I met with 10 early-stage startups in Seattle yesterday and it was a good reminder for me what some of the most important messages are that you want to bring across to an investor when you have a limited amount of time to present your company. Here are the 4 key points that I very much care about:

• Company vision / elevator pitch: I too often get founders that cannot describe in 2-3 sentences what the vision of their startup is and what their company is all about. Make it simple and start the conversation with it. Otherwise, the investor will feel kind of lost as they don’t even know what you really want to build.
• Team: everybody has a team slide but in an early-stage environment I really want to know who can actually build stuff (and see examples of what they have built) and who are the “suits” (and what concrete value they are bringing to the team). Your team is only 3-4 people strong so you better have the right guys on board to start this company and you need to bring this across to the potential investor.
• Competitive advantage: think long and hard about how you differentiate from other sites out there. Too often founders overestimate how differentiated their product is when it is actually just a nice evolution of existing products that will have a hard time convincing users to switch.
• Distribution: distribution often doesn’t get the necessary amount of attention and founders seem to assume that people will just flock to their site so really go through the different marketing channels and come up with a strategy that make the most sense for the product you built.

So keep your pitch short and simple and make sure to address those 4 points – it will sure help to make your pitch more concise!

P.S.: I had a great time in Seattle and am always impressed by the consumer internet scene down there – perhaps this will turn into more investments soon!