Our special guest and experienced investor Nick Telson roasted 3 pitch decks of consenting startups in the presence of Roastmaster General Shaun Gold.
See below the video and transcript of the event.
Pitch Deck Roast 3 - Video
Pitch Deck Roast 3 - Transcript
Shaun Gold: Hello. Hello and welcome. I am Shaun Gold, your roastmaster general, and I am coming to you live from the 305 that's right, Miami, aka Silicon Swamp. And I want to welcome you all to Nightmare on Elm Street Part Three sorry, I mean the OpenVC Pitch Deck Roast, part three, proving that people want to learn, get roasted, and more importantly, laugh. Our objective here is to show you how a VC thinks when he opens your pitch deck for the very first time. This is being live streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Before we start, please help us by liking, by sharing, by retweeting. Doing this not only helps us, but makes me feel more like a promoter and less like an influencer. The last thing we want to do is be showing sponsored products in the middle of the roast. Speaking of which, do you find yourself feeling lethargic not seeing enough gains in the gym? Isn't it about time that you get the body you deserve? Yeah, we don't want to be doing that at all. So please like and share. More importantly, if you want your pitch deck to be roasted on a future roast and let's face it, who doesn't? There'll be a link in the live chat to submit. We're going to be submitting that throughout the roast. So if you miss it, don't worry, it's coming back. Here's how. We collected three, that's right, three pitch decks from consenting founders, and we are going to roast them live in front of you. To do that, I'd like to welcome our special VC guest roaster. He's an exited founder and serial investor with over 55 investments, which is 54 more than me and the host of the Pitch Deck podcast. Wow. And he's doing our show! The man who'll make you wish for a Brexit, Nick Telsen.
Nick Telson: Hey, Shaun. How are you doing? Glad to be here.
Shaun Gold: Thank you so much. Thank you. Tell the audience a little about yourself. Anything I might have missed?
Nick Telson: Yeah, ex did a company here in the UK called Design My Night, which was a SaaS business, set out Horseplay Ventures, which is an angel investing arm. As you say, we've done over 55 angel investments across the world. And, yeah, I'm a sucker. So we're going again with another company called Trumpet on SendTrumpet.com, which is trying to disrupt the whole sales cycle. So we've just launched out a beta for that. So, yeah, we're going again.
Shaun Gold: Wow. Okay, well, thank you for being here. It's an honor to have someone who has both experienced and, more importantly, a lack of mercy. Now, we got three rules of the roast. First, it's good fun, but we all try to be educational and provide real actionable advice for founders who are watching. Being able to take a joke in life is so important, especially with decks like these. Just remember, entrepreneurship is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think. Number two, real conditions. Nick is going to open these decks and spend two to three minutes on each while saying out loud what he thinks. No filter. We want to see his thought process as he goes through each train wreck, I mean, deck. And he has his checkbook. So in the event that I am wrong, Nick may take a meeting and may actually invest in any one of these startups. And I am also starring on this Sunday's House of the Dragon on HBO Max, where my character is going to decide the fate of Westeros. Remember, it's not TV. It's HBO. Number 3. 10 minutes total per deck. Feel free to comment, ask questions. We will use that to discuss each deck. Nothing is off the table. We want to hear from you in the audience. So if you have any thoughts, comments, questions, now is your time to ask them. Now, before we begin, I want to salute and commend each and every founder for having the guts, the bravery and the fortitude to come up here and get roasted in front of a live audience. We are not personally attacking you. In fact, you are more than capable of being successful at anything except being an entrepreneur, a founder, a designer, a salesperson, a creative director, a product manager, and dare I say, a company that is fundable. Now, let's start roasting. First up, as a startup whose name probably appeared as a clever play on words to the founders, but as a grammatical screw up to the rest of us, it's gipht? Gifts? Goofs. Nick, take it away. I need a translator for this. Look at that. Live on live clap.
Nick Telson: Okay, can we see my screen?
Shaun Gold: Yes, we can see it.
Nick Telson: Perfect. Yeah, you sort of stole the thunder. When I open this, I'm like yeah, is that Gipht? Is that gift? Is trying to respell a word a bit. 2000, 1999. And then to match that with a logo that looks like you could have just got that off cliff art.
Shaun Gold: That's because they did get it off cliff art.
Nick Telson: At least use camber. If you're going to just steal something, don't use cliff art. So, yeah, I would open this deck and I would probably give it one slide more just because it looks like it was made in the early 2000s. What I will say is at least they tell you exactly what it is so I know exactly what I'm looking at. So you're sending gifts with just an email address or a phone number. So that is a positive. But I don't know how far I would get into this actual deck. The other thing is it's 21 slides. I had a quick look, that's way too many, so I'm already thinking, okay, if I'm going to give this a minute of my time, I've got to get through 21 slides, which is like a few seconds on a slide. So my rule is max 15. If you can get it ten to twelve, then that's even better. Problem, solution. That's good. I'm a stickler for grammar and how things look and having bullet points on one side, not bullet points on the other just makes me think you're not very good marketeers. So that annoys me. Saying something is the stripe of something is the same as saying the airbnb or the Uber of something. That stripe just tells me it's like the rails of something. I think that's a bit cringe.
Shaun Gold: The x of y. Come on, It used to be hot 15 years ago.
Nick Telson: Yeah, unless it actually tells me something, which this doesn't, I don't think that's very useful. But positive is problem and solution on one slide, so I don't know why we've got 20 others is a good start at least.
Shaun Gold: You're going to find out.
Nick Telson: Well, I mean, if we went from clipart slide one to this design wise does not fill me with any inspiration at all. This is quite a long how it works. It's not actually that clear either to me. So they're trying to make it clear, but actually confusing me. So I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, I can go on to any website and is there a gift guide button that I will press instead of like Google Pay? And then the other thing is the recipient receives an email to accept the gift. So does that ruin the surprise if I'm trying to surprise someone with a nice gift, but they're going to get an email telling them there's a gift on the way, so yeah, I find that a bit strange as well. Leadership team. The positive here is that you're telling me a bit about yourself, so that's good. I hate it when you just have logos and nothing else. Yeah, we all could have worked at Google as like an intern, so at least you're telling me who you are, which is good. I feel very bad saying this because I'm not as bad as Shaun. If you're saying you're an experienced marketer and this is the design and this is the logo and this is the name you've come up with, I would very much question your marketing skills. So that is like a big cross. Like if you're saying you're an experienced marketer but this is how the deck looks, that it was made about 20 years ago. Positive is marketeer and CTO. So that's good. You've got dev and marketing. Don't see any sales advisors. I'm a bit 50/50 where people put advisors in if their own team doesn't sort of stand up. Target market. You know what, I just gloss over target market. I'm not interested in target market. I know Gifting is probably a big market. I don't need to get your BS numbers. I'm also very unsure about these types of slides because you're only going to put this slide in if you're all ticks, and they're mainly crosses. So again, it feels a bit pointless.
Shaun Gold: A bit?
Nick Telson: A lot pointless. And then the big worry here is Amazon is pretty similar. So it sort of tells me you're going up against Amazon, which is sort of any worry to a VC. And I don't know why you put the logos at the bottom. That's almost like promoting your competitors there. Just not needed this slide, I don't think. Okay, initial market validation. This is good. Let's see what we've got. We've got terrible design, we've got terrible logo. But have we got some traction? I'm still not 100% sure. I'm in presentation mode, so I don't know how many slides I'm in, but I'm probably in about eight, nine slides. And I still don't really know how it works, which is a problem. If this was across my desk and I wasn't roasting it live, I would have switched off by now.
Shaun Gold: At least to the founding team. You are reading it. So that's a plus.
Nick Telson: This is a plus. Yeah. The race is a plus for them. So it's telling me Amazon has already built the feature that they're launching, but only for prime customers. So that's not a real good line because A, there's a lot of prime customers, and they could easily turn it on for all customers if they want to. So they're telling me that Amazon have their product, but Gipht is they're telling me Gipht is this Amazon button that can go on all ecommerce platforms that you market as a gift. I'm just not really sure. And then they've screen grabbed a video. So my instant thing is to try and actually play a video, but I can't. It's just a screen grab, I think. Yeah, it's just a screen grab. So I still don't know what the bloody product actually is, which is very frustrating.
Shaun Gold: We still got ten more slides of this.
Nick Telson: Not my whiskey. I'm having a whiskey.
Shaun Gold: You're going to need a whole barrel after this.
Nick Telson: We're telling me how we're different, but I still don't really know what you do. Its ust too much. There is too much to read. Bringing back Main Street. So it's gift selections, it's local gift selections. It's personalized, unique, memorable gifts. This is all just fluffy stuff. Like, I already do gifting and especially corporate gifting, and I can do all of this stuff already. So you're not really telling me why you're different. You might be telling me why you're different from Amazon, but there's a lot of other things out there. So initial market validation. I personally hate seeing quotes because you could have just made them up. Liz could be your mother in law. Peter?
Shaun Gold: Who the hell is who's going to make up Peter?
Nick Telson: Peter. Is this Peter Pan? And you just made up a quote like, quotes are pointless. If you're going to talk about initial market validation, which we started here, and then have this different and now we're back to validation again, you haven't formatted that box on the right, so I can't really finish reading that. That's a problem for Gene, who's an experienced marketeer. Pointless. So this doesn't really tell me anything about any sort of traction or if this is a good idea. Traction. Okay. We love traction. So, again, formatting is off at the bottom. 50 end users. You can't get that all in the one square, which really frustrates me. Marketplace has an E on the next line that really frustrates me. So you're telling me that you're basically now doing your beta testing and you've got 25 merchants on shopify. So you've got 25 merchants, 50 end users. Okay. So look, you've got to start somewhere. So I'm not going to mock traction. This is very, very limited traction. They've highlighted where we are now, 25 merchants on the Shopify store. So I hope at the next slide we're going to see the results. No. Okay, so how are those 25 doing? Have you spoken to those 50 end users? Is Peter and Liz one of those 50 end users? Don't know. This doesn't tell me anything. It tells me you've got 25 merchants but not who they are. Is there a video of seeing it live on their shopify stores? Are you going to tell me what the shopify stores are so I can go and experience the product myself? Clearly not. So this really tells me nothing about your traction. Go to market, competitive advantage, greater user base, start with a core set of meetings. Yeah, I mean, it's not really reinventing the wheel here. I think what they should talk about, if I fully understand the product properly and I'm just looking at this now, is a flywheel of low cap, because you sign up your shopify stores, they bring your end users to you. The more end users you get from your shopify stores will hopefully tell other people, and then that flywheel starts to grow. If I were them, I would talk about a flywheel of marketing. Not email marketing, paid advertising, video marketing. I mean, isn't that every business that does that? And what experience do you have of doing those three things? I don't know. Business model. I'm ignoring the thing on the right monetization. So it's $5 per transaction. Okay. That feels quite high. I know in ecommerce, every cent counts, every penny counts. We say over here. So $5 on top of a transaction fee. They're probably already paying shopify. $5 feels quite a lot. So those 25 people that you talked about, that is live, are they happy with that? $5. How much volume they put through? Is that $5 a good return on investment for them. It's not really telling me anything. Okay, here we go. Estimated revenue. So where are we? We are August 22. So that's now two years, we're going to be doing $12 million. And that's on the right there. Sorry. Yeah. Everything I've just seen and critiqued, now you're telling me you're going to go from 10,000 to 2 million to 20 million is just absolute pie in the sky for me.
Shaun Gold: I mean, listen, it could be 25 million. So at least that would be excessive. 20 million is a good round number.
Nick Telson: It could be taking on Amazon by 2024. Just keep your numbers real, like, you know you're not going to do 10,000 and then do 2 million and then do 20 million, especially on everything I've just seen, even though I still don't really know what the product is. So my advice is keep your numbers real. Yes, you can maybe have 20 million in five years, but not in two years, because I'm not taking you seriously. The ask, that's good. A lot of people forget to put the ask in, which is ridiculous. So they're doing one mill precede. It's a safe. It's not telling me evaluation. They basically got zero traction, so I hope it's a low valuation. Eight month runway is very short. So if you're telling me you're going to burn through a mill in eight months, that would worry me a lot. In today's market where money is hard to come by, or tougher, I should say, you at least need 18 months runway. So if I was interested in gift gift, I would be telling you, okay, maybe you need to raise 2 million, but that really depends on what your valuation is going to be. Or let's look at why you're burning so much money. That would be a big worry for me. And you haven't told me, really, what the safe is, what's the valuation, what's the cap, what's the convert? I don't really know anything. And that's it. That's good. FYI, I like that. Sign up for a progress newsletter. That is good. So if I was interested, but not at this round, I might actually do that. But, yeah, need to make it a lot better looking. Cut it down from 21 slides to twelve to 15 and tell me what the product does. I still don't really know what the product does, which is a cardinal sin for any deck.
Shaun Gold: Well, I want to thank Geist or Gift for, you know, coming up here, and the greatest gift is that the deck is over. So thank you. Thank you. The effect. All right, we are ready for deck number two. Next up is company Eva, as in you are never, ever going to get funded with this deck.
Nick Telson: Well, first slide. I like it. So let's compare this to Gipht.
Shaun Gold: Okay. It's kind of hard to compare something at the bottom of the landfill to something at the middle of the landfill. But it's your roast. I'm just the host. Take it away.
Nick Telson: The eva team. You've come at a good time. You caught me after the guide, so this looks good. I like the color. I'm a branding guy, so I like.
Shaun Gold: Can we go full screen on it.
Nick Telson: This one?
Shaun Gold: Yeah. I want to see the little people in all their glory.
Nick Telson: Better?
Shaun Gold: Yeah, much better. Now I can see they're empowering a new generation of consumers to access valuable financial protection. That's easy.
Nick Telson: They're so excited to get going. Look at them. Look at the basics.
Shaun Gold: The best way to protect consumers financially is to make sure they don't invest in this company. Thank you, you are a great crowd.
Nick Telson: Again. They're killing me, these people. Twelve to 15, max. So that's what makes me a bit annoyed, even though it looks good and I quite like the logo. So let's sort of dig into Ever or Eva and see what we're talking about here. So this looks like a problem slide. So again, I like how it looks. And we're talking about Latin America here, so that's nice. Latin. So every 6 seconds a family falls into extreme property due to lack of financial protection. Yes. It's a huge problem. I like that. I can move on. That's good. It's good to light. So the actual problem here is they need to make funding arrangements. So they need to get ready for retirement, is how I'm reading this. We've got Jesus. He's older than 25 years, as I understand it.
Shaun Gold: He's riding a hoverboard, as I understand it.
Nick Telson: Well, so he's resurrected as a gig worker. God poor Jesus. So here he is. Morbidity risk. Market risk. Yeah. Okay. So basically you're telling me Jesus needs to start protecting himself for retirement. Okay, I get that. Spoiler alert. That's very Shaun. I like that. That's very you. I can see you don't like them as hashtags. That's a bit two years ago. This is a good existing market. So the current market is not doing what they need. I like this design. You can't really read it. So there's jargon, there's cumbersome, there's lots of bureaucracy. There's old technology. Good luck. I like it. Okay, this is good. This is good. This is good. Okay, so let's meet Ever, your one stop platform. Financial protection. Okay, this looks nice and pretty, but it doesn't really tell me anything. It doesn't really tell me anything. I've got lots of things that's happening in my life. Whether that happens in my life, hopefully I win some trophies. That happens in my life.
Shaun Gold: Maybe you don't end up in a wheelchair. Hopefully you don't. I mean, there's…what is that? AI. There's way too much going on. You don't need funding. You need a designer. That's pretty simple.
Nick Telson: You got to tell your designer to declutter that. We need some maricondo going on on this slide. So this doesn't tell me anything. So it looks nice, but it doesn't tell me anything and it just confuses me. So hashtag first life protection. Okay, so I'm guessing this is life insurance. They might call it life protection in LATAM. So I'm not going to say anything negative about that. So death is life's biggest financial event. I don't know about that. Life certainty is death.
Shaun Gold: Way to bring the energy down.
Nick Telson: Whiskey. Again, this doesn't really tell me anything again. So they're starting to lose me. So you should be telling me why you're focusing on life insurance. Property underwritten focus on distribution. Get closer and you start telling me up here. But then actually three, four and five isn't telling me why life protection. So you're starting to lose me now. And I know I've got 21 slides. Why now? Okay, a big bugbear of mine is giving me the why now? And I still don't really know what your product is. All I know is your life insurance, but I don't know anything really more than your life insurance. And now you're telling me why the market is right. You should have a why now slide. Always, but I need to know what the product is to know if there is an industry tailwind or not. But this is a solid Y now slide. So COVID there's bad distribution. Digitally it's the lowest insurance penetration. I don't really know what that means. I'm guessing there's a big opportunity to penetrate into life insurance. So that's a solid slide, but I don't want to know it now. Again, we're in the business model and like Gipht, I still don't 100% know whatever Eva really is apart from life insurance. And again, this isn't very clear on your business model, so you B to B to C, so you go through agencies and partners. It's not clear ever. You're starting to lose me, which is a shame because it started to look nice. You need to be clearer on how you actually work while you're creating value customer engagement. So you're just telling me stuff. I think I would like to see a little video of the product here or at least some screen grabs of, like, how you actually work. So you're telling me why Ever Eva is good customer engagement. Isn't that every product?
Shaun Gold: Only the good ones?
Nick Telson: Maybe not Eva. This is a bit better though. So education? You're going to do education? You're telling me it's personalized. You can apply fast and it's digital. Okay, so this is a bit better. I need this a lot earlier. So basically you're telling me you're an educational content platform and it's personalized and that's how you're going to hook people in and then they can actually do the whole process of life insurance a lot quicker and easier. So I'm on slide nine. I probably would have been fading out by now. This needs to move way up. This tells me what you actually are. Flexible distribution. So this feels similar to this slide. So basically how it all works, customers, agents, carriers.
It's confusing. Again, you're not being really clear. Not very flexible or too flexible. It's too much going on. Yeah, I'm lost. Okay. The good old Tam slide, $14 trillion. Okay, excellent. So total latter model production gap, 28 billion. 70 billion, 160,000,000,000. I hate these slides anyway, so I'm not going to try and decode. That the classic why we're different. Too many here. This is too much to read. US angels and VCs are simple folk. We just want to scan this. So cut this, pick the top five best ones, I would say, and focus on that. I can't bother to read that. And now we're into the classic competitor slide. Again, there is a lot going on here. I do a quick scan and a very quick scan. My worry already is that some of them have a lot that you do. So this assos not atos Asos life insurance. Mga API. So dynamic. But I don't know why that makes you better. Instantly, instantly. Dynamic. Dynamic. D to C. B to B to C. D to C. B to C. You're not sure if they got a referral program. Strong UX. You've got a strong UX. They've raised more capital than you. And then you're telling me you're going to win because of your community with your stupid hashtags.
Shaun Gold: Hey, those hashtags aren't stupid, okay? There's some real tastemakers in that community. It's growing. It's growing.
Nick Telson: Well, I can't wait to follow your Twitter and see you hashtagging the Eva movement. Thank you. Don't just throw in community, everyone. Communities are very hard to build. And unless you've got a strategy around community, hashtags aren't a community. So you've sort of shot yourself in the back here because Azol looks very similar and is obviously in Latin America as well. And the Spanish one, get Life looks pretty similar. Yes. And they've got 7 million. I'm guessing it's Spain, so it's Spanish speaking. So could they take it to LATAM. As well? So you've sort of shot yourself in the back with that slide. So I hate those slides. And you've done yourself a dirty with those ones.
Shaun Gold: Here's the hook. Here's the hook!
Nick Telson: 14 slides in, and I've got the hook. So let's have a look. If this is a good hook. If it is a good hook, this needs to be whoa. Slide three or four. Sell insurance without selling insurance. I know what you're trying to say there. So you're going after a young customer. It's a simple product. Pay as you lead digital process, a reward program, fitness tracking. You're just a bit confused. You need to break it out. I know what you're trying to say here, but you're not saying it well. Basically, you're saying you can relate to the younger buyer. They can go on and use your platform whenever they can get education from your platform about healthy living and lifestyle and join your Hashtag community. Then they can sign up to life insurance at just $3 a month as and when they want, and you can give them rewards like the community.
Shaun Gold: Join the slack channel.
Nick Telson: Join the community. God. And then you'll live longer. Hashtag, they trust us. So I'm guessing this is the people they've partnered with already. So this is very important, but you haven't really told me much. And is their traction with them? Are they getting customers for you? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And again, this is slide 15. Needs to be way higher up revenue model. Okay, I thought it was $3 a month. I don't know what the hell this is. Shaun, can you help me? What are they saying? $0.50?
Shaun Gold: They are saying there is a fee coming from the D to C and the B to B to C, and the fee is 0.50 cents for the first year from the D to C. And then it goes down as you stay longer because you're part of the community. And if you make it to the 10th year, you get $0.05. So, yeah, I mean, it's a deal. You signed up now and you forget about it and you're paying pennies. Pennies forever.
Nick Telson: You're paying half a cent by the time you're in your fourth year. Yeah, this has lost me. This means nothing to me. You've confused me. Roadmap, early stage. Okay, so you're going to spread around South America. I'm guessing you're leaving Brazil because of your competitor that is exactly the same as you, but with more funding. Putting PMF as a roadmap, that should not be a roadmap. That should just be in your core strategy is Product Market Fit for anyone that doesn't know. So product market fit. Yeah. So you're telling me that you're going to get Product Market fit and yeah, that's not a roadmap. Grow like SaaS, again, is not a roadmap. That is just what you should be doing.
Shaun Gold: Maybe you're on the wrong road?
Nick Telson: Marketplace growth like SaaS. Scale like Marketplace. And I want product market fit. Okay. This isn't a road map. This is your very poor go to market strategy with no detail. So what is your roadmap? I don't know. Because your first slide was about the whole financial sphere and we've only talked about life insurance. The team oh, I don't know. Is this person very ugly? And that's why they're blurring him or her out.
Shaun Gold: Come on. Look at that suit. It's bigger than the one against theranos.
Nick Telson: At least he's got a suit on. And I haven't. I've just gone for a hoodie today, so he's more respectable than me, this person? Yeah. Don't leave them empty and blow them out. Marino: Okay, that's good. You've got ten years experience in insurance. I don't really like seeing marketing agencies on a team deck unless they've got equity or some. Sort of deal. I don't need to know that. So basically you're telling me you are the team. So far you've got LinkedIn, but I can't click on anything, so that doesn't help me. So I've got lots of other decks to see, so I'm not going to bother to find you. So make those links clickable. Yeah. Who's giving you this quote about how great you are? Is it Peter from the Gipht slide?
Shaun Gold: Very bad.
Nick Telson: Don't quote yourself from how great you are. So basically I read that as it's only you, Marino, which is fine, but if that is the case, bolt your profile out a bit more. The Eva movement, the community, we want to impact a million lives, empowering everyone to achieve financial protection through education, community and purpose. This actually should be further up without the hashtag because this is basically your mission statement. This is what you want to do. But again, we're 19 slides in and I'm going okay...
Shaun Gold: Time to take action. Here's the ask. Thanks for reading.
Nick Telson: There is no ask.
Shaun Gold: The ask was asking you to read the deck.
Nick Telson: The ask was, yeah, get to the end of 21 slides. Poor team slide. There's no ask. I said that after I read the gift, one that people bizarrely leave out the ask slide. So I've got no idea what you're raising. I've got no idea what the product is. I've got no idea if it's live, I've got no idea how it works. I've got no idea if you're in beta, no traffic. It started really positively and I'm really disappointed because yeah, so poor team slides for some ride. I don't know if you've got traction, I don't know if the product live, I don't know what the product looks like. You're talking about doing the whole financial protection, but you've only talked about life insurance and your roadmap didn't tell me anything apart from you're going to grow like SaaS. So unfortunately, this would be a pass for me, even though it's something that would have been very interesting.
Shaun Gold: That's got to cut.
Nick Telson: A lot to work on.
Shaun Gold: Well, thank you. Well, now we're going to our third and final deck. It's a health tech startup, which is good because after reading this deck, I'm going to be sick. Going to be sick! Give it up for Revital.
Nick Telson: Okay, revital. Twelve slides. Big tick. That's the smile on my face. I'm going to actually cheer for that. Twelve slides.
Shaun Gold: Can they put that in the testimonial?
Nick Telson: Yeah.
Shaun Gold: Nick Nelson toasted our deck upon seeing our very first slide.
Nick Telson: But then I had to look at it. Okay, again, this logo looks like it was done in clipper. Not even camber. I mean, guys, there's so many. Even if you've got £0, there are plenty of free logo generators that are still pretty poor, but much better than this 2015 font and clipart looking design repair. Recharge. Reconnect tells me nothing. I like to be told like, gift guides did, to be fair to them, what you actually are. And I have no idea what PL is. Are you going to show me your PNL? What's PL? I have no idea.
Shaun Gold: That's how you're opening the deck to find out.
Nick Telson: Will I after slide two?. The problem is okay, so we're back into clipart territory. We've got lots of very sad looking doctors and nurses at their lunch boxes leaving the hospital. I hate this font. I hate the gray. Okay, I'm going to see past the design. Thank you for your satisfying the problem is medical error is what? I'm zooming in here. So 250,000 people a year die because of medical error. Okay. 2025. There will be more than 40,000 deaths due to failure to monitor caused by understaffing. Okay? Restaffing costs are 6 billion a year. You sort of told me a problem. I'm going to guess that this is some sort of staffing platform. That would be my guess. The solution. Okay, revital offers a complete system connected to all the same tools nurses and doctors using LTC is LTC an American abbreviation. I don't know what LTC is.
Shaun Gold: We could look it up together.
Nick Telson: Lifetime don't use abbreviations in things that are quite technical. So I'm not in the medical industry. I don't know what LTC is. All I can see is your clip art of medical equipment again. So with a pictorial front end. That's very descriptive.
Shaun Gold: It means long term care. That's what it means.
Nick Telson: Connected to all the same tools. I mean, that's not very good English either, which I hate. With a pictorial front end instructions making the system multilingual at its core and a data collection layer. Okay, well, I will send some whiskey to someone that can tell me what this product is because all I'm seeing is it looks like a cartoon that can be multilingual. And that's all I know. I have no idea what the solution is. Genuinely, I would close the deck now. You literally haven't told me what your solution is on your solution slide. I was hoping that the next slide you would share a video or some close ups of the product, but we don't. We go to the market. As you now know, I hate these market slides. Doesn't really tell me anything. Okay, this is a big market. Okay, the model god looks like it was created in 1999, but here we go.
Shaun Gold: It's 2007 by a drunk high school student who forgot that it was due.
Nick Telson: Just put the mother in $6 a bed a day. I'm guessing MRR. $90,000 of what? Are you calculating that? MRR. How many hospitals? It's not telling me anything. And now you're telling me and it's $9 per sick person a month per person that's got a temperature. This is so frustrating. So, A, I don't know what your product is, and B, you're telling me you're going to be at 100,000 MRR in four years, which isn't great, and I still don't know what that relates to. So awful. Okay, so we don't know the product. We don't know who we're charging, but let's look at the customers. So Revitals main customers are hospitals. Okay, we got that with the beds with long term wards, GPs and other okay, so it's care facilities, let's call it. Another area is care homes. Okay, so hospitals care homes. Like GPs. I get that. What the hell is my pal? I thought it was called Revital. Mypel refined my pell. Okay, so this must have been the PNL on the front slide. Now you're introducing a new product, which looks like a smartwatch with some crap animation on to manage your energy. Okay.
Shaun Gold: It looks like a Middle earth journey.
Nick Telson: This is like La to New York. I just want La to Vegas. Genuinely, even if I love the product, I would not look at this. I can't…the team, okay? They've fallen into the trap. Tory, you've just given me loads of logos. You could have been the team man at Nokia. You could have worked in the postal team at Ericsson. You're not telling me anything about why you're all great. It's pretty pointless, this slide as it is. You've got this bloody PNL popping up everywhere. Again, why is PNL you're literally telling me nothing about yourselves in this slide, apart from those four of you, so great.
Shaun Gold: Well, it's better than three.
Nick Telson: The advantages of what? I don't know. Oh, my God. The advantage of your team? No, the advantages of the product. Okay, this is even worse. You're telling me you've got a professional artist on the team, and this is what your deck looks like?
Shaun Gold: A spiritual artist. An artist at heart.
Nick Telson: Because I don't want to slag this person off, but you need to work on your artistry skills, or at least how to make a deck, because I would very much question your artistic skills. It's a rugged server, which is interesting. I've never heard of a rugged server before. So it's cloud based, GDR compliant. Yeah, I should hope so, too. And talks are in place with one hospital. I don't know what the product is. I don't know what this TL is. I don't really know what your revenue model. At one point, you're selling to GPs care homes. The others, you're charging per bed. I don't know who the team is. And now you've just shown me your tech map, which literally tells me nothing. Okay, the ask. That's good. We've got some lovely they've searched Money Tree in Cliff Arts runway equals remedy-cle alpha. What does that mean? I'm lost so 500K seed 15%. I haven't seen a product. I don't know if you've got traction. You said you're in talks with one hospital, so in my mind, this is like pre product, pre revenue. So that might be a punchy valuation. You are already talking about your A rounds. Let's not worry about your A round. We've got a lot to fix before your A round. By the looks of this, instead of just throwing in a round, a good tip would be maybe tell me what you're going to wait, it might be the next slide. No, it's not. Tell me what you're going to achieve with your 500,000. So 500,000 is going to get us to five hospitals, 15,000 beds, 30,000 sick people, $25,000 MRR. You're not telling me anything.
Shaun Gold: They're telling us that they're going to miss their fundraising goals.
Nick Telson: They're telling us to contact them in lots of different ways. And then we've got this revital back again, which is the main product. And then we've got this pell again. Can I click on any of these? Yes. Okay. And this doesn't click on them? Yeah, yeah. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Twelve slides is great, but all of the twelve need to be redone. It would have been better just to have twelve blank slides and just the name revital on the front and have some info. Tell us how you really so, yeah, all three of them, which is very disappointing, is I don't know what the product does. I haven't seen the product. I don't really know what your traction is. If you're saying you've got traction, you haven't really shown your traction, which is really fundamental things in a pitch deck. So all three of them need to go and take a long, hard look at those and revital and guide gifts you need to go onto canva. Stop using clip art.
Shaun Gold: Say it with me. Up work.
Nick Telson: Spend $20 and get something presentable. Come on, you'll save yourself some heart break.
Shaun Gold: Anything else you want to add for the audience at home and the viewers later? Any tips, tricks, pro tips? Anything that you could share to avoid what we have just witnessed?
Nick Telson: Yeah. So ten to twelve or ten to 15 slides. Why? Problem solution, why now? Why do you answer those questions? If you've got a product, show the product. If you haven't got a product, show some screen grabs of it on figma or something. Bring it to life. Spending $100 and getting someone to design your deck or $50 is worth every penny because I have in the past opened up a slide deck, seen the first page, seen it looks awful, and shut the deck straight away. If you can't go and use Canva for free, that tells me you're not a very good founder. The team slide. Don't just put logos, put actual details about yourself. If you've got traction, do some quantitative details on your traction. Don't just do quantitative. Don't just do a quote from Peter who says your product is awesome and your deck is a brochure to get intrigue. Do not tell us everything. We will typically take 1 minute 32 minutes to read a deck. So what I tell founders is open up your own deck and put the timer on and try and read all of that crap that you put in your deck. Can you do that in 90 seconds? If you can't, you need to cut back. Nice design. Bullet point text. A good tip is to make the headlines, tell us actually some information. So rather than just saying problem, why not say, we are solving XYZ in the title? And then if I am just scanning it and not reading everything, I can then pick up everything I need to know from just your titles to go back and look at your deck and look at your titles. And I think that's about it.
Shaun Gold: All right, let's get to the real stuff. People want to know, what's the brand of whiskey you were drinking during the roast?
Nick Telson: That is an Irish whiskey called Powers, which is a delightful Irish whiskey for anyone. Very smooth. The Irish do great whiskey. You always think of the Scottish or now the Japanese, but I can highly recommend it. Powers.
Shaun Gold: We need the hashtag for that. Hashtag for the Powers whiskey for when you're roasting decks or in this case, when you're making one. I want to thank everyone for taking the abuse, the founders and the teams. I seriously hope you find funding or at least a good day job. Say it with me, the door dash delivery driver. Next roast will be on October 25 at the same time of day that's close to Halloween, but in the startup ecosystem, every day is Halloween. If you want to be featured on the next roast, you can sign up. We're going to have the link going around in the chat again. Don't forget to, like, share comment on social media and make this go viral. I want to thank OpenVC Nick Telson for his time, his intelligence, his effort, and his comedy. For joining us, Stephane Nasser, the founder of OpenVC, for creating this and for you for being here, I'm Shaun Gold. This has been a job done.
