How To Get VC Funding & How To Design The Perfect Pitch Deck

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of No Bullsh*t Talks.
I am pleased today to be welcoming Mike Lingle, who is a serial entrepreneur, and he specializes in helping startups with financial stuff and pitch decks and all that sort of malarkey.
And I’m going to let Mike do the talking right now because I feel like you do so much that I am not going to do it justice if I try to introduce you.
So, do you want to tell everyone today what you do for startups and what your specialties are?
Mike Lingle:
Sure, and thank you for having me on the show, Sabrina.
It’s great to be here.
And basically, I am a former software developer and serial entrepreneur and have done the whole raising venture capital thing.
One of my companies had an exit about 11 or 12 years ago.
And then since then, I’ve been focused on working with other entrepreneurs, helping them with their fundraising.
All of my startups were presentation startups, so I’m good with pitch decks.
And then I’ve become very obsessed with financial projections and making the financial piece easy for non-financial founders.
So, I do a lot of that work with Rocket Pro Forma.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Those are key industries, like how to get funding for startups and all that sort of stuff.
And I feel like whenever you listen to the news, you just hear the success stories.
You hear this new tech company has just made a billion dollars from this, and the CEO is driving Lamborghinis every day because they do so well and all that kind of stuff.
But I mean, the reality obviously is not like that.
Every startup, those are the unicorns that we talk about, right, that are raising funds.
What are the actual numbers?
Do you know roughly how many startups are actually successful in that sense of raising money?
And is it really only tech startups that do well?
Because I feel like these days, if you want funding, if your business is not tech-related, you probably don’t stand that much chance.

Mike Lingle:
Yeah.
So, there was a lot covered there.
And I think one thing I would do is draw a distinction between startups that are meant to scale, right?
So, they need to grow explosively in order for investors to get excited.
Versus businesses that normal human beings start.
They can do quite well but aren’t necessarily designed to ramp into outer space, right?
And lots of people start businesses and do well and save money and provide for their families and make a bunch of money.
And it doesn’t have to be like this venture capital craziness, right?
So, that’s totally a path, and lots of people do it.
And that works out for lots of people, and lots of people make a bunch of money doing it.
It’s not that you can’t make money doing it.
Specific to the venture capital world, they are looking for startups that they think can go to the moon.
So, when you step onto that venture capital treadmill, right, you are positioning yourself as this high-growth, tech-enabled startup that’s just going to explode.
And that’s part of the game.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
So, if you’re sort of like the average Joe business owner who’s like, right, I’ve got this company, it’s got a good solid business model, we’re going to grow year on year just standardly, then investors are just like, that’s just your average business.
Whereas if you’re like, right, I’ve got the new Uber, for example, where you can talk about how that’s going to be worth five billion in a year’s time when I have like 500 people going to work with us next month or whatever, and that’s all the growth, I guess, is what investors are kind of interested in.
Mike Lingle:
Yeah, and there are different types of investors.
Like, it’s a big world out there, so whatever business you’re starting, there’s someone who will put some money into it, right?
It’s just that the venture capital world in particular has much different expectations.
Versus if I have a restaurant or a small business or something that’s not tech-related, I can get an investor, but they’re more likely to be a silent partner who puts up some money.
I pay them some money out of the business to pay them back over time, right?
It’s just a different structure.
But it’s a big world out there, and lots of people put money into lots of different types of businesses.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
So, do you help just the kind of big tech firms that are trying to get VC funding, or do you also help smaller businesses that are looking for private investors?
Mike Lingle:
I end up helping a lot of different people.
Most of my experience — actually, that’s not true.
I’ve been a founder that was not VC-backed, and I’ve been a founder that was VC-backed.
So, I can provide my own experience for both of those situations.
And I end up helping a lot of different people.

Mike Lingle:
I think I’m a tech person at heart, and I’ve done the venture capital thing.
So, I tend to lean towards the venture capital path, but I certainly don’t think everyone should or needs to go down that path.
Again, when you step on that treadmill, you’re promising you’re going to go fast, right?
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Right.
So, who should do that?
What sort of qualities should a company have or some people as a founder?
Like, who absolutely should be getting VC?
Mike Lingle:
So, I think if you love technology, right, and you think really big, the venture capital world can be an amazing place, right?
Because the idea is you have an idea, you have some proof that it’s going to work, and then you get all this fuel and ammunition to go out into the world and make it happen.
And right, so all of a sudden you can hire people, you can reach customers, like you can do all this fun exciting stuff.
You just need to also be someone who can keep things moving quickly, right?
Like, you always have to be thinking big.
You can’t just take the money and then not think big anymore.
It’s almost like you have to take the money and then think bigger.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
But you know, so from an investor’s point of view, they spend a lot of money on trying to hopefully find the next big tech thing.
A lot of them aren’t successful.
I’m fair to say that most of them aren’t successful, I’d say.
Mike Lingle:
Certainly not in the way the investors want them to be.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Yeah, exactly.
So, what do investors look for when they’re trying to invest?
Because I feel like there is a lot of variance in ways people present themselves, obviously, and you come into pitch decks in a minute, but there’s obviously an art to it.
You present the information in a certain way to make it as attractive as possible.
But people promise things and they don’t deliver, and there’s so much of a high failure rate when it comes to startups and everything.
So, if I was an investor, I’d be pretty sick and tired of investing into companies that just take the money and screw up because a lot of these people don’t have the business acumen.
They may not be trained in how to do that, but they have a fantastic idea and lots of innovation.
They’re really creative, they’ve got the energy group, but they may not be that business savvy and may just screw up.
So, what do investors look for in the people behind these VC companies or the idea in order to have more confidence about where they put the money?
Mike Lingle:
It’s a great question.
I love this question.
I want to take a moment to just put in a

Mike Lingle:
I vote for running an initial projection, right?
Like, this is a business that we’re talking about, and what we’re going to do is raise money and then use that money to grow the business.
So, having a plan, understanding the plan — if you don’t do your financials, it’s like buying a Ferrari but not learning how to drive.
You have to be able to drive the business.
And the Ferrari has all this cool tech, but if you don’t know how to drive it, you’re going to crash, okay?
So, sitting down and spending a couple hours figuring out the numbers helps you, and also helps the investor.
I think specifically in the pitch, there’s a mismatch between what entrepreneurs want to talk about and what investors want to talk about.
As an entrepreneur, I’m a builder.
I want to talk about the problem I see and the solution I have for that problem, right?
As an investor, it all starts to sound the same.
Everyone has this big idea that’s going to change the world.
They’re building cool tech, right?
Not to take anything away from what people are building, but it does all start to blur together.
And the things that really stand out are the team, right?
Why am I going to back this person?
Because we’re looking at a plan, and we know it’s not going to go the way it’s written down.
So, can the team execute?
And how do I know that, right?
That’s really what I’m doing as an investor.
I’m investing in the team.
What’s the traction, right?
Is this an idea?
Is it built?
Does it have customers?
Is there revenue, right?
Like, where are we on that timeline?
And do we have any proof that this is actually going to work, right?

Mike Lingle:
And then the last piece is customer acquisition.
We’re going to have to make money.
So, at some point, in order for this to work, how are we acquiring customers?
What market are we in?
What is our channel to get more of those customers, and how are we going to scale?
So, team, traction, customer acquisition — those are the things that investors want to talk about.
And the mismatch is entrepreneurs walk in and talk about the problem, what they’re building, and they want the investors to write them a check based on that, which could happen.
But if you focus on team, traction, and customer acquisition, now you’re talking about business and scale and growth, and that’s more likely to lead to an investment.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Okay.
So, say a business has all that impressed, there’s still no guarantee of success.
So, what do you notice in the successful tech startups?
There must be some common features there which lead to their success.
What do you think?
Mike Lingle:
Yeah, okay.
So, I think a few different things.
One is, after we raised — so we raised a two million dollar Series A from a San Francisco venture capital firm.
And so I sat down with one of the partners after we raised the money, and I was like, why did you invest in us?
And what are you looking for in a startup?
He was like, I have to believe it can be a home run, right?
Like, I have to believe that this is — venture capital talks to — this is not every investor.
I have to believe it’s a home run.
I have to believe it can go public.
I have to believe it will be that big, right?
So, if I invest in those companies, right, I can only invest in a few of those because I want to be on the board and provide some guidance.
And that’s why the venture capital firm has a number of partners, so between them they can each do three investments a year or whatever.
And if we just keep doing that, one or two of those companies will actually turn out to be a home run, and that makes all the money back for all the companies that didn’t do as well, right?
Also, the VCs make their money a lot of the time on the second round.
So, if you think about it, they can invest in ten companies without writing very big checks.
They have most of the fund left after three of those are doing well.
They can come in on the second round, and now they have a better sense of which are going to succeed.
They can put more money in to make more money.
So, that’s one thing, again, the sort of big, you know, we really believe this can be big.
Two is grit, right?
So, when we raised our Series A, we raised two million dollars.
It took us eight months and probably 40 investor pitches, which meant we had to ask like 140 people for meetings.
40 of them said yes.
37 of them in a row said no over eight months, and then the last three said yes, right?
So, it’s grit, right?
Like sticking to it and adjusting.
So, the reason the last three said yes was not because we got lucky all of a sudden.
It was because we got better at pitching, right?
We learned how to talk to investors.
We learned how to find the right investors.
The first investors we were pitching were never going to invest in us regardless of what we said.
And we improved the company, right?
Like, we improved the business based on what the investors were saying they wanted to see.
So then we became investable, right?
And I think there’s this grit, like you got to stick to it.
If we had heard the first 37 people say no and not gone to the 38th meeting, we wouldn’t have got invested, right?
And I’m not the only founder who’s had this experience.
And then I think the last piece is pure sales, right?
There’s a whole thing about fundamentals and whatever, but then you also have to be able to pull people into your world, take them along for the ride, paint the vision, right?
And a lot of what you see in the news are extreme examples.
The people who are really good at that — like the WeWork guy was crazy good at that, right?
Like, he took essentially a real estate company, pitched it as a tech company, and got millions, billions of dollars.
He got J.P. Morgan to personally loan him 700 million dollars.
Like, he was a good salesperson, right?
And when you combine that with high growth, you’re able to basically get whatever you want.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
I do much nighttime, our company gave them six figures and went, say, “We.”
It was definitely great, that sort of thing.
I mean, I also watched that documentary, the WeWork documentary.
I haven’t watched it yet.
It’s a good watch.
I mean, because obviously we’ve been with WeWork for years, and they bought into the whole model and loved it.
So, how are they worried about this guy who — I hope I gave everybody the same — but all the people that he was around, he surrounded himself with some very, very wealthy people, and they all bought into his idea.
He was very charming, very, very good at his job.
Mike Lingle:
So —
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
You know, like 37 no’s, though.
Not many people can handle that level of rejection, I think.
I mean, no one likes rejection, but that’s a lot of rejection.
And surely it must make you doubt yourself, thinking like, I’ve got this great business idea, but 37 people just said no, I don’t want to give you my money, so I don’t know.

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Everyone isn’t born to be an entrepreneur or startup founder, right?
What qualities are we looking for?
Like we talked about Adam Neumann, the WeWork guy.
Mike Lingle:
Yeah.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
That’s inside of you.
But Adam Neumann is an extreme example.
What is a typical — if you had some persona, like a typical successful tech startup person — who would suit that sort of thing?
Because I don’t think everyone’s suited to that sort of lifestyle.
What are typical character traits you see?
Mike Lingle:
I mean, I think you have to believe in yourself a lot, you know?
And I think — I don’t know, I’m not young anymore, and I still have a little bit of imposter syndrome, you know what I mean?
So, I think all of these are things that can be learned, right?
Learning how to sell yourself, learning how to sell the vision, learning to believe in yourself — that all is stuff that we practice, right?
I think also just talking to people, right?
Like, the way people get invested is by telling everyone what they’re trying to do, right?
And I really believe that secrecy kills a lot of startups because people are always trying to hide what they’re trying to do.
And what I found in my own career and working with a million other startups is the ones who go out into the world and tell everyone, like, “I’m trying to do this. Here’s what I’m trying to get to,” they get the introductions, they get connected to the right people, they find a path, right?
Because they go to the universe and tell the universe what they want, and then the universe figures out a way to provide it, right?
And again, the sales piece, which I would combine with being coachable, right?
I think it’s a fine line, this coachability thing.
Because in order to change the world, we have to stick to our guns, right?
We can’t just fold.
So, we have to be willing to hear 37 no’s in a row but know that we’re right.
But at the same time, as we were hearing no 37 times, we were adjusting after every pitch, right?
We were learning and saying, “We need to change this,” or “We need to go work on this,” or “We need to say this,” or “We need to do this.”
And so those 37 no’s acted like a coaching boot camp on how to pitch.
And so we stuck to our guns.
We got funded for what we originally wanted to get funded for, but we dramatically changed how we were approaching it because we were learning on the job and we were listening to what most people said.
Some people, you don’t want to listen to what they say.
And that’s the fine line, right?
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
I’m going to backtrack a little bit because I know that I work with other clients in startups, and people talk about VC funding and investing and all that kind of stuff, but actually they’re not even aware of what it entails.

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
So, these VC Fundings think it’s a lot of money.
Like I said, there’s angel investors and small private ones.
It’s not the same thing, and let’s focus on VC funding right now because I think it is quite a hot topic that way because everyone wants to become the new tech billionaire these days and thinks they’ve got the best new thing.
So, how does it work in terms of the different rounds?
And at what stages do you get your seed money and then what do the VCs typically expect?
Because I know I’ve got a lot of clients out there who are startups who would be interested in this but perhaps a little bit intimidated by what they’re expected to give once they’ve got this money.
And then how often do they keep raising the money?
So, if you want to maybe just walk us through the basics of VC funding, I guess that would be good.
Mike Lingle:
Yeah.
Okay, so a few things.
Again, we just covered a lot of ground there, so let me think about how to organize this.
I think you usually want to take enough money to last you 12 to 18 months, right?
So, that gives you time to hire, gives you time to figure some stuff out, it gives you time to prove out the model, find the customers, right, move the product or service along a bit.
From the VC perspective, they’re going to want you to raise more money because they want all their companies to grow really quickly.

Mike Lingle:
I would divide the company roadmap into two sections.
There’s the “building the rocket” section, which is like we have a vision for a rocket.
We have some proof that we can fly to the moon.
We have some proof that this is the tech we can use to build the rocket.
We think it’s safe for humans, but we need some money to build the rocket.
And that’s risky.
The second phase is we built the rocket, right?
We have a rocket that can fly.
We need fuel to put in the rocket, right?
And the VCs want you to build the rocket as quickly as possible and put as much fuel in it as possible and go as fast and high as possible, right?
But those are really the two places we go out for funding.
And the VCs win when their rocket makes it to the moon, right?
And actually, I’ve heard this from a couple different sources.
So, Andreessen Horowitz invests in obviously a ton of different startups.
Just their returns from the Coinbase investment allowed them to pay back the investors of every fund, right?
So, one rocket, right?
Like, one rocket is all they need to make it work for all the investments they had done, all the money that investors had put into their funds.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
And that’s what they have greatly.
This is how people write to land that one that lets them land that money, exactly.
Mike Lingle:
Right.
And also, as an investor, the better my deal flow is, the more good companies that I see, the better I can do, right?
So, if I’m the investor who invested in Coinbase early, I’m now going to get every future Coinbase knocking on my door saying, “Hey, let us in, let us in,” so it improves my chances of investing in the next Coinbase, right?
So, as an investor, it’s really hard at the beginning if no one’s heard of me to get good deals.
But if I’m Andreessen Horowitz, I get all the deals.
And now my problem is I have too many good deals, which is a way better problem to have, right?
But what they want you to do is take the money, move as quickly as possible, spend the money, right?
They don’t want you to have the money in the bank account at the end of the year.
They want you to be down to zero and then take more money.
And the next round does a couple things.
One, it allows you to grow faster.
So, it should be way more money, right?
If I’m raising half a million in the first round, maybe it’s five million in the second round.
Again, most of that is going to be fuel for the rocket.
So, it’s sales, bringing on customers, improving the tech of the rocket, whatever.
But they want it to be a larger round.
They usually want another investor to lead it, right?
Because that proves that someone else has kicked the tires and agrees that this rocket can fly, which kind of de-risks it for the first investor.
But remember what we talked about.
The first investor has a bunch of cash, so they can come into that second round with a bunch of money.
But another investor has led it.
So again, it de-risks it, but allows them to put more money in so they can make more money when the company is either acquired or goes public.
So, that’s the idea.
Hire people, spend the money, raise more money, move as quickly as possible.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
I love it, and it’s very successful.
And now I totally get why you called it Rocket Pro Forma, which makes so much sense.
Let’s get onto that, like what you guys do because I think that pitch decks are again such a topic of debate in startups.
And there’s always people Googling “best pitch decks,” and there are these example pitch decks of ones that were amazing.
And I know that as an agency for us, like as a design agency, we get given pitch decks and get asked, right, what information can you make look nice?
And obviously, we can do that sort of thing, don’t get me wrong.
The presentation part we can do, but the content of the pitch deck is obviously what sways the investor.
And investors don’t have all day.
So, presenting them with a 100-page pitch deck of everything means it’s not going to be what they want.
So, if you had to give your —

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
What would be your top tips for designing a pitch deck that’s going to attract the right investment?
Mike Lingle:
Okay, so I think a few things about this.
One is I go back to investors wanting to hear about team, traction, and customer acquisition, and founders wanting to talk about the problem and the solution, right?
So, you need to get all of that into 15 slides, let’s call it, right?
But you really do need to have the team, traction, customer acquisition.
You want the investors to pay attention, especially if you’re going to be emailing it, right?
So, the second thing I would say is think about the communication, right?
If I’m emailing a deck in order to get a meeting, I’m not there to tell the story.
So, the deck needs to tell the story, right?
If I’m in the meeting, I need to tell the story.
So, the deck actually needs to act as a platform that allows me to stand on stage, tell the story, become the source of truth, and establish a personal connection with the audience because people invest based on personal connections.
So, think about it, and that’s really two concepts.
One is the communication, right, and what’s the goal of the deck.
And two is the goal, like what’s the next milestone?
How do we get there, right?
If I’m sending someone a deck, I’m trying to get a meeting.
If I’m in the meeting, I’m trying to get a second meeting, right?
Or get them to write a check.
So, the decks end up being a little bit different.
In a perfect world — in real life, you may use the same deck — but when I’m emailing someone, I would probably send a shorter deck, right, that has just what they need in order to say yes to the meeting, with maybe a little bit more text because I’m not there to tell the story.
And I would probably lead with team, traction, and customer acquisition and then work my way into the problem solution, which is not what decks normally look like.
And because team comes first, if I have any kind of — you know, if I worked at Microsoft or previously had an exit or my co-founder is the best developer in the world, I would put that on slide one and also put that into the email.
Like, I would send a short note, but that would be different probably than the deck I would show up to the meeting with.
That would be a little bit longer, go a little bit more into detail, but have less text and more images, right?
Because I’m going to be telling the story, so I don’t want the text to compete for attention with me, right?
If I’m showing a slide and I show words on the screen, people will stop listening to me as long as it takes them to read the words.
So, the deck can really work against me.
Conversely, if I have good diagrams and good imagery, they listen to my narrative, but their brain remembers the image, right?
And so the next day at breakfast, they’ll remember the image or the diagram and remember what I said and remember my presentation and think of me as someone who educated them and entertained them.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Yeah.
That’s where we come in.
That’s tough because we’ve done this many times.
If there’s loads of data, writing it is like, I’m just going to sit and read that on the screen.
You’re not going to pay attention to what they have to say.
And so we definitely help with that.
But I think 15 slides is great.
We always say that 10 to 15 slides would be ideal.
We’ve had decks come in at 65 pages long, and we’ve had to somehow condense it.
I was like, I don’t have time to read this, let alone a big tech investor.
So, this is not it.
So, what would you say then?

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Like you said, you can probably get different meetings.
How many meetings would a typical startup perhaps need to get with an investor before they are convinced, so to speak?
Mike Lingle:
So, that’s a great question.
I think that’s also one of the things I would say is you probably do need to start with the 65 pages, but for yourself, just to get it all down on paper.
From there, you want to pull out the shorter, tighter story.
And to answer your question, you’ll have a bunch of meetings with someone who’s going to invest.
So, let’s take a typical venture capital firm.
There are multiple partners.
They all need to agree on every investment.
And the way that happens is they’ll send one representative to talk to you, which can either be an analyst who’s not a partner or a partner.
They’ll review the deck and decide whether there’s a meeting.
You usually get one person in that first meeting, and then if they like you, they’ll do a second meeting with more people, right?
So, you’ll probably get at least two meetings.
Then you’ll have some other conversations, maybe with more people, maybe with those same people.

Mike Lingle:
And then they would offer you a term sheet, and the term sheet says, “We’ll invest. Here’s what the deal is going to look like.”
It’s not a contract, but it’s usually binding for 30 days.
During those 30 days, you’re going to have lots of conversations with them.
They’re going to do due diligence.
They’re going to want to look at every financial document, every contract, to make sure you’re telling the truth.
They’re going to want to talk to customers, right?
So, even after they’ve made an investment decision, there’s a whole 30-day diligence and discovery process and, you know, “Let’s really get into the information here,” and then they write the check.
So, working backwards, the thing you do not want to do in the first meeting, knowing that you’re going to have all these meetings, is try to get across every piece of information because you have lots of time.
For someone who’s going to invest, you’re going to have all the time in the world to give them the whole 65 pages.
You need to get it down to the core pieces that are going to get you into that next meeting, that are going to get you into that due diligence.
And you shoot yourself in the foot if you try to present too much information.
People can’t remember it all.
You just overwhelm them with info.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Absolutely.
I think what is definitely true is that eventually you do need all that information.
Like you said, that 65 pages is good for yourself, and you need to actually know that business inside out.
And you mentioned financial projections, and there’s a lot more that you need to know in order to become successful at getting funding.
So, at Rocket Pro Forma, you don’t just obviously have a pitch deck.
You do all the other stuff that goes alongside with it.
So, what else do you do?
What else is absolutely necessary for startups to think about if they want to try and get funding, and how can you guys help with that?
Mike Lingle:
Yes.
So, look, I’m a software developer, right?
I have built software for a long time.
I love technology.
I think technology creates a lot of opportunities.
I think it solves a lot of problems.
I think technology’s amazing.
And in the startup world, we hear this narrative of like, “Tech is tech, solves everything, and if you have the right tech, you’re going to succeed,” right?
In real life, in my experience, the first time I did this, I did it without funding, and all of a sudden I turned from a developer into a person who was running a room full of guys, running a company, right?
So, 12 people in a room, I’m making decisions about running the company.
I’m a developer.
I didn’t understand the financials, and I almost broke the business.
I almost crashed the Ferrari, right?
And we ended up in debt.
We ended up having to lay people off because I had messed up as a business owner, right?
In the process of rebuilding it, I learned the financials piece, and I put a lot of work into that.
So, the next time around, which turned into being a venture-funded company, I understood much better how to drive the Ferrari, right?
And when we were pitching the VCs, I had built a lot of the financial model, and I was making the changes.
They were my projections.
When we raised the money, we based the company on the plan, right?
It wasn’t like we had a secret plan in the back room.
We used the plan.
Now, things didn’t go to plan, but we had built a hiring plan, we’d built projections, and that’s what we used to run the business.
And then we had an exit, and then I’ve worked with a million other startups, and I realized a lot of people are the same, right?
We’re builders.
We’re not finance people.
We don’t really understand the numbers.
But two things — one is the number one thing that founders can do to improve our chances of success is to understand the numbers, right?
Like, there is nothing else.
There is nothing we can do with technology that will improve our chances of success more than spending a couple hours understanding the finances and understanding how to drive the business’s numbers, right?
Like, if we’re not doing it for money, it’s not a business.
It’s a charity or it’s a hobby or there’s another word for it.
Businesses are about numbers.
They are about finance, and we have to agree as founders, right — this is part of the coachability piece — we’re going to have to understand the numbers in order to successfully run a business.
When we do that, our chances of success improve dramatically.
So, that’s been the key discovery for me over my career.
Like, I don’t have to spend all my time on the finances, but I have to understand them well enough that I can run the business.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
But what if those kind of listeners are saying, “Oh my God, I hated maths at school. I hate finance. I just don’t want the numbers.”
They’re probably panicking right now, like, “Okay, I kind of want funding, but I don’t want to have to do all this.”
What would you recommend to those guys?
Mike Lingle:
So, that’s the whole point of Rocket Pro Forma, right?
And I’ve tried this a couple different ways.
I have built really complicated spreadsheets where I’m in there with all these little boxes changing things.
And not only do I have to understand the assumptions, but I have to understand how to make spreadsheets, right?
So, that’s two skills that are pretty complicated that no one wants to learn.
Some people want to learn, but usually startup founders don’t want to learn to do it.
So, I tried that.
That takes a long time.
Then I tried building financial models for founders, right?
So, they pay me, I build the model.
That doesn’t work either because I hand them a fancy model, but they have no idea how to drive the car, right?
So, we’re back to here’s the fancy car, they get behind the wheel, they crash the car.
So, that doesn’t work either because they don’t understand anything.
And what that leads to is like, “I don’t know how to run the business,” but it also leads to I’m in a room with an investor and they’re like, “What are the assumptions behind this projection?” or “Can we change the price?”
And the founder is like, “No, I have to go back to my spreadsheet person,” right?
So, that leads to not getting invested.
So, the middle ground for Rocket Pro Forma is a simple interface where I can enter pricing year one, pricing year two, pricing year three, prices, right, or year one sales projections, year two growth percentage, year three growth percentage, and that creates in the background all of the math and the model and whatever.
And I just get a chart that I can put in my pitch deck that’s formatted right, that investors want to see.
But if I get into a conversation about what’s the assumption, well here’s the pricing for year one, year two, year three.
And if I need to change something, I can change year one pricing, year two pricing, year three pricing, right?
So, that’s where we’ve ended up, is using tech to put all the complicated stuff in the background and just put the simple stuff in the foreground so that anyone can now drive the car.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
That’s funny, and I think that’s something that every startup is going to need.
I mean, it sounds like a really useful tool to have, and I think that’s brilliant.
I think everything today has been so useful when it comes to startups because we deal with a lot of clients who are thinking about having funding and whether they go down an angel investor route or whether they’re going to have a high enough growth sort of startup that a tech VC would be interested.
I don’t know, but I think it’s been so helpful to hear all this.
So, where can people get in touch with you to say they wanted to ask you a question, like they wanted to just kind of pick your brain or get some advice on pitch decks?
Where can people get in touch with you?
Mike Lingle:
I’m just at RocketProForma.com.
Then you can go to the website.
Also just Rocket Pro Forma — R-O-C-K-E-T P-R-O F-O-R-M-A dot com.
There’s a spreadsheet there.
We also offer coaching sessions, so if you want to hop onto a coaching session, we can do that.
You can email me.
I also make a bunch of free resources available, so it’s all kinds of stuff.
There’s like a resources tab and the blog, both of which have all kinds of free downloadable content, both around financial projections and pitch decks.
And just the last thing I would say — if you are raising money or think you want to raise money, go talk to a couple investors, right?
And not even because you want to get invested, but just because you want to learn how they think and just see what the process is like, right?
You’re not going to break anything.
You’re not going to offend anyone, right?
Investors always want to hear about cool new stuff, but that gives you a chance to kind of test the waters, hear how they think, hear what they would want to see in order to invest, right?
And from there, you can decide how you want to proceed.
But it’s worth having those conversations just to kick the tires.
And the last thing I would say is —

Mike Lingle:
Raising money — money is just sales, right?
So, it’s a different customer, right?
Investors are a different type of customer.
It’s a different product from selling myself and my company, but it’s really just sales, right?
So, I need to learn who my customer is, how they think, how to package what I have so that they want it, how to adjust what I have so it’s actually the right product for them.
But it’s just a sales process, and it’s learnable.
So again, it’s not a mystery.
You just have to put in the time and the effort.
And as founders, everyone wants to talk to us.
Everyone wants to hear our pitch.
Everyone wants to give us free help and mentoring.
Like, there are just so many resources that you can tap into as a founder.
So, go ahead and give it a try and see what you think.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
That’s great advice.
I think it’s really scary doing it.

Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
Thank you so much for coming on today.
It’s been amazing to hear more about the VC world and startup funding and all of this stuff.
Mike Lingle:
So, thank you so much.
This was great.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Sabrina Chevannes-Denman:
And thanks everyone for tuning in today.
This has been a great episode.
I’ve definitely learned a lot.
And if you liked the show, then please remember to hit subscribe and leave a review.
It would mean a lot to us, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of No Bullsh*t Talks.
Thank you.