how much capital you are raising
• Tell investors what that investment will deliver…

10 Slides max…
External use permitted
Aim to capture a modest 1% market
share…

and there is never NO competition

 What happens if you don’t have warm
contacts in the investment industry or a
lucky meeting?
If you have very few contacts – run a
structured process…
 Structured fundraising process

• Create a target list of investors who invest in your area

• Do they invest at the right stage / the right amount?
• Do they have funds to invest?
• Do they have existing investments that compete with yours?
• Who knows who at target investors?
• Define your top priority investors and go to them first
• Do not flood the market with your teaser deck – go in stages
• Run a rigorous process with weekly meetings to update to the list
• Line by line - what stage is each investor at (live versus dead)?

How an investment bank would do it…

External use permitted
Does everyone do it this way and is it the
most successful approach?
Social capital and the liability of newness
Research on how entrepreneurs raise finance

• First time entrepreneurs are often bewildered

• Random approach
• Those with business experience use a structured approach
• Open the contact list and organise a road show
• Serial entrepreneurs go straight to their network of VCs
• They get meetings fast

Not surprisingly, serial entrepreneurs raise more finance

and raise it faster
Convince a serial entrepreneur to join as a
board member or adviser

Credibility, Connections and Experience

Does your address matter?
Entrepreneurial clusters
Clusters
• Dense networks
• Frequent interactions
• Shared infrastructures
• Interdependent firms and individuals
• Silicon Valley (science and technology)
• Cambridge (science and technology)
• Milan (fashion)
• London (finance)
• … and Warwickshire (auto industry/ gaming & media)

Clusters foster entrepreneurial start ups

Clusters lower transaction costs
• Skilled workers
• Specialised inputs such as lawyers, accountants
• Access to capital – VCs and Angels
• Knowledge spill-overs and collaborations
• Proximity to customers
Locating within a cluster can help raise
finance!
Conclusion for entrepreneurs…

• Develop your series of pitches

• Look for warm contacts
• Seek to maximise your network in advance
• Run a structured process like an investment bank
• Consider location of the business
• A ‘serial entrepreneur’ as an adviser can shortcut everything
Summary

• A business plan is for evaluating the opportunity

• A pitch is for the external audience
• A series of pitches
• Be structured and organised in your process
• Template is a guide not gospel – be original to stand out

Plans evolve and are out of date almost immediately

Everyone gets rejected multiple times but you only
need to convince one investor
to get started…

Securing the first investor is

the biggest challenge
This seminar

Renovo case
Thank you for your attention today and see you
tomorrow in the seminar ☺