Vettery Pitch Deck Seed Stage Startup to Raise Venture Capital

Here’s the Vettery pitch deck used to raise $9M Series A on August 16, 2016, by co-founders Brett Adcock and Adam Goldstein. In total, they have raised $11.93M in 3 Rounds from 7 Investors.

The Series A was led by Greycroft Partners and Raine Ventures, and according to co-founder Goldstein, will accelerate the company’s expansion into San Francisco, help it move into new industries (it’s currently focused on tech and finance) and allow it to expand the product team, with the aim of building integrations with existing HR tools.

Based in New York City, Vettery is a trusted hiring marketplace built to help people find their dream job. Vettery takes the best from the recruiting and technology worlds by connecting employers and talent through a curated marketplace of vetted candidates. The company came together to change the recruiting landscape, celebrate Monday mornings, and help everyone find a job they love.

Founders approach to the deck

We didn’t do the dry, standard Problem and Solution approach. Instead, we decided to describe the problem through a user story. We told the story of how a hiring manager struggles to find talent, and how Vettery solves this problem. We immediately backed up our story with traction stats to validate our words. The deck contained two slides that were key to winning over investors: our vision and traction. Our vision was to grow a massive company in a huge market, and our traction made it easier to believe that we could do it.
Whatever direction you take in your pitch, you will need historical financials and projections and strong customer references. Vettery has over 1,500 customers and we’re very fortunate that they were willing to take time out of their busy days to walk the investors through our product from their perspective.

Deck review

The deck is short and clean, in an almost investment banking sort of way. I don’t really like it to be honest.

Positive

Very well-formatted. Font type is modern and appealing
This is one of the first decks I have read in a while that include a ‘vision’ slide. Some investors like this, others don’t mind. I personally think it is important and powerful, as investors want to know what they are buying into since it heavily impacts their outcome. The problem to me though is it is very broad and unfocused. Having said that ‘organising the worlds information’ would sound equally incredulous
I am lukewarm on the ‘overview’ slide. The content is quite well written, but it isn’t personable or powerful. It’s very functional and illustrates traction
I like the concept of the ‘why it’s working’ slide. In a marketplace you need to make both supply and demand work, which typically raises the question or how many slides does one have to write..? I just find the benefits a little uninspiring
The competitive landscape slide is different from those I typically see. What they do is split the market into three segments in terms of the degree of service, or how they term it ‘price.’ This is effectively an abbreviated value chain of which they have positioned themselves centrally in it. In a sense they are positioning themselves is medium pricing and medium scalability
The business model slide just says they will make a high margin. This isn’t a terrible thing, but they don’t allude to market size. It’s almost like they are saying, sure Hired may be bigger, but this is a big market and even if we aren’t number one we will still be profitable and generate cash with decent acquisition multiples

Negative

There doesn’t really seem to be any flow in the Vettery pitch deck
The opening slide omits to add a tag line to explain what the business is, this is a missed use of space. They do include the date, which can be a dangerous thing to do as it reminds people how long the process has been going on. It is also one more thing to remember to change when you sent it to investors
They take for granted that people have understood competitors like Hired and jump into metrics rapidly. At the end of the day, investors invest in traction, particularly at series-A stage onwards. There is some funny presentation manipulation- look at the ‘monthly average invite salary.’ The base figure is $95k with the y-axis going up to $120k. It looks like a big difference, but it’s just data manipulation. Some of the axis figures are missing, so it’s hard to comment on the rest of the data points. They generally look ok
On the ‘revenue growth’ slide, the commentary and y-axis data points are missing, but prima faces the numbers don’t look super inspiring. Unsurprisingly, the last monthly revenue has jumped up a lot just as they are fundraising (as founders will aim to do)
The market sizing is simplistic. They just quote some top-down references and don’t source them