Taking the Leap: MVL's insights on pitching your startup

While it may be as short as five minutes, a successful startup pitch is the culmination of months, sometimes years, of work. Leading up to their first meetings with investors, founders spend countless hours ideating, researching, building, recruiting, and selling their idea. Pitching forces them to translate those efforts into a concise story to hook investors, sustain their attention, and ultimately convince them to back their venture. Given the stakes of these conversations and founders’ personal investment in the company, raising money understandably produces dread among entrepreneurs. They face pressure to deliver results, and the volume of rejections during the fundraising process can be discouraging. On top of the stress, founders often have little visibility into what investors value, leaving them wondering what a “good” pitch even looks and sounds like.

This is where guidance and coaching can be critical. At our September 18th Leap event, MVL’s Product Lead, Elizabeth Webber, and Partner, Henry Huang, shared insider tips on crafting a compelling deck. In addition to their current roles at the studio, Elizabeth and Henry bring backgrounds as former founders and successful startup operators. Those experiences, combined with their repeated collaborations with the Madrona investment team, led to insights on how to craft a powerful presentation that grabs investors' interest and persuades them to fund your company.

How to “hook them” & “hold them”

Elizabeth and Henry emphasized a successful pitch needs to do two things:
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Hook them: Capture investors’ attention immediately. Founders only have a few minutes—sometimes just seconds—to convince investors that they’re worth listening to, and they need to make a case for themselves early and powerfully. That means appealing to emotion and repeatedly telling them why they should care about the problem area.
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Hold them: Once investors are hooked, the challenge is to sustain their attention with a compelling, well-structured story that demonstrates sound judgment and a clear vision. This involves establishing credibility, explaining research findings around the market opportunity, and detailing the ideal customer profile (ICP) in a way that ladders to your vision.

Pitching is a form of storytelling, but Elizabeth and Henry cautioned that investors don’t operate like traditional readers who invest in gradually building tension throughout a book. In comparison, investors have relatively short attention spans. In response, entrepreneurs must start their presentations strong, hooking their audience quickly with the opportunity and the solution. This results in a “right-skewed” story arc for a pitch, as demonstrated below. The long tail of the pitch should continue to build on that initial momentum.

As a result, the hook is the most critical part of the pitch. If founders fail to capture attention in the first few minutes, their chances of securing investment diminish significantly. So, how does an entrepreneur create a hook that excites investors? The first slide should instantly capture attention through statistics, facts, or anecdotes. This is where founders establish the "why" behind their pitch — why should the investor care? Henry described one of the most compelling pitches he’s heard and how the founder moved him:

Opportunity, alignment, & “telling them what you already told them”

After the hook, founders have a couple more slides to develop the opportunity further. This section should be simple to understand but communicate massive potential. The opportunity needs to feel tangible and significant right from the start. As part of that argument, Elizabeth recommended delivering a second-order insight that the entrepreneur has uncovered only through their rigorous validation process. This insight sets their company apart as the authority in the space, and it’s a pivotal moment in convincing investors that their team is the right one to tackle the problem. 

At MVL, Elizabeth and Henry coach future founders to think about this moment as answering the question, “Why you?”, which covers three key dimensions:

Passion: Investors want to partner with founders deeply committed to solving the problem. Startup life is a marathon, and investors must believe the team possesses enough passion to endure the ups and downs.

Credibility: Of course, passion is critical but not sufficient. Founders must also have the experience and expertise necessary to solve this problem. Elizabeth and Henry suggest that founders highlight their track record of innovation, team-building, and industry knowledge to emphasize their reliability and authority in the space.

Adaptability: Pivoting is an inevitable reality of startups, and founders need to be flexible to weather the eventual changes in strategy. As a result, adaptability is critical to navigating the uncertainty of startup life. Consider highlighting any previous experience working in early-stage startups or leading 0-to-1 efforts at larger companies.

After establishing the opportunity and proving the founder is uniquely equipped to solve it, it’s time to introduce the solution. When explaining the solution (the company’s product vision), ensure it ties back to the big opportunity, is feasible and grounded in reality, and stands out from the competition.

A founder’s solution should be grounded in the rigor of their customer validation process, or the process of testing and gathering feedback from potential customers to ensure that a product or feature solves a real problem, meets a real need, and provides real value. While it sounds simple, many founders “build first, ask questions later.” In their presentations to VC firms, they emphasize the sleek product or unique technical innovations but fail to demonstrate the sufficient customer demand that translates into a meaningful investment opportunity.

The pitch job is not over even once the founder has presented their solution and grounded it in previous research. Now, it’s time to reiterate the narrative and demonstrate their strategic and operational excellence. This is the section of the presentation where Elizabeth and Henry suggest covering go-to-market (GTM) strategy, growth trajectory, and how a founder plans to execute their vision. This includes discussing the competitive landscape and market size. Research shows that VCs spend an average of 55 seconds on this slide during the pre-seed stage, so be prepared to explain the winning strategy briefly. Don’t just list competitors—founders should show they’ve thought deeply about the market dynamics and can explain why their approach is superior.

“Everything should ladder up to the vision,” Elizabeth emphasized. “Your competition slide isn’t just a template to complete; it’s another data point related to your conviction that your company solves a venture-scale pain point that isn’t addressed in the market today.”

This might feel repetitive, but reaffirming the vision is integral to any successful pitch. “We are strong believers in telling them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them again,” Henry underscored.

Finally, after many slides of setup, founders are positioned to make a clear and precise ask. This is the culmination of the entire presentation. Show the path from investment to growth, tying everything back to the opportunity and the solution presented. The point isn’t just to raise as much money as possible; the number should be specific and rooted in the milestones the team needs to achieve before raising again.

While "the ask" can feel especially intimidating to founders, Elizabeth ended the evening by reminding the audience that ultimately, it's just another storytelling device flowing from the emotional hook provided at the beginning of the pitch:

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This event is part of our Leap program, a partnership between Madrona Venture Labs and Madrona to build a community of high-potential entrepreneurs, introduce them to the growing and vibrant local startup ecosystem, and help them build relationships with fellow innovators, experienced builders, industry experts, and top VCs.
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