Learning to Pitch for Investment with Village Capital

What’s it like to “make a pitch” for an investment?

Recently, I slipped into the back of a darkened conference room in downtown Nairobi. Our partner, Village Capital, was conducting the second day of a training session for 12 business ventures selected for the latest FinTech for Agriculture East Africa competition.

The young business owners sat around a U-shaped table buried in papers, cups of coffee, and opened laptops hurriedly making last minute changes to presentations. Seven mentors with various backgrounds (previous Village Capital winners and successful entrepreneurs) sat against a wall ready to provide constructive feedback.

The session I witnessed was the entrepreneurs’ first mock ‘investor pitch’. Each entrepreneur, given only three minutes for the total pitch and no more than 15 seconds per slide, presented their company as if the audience were potential investors. At the front of the room, one of the entrepreneurs, the CEO of a small agri-digital start-up, stood fidgeting. Then, ready to go, he whipped through his presentation, finishing within the allotted three minutes, but the 15 second timing for slides proved rather challenging. You could see his sense of relief when he finished.

After each presentation, the mentors engaged with the entrepreneurs and provided comments and constructive feedback. This mostly concentrated on content rather than the actual delivery. Some of the pointers provided are as follows:

• Tailor presentations to each investor – do your research and know your audience;
• Don’t spend too much time on the background – history, organization, staff;
• Run through your presentation before presenting to the investor – do an oral time check, review the slide show in a similar setting, vet the font color and font size, and only make two to three points per slide;
• Get to main idea pretty quickly – what the product or service is, the gap it will fill, how it is delivered and the start-up’s strengths and advantages;
• Be open and candid with the investors – explain what you did, what you’ve learned and, most importantly, where you are going;
• Be honest – present your challenges and how you are mitigating them;
• Present very basic target numbers – client outreach and budget – this is imperative; and
• Explain what you need in terms of investment, and put it in the context of each investor. For instance, if you need $4m and the investor only funds up to $2m, then present the whole $4m but let them know you will find/have found the other funds from another investor.

The entrepreneurs I witnessed in the cohort will have two more occasions during this first training session to refine their pitch and learn from one another.

The entire FinTech for Agriculture East Africa training takes place over 12 weeks and has three in-person trainings like this one. It encompasses everything the ventures will need to grow their businesses. Participants will also join various forums, allowing them to test their product or service with potential customers, and connect with potential investors.

There are an estimated 450 million smallholder farmers globally. More than two billion of the world’s poorest live in households that depend on agriculture for their livelihood. At an estimated size of $450 billion, the global demand for smallholder agricultural finance is large—and largely unmet: only about 3 percent of smallholder farmer credit needs fulfilled.

Like others, The MasterCard Foundation believes that technology can significantly close the access gap to financial products and services for rural clients. Village Capital’s FinTech for Agriculture East Africa accelerator is one example of how the Foundation is supporting activity that, among other things, will extend Digital Financial Services (DFS) for smallholder farmers and households.

This initiative supports innovation in delivering product and services that increase access to finance for smallholder farmers. It has a successful track record in finding and capitalizing early stage ventures that provide entrepreneurial solutions. We have partnered with Village Capital because we think its support model to start-up ventures is innovative and its impact in sectors, such as education and financial services for the unbanked, is proven.

The training finale and the ultimate goal is the selection of the top two ventures by their peers. In other words, each participant in each training is judging – and ranking – the other ventures. In the end, the two ventures seen by other participants as the most promising will receive a $50,000 investment each.

So, what’s it like to make a pitch for an investment? It’s educational, stressful, empowering, but ultimately rewarding for the entrepreneur, for the community, and even the nation that benefits from the product or service.