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How to be Featured in Investor Day

Nic Mahaney

OnePager Co-Founder

October 28th, 2021

What is Investor Day?

OnePager Investor Day is a newsletter that is shared every other week with more than 800 of the world’s top investors. From General Catalyst to the Harvard Business School Angel Association, this newsletter is an opportunity for your startup to get hundreds of warm intros at the same time. You can learn more about Investor Day, here, and sign up now to be included.

How do you get included?

Our team at OnePager has a singular mission: help founders get access to capital. From launching the world’s largest, non-exclusive scout network on college campuses to analyzing the structure of a traditional Venture Capital Term Sheet, our goal is to reduce some of the many barriers on a startup’s path to success. With that said, we are not arbiters of what is a “good” or “bad” startup when selecting companies for Investor Day; we make determinations based on the quality of OnePager. Below, I will break down the three most important cards that we look at when picking the top 30 OnePagers to be included in Investor Day.

Team

A core aspect of early-stage ventures is “investing in the team as much as the idea”. Strong founders and executives in startups can be a massive determinant on whether or not you will be able to successfully fundraise a Pre-Seed or Seed round. When we look at the Team section, the first thing we check is if this is focused on the leadership team. This card should only highlight three to four leaders at your company. While we understand that sometimes founding teams can be larger than four people, and that this by no means represents the importance of other team members, this should answer the following question:

“Who at my company would be in a meeting with investors?”

Outside of leadership, two other quick checks that we look for are if your social accounts are connected, and if you’ve uploaded a photo as your headshot. If you feel great about these three facets, you are on the right track to be included in Investor Day!

Frequently Asked Questions

While other cards may have a more prominent location on the OnePager or may drive immediate decisions for if a company is included or not, the FAQ card can help a company stand out as a top OnePager to be featured in Investor Day. Outside of Investor Day, FAQs are also an incredible opportunity to control the narrative when interacting with investors - you get to control the questions they’re asking! Similarly to the Team card, there is a single question to ask yourself when approaching this with best practices:

“Am I succinctly answering questions that investors will always ask me?”

To answer this question appropriately, you should target to ask and answer three to five questions. Within these questions, there should be no need to answer this question with more than a single paragraph. Long blocks of text lead to investor fatigue and it can be a great show of expertise to use concise, clear answers.

Deck & Fundraising

The Deck and Fundraising cards are the only two cards that we require for a company to be included in Investor Day, even though they are optional within OnePager. When we share information with our investor network, they expect to see the same format every time - it’s one of the great benefits to using and consuming OnePager. Two core components of this are reviewing a pitch deck and knowing the terms of the current round. Investors are used to these two things being the most up front assets and pieces of information from a founder; they’re frequently two of the earliest questions asked by investors. By requiring these fields, we make it easy on the investor to consume information about more startups, which inherently allows us to share more startups in the newsletter.

Takeaway: Spend Time Building a OnePager

OnePager is a storytelling tool, and it takes time to tell a good story. Spending thirty minutes curating your Team, FAQs, and other sections will improve your OnePager. Take a look at the OnePager Best Practices for how to focus on the other cards!

We love working on the Investor Day newsletter because it’s a perfect reflection of the mission we are trying to accomplish. Have any questions or feedback about what we’re working on? Send us a note and we’ll get back to you as fast as we can!


Note: The team at OnePager reserves the right to withhold companies from the Investor Day newsletter at its discretion. While we aim to share information about as many companies as possible, we also aim to provide legitimate investment opportunities to our investor network.


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