Investment Process
The process starts with your assessment of whether your company is a good candidate for Moksh: Alpha Angels given the specified criteria. In addition to the above, we also generally prefer companies that have defined problem-solutions, defensible technology, disruptive solutions, well defined product-market plans, and strong teams that have the demonstrated ability to execute.
If you meet our criteria, we encourage you to submit a plan for our investment consideration. This is accomplished by submitting a well written executive summary or proposal online or email. We evaluate every submission and endeavour to respond to every submission.
There are no charges to submit materials to Moksh: Alpha Angels. As is the case with most Angel Groups and Venture Capital Firms, we do not accept confidential information and do not sign nondisclosure agreements.
Preparation of Investor Materials
There are two key documents that you will need for consideration by Moksh: Alpha Angels — the Executive Summary and PowerPoint Presentation. You are well served by investing time in both of these documents. These two documents will be your workhorse documents for virtually any investor. They are usually very challenging to develop in a compelling, clear, and concise manner.
The following guidelines should be helpful to you in the preparation of these documents and embody best practices that we have come to appreciate in our own experiences as entrepreneurs and investors.
Executive Summary
You should think of the Executive Summary as just that — an executive summary of your business plan. It should have all the elements of a good business plan, however, just summarized. The Executive Summary should follow the outline of your investor PowerPoint presentation but in narrative form and with appropriate charts and tables.
In reality, there are two kinds of executive summaries in use today. The "One-Pager" and the several page document. The One-Pager is usually in template form and has a summary of all the key information. These are somewhat useful for a cursory assessment. However, the several page document is much more effective for discussing the opportunity and plan. You should prepare both documents because you will be asked for both by various investors.
Investor Presentation
There are a number of excellent resources on preparing presentations for prospective investors. A well prepared presentation and great delivery are critical to your financing success. You should plan on no more than 20 slides for your first presentation. You should plan on a 20 min - 30 min delivery with the balance of your meeting for Q&A. Your ability to manage the meeting time is an indicator or your management capability. These guidelines will serve you well for a meeting with virtually any angel group or venture capital firm.
While the specifics of your presentation will differ with the nature of your business, the following guidelines will address what virtually all early stage investors which to assess. Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of building what is primarily a product presentation. You should force yourself to keep the product discussion to just a couple of slides. This presentation needs to be focused on the building of a company — of which the product is a foundational element. This is often a difficult mental transition for entrepreneurs to make — see the company building opportunity, not the product! You can't go wrong with this outline:
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Company Background
One or two page summary that profiles the company, product, sales & marketing, market opportunity, and financing overview. The object is to provide a snapshot of the company and to "tell them what you are going to tell them".
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Vision/Mission or Elevator Pitch
This should be a very simple several sentence statement of why the company has been formed and how its going to change the world.
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Problem/Solution Scenario
All products start with the definition of problem; a pain point. A well articulated problem and a well articulated solution will set the stage for the rest of your presentation.
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Market Opportunity
All good company-building opportunities start with an attractive market opportunity — in market size and growth. The pain you articulated earlier should translate into a market opportunity. Quoting analyst market numbers that are not particularly focused will not convince an investor that you understand the market opportunity. You should challenge yourself to try and build a bottoms-up analysis, with assumptions, that builds an attractive market opportunity. Other issues you may wish to address are customer switching costs, willingness of customers to buy from startups, power of incumbents, etc. Competition can be addressed at this point but is more meaningful after a product context has been established.
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Product/Technology Description
This is the opportunity to talk about the product. Talk about what's disruptive and innovative. Define the value propositions. This section does not need to be half of the presentation. Plan on no more than just a few slides.
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Competition
Direct and indirect. Current, future, & framework for analysis.
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Current & Sustainable Competitive Advantage
IP is helpful, but usually not sufficient. Strong know-how, network effects, high switching costs, long term contracts, learning curve benefits, and capturing key distribution channels can all be used to build powerful competitive advantage and entry barriers for others. First mover advantage in itself is usually not sufficient unless it can be used to accomplish some of the above mentioned entry barriers.
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Business Model
Manner in which you develop repeatable & profitable business. Discuss capital efficiency. Discussion of supporting models — operating, product development, and sales and marketing will demonstrate your command of the business and the business model.
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Go-to-Market Strategy
This slide(s) should be dedicated to how you plan to cross the chasm, obtain your first reference customer(s), first 500K users, etc. Discuss target market strategy, sales & distribution, partnering, pricing, & promotion.
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Customer Traction/Pipeline
Show your pipeline and that you have an organized process for developing customers and know how to advance them through a sales process.
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Team & Human Resources
Brief Bio's; companies, specific positions, key accomplishments, and education.
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Execution Timeline
Bring realism and believability to your plan. Discuss risk factors. Human resources. Spend rates. Key milestones, etc. How far will the money you are raising last? What reserve will you have if key milestones slip? Have you built adequate time margin into your next round financing? Does the financing timeline interleave with your key milestones?
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Five-year Product Market/Technology Roadmap
What does the future look like? Do you have follow-on markets. How big? Competitors? Technology and product development requirements? Risk factors? Etc.
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Five-year Pro-forma
Highlight the key metrics. While the Pro-forma will often get cursory review in an early stage company, it still makes certain statements about your command of the business, your vision, the size company that may be built, your expectation on cash breakeven, capital required to reach breakeven, etc.
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Financing Requirements & Financing Scenario
Provide a timeline of your expected financing rounds, and how large you expect those rounds will need to be.
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Investment Thesis
Make the potential investors job easy and summarize why we should invest. How would you summarize the deal and compelling reason to invest if you had to do it in one foil?
Backup Information
Your backup information should include evidence of whatever key facts you are claiming. If you claim you can definitely design something for $1M in 12 months, you might support it with schedules, engineering analysis, comparison to similar efforts and 3rd party expert opinions. If you claim there is a $100M unserved market opportunity, you might support it with market data and verifiable customer testimonials.
Your backup material should also include an operating plan, including detailed milestones and monthly financials for the period supported by the funding you are requesting, plus key milestones and quarterly financials to the exit point. The financials should generally include an income statement, balance sheet and funds flow statement.
Your backup info should also include resumes for all key team members.
High quality backup material will allow your deal to move ahead much more quickly.
Pre-Screening
If your Executive Summary is of interest, we will schedule a pre-screen meeting. Deals are evaluated on multiple criteria, including quality of management, market opportunity, product concept, competition, go-to-market plan, financial projections, the investment's potential returns and whether the deal fits the investment our objectives.
The meeting generally will include your presentation of your PowerPoint pitch, as well as a Question & Answer period. Depending on the nature of the deal, additional pre-screening meetings may be required.
Presentation to Moksh: Alpha Angels
Plan on a 20 minute presentation and a 15 minute of Question & Answer period.
Followup
In the days following the meeting, Moksh: Alpha Angels decide whether the deal is of interest and whether they wish to participate in due diligence for the purpose of an individual investment. You will hear back from us within 5 days of your presentation. If the deal attracts interest, we will form a due diligence plan to work directly with your company to address any outstanding concerns and to negotiate the investment.
If a project meets the initial selection criteria, Moksh: Alpha Angels undertakes detailed due diligence to confirm that all of the investment criteria are met. Upon satisfying all further screening requirements and successful Terms Sheet negotiations, successful projects as part of the value adding process will benefit from our experiences in the following areas in which we would play an active role:
Product research, design and development
Product Launch and Company branding
Customer Care - including clinical applications
Clinical trials - installation and training
Team management and team building
Designing and implementing solid regulated quality systems
Developing solid business plans and value propositions
Developing and planning execution of value creation strategies
Negotiating deal agreements
Ensuring appropriate intellectual property protection strategies are in place
Ensuring R&D milestones link to budget and Key Performance Indicators
Developing capital raising strategies
Ensuring proper corporate systems are in place
Liasing with and securing broker support
