Jason Kirby: Hey, Live Live team. This is me just trying. I'm throw something out here. Let me know what you think. Let me know how the audio is. Let me know how everything looks. I'm just gonna riff here on a couple of talking points. I'm gonna keep pausing in between. This will be meant to be chopped up and put into a much more engaging video.

Jason Kirby: So hopefully this doesn't suck and it's good enough to turn into a video, but the topic will be how to prepare for an investor update. We'll see how it goes. All right, so I'm gonna start the first part here.

Jason Kirby: You just got one shot. You get one shot to make an impression with investors. So why do most founders blow it on their very first call?

Jason Kirby: In this video, I'm going to share the secrets to nailing your first investor call and not just survive this call, but actually leave the investors wanting more. That's what we're going to go over today.

Jason Kirby: Hi, I'm Jason Kirby. With four exits and over 135 million in transactions under my belt, I've seen how critical it is to nail these first few conversations and kind of how you conduct yourself in these meetings. And I wanna share those secrets with you so you thrive on these investor calls and don't just sit there waiting for something for them to get back to you.

Jason Kirby: Hi, I'm Jason Kirby. I'm a serial entrepreneur, investor, and mentor to founder-led companies. And with over four exits under my belt and over 135 million in transactions, I want to share my secrets on how to nail your first investor meeting. It's not just about showing up and having a conversation with an investor. It's about having a proven strategy every time you get on that first call, whether it's a Zoom, a phone call, or an in-person meeting. There are certain strategies to make sure they're leaning in and wanting to know more. And that's what we're gonna cover today.

Jason Kirby: Alright, so I'm switching over to another script I haven't reviewed yet.

Jason Kirby: So let's start with the most important thing. And actually, it happens before you get on the call. It's knowing who you're talking to and if they're the right person you should be talking to. So let's just say you nailed the opportunity to get the meeting. That means you messaged the right person, got the right intro—that's a separate video. But now you have that meeting on your calendar, three days from now, to hop on a call. What are you doing to prepare for that call?

Jason Kirby: There's only so many investors in the world that actually care about what you're building and have the ability to invest in the company that you're building. So do not mess up these first impressions and do your homework. So let's walk you through what that homework looks like. So first, you should be Googling them and researching their LinkedIn. Google because it might show any current or relevant events that might pertain to their firm or to their leadership there. Any kind of recent events will be important to be known before getting in, whether it's good or positive news or recent deals, it's good to show that you did your homework and highlighting a recent event for them. Two, look at their LinkedIn, look at their history, who else do they know? Are you talking to an associate or a principal, the managing director, a partner? Knowing those details should change ultimately how you conduct your meeting. So first step, do your research, get an understanding of who you're going to be talking to, and come in well prepared with talking points of points of relatability with that person to have a better conversation.

Jason Kirby: Some of my favorite things to know about an investor before I hop on that call is where they went to school, where they live, who we might know or have interacted with before, whoever made the intro—making a point to bring that up in the conversation—and knowing their investment thesis. What do they actually invest in? Knowing what it says on their website versus maybe the deals that they've done. And if you haven't already used Thunder to cut out the Thunder reference there. Alright, let's move on to the next point.

Jason Kirby: All right, you've done your homework. Now it's time to get on the call and set the tone. It's important for founders to come in confident and not wait for the investor to set the terms or set the tone of this call.

Jason Kirby: You're now logging on to the call, you've done your homework, you're prepared. Now it's important to set the tone. Investors are constantly hopping in and out of meetings. They don't really have much invested into you at this point. All they've really seen is a deck. They're not jumping at the edge of their seat to meet with you most likely. They're running through their checks and they're wanting to make sure they show up. You have to grab their attention and show confidence and show that you're a founder worth listening to within the first few seconds of the call. How do you do that? One, you're polite, you're respective of the time and the conversation, and you want to start off with getting to know each other. All right, start, scratch this one.

Jason Kirby: So, you're hopping on the call. You got your homework done, you found points of relatability. Why is it important to find those points of relatability? Well, it's because founders and investors—that relationship can often be 10 years if you're early stage company. And VCs, investors, they want to know that they're going to like you. They want to obviously invest in your business, they want to look at the future returns and all that kind of stuff, but they're going to deal with you and are you a person that's worth dealing with? And that's why it's important to have those relatable points to start your conversation a little bit more casual. Get them off of their defense, you know, get them off their defenses, you know, get them to be open to having a conversation and a flow. The one thing you do not want to do is go straight into pitching. You go straight into pitching in these conversations, you already lost them. Doesn't matter how good your business is. It puts them on their heels. It makes them feel like they got to be defensive on coming in on why this might not work. That's the frame of reference I come in with. So you're much better coming in saying, hey, John, hey, Jessica, whatever their name is. Great to chat with you. Can you give me a quick intro on you guys real quick? And it's always important to let them lead in with the intro. This gives you all the data you should need to be able to have a conversation.

Jason Kirby: This is not flowing very well. Let me see if I can get some points here. I'm just going to keep this rolling. You guys can see if it's choppable and editable into anything that's worth having.

Jason Kirby: So, you've done your homework, very important to come in. The reason—so you've done your homework. Now why did I ask you to do your homework on these people? Well, at the end of the day, you need to build a relationship with these investors. Investors do not wanna be asked for money. At end of the day, that's what everyone comes to them for. They know that's obviously why you're there. So, skip that part and just go into straight building a relationship, trying to understand who they are. What makes them tick? Do they have kids? Do they not have kids? Do they go to the office? They're not going to the office. They work from home or are they in San Francisco, wherever they are. Try to leverage your homework on that point of relatability. And in those first few minutes of that conversation, be sure to weave in the fact that you did a little bit of homework. It's always flattering to them, makes them a little bit more obligated to give you a shot when you've shown that you've done homework.

Jason Kirby: If you go straight into, I'm the CEO of ABC company and I'm going to change the world, blah, blah, blah, blah—they're going to go straight on the defense and they're not going to be ready to lean in because like, whoa, slow your horses there. Let's not get married straight away. Let's make sure we're both cool people. So you've your homework, you present yourself as a likable person. You show that you've done their research on them. Now you have that little small talk back and forth—should only be about two, three, maybe five minutes or so. If it's going well, it's going for a couple of minutes and then you can cut into transitioning over to them giving their background. So you always want VCs to start with sharing their thesis and who they are. It's pretty default. It's a boilerplate statement for most of them. They rehearse it all the time. They usually like to get it out of the way first. So just let it happen.

Jason Kirby: That means you now get all the data that maybe their website didn't disclose, might change some of the key talking points that you want to bring up, but this is really important to being able to control the narrative of the meeting by having them share a little bit more about their investment thesis and their process. Now, they may or may not share this, and if they do not share this one question—answer this one question—you need to ask it. This is probably the most important question to ask: why?

Jason Kirby: Why did you take this call? So as a founder asking an investor, saying, hey, out of curiosity, why did you take this call? And pause. Don't sit there and elaborate. Don't run on sentences. Hey, why did you take this call? Make them actually think. Was it your deck? Was it the fact that their boss told them to meet with you? Was it the fact that a very reputable introduction came in and they're just giving you a shot. Did they do their homework on you? Maybe not. I've had some situations where VCs didn't even look at your deck before hopping on a call. It just felt obligatory to take the meeting. So this will help you understand how serious they are about the call and how much catching up you have to give them. Like if they haven't really done a lot of homework on you, if they're not really impressed, you need to maybe start with some of the basics. If they're like, hey, we read the deck, we get the model, we're heavily invested in this industry, we know all about it—well, then don't talk about the industry. Talk about what makes you special and differentiated. If they talk about that they've got a warm intro, then you might need to kind of give them a little bit more of the problem you're solving, the vision that you have for your company, the solution, and some of the education on the market. And you'll have to kind of go through some of those talking points. So once you've gotten through this stage, and now you have context as to why they're taking the meeting, you should be mentally capable of running the show on this meeting.

Jason Kirby: Assuming it's only 30 minutes, which is the average, you should now be focused on giving them your background, not the company's background—your background. Why are you qualified to be building this company? Why did you start it? Why are you passionate about this particular problem? You should be hitting on key points around your unique background that makes you qualified for what they call founder‑market fit. You want to kind of check that box as early as possible, tie in your background and interesting points about you. From there, you want to talk about what you're doing to the industry. What are the industry changes that are happening that brought you to solving this problem and ultimately demonstrating the value of your solution. Now it's always going be better to show not tell, but do not pitch your deck.

Jason Kirby: Founders, this is what will kill you immediately in a meeting: if you sent a deck and then you go and present that deck on the call, you're pretty much not going anywhere. If they ask you to present the deck, then maybe, sure—hit a key point, you know, a couple slides—but don't go through the whole spiel. Have a quick, three‑minute version that you can kind of knock through. Don't be spending 25 minutes on a call, walking someone through your deck. You've already lost if that's the point.

Jason Kirby: So be sure to cover your background, get into what makes your business unique and how you're competitive and what you're doing in the industry. Talk about your big picture vision, but you should not be presenting that deck. Plain and simple. If you need to reference a slide as a visual support or you wanna do a demo, totally fine. If it really wows people to kind of see a visual for your product, by all means share those on these calls, but do not walk through the deck you had sent prior to the call. It will automatically disinterest them because odds are they probably read through it and they're up to speed on that stuff. You don't want to be wasting that time. In fact, what you want is you want to encourage them to ask questions. The best dialogues that I've seen between investors and founders is usually 50‑50. That means on a 30‑minute call, the investor is talking for 15 minutes and asking questions, sharing their thoughts and ideas, and you're talking for 15 minutes. Something acceptable might be like the 70‑30 where you're talking 70% of the time, but if you're talking more than 60‑70% on a call, you probably lost. And they're probably not interested. They're probably not going to follow up. They probably say, yeah, sure, give us access to the data room, but they probably won't look at your data room because they're just not that into you. That clear sign of indication that they are interested in you is when they are constantly going back and forth or riffing ideas with you. They're trying to understand something more about the business or they're saying how do we move forward.

Jason Kirby: So you get through your presentation—essentially you're talking about what makes your business special, you're having a little bit of back and forth dialogue—you got about three minutes left in this call. You either have one or two options. This conversation is going phenomenal and you say, hey, we're running out of time in about three minutes, do you guys have more time to keep talking or do I need to wrap things up?

Jason Kirby: This one shows you're acknowledging and respecting their time. You're not putting them in an uncomfortable situation. They respect that. They might want to keep talking to you, but they do maybe have something very important they have to jump to. Some cases they will be canceling the next meeting because they really want to prioritize you. In some cases they'll say, yes, I have to stop. And what you want to do when you have to stop and they say, yes, I have a hard stop, is to basically take those last three minutes and walk them through your process.

Jason Kirby: Don't let them dictate to you what their process is. You should have already gotten that in the beginning stage of the call. So this is where you say, hey, it's been great meeting you. It's been great having this opportunity to present what we're doing. I'd like to get another call in the books where we can kind of walk you through a demo and give you a full length—not full length, you don't say full length, that might scare. Give them a demo of your product and show them what your product's actually capable of, maybe walk them through a couple case studies. So at that last three minutes, like, I'd love to just go ahead and schedule a follow‑up call. I only need about 20, 30 minutes every time to give you a demo. That should really give you a great idea of what we're doing and why our product's so unique and has a chance to win the market. And you want to book that call on the call you're on. You don't want it to go to where like, yeah, yeah, us an email and we'll figure it out. You might lose them. If you don't get that follow‑up call booked on the call—either again, they're not that into you. They were distracted and weren't really paying attention. Again, not that into you. Or they say, yeah, yeah, we're free on Monday at 1 PM. It's like, boom, they're interested. And now you need to maintain momentum.

Jason Kirby: So we're not going to talk about all the other steps that come after the first call. But in this first call, you need to land that next meeting and have it already in the calendar before you hang up. If you lose that opportunity, the odds of them staying engaged and wanting to continue moving on have dropped probably by 60, 70%. It's not impossible, but it's gonna be a lot more work for you to get them to the table if they don't book that call. So your number one priority in pitching the first investor meeting is to establish a relationship, establish some relatability and connection to them beyond just your pitch. Two, make sure they understand your business. Have a dialogue, make sure they're asking questions, they're engaging.

Jason Kirby: And the third most important priority is that you're not trying to get their investment on a first meeting. You're trying to win more time. You're trying to get them to invest more time into getting to know you and your business. Cause it can take somewhere between five to 10 meetings before you actually get a term sheet. You know, unless you're the hottest thing in the market right now, like it could take several meetings to get investors interested, especially a lead investor is going to be the one doing the underwriting. So when you get into those meetings, make sure you're booking that next call by the end of the meeting. Otherwise, your shots are limited. So that's my advice on how you run your first investor meeting. If you differ from my...

Jason Kirby: So that's my advice on how you're supposed to run your first investor call. Now, if you thought this was great advice, let me know down in the comments. If you thought this was terrible advice—maybe you're a VC and you say, hate when founders run in this process—be sure to let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear what you have to say. But if you liked the video, make sure to give it a like. If you want to stay tuned for more content, we're be pumping out more of this stuff in addition to our weekly podcast and our weekly newsletter.

Jason Kirby: But you can learn more and subscribe to it—join.thunder.vc. But otherwise, be sure to subscribe to this channel, like the video, leave me a comment down below, and that will encourage me to continue to produce this content that I usually reserve for my clients and never actually share this stuff publicly outside of maybe a couple of written pieces. But this time, I'm trying to up our game on the video quality and the content that we produce for our audience to help founders further that, you know, may not be able to get the time with me one‑on‑one, where I share this advice on a regular basis with every single one of our clients we take to market. We're giving them constant coaching and advice and feedback on how to run their calls. And this is taken from those lessons. So I hope you enjoyed it. But be sure to let me know if you did down below. Until the next video.

Jason Kirby: Alright, so now my team, that could be chopped up in a bunch of different ways. I'm going to try to redo an intro. And maybe give you a couple sound bites to choose from here. But hopefully this can be cut down to like a 5‑10 minute video.

Jason Kirby: We're going to try the intro again here.

Jason Kirby: You've got one shot to make that first impression with an investor.

Jason Kirby: What are you supposed to say on your first investor call that gets them leaning in and wanting more versus yawning and saying, send us your data?

Jason Kirby: You get one shot to make an impression with an investor on your very first call and how you handle it could make or break your fundraising. Hi, I'm Jason Kirby.

Jason Kirby: You get one shot to make a first impression with a venture capitalist, private equity firm, angel investor. And I want to give you the secrets to make sure you don't screw it up. These first investor calls are what make or break your company and could determine a one month fundraising cycle or a one year fundraising cycle. So I want to give you the secrets on how to cut that down to a short period of time as possible, make your fundraising as easy as possible. And I want to give you all my secrets that I give all of my clients that are actively raising hundreds of millions of dollars on how to handle your very first call with a first investor for the first time you're meeting them.

Jason Kirby: You get one shot to make a first impression. You get one shot to make a first impression with an investor, whether they're a VC, private equity, or an angel investor. And that first call you have with them, that first impression you deliver, could determine whether you have a one month fundraising cycle or a 12 month fundraising cycle, or end up running out of money. It is crucial to follow these secrets I'm going to give you in this video to make sure you land that first meeting, but not only make that first meeting, but you get that second and third and fourth meeting that ultimately lead to a check. So let me walk you through those secrets. Hi, I'm Jason Kirby. I'm a serial entrepreneur with four exits under my belt and have been involved in over $135 million in transactions. I help founders navigate their capital strategy every single day, raising hundreds of millions of dollars on a regular basis. And I'm here to give you my secrets on what makes a great capital strategy and...

Jason Kirby: And I'm here to give you my secrets on fundraising and managing capital strategy, whether you're raising debt, equity, or pursuing to sell your company. I'm currently the managing director of Thunder.BC.

Jason Kirby: Hi, I'm Jason Kirby. I'm a serial entrepreneur, I've built and sold multiple companies, I've been involved in over $135 million in transactions, and I'm passionate about helping founder‑led companies navigate their capital options. And that's what we're gonna do today in this video about investor calls and making sure you have the best first impression.

Jason Kirby: So let me just give you the quick highlights if you're not patient enough to watch the whole video and get all the secrets. First, do your research before you start the call and know who you're talking to. Second, make sure you set the tone of that call and you set the agenda for that call. Third, you should be spending about 50‑50, maybe 60‑40 on time spent on that call, meaning you're spending 60% of the time talking, they're spending 40% of the time talking. If you're spending 90%, you'll... HMM

Jason Kirby: Let me go ahead and give you the quick secrets and bullets on what to take away from this video. Number one, do your research before you start the call. Number two, you set the agenda for the call. You set the tone for the call.

Jason Kirby: Number three, make sure you're not talking the entire time for obvious reasons. Three, make sure you don't leave that meeting without booking the next meeting. And four, and five, remember this point. You are not there on that first call to raise money. You are there to build a relationship and earn the right to the second call. That's what this video is about. Let's get started.

Jason Kirby: All right, I don't know, this is gonna go. If you guys wanna chop this up and throw it in and see what happens, I know I just sent the message where I wasn't gonna be able to pull this off, but I just wanted to throw and barf something up and just see what you guys think and if it's something that we can actually work with and if this process works. Cool.