How To Prevent Investors From Forwarding Your Pitch Deck (2023)

FAQs

Is it safe to share pitch deck? ›

You'll arm the competition.

Even a trustworthy investor could end up hacked by a bad guy willing to give away all your great ideas. Some slide-sharing services have security features, which can help, but the safest approach is to avoid sharing the pitch deck in the first place.

A pitch deck is personal, in the sense that it needs to be unique to the idea, the business, the company, and the company's need for funding — it's different for every single startup. It's also private, in that there should be a lot of confidential and sensitive information in a pitch deck.

An investor deck is often sent prior to securing a meeting, so you will have a bit more text (again, not an excuse to clutter your slide)! These are anywhere from 10-20 slides, and they will include financials & confidential product information.

First off, in protecting your pitch deck, always send your pitch deck as a PDF. This should be a no-brainer. Never send a PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides document to anyone outside of your company (except your designer of course).

If you determine that the invention is probably not patentable, the most effective way to protect yourself is to have prospective licensees sign a nondisclosure agreement before you reveal your invention. This document is sometimes called an "NDA" or a "confidentiality agreement," but the terms are similar.

Copyright is certainly important, and can serve as a first step, but it is really important to understand that certain important parts of any television series pitch deck are not protected by copyright law.

Simply put, a competitive pitch deck should include 10 slides, be no more than 20 minutes long, and should only include up to 30 points.

In an ideal situation, you will deliver the full pitch deck in person at a meeting in the future. There is a clear through-line here from your initial contact with a VC firm, often by email, to the investor deck, and then finally to the full pitch.

The pitch deck should include details of who the people behind your business are, the problem you are trying to solve, your product or service which acts as the solution to that problem, traction, the current market and your competitors, as well as details of your business model and how any successful investment will ...

What financials should be in a pitch deck? ›

Financial Data in Pitch Decks Should Include Income, Expenses, and Business KPIs. These slides must succinctly outline the financial health of a company while projecting revenue potential in the future. Our research revealed the key metrics that investors are expecting to see and how they're expecting to see them.

While pitch decks vary in size, the average length is 12 to 14 slides (and never longer than 20), with each slide presenting one clear idea. Although its order can change depending on how you wish to tell your story, the general slides to include are: 1. Company vision.

there's no “rule” governing the length of a new business pitch, decades of evidence support the 18-minute rule. Keep your presentation to 18 minutes or less and let your audience decide how much further they want to take it.

The simple answer is: file a provisional patent application before you publicly share, sell, or disclose any details. Provisional patents in particular are a cost-effective, low fidelity (you don't have it all figured out yet) approach to protecting your idea, while securing the earliest possible filing date.

The five essential legal tools for protecting ideas are patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade dress unfair competition laws, and trade secrets. Some of these legal tools can also be used creatively as marketing aids, and often more than one form of protection is available for a single design or innovation.

What I can assure you is active angel club investors and venture capital funds are not likely to steal your ideas and morph into your main competition. The purpose of startup and early stage investors are to fund high-potential companies like yours, not operate them.

Venture capital is a people business, so get it out of your mind that VCs are going to steal your idea. A venture capital firm that regularly shares your idea or plan with other entrepreneurs will not stay in business long. Eventually good entrepreneurs will not trust them. Plus VCs are investors, not operators.

A poor man's patent is essentially writing out a description of your invention and then mailing that written description to yourself. This postmarked envelope supposedly acts to create the date of your invention as the date this written description was postmarked.

Conclusion. Often it may take two to three months of creation, presentation and feedback, and revision to create a pitch deck that truly stands out. You have to make the pitch deck interesting and short to capture the attention span. Though some can create a powerful deck in hours.

Can you sell a show idea to Netflix? ›

Unfortunately, we cannot and do not accept or review any materials (whether manuscripts, treatments, scripts, drawings, ideas, pics of rainbow-colored unicorns, etc.)

Copyright will automatically exist in all literary, artistic, musical and dramatic works. So, for example, any original designs, drawings and illustrations you present on a pitch will be protected by copyright.

You cannot protect an idea. This is the whole point of copyright law. Your first task after coming up with a great idea for a movie is to write as detailed an account of your idea as possible.

According to START UP, to make a good pitch you'll need to do three things: grab the attention of your audience. take them on a clear and logical journey. leave them with a compelling call to action.

According to research done by DocSend, investors spend on average 3 minutes and 44 seconds per pitch deck.

Typically teams are given 5-10 minutes to pitch. In real life, this is the pitch for a pitch (if you give this pitch to a potential investor and spark their interest, you may earn 45 minutes with that same potential investor - that's the beginning of the real pitching process for that investor.)

You see, an investor deck puts most of its focus on the information investors need to make a decision about investing in your business, while a pitch deck's key message is all about getting an investor to be interested in your business in the first place.

How To Pitch To Investors In Under 2 Minutes - YouTube

I put the Milestones Slide as the very last slide in any pitch deck. Just leave it up on the screen when you're done presenting and it will support exactly the conversation with you want to have with potential investors.

What are milestones in pitch deck? ›

The milestone slide is a great way to show that you can get stuff done, but also to get attention about how you will use the invested funds for the next steps. It helps the investor to understand in which direction you are going and to get an idea of whether you will need additional funding or not.

Attract an investor's attention and keep it

Elevator pitches can be hard because start-ups don't have a platform for talking about their products. Instead, they have to squeeze it into a conversation. Introducing a problem question related to the product is one way to get on the right track and engage the investor.

Your pitch should be concise but detailed; informative but persuasive; and most of all, memorable. The pitch you create should detail the story of your business – who the market is, what problems they face, what your solution is, and why your solution is the right solution.

Investors will want to see information that indicates the current financial status of the business. Usually they will expect to see current reports such as a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement as well as projections for the next two or three years.

It's quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach an agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc. Ten slides.

Ten slides.

According to Guy, it's important to keep the slides to only ten because this is how you boil down the most important and impactful information — without creating a boring presentation that investors have seen a thousand times over.

How do you pitch a startup in 3 minutes? ›

How to Pitch your Startup in 3 Minutes - YouTube

A startup pivot, or business pivot, occurs occurs when a company shifts its business strategy to accommodate changes in its industry, customer preferences, or any other factor that impacts its bottom line.

You can sell an idea to a company without a patent. You need a way to stop them from stealing the idea from you. One way to do that without a patent is with a nondisclosure agreement, aka NDA. The NDA would limit the company's ability to use your idea without paying you for it.

How do I protect my idea? Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.

Ideas alone are not protected under intellectual property law. There are two primary ways that you would be able to sue the company for stealing your idea. The first is if you did, in fact, reduce the idea to a protectable form before telling the company about it.

Many inventors choose to sell their ideas to companies for royalties rather than a one-off payment, especially if the concept is especially promising, as royalties can often end up allowing them to earn much more over a longer period (passive income). As a result, many companies offer this as an option to inventors.

A patent attorney will usually charge between $8,000 and $10,000 for a patent application, but the cost can be higher. In most cases, you should budget between $15,000 and $20,000 to complete the patenting process for your invention.

If an idea is fixed in a tangible form and demonstrates a spark of creativity, it could be protected by copyright. While it's impossible to protect an idea alone, you can protect the creative expression of an idea under copyright.

What can you do if someone copies your business? ›

If you come across a copycat company or business owner, contact them directly. Call them and speak calmly with those in charge. Let them know that you are aware that they are copying your product and that you don't appreciate it.

The pitch deck should include details of who the people behind your business are, the problem you are trying to solve, your product or service which acts as the solution to that problem, traction, the current market and your competitors, as well as details of your business model and how any successful investment will ...

How To Pitch To Investors In Under 2 Minutes - YouTube

Ideas: Copyright protects the expression of an idea but does not extend to the idea itself. Until an idea is expressed in a fixed form (i.e. paper, electronic or digital media), there is no copyright protection.

Many inventors wonder if they need a prototype prior to patenting an invention. The simple answer is “no'. A prototype is not required prior to filing a patent application with the U.S. Patent Office. While prototypes can be valuable in developing your invention, they can also be costly.

Ideas. Ideas can not be copyrighted because they are not fixed into a tangible medium of expression. For a work to be copyrighted, it has to be written down, saved to a hard drive or somehow otherwise fixed.