TC+ Roundup: Pitch Coaching from 5 VCs, Black Founder Funding Options, 3 Fintech Flubs

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Based on my conversations last week at TechCrunch Early Stage, VCs are very open to first-time entrepreneurs who can demonstrate more than just enthusiasm.

But deal-making is idiosyncratic: A few investors may be happy to do a deal over coffee, but early stage teams still need a solid pitch deck or memo to leave behind.

Similarly, one VC might encourage newly minted CEOs to eat ramen and ride the bus, while another might suggest a salary in the low six figures, depending on geography, revenue and other factors.

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I asked five early-stage investors to share their honest advice for newbies, and I’ll save you some time—many, if not most, of you are probably not yet ready to pitch an investor.

If you haven’t already talked to a lot of customers or created a contact spreadsheet of at least 25 investors who have backed companies like yours, it’s too early.

And if you’ve added “AI” to your pitch deck just to make it more appealing, I’ve got more bad news: FOMO is passé, and due diligence is the new black.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond! If you are an early-stage investor who would like to be included in future columns, please email [email protected] with “How to pitch me” in the subject line.

Here’s who attended this month:

• Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner, Glasswing Ventures
• Patrick Salyer, Partner, Mayfield Fund
• Josh Constine, venture partner, SignalFire
• Alexa von Tobel, Managing Partner, Inspired Capital
• Oren Yunger, partner, GGV Capital

Thanks for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editor-in-Chief, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

10 years of fintech failures: 3 more ideas that failed to live up to the initial hype

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Do you remember P2P loans and order insurance? If not, there’s a good reason: despite a lot of hype, they’re just two of several fintech innovations that have taken off over the past decade.

For his latest TC+ column, fintech consultant Grant Easterbook examined three more ideas “that initially seemed promising but largely failed to transform the financial services industry.”

According to Easterbrook, these misfires offer valuable lessons to today’s founders and investors: “Fintech entrepreneurs must remember the fundamental principle that the average consumer does not like to think about money and often wants someone else to take care of it.”

The precision milling capacity craze: Have we lost the plot?

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Food produced via precision fermentation is in frozen aisles in supermarkets and fast food restaurants, but when will bioprocessing’s output surpass traditional farming methods?

“Leading scientists and technologists from industry and academia tend to tell me—often in hushed tones, and sometimes just off the record—that the economics of food-grade precision fermentation are nowhere near competitive with dairy or eggs,” says Blake Byrne, a University of Cambridge graduate who is building a stealth-mode biomanufacturing startup.

Instead of “scaling legacy systems,” the precision milling industry should invest in applications that produce “radical rather than incremental process intensification,” he writes in TC+.

At 0.69% in Q1, the decline in funding for Black entrepreneurs no longer elicits an emotional response.

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Including seed, corporate venture, private equity and venture capital, Black entrepreneurs typically receive about 1% of all funding.

Recently, however, entrepreneurs in this group saw a significant decline: In Q1 2023, “black founders raised an estimated 0.69%, or just $312 million, of the roughly $45 billion Crunchbase total for the quarter,” reports Dominic Madori-Davis .

In the same period last year, they raised $1.26 billion.

With such an uneven playing field, it is legitimate to expect some players to take a different course, which is why some Black entrepreneurs are exploring options such as government grants, “CVC funds and emerging firms in the Middle East.”

Aventurine helps early-stage entrepreneurs find their footing

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Odyssevs wandered for 10 years trying to find his way home, which is also about how long a founder can expect to work on building a successful startup.

Like an epic poem, the journey is characterized by pitfalls and self-made setbacks. It is not for everyone, and that is why Aventurine Capital Group “comes in early to support people who are not natural entrepreneurs”, writes Haje Jan Kamps.

“These people are professors at universities, and asking them to pull up roots and come to where we are, where there’s a studio, is not going to work,” said Joe Maruschak, CEO.