> However, after trying to actually pitch an idea in person, I learned that I wasn't nearly as prepared as I thought I was.

After several hundred e-mail messages sent, I never pitched a VC. But I've done lots of successful pitches elsewhere, academics, technical work, in business. As an undergrad math major, I got Kelley, 'General Topology', read it, and gave lectures to a prof -- so, I had practice lecturing. I've done lots of college and grad school teaching. E.g., in a software house, I corrected some engineers of our customer, found what they really needed in power spectral estimation, pitched it, and converted the competitive bid situation to sole source. E.g., I passed my oral dissertation defense for my Ph.D. For a Ph.D. qualifying exam, I took an oral and got a High Pass. Once I gave a talk in AI and got a big room of people all excited and, then, invited to give more pitches. I presented an AI paper at a Stanford AAAI IAAI conference -- seemed to go well enough.

So, my presentation abilities should be good enough for VCs.

> As for the clarification on your idea, this audience (and investors) would expect to see much more than that.

Here I was just being really short, just to say that it's not supposed to be a trivial project, just for here. Actually, I rarely mentioned all that arithmetic and, instead, kept things qualitative. All the e-mail messages and foil decks I sent had more on the nature of the project.

In part I omitted that stuff here because I'm just commenting on the subject of contacting VCs and not trying to pitch any VC readers of HN. I'm not including a sample VC pitch here. I'm not trying to use HN to pitch VCs.

As I mentioned, some of the advice I got was to keep the number of foils to a few and have only a few words per foil and use the pitch deck just as a way to get past the VC's first filter and have them ask for more. Okay, I did that, lots of times. Didn't work at all well.

Other times I wrote much more, as foils, just as e-mail, as both, etc. No difference.

> After reading what you wrote, all I can tell is that it's related to online advertising, but I'm not clear on what specific problem you're addressing, how your product will make money, or how your product will compete and gain marketshare in a crowded market of entrenched (and capital-rich) competitors.

Right. In what I sent the VCs, I always covered much of what you mentioned. Some of what you mentioned seemed too difficult -- e.g., competition -- to cover at all well, without raising more questions than I was answering, so I left it for later. Their wasn't any "later".

Again, my post here wasn't like any of my pitch decks or e-mail descriptions. I told the VCs from more, say, in 6-8 foils, to a lot more -- made no difference.

> I say this with the intention of being helpful, not to tear you down. And I'm just a guy who reads HN, not an insider of anything.

Yes. Thanks. And here I'm just trying to get back to some reality on how VCs react to e-mail, foil decks, and introductions.

In particular I suggest that entrepreneurs basically ignore all the advice on how to contact VCs and especially ignore all the stuff on VC Web sites and, instead, look for what the heck the VCs really want. For what they really want, I gave my best guess.

Or more simply, I don't think that the VCs give even a weak little hollow hoot about anything but, to boil it down to one word, traction, significant and growing rapidly. For the rest -- founder's background, team, technology, code architecture, code, intellectual property, scalability, barriers against competitors -- they don't care. Size of the market? If it's small, then the VCs will have M&A exit in mind. If large, IPO exit dreams in mind. For first funding, they don't care.

Net, I wasted a LOT of time trying the advice on how to contact VCs, the best ideas I could think of, tried darned near everything -- just a total waste of time. Hence, here I'm suggesting that other entrepreneurs don't do that.