Thinking about investment for your VR Startup

http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo

VanVR: The Business of VRThinking about Investment for your VR StartupQ4 2015

http://ishuman.co

Boris Mann, @bmann HUMAN • http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo

Boris Mann• COO, HUMAN — http://ishuman.co

• Managing Partner, Full Stack — http://fullstack.ca

• Founding Director, Open Angel — http://openangel.ca

• Over 10 years of community building in Vancouver


Venture Businesses

• Are you building a venture business?

• All businesses are not a candidate for venture investment

• Big idea, big market, big growth, big outcomes

• For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll be talking about venture businesses


Big Hairy Audacious Goal• You need a BHAG

• Vision and purpose that form core passion & “true north” for the company & team

• You also need an execution plan:• What can you build and sell today? • Prove you can ship • Charge money to prove early demand OR show end user traction OR find investors

who believe in your big vision


Early Stage Funding

• Pre Seed: < $500K• Working code & customers

• Seed: > $500K to $1.x M• Paying customers or significant traction

• Series A: $1M++• At least one known, repeatable sales channel / distribution model

Day job F&F

$30K prototype Cofounder

Accelerators Futurpreneur Consulting


VR Landscape - 234 companies, $13B

• Application / Content

• Tools / Platform• VR Content Studio • Reality Capture • VR Content Distribution Platform

• Infrastructure• HMD • User Input


Market Segmentation

• Types of VR Experiences• Film • Gaming • Practical

• Types of Headsets• Powered Headsets • PhoneVR


What’s your business model?• Film / Gaming Studio

• Hits driven • Large teams • Need to continually sell units

• Need “web” marketing & advertising skills • Any plans for recurring revenue?

• Hardware• It’s hard, and the giants are in already

• B2B / SaaS• Find early customers, solve their pain • Charge money right away • Recurring revenue

• B2D• Dev tools, SDKs, analytics, etc.

• B2C• Works at scale • Really hard, lots of $$$ to get to scale


11 Pitch Types (Jason Shen)• #1 Traction

• #2 X for Y

• #3 Personal Story

• #4 Pivot / Offshoot

• #5 Evolution Next

• #6 Painting the Future

• #7 Service at Scale

• #8 Wouldn’t it be cool if

• #9 Insane Tech

• #10 The Dream Team

• #11 Consumerification of Enterprise


Prayer is not a strategy

• I’m praying that I can sell units in the future

• How do you de-risk?

• How do you stay alive as the wave crests?


The Consulting Trap

• We’re going to do consulting while working on our product on the side

• Wow, we’re busy and need to hire people to work on these projects!• (too busy to work on product)

• Wow, we have all of these people and need to find more consulting work to pay them

• (too busy to work on product)


The Consulting Upside

• Learn using other peoples’ money

• Involvement in a number of different areas

• Invest in internal tooling, expertise

• Feel the pain yourself, discover then build

–Mark MacLeod, @StartupCFO

The best investors don’t want to just fund revenue growth, they want to create the future.

When you look back at the biggest startup successes, they are all based on a simple, clear

insight about the future of a market.

http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo

THANK YOUEmail: [email protected]: @bmann / @isHumanCo

http://ishuman.co

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References

• VR Landscape, Venture Beat• http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/12/the-landscape-of-vr-is-complicated-with-234-

companies-valued-at-13b/

• 11 Startup Pitch Archetypes, Jason Shen• http://www.jasonshen.com/2012/eleven-compelling-startup-pitch-archetypes-with-

examples-from-yc-companies/

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/12/the-landscape-of-vr-is-complicated-with-234-companies-valued-at-13b/

http://www.jasonshen.com/2012/eleven-compelling-startup-pitch-archetypes-with-examples-from-yc-companies/