Tag: teardown

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Pitch Deck Teardown: Simba Chain’s $25M Series A deck

Grab a cup of coffee and strap in, because this pitch deck teardown is pretty different from most of the ones I’ve done to date.

Why? Let me count the ways. (OK, fine, there are only two ways.) But let’s take a closer look:

1. This is a blockchain pitch. The pitch deck is for Simba Chain, a blockchain company that raised $25 million in a Series A. It’s hella brave of them to submit their deck for a teardown. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that of every three or four tweets, one has me making fun of blockchain tech.

It isn’t that I hate the people who build blockchains, but in the decade or so that I’ve been following the industry, I have come across only a tiny handful of companies that make sense to me (Arkive is one, and I did a teardown of its deck, too). Most of the time, I conclude that it’s a crying shame that people this talented are throwing away their time and talent building something in this space.

I know those are harsh words, and I hasten to add that that’s my personal opinion, not that of TechCrunch overall. (Besides, you wouldn’t want me writing about this when we have an incredible crypto/blockchain/web3 team covering it.) I did want to mention it, because as much as I’ll try to be neutral, my disdain for blockchain tech will almost certainly show through in this teardown.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Arkive’s $9.7M seed deck

2. TechCrunch didn’t cover the round! I know, I know, that’s pretty much one of the rules here for the pitch deck teardowns. Having said that, The Wall Street Journal covered the round, as did CoinDesk.

The team slide shows that the CEO has been involved in 380 startups and 17 exits. You’d better believe I’m paying attention.

Suffice it to say that I’m stretching my knowledge to the max here, but I invite you to consider two things:

  1. I don’t have to have a deep understanding of blockchain tech to be able to critique the pitch. In fact, many of the people who buy my book and who work with me as a pitch coach are running companies in spaces I know nothing about.
  2. Storytelling is universal, and as long as the founders know what they’re talking about, I can help with the pitch side of things.

So here’s an invitation: Let’s see this as an adventure we can go on together, and if you have feedback, thoughts or comments, feel free to write them on a piece of paper and set it on fi … I mean, feel free to make fun of me on Twitter. I promise to be open-minded.

With all of that out of the way, let’s learn some stuff together!

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

Slides in this deck

Simba Chain’s slide deck is incredibly impressive and covers a lot of ground. It consists of 19 slides, some of which sneak up on you with a surprise, and others that might leave you scratching your head.

  1. Cover slide
  2. Problem slide
  3. Solution slide
  4. Market slide (TAM/SAM)
  5. Market slide (SOM)
  6. Vision slide
  7. Traction slide
  8. Awards
  9. Team slide
  10.   Board of directors slide
  11.   Scaling Simba slide
  12.   Positioning slide
  13.   Competition slide
  14.   Moat slide
  15.   Competition product comparison slide
  16.   “Invoke Smart Contract Method” slide
  17.   Supported blockchains slide
  18.   Current investors slide
  19.   Thank you/contact slide

Three things to love

There are two ways to make money in a gold rush: One is to dig out a giant honking nugget of heavy, yellow metal; the other is to supply the miners with picks, shovels and TNT.

I love how explicit Simba Chain makes that it is doing the latter — and not just for anyone, either. The company has been working with an incredible list of customers, including ones (such as the U.S. Navy) that are notoriously hard to land contracts with. In the pitch and storytelling, Simba Chain leans on its customers’ pedigree to make its story come to life.

Crystal-clear vision

Simba's Vision slide

[Slide 7] I love the clarity of vision here. Image Credits: Simba Chain

A lot of companies find it surprisingly hard to figure out their raison d’etre. When you’re an early-stage startup running a blue-ocean strategy, a thousand opportunities come your way at every turn. Cutting through the noise with a clear, strategic vision, followed by implementable tactics and repeatable operations, is the way to build a fast-growing, successful company.

This vision slide has an abundance of clarity: “‘Picks and shovels’ of the blockchain rush” is ChefsKiss.gif, and “What Stripe is to payments, Simba will be to blockchain” nails it down harder. I wish that this was the second slide because it gives even a chain skeptic like myself a reason to nod my head and mutter, “I see what you did there,” under my breath.

There’s a couple of head-scratchers here, so I’ll quickly name them: I have no idea what traction or investors are doing on a vision slide — it dilutes the message and muddles the story. If the last two bullets on this slide were moved elsewhere, this would be a perfect setting-the-tone slide for this pitch.

As it is, it’s merely extraordinarily good, so we’ll let the founders off the hook here.

Holy team, Batman!

Simba Chain team slide

[Slide 10] First impression: Goodness, that’s a lot of white guys. Second impression: Goodness, that’s a hell of a team. Image Credits: Simba Chain

In a world where diversity matters, this slide earned an eye-roll from me. But then I started reading the descriptions.

I’ve never seen anything like, “Bryan has been involved in 380 startups and 17 exits” on a slide deck before. It seems like he was pulled in as part of the Series A after serving as the company’s board chairman since its late-2019 seed round. A claim like “380 startups and 17 exits” will have any investor looking up Ritchie’s LinkedIn page.

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect there, and I suspect the founding team had an interesting time in due diligence. Still, the company successfully raised the money, so they passed due diligence, and if the company can back up the claim, it speaks to a lot of experience for sure.

The rest of the team is stacked with veterans, too. The CTO had been in IT academia for a decade before co-founding the company, and the COO spent 25 years at Microsoft before joining Simba Chain (although it appears he’s recently moved on to Google).

The co-founder and ex-CEO, Joel Neidig, has an impressive resume as well, although “addressed the president’s economic council on blockchain” is somewhat fuzzy — I don’t know what that means. In any case, it appears he left Simbla Chain in July, along with COO Joe Matz.

This slide is pretty wild. I haven’t spoken to the company, as I’m trying to do these pitch deck teardowns as prima facie as I can, but there seems to be more to the story than you’d think at first glance.

If I’d come across this deck when the company was raising its round back in 2021, I’d have said, “There’s a lot of veteran talent here.” Looking at it with the benefit of August 2022 eyes, though, the picture is interesting: The CEO wasn’t there when the fundraising happened (he was promoted from board chair to CEO as part of this round), and two of the remaining seven folks on the deck have moved on.

My read is that the company brought in veteran leadership, which caused a shake-up. That’s not a bad thing — companies expanding rapidly often outgrow their founding team and early employees — but it would certainly make me conduct deeper due diligence than usual to make sure there isn’t a cultural problem here.

In any case, the company currently lists 91 employees on LinkedIn, so it looks like it has been on a hell of a trajectory since its early days.

A beast of a competition slide

Competitive Advantage slide

[Slide 14] Check check check check check this out. Image Credits: Simba Chain

Blockchains and web3 are rapidly evolving spaces, both in terms of market acceptance and technology. It helps that Simba Chain was originally spun out of a DARPA contract and has a gathered credibility from being associated with established, well-respected academic organizations. This means it has a head start on making itself palatable for governments and enterprise customers alike.

Of course, the company wasn’t going to add anything to its own competition slide that doesn’t show it coming out on top. Even so, this is a rather impressive way to start a conversation. Follow-up conversations would be around why these points are so important to government customers and how that translates to overall competitive advantages.

Of course, investors will want to check whether Simba truly is way ahead of everyone else and that there is really no competition for no-code options. That said, this slide does something particularly elegant — by mapping out the competitive landscape in this way, you are able to guide the first pass of the competition conversation in your direction. Very clever and undoubtedly elegant.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Simba Chain could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

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Pitch Deck Teardown: Arkive’s $9.7M seed deck

On Tuesday, I covered Arkive’s $9.7 million funding round, a startup that is trying to answer the question: “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?”

The company’s founder and CEO Tom McLeod was gracious enough to let me take a closer look at the pitch deck he used to raise their seed round for our pitch deck teardown series here on TechCrunch+. Let’s get to it!

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

Slides in this deck

Arkive’s deck is a hard-hitting, to-the-point deck that crams a lot of details into just 12 slides:

  1. Cover slide
  2. Mission slide
  3. Problem slide
  4. Solution slide
  5. Business model slide
  6. Value proposition slide
  7. Roadmap slide
  8. Market context slide
  9. Market size slide
  10.  Milestones and What’s Next slide
  11.  Team slide
  12.  Closing slide

The deck has a small number of redactions; the team reports it removed the following information:

  • Amount of money needed and valuation.
  • Specific timeline of product features.

Three things to love

Right off the bat, this slide deck shouts both “good storytelling” and “experienced entrepreneur.” The former because the narrative flows effortlessly and clearly from one slide to the next. Very few of the slides are, as many founders choose to do for clarity, labeled as “product” or “roadmap.” Both the content and design make sure you know exactly which part of the story you’re looking at.

Here’s a few things I think Arkive did particularly well:

Planting the seed of a dream

Arkive slide 2 - What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?

[Slide 2] Barreling hard out of the gates. Image Credits: Arkive (opens in a new window)

Early-stage startups can only share so much about their traction. If you have customers, they may not be fully representative of your eventual customers. If you have a beta product, it will evolve as you learn more about the problem space you’re in and the customers’ needs and desires.

So what’s left? You sell the dream — and my goodness, did Arkive knock that particular ball out of the park.

Love or loathe the idea, “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?” is a hell of a conversation starter. It also serves a more subtle purpose — for some subset of potential investors, this slide will make them nope the hell out of the deal right away.

Make it easier for investors to paint your dream in numbers — it makes it far easier to give an enthusiastic “yes!” to backing your company.

That can be an advantage, as it’s nearly impossible to convince people who’ve made up their minds about crypto, blockchain, museum curation or fractal ownership to get excited about Arkive. The corollary is that investors who are excited about this space are invited to elevate their excitement with a very simple slide.

The slide hints at the market, it suggests the solution Arkive is building, and it communicates the company’s goals and missions. It’s simple, effective and demonstrates a clarity of vision that I rarely see in founders in this context.

There’s one lesson you can take away from this: If you’re struggling to come up with a vision that’s as clear as this, ask yourself if you fully understand your market, the problem you are solving and the solutions you are proposing.

It was that, now it is this

Slide 4 - We create a unique opportunity by shifting from the consolidation of curatorial power with elites to weaponizing the power of crowd- sourced intelligence.

[Slide 4] “We create a unique opportunity by shifting from the consolidation of curatorial power with elites to weaponizing the power of crowd-sourced intelligence.” Image Credits: Arkive.

As a founder, you have to truly, completely believe that you’re going to change the world or something important within it. If that isn’t true, I’d question why you’re doing what you are doing in the first place. If you’re smart and persistent enough to think you’re going to start a company, why would you waste that talent on something trivial?

Few founders pause for long enough to consider that investors are pretty similar in their motivations. Yes, they’re trying to create an outsized return for their LPs, but to many VCs, that’s the “what” and maybe the “how,” but not the “why.”

I love this slide because it plants a bold stake in the ground, striking a stark contrast between the old (traditional musea) and the new (Arkive). It uses the buzzwords of crowd-sourcing, equality and speaking democratic truth to a traditionally elitist group of curators.

For investors who care about diversity, inclusion and social justice, the message is spot on — will this be the first time there will be true representation in art and artifact curation? And on the other end, for investors who couldn’t wring out a singular copulation about making the world a better place, the slide does something else: It highlights a market that is staggeringly low on innovation and may turn out to be ripe for financial disruption.

I wish the slide had fewer words in it (perhaps Arkive could have made a deck with fewer words for presentation purposes), but that tiny niggle aside, I think it is very close to being perfect. It draws out the contrasts and sets out the playing field effectively while leaving enough space to have fruitful and interesting discussions about Arkive’s visions for the future.

Let’s talk business model

Flywheel: By acquiring and showcasing a global collection, our membership drives capital into the treasury long-term.

[Slide 5] Business model, meet acquisition model. Image Credits: Arkive

A startup’s business model should be like a flywheel that builds momentum as the company grows and evolves.

This slide outlines two important parts of that business model. For one, it outlines the user acquisition path and explains how the company is planning to take care of part of its marketing. It also explains the “How will this thing make money?” question without going into too much irrelevant detail.

This slide, in particular, helped me realize that the founding team is particularly experienced. Instead of only looking at one part of the puzzle in isolation, they have instead identified and articulated how all of the pieces come together while focusing on the user acquisition aspect of the business model.

The effect is simple but powerful. Just with the slide, I can deduce what I would have said to pitch it, but I’ve interviewed McLeod, the company’s co-founder, so I know he is a good presenter and can speak about his vision with great passion. Each of the four boxes on this slide is a slightly ajar door inviting you to have a conversation.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Arkive could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

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This week in TechCrunch Experts: Don’t blow your Q1 2022 marketing budget

The TechCrunch Experts program had an active week!

Joey Noble, community manager for Demand Curve, returned with a teardown of Customer.io’s homepage with insights you can apply to your own company’s website, and Jonathan Martinez shared his essentials for creating an optimal growth marketing tech stack.

With the new year almost upon us, I interviewed several of the experts we’ve identified through the Experts program and asked each of them how they’d manage a small Q1 2022 marketing budget, and on Wednesday, Senior Editor Walter Thompson hosted a Twitter Space with Octane.ai co-founder Ben Parr to discuss using zero-party data for personalization.

Our coverage this week also includes notes on how DevOps efforts are supporting recent and upcoming trips to space. Find a full recap below.

Software consulting

DevOps transformation: Taking edge computing and continuous updates to space: Fred Simon, co-founder and chief data scientist at JFrog, wrote about the field’s contributions in the past two years to space exploration.

“One of the great revelations of the new space industry is that it’s being eaten alive by software,” says Simon. “Software is getting smarter, better and easier to update; however, the amount of compute power needed to execute software commands in space is growing exponentially.”

There are plans to launch as many as 40,000 satellites in the next few years, but how do we transform the way we continually update software that runs in space?

My personal view is that we need to create a new way of performing continuous delivery and continuous updates in space. On Earth, many organizations use an orchestrator to handle the continuous update processes — automated configuration, management and coordination of systems, apps and services to help IT teams manage complex tasks and workflows efficiently. As of now, there is no equivalent to this for use with satellites in space, and those that exist are extremely limiting.

Consultant: Emit Knowledge
Recommended by: Envoice
Testimonial: “We were able to focus on growing the business while Emit Knowledge has helped us to build and manage the product from idea to delivery.”

Growth marketing

(TechCrunch+) Growth marketing experts survey: How would you spend a $25,000 budget in Q1 2022?: Miranda Halpern spoke with seven marketers that we’ve come to know through our TechCrunch Experts program. The question each expert was asked to answer was, “If you only had a $25,000 marketing budget for Q1 2022, how would you spend it?” Read the full article to see how these marketers break down their “budget.”

A lean startup’s growth marketing tech stack: Without a robust marketing growth stack, startups can’t easily integrate the myriad work that goes into building a customer base. According to paid acquisition expert Jonathan Martinez, here are its main components:

  • Customer data platform (CDP).
  • Mobile measurement partner (MMP).
  • Data warehouse.
  • Business intelligence tool (BI).
  • Customer engagement tools.
  • A/B testing/experimentation tools.
  • Acquisition mediums.

“Think of these tools as the parts of a car, where the customer data platform acts as the engine and the other tools are the parts hooked up to the engine.”

Demand Curve: How Customer.io’s homepage converts readers into customers: Joey Noble, Demand Curve’s community manager, is back this week with another teardown (check out last week’s teardown here). This week, Noble focused on Customer.io and provides tips for you to apply to your own website. Noble says, “A general framework for writing a good header: If a visitor reads only your header, they should still know who you are and why they should use your product.”

Marketer: PVTSEO
Recommended by: Flynax
Testimonial: “[With their help] we successfully reached the audience, got the higher positions on SERPs, which brought us revenue.”

Marketer: Eli Schwartz
Recommended by: Anonymous at a16z
Testimonial: “All of my portfolio companies had been pouring money into consultants that were not driving results and now we have altered the way we approach SEO and are driving toward revenue and product.”

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Teardown of Magic Leap One reveals highly advanced placeholder tech

The screwdriver-happy dismantlers at iFixit have torn the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset all to pieces, and the takeaway seems to be that the device is very much a work in progress — but a highly advanced one. Its interesting optical assembly, described as “surprisingly ugly,” is laid bare for all to see.

The head-mounted display and accompanying computing unit are definitely meant for developers, as we know, but the basic methods and construction Magic Leap is pursuing are clear from this initial hardware. It’s unlikely that there will be major changes to how the gadget works except to make it cheaper, lighter, and more reliable.

At the heart of Magic Leap’s tech is its AR display, which overlays 3D images over and around the real world. This is accomplished through a stack of waveguides that allow light to pass along them invisibly, then bounce it out towards your eye from the proper angle to form the image you see.

The “ugly” assembly in question – pic courtesy of iFixit.

The waveguide assembly has 6 layers: one for each color channel (red, blue, and green) twice over, arranged so that by adjusting the image you can change the perceived distance and size of the object being displayed.

There isn’t a lot out there like this, and certainly nothing intended for consumer use, so we can forgive Magic Leap for shipping something a little bit inelegant by iFixit’s standards: “The insides of the lenses are surprisingly ugly, with prominent IR LEDs, a visibly striated waveguide “display” area, and some odd glue application.”

After all, the insides of devices like the iPhone X or Galaxy Note 9 should and do reflect a more mature hardware ecosystem and many iterations of design along the same lines. This is a unique, first-of-its-kind device and as a devkit the focus is squarely on getting the functionality out there. It will almost certainly be refined in numerous ways to avoid future chiding by hardware snobs.

Magic Leap One AR headset for devs costs more than 2x the iPhone X

That’s also evident from the eye-tracking setup, which from its position at the bottom of the eye will likely perform better when you’re looking down and straight ahead rather than upwards. Future versions may include more robust tracking systems.

Another interesting piece is the motion-tracking setup. A little box hanging off the edge of the headset is speculated to be the receiver for the magnetic field-based motion controller. I remember using magnetic interference motion controllers back in 2010 — no doubt there have been improvements, but this doesn’t seem to be particularly cutting edge tech. An improved control scheme can probably be expected in future iterations, as this little setup is pretty much independent of the rest of the device’s operation.

Let’s not judge Magic Leap on this interesting public prototype — let us instead judge them on the farcically ostentatious promises and eye-popping funding of the last few years. If they haven’t burned through all that cash, there are years of development left in the creation of a practical and affordable consumer device using these principles and equipment. Many more teardowns to come!

Posted on

Teardown of Magic Leap One reveals highly advanced placeholder tech

The screwdriver-happy dismantlers at iFixit have torn the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset all to pieces, and the takeaway seems to be that the device is very much a work in progress — but a highly advanced one. Its interesting optical assembly, described as “surprisingly ugly,” is laid bare for all to see.

The head-mounted display and accompanying computing unit are definitely meant for developers, as we know, but the basic methods and construction Magic Leap is pursuing are clear from this initial hardware. It’s unlikely that there will be major changes to how the gadget works except to make it cheaper, lighter, and more reliable.

At the heart of Magic Leap’s tech is its AR display, which overlays 3D images over and around the real world. This is accomplished through a stack of waveguides that allow light to pass along them invisibly, then bounce it out towards your eye from the proper angle to form the image you see.

The “ugly” assembly in question – pic courtesy of iFixit.

The waveguide assembly has 6 layers: one for each color channel (red, blue, and green) twice over, arranged so that by adjusting the image you can change the perceived distance and size of the object being displayed.

There isn’t a lot out there like this, and certainly nothing intended for consumer use, so we can forgive Magic Leap for shipping something a little bit inelegant by iFixit’s standards: “The insides of the lenses are surprisingly ugly, with prominent IR LEDs, a visibly striated waveguide “display” area, and some odd glue application.”

After all, the insides of devices like the iPhone X or Galaxy Note 9 should and do reflect a more mature hardware ecosystem and many iterations of design along the same lines. This is a unique, first-of-its-kind device and as a devkit the focus is squarely on getting the functionality out there. It will almost certainly be refined in numerous ways to avoid future chiding by hardware snobs.

Magic Leap One AR headset for devs costs more than 2x the iPhone X

That’s also evident from the eye-tracking setup, which from its position at the bottom of the eye will likely perform better when you’re looking down and straight ahead rather than upwards. Future versions may include more robust tracking systems.

Another interesting piece is the motion-tracking setup. A little box hanging off the edge of the headset is speculated to be the receiver for the magnetic field-based motion controller. I remember using magnetic interference motion controllers back in 2010 — no doubt there have been improvements, but this doesn’t seem to be particularly cutting edge tech. An improved control scheme can probably be expected in future iterations, as this little setup is pretty much independent of the rest of the device’s operation.

Let’s not judge Magic Leap on this interesting public prototype — let us instead judge them on the farcically ostentatious promises and eye-popping funding of the last few years. If they haven’t burned through all that cash, there are years of development left in the creation of a practical and affordable consumer device using these principles and equipment. Many more teardowns to come!