The primary building blocks for these four chapters are based on the work of Warren Buffett, Aswath Damodaran, David Dodd, Mario Gabelli, Benjamin Graham, Bruce Greenwald, Seth Klarman, Michael Mauboussin, Roger Murray, and John Burr Williams. A certain degree of pre-talk nerves is good and even veteran presenters have them. However, you don’t want your nerves to detract from the presentation.
Gaining a deep understanding of your target investors should be a top priority when creating your pitch deck. Avoid the rookie mistake of only including information you personally find interesting or want to share about your company. Be ruthlessly audience-centric in your approach.
Brilliant Pitch
The new course focused on having the students pitch investment ideas with a value discipline. Applied Value Investing is one of the most popular courses at Columbia Business School, with multiple sections taught each semester. Money managers, analysts, bankers, executives, salespeople, students, and individual investors alike stand to gain massively by employing the techniques discussed here.
On Wall Street, the kit includes your computer, phone, and access to data sources such as CapitalIQ, Factset, and Bloomberg, as well as sell-side research and other similar resources. The quote by Picasso captures how we feel about this book, as our thoughts changed considerably over the three years it took us to write it. We’re always here to help guide founders of startups to get the funding they need to expand and scale their business. Get in touch by completing the contact form and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours Monday to Friday. Missing out key elements that investors need to see in a picth deck can lead to investors passing on your investment or that essencial meeting to explain your offer. We help founders develop their pitch decks to become ‘Investor Focused’ rather than what we normally see, which is product or service intensive.
Is fond of saying, Being listed as a co-author and writing a book are two completely different things. While we both have been listed as co-authors before, this is the first book that we have actually written. We both had wanted to write a book for years, but life kept intervening and we never found the time to pursue the idea. During the summer of 2013, with significant prodding from his friend Alejandra, Paul S. “What I loved about his pitch is he actually had a catastrophe in the middle of it. Peter Jones went over and pulled the radiator off the wall and said the GripIts don’t work.
Stumbled upon an illustrator, Charlie Pendergraft, on Instagram (@drawmecharlie), who was very creative and reasonably priced. Over the course of a year, Charlie produced more than 300 images that we have used in the book. If you are embarking on a Wall Street career, you must have a will to live, as you are throwing yourself into an incredibly challenging career and one that will test your will to survive on a regular basis. In terms of the kit, Wiseman says, We keep this to a minimum and have a thorough knowledge of its uses and capabilities.
- Like Picasso’s picture, our book will take on a life of its own as the concepts we present are assessed and scrutinized, adopted by some and refuted by others.
- In addition to being complicated, the sheer volume of material is absolutely staggering, which made the culling process that much more challenging.
- Although Paul was amenable to the idea of teaching someday, he was concerned that he would not have enough time to prep for the term or enough material to fill a semester-long course.
- For a clean, professional appearance, use readable word sizes, high-contrast color schemes, and strategic alignments.
- There are other people whose work and ideas were less identifiable as discrete building blocks, but were critical in the development of certain concepts, helped shape our thought process, or simply stretched our thinking.
Uses a lot of metaphors and is a creative, visual thinker. For Paul J., this creativity made the process sometimes frustrating,11 often challenging, but always instructive and, in the pitch the perfect investment end, a highly rewarding experience. In addition to being complicated, the sheer volume of material is absolutely staggering, which made the culling process that much more challenging.
They are looking for reliable total addressable market statistics as well as an accurate analysis of the competition environment. It is essential to have a well-considered go-to-market plan backed by specific traction measures. Investors want to see your business plan, financial forecasts, goals for fundraising and a profile of your competent staff. Effectively addressing these issues is essential to winning their support for long-term success. Taught his first class, Advanced Seminar in Fundamental Research Techniques, in the spring of 1996, his goal was to teach students the essential skills they would need to do their job as a securities analyst. The presentations were painfully boring, and to Paul, who was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at the age of five, the experience of sitting through them was simply unbearable.
Pitch the Perfect Investment
The answer was, Because they expect it to go up. Clearly no one buys a stock with the expectation of losing money. However, there was one student, who, for some unknown reason, insisted on searching for a corner case7 to prove Paul J. For 10 minutes, offering scenario after scenario under which one might purchase a stock for a reason other than to make money, each of which Paul J. Gracefully parried and proved to be flawed, until the student finally found a case involving an elaborate options hedge that seemed to be an exception. While the student appeared to be technically correct, the discussion seemed to be an incredible waste of time, as, in the vast majority of situations, an investor buys a stock because he expects it to go up.
So you’re a Founder seeking Angel Investment?
There was also a lot of material that wound up on the cutting-room floor. We believe that the final product benefited greatly from these efforts. Being direct and unambiguous in requesting funding is critical.
What investors want in a pitch deck
For example, in an early draft we wrote five pages on the limitations of EBITDA. While the material was excellent, it was overkill for what we were trying to communicate in the chapter and we truncated the discussion accordingly. Please keep in mind that many (actually all) of the topics we discuss can be expanded upon significantly. With his Security Analysis class and became his teaching assistant in the fall of 1995. Became an adjunct professor and taught at Columbia Business School for the next 16 years, eventually teaching over 450 students. Has been an adjunct professor for 25 years and has taught over 40 investment courses to more than 2,000 students.
Alex Sacerdote of Whale Rock Capital
We will seek to correct this deficiency over time as we assemble a reading list of books and journal papers that we feel were relevant and important in our writing the book, which we will make available on our website, The first four chapters of the book layout the process of determining a company’s intrinsic value. This explanation begins with valuing an asset using a discounted cash flow model in Chapter 1, then uses this approach to value a business in Chapter 2. Because assessing competitive advantage is critical to determining the value of growth, we discuss these topics in depth in Chapter 3.
We then explain how investors set stock prices, which entails a detailed discussion of market efficiency. We begin in Chapter 5 with an examination of Eugene Fama’s efficient market hypothesis, where we establish the rules the market follows to set prices. We discuss the wisdom of crowds in Chapter 6 and show how these rules are implemented in the market. We then discuss behavioral finance in Chapter 7 to show how these rules can become strained or broken. Whereas the SAS Survival Handbook has 672 pages, our publisher informed us that the ideal size for a book of this type is approximately 320 pages.