# demo-day-and-q-a

**Mode skill.** Default-enabled on the Stage specialist.

## When to use

Use after the deck is drafted, before the founder steps on stage or into the partner room. Covers demo-day rehearsal (2–5 min slots), Series A partner-meeting rehearsal (12 min pitch + 30+ min Q&A), and post-pitch debriefs. Also use to diagnose a pitch that "didn't land" — the failure is almost always Q&A.

A pitch is delivered live, not read.

## The two formats

**Demo day (2–5 min).** Deck compressed to 5–7 slides. No Q&A; the room hears 30 pitches. Job: be the company three investors write down. The first 20 seconds carry 60% of the recall.

**Partner meeting (12 min + 30+ min Q&A).** Full deck. Target: every question on the twenty-question list answered in one breath, one specific number.

## The twenty questions

Investors ask variations of the same twenty. The founder who has rehearsed them sounds prepared.

1. Why now — what changed?
2. Why you — what earned advantage?
3. Customer in one sentence?
4. What did they do before your product?
5. How did the first ten customers find you?
6. Retention or churn at the cohort level?
7. CAC and trend?
8. Gross margin and what drives it?
9. Pricing logic — seat, usage, outcome?
10. Three closest competitors and how you win each?
11. Moat in 18 months when the feature is copied?
12. What does the round buy in milestones?
13. Next round's target and trigger?
14. Monthly burn and runway?
15. Biggest risk not on the slides?
16. Last failed experiment and lesson?
17. Who else is in the round and at what terms?
18. Who would you hire first?
19. What has to be true in 12 months to be a fund-returner?
20. One question we did not ask that we should have?

## Procedure

1. **Time the deck cold.** Read every slide aloud at presentation pace. The slide where you go over is the one to cut.
2. **Compress for demo-day under 6 minutes.** Drop slides four and eight (old way fails, market build) — those move to Q&A.
3. **Rehearse the opening 20 seconds verbatim.** The opener is the shift sentence delivered without a slide. Memorize word for word.
4. **Run the twenty questions in random order.** Shuffle — investors do not ask in order. Each answer in one breath, one specific number. Mark the slow ones.
5. **Coach recovery moves.** When the founder doesn't know: *"Directionally around X — I'll send the exact figure tonight."* Never bluff. The room checks.
6. **Stage the silence.** After each answer, the founder stops. Filling silence dilutes the answer.
7. **Debrief.** Which question made you fumble, which energized you? Fumbles are deck gaps; energy is the slide to lead from next time.
8. **Hand investor-update follow-up to Copy.** You handle the live pitch; Copy writes the email.

## Decision rules

- **Open with the shift, not the company name.** "Acme is a..." dies. "In 2025, [shift]..." earns the second sentence.
- **One specific number per answer.** Investors test recall by asking the same question twice in different framings. The number stays constant.
- **Cut, don't compress.** A six-minute deck squeezed to four minutes is four minutes nobody can read. Drop slides; do not shrink type.
- **Q&A is part of the pitch, not after it.** Founders who treat Q&A as the most informative slide win. The questions tell you where the deck failed.
- **The last question is always "what did we not ask?"** Prepare an answer. It is the founder's last chance to plant the risk the deck did not have room for.

## Anti-patterns

- Reading the slide aloud. The room is reading already.
- "Great question." Filler that signals stall. Cut it.
- Inventing a number under pressure. A fabricated CAC kills the round.
- Apologising for the deck ("sorry, this slide is messy"). The room takes the cue.
- Closing on "any questions?" Close on the ask plus the next step ("$2M closing, $1.4M committed; happy to send the data room").

## Before / after

**Brief:** "Founder rehearsing a 3-minute demo-day pitch."

**Before** (name first, no shift, no stakes):
> *"Hi, I'm Jordan. Acme is a customer-support tool for small ecommerce stores. We help them reply faster."*

**After** (shift first, name at the end, stakes by sentence two):
> *"Review platforms now score stores on response time. Google's shopping rank pulls from those scores. Stores replying under an hour are winning; stores triaging once a day are losing. Acme replies for them in eight minutes, in their voice. I'm Jordan."*

The "before" lasts 12 seconds and the room moves on. The "after" lasts 18 seconds and three investors are writing.
