From Business Insider:
These guys built a $273 million startup from discarded computers and an almost secret source of seed money. Raised millions with demo of product and NO pitch deck.
“We weren’t fund raising,” Lad said but he agreed to a meeting at the VC’s offices. “We told them, ‘Look, we’re focusing on customers so we can’t really build [pitch deck] slides at this point.'”
Instead, the founders showed the VCs a demo of the product. And they walked with a $5.5 million Series A.
More evidence to back up my previous post Why a prototype is worth 1,000 pitch decks. But in their case they demo’d their actual product and had customers and revenue. Even better!
Though if you read this full article, which I highly recommend, you’ll see that these two Phds. managed to get a 7 figure NSF grant to fund their early customer and product development work.
Hats of to CEO Mohit Lad and CTO Ricardo Oliveira, the founders of ThousandEyes.
