I simply wanted to highlight this again as many other VC's already have and really do want to get entrepreneurs to re-think their pitch. Some points from Marc which are so god-awfully true:
Two additional points on competition risk that founders routinely screw up in VC pitches:
Never, ever say that you have no competitors. That signals naivete. Great markets draw competitors, and so if you really have no competition, you must not be in a great market. Even if you really believe you have no competitors, create a competitive landscape slide with adjacent companies in related market segments and be ready to talk crisply about how you are like and unlike those adjacent companies.
My favorite response to this actually is "if you have no competitors, there is no market!"
And never, ever say your market projections indicate you're going to be hugely successful if you get only 2% of your (extremely large) market. That also signals naivete. If you're going after 2% of a large market, that means the presumably larger companies that are going to take the other 98% are going to kill you. You have to have a theory for how you're going to get a significantly higher market share than 2%. (I pick 2% because that's the cliche, but if you're a VC, you've probably heard someone use it.)
If you plan on ever raising money from VC's, I highly recommend you read this series of posts over on Marc's site. I simply am re-posting these two points above as I continue to hear these things over and over again. If some marketing professor told you to pitch like this, you should go back to that university and request your money back! When I was at SAP I used to shake my head in bewilderment as start-ups in SAP's ecosystem would explain to me that having 2 or 3% of the same market that SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. were in would be sufficient for them. No one ever mentioned how they were going to keep from getting hit by the bus (driven by Henning, Larry, or Steve) trying to kill them. (OK, Henning's a good guy and he'd someone else to do his dirty work!)
