Notching a billion-dollar valuation as a private tech company is hard, exiting at one is even harder. For nearly all the most valuable investor-backed companies in tech, nailing a pitch to early potential investors was a step on the journey. As Bill Gurley of Benchmark recently noted in his defense of the pitch deck:
“Investors are not solely evaluating your company’s story. They are also evaluating your ability to convey that story.”
So we compiled the early pitch decks of five private or exited companies valued in the billions of dollars. These include the decks of pre-revenue LinkedIn and a then-smallish-site named Buzzfeed, when it was registering just 2.5M monthly page views. Would you have invested in the vision they were pitching?
AirBnB, current valuation: $25.5B
In its early pitch, AirBnB named Coachsurfing, Hostels.com, Hotels.com, and Craigslist as competitors. Today, its $25.5B private market valuation is greater than the public market capitalizations of Marriott, Starwood, Expedia, Wyndham, and HomeAway.
AppNexus, current valuation: $1.2B
First Round Capital shared this seed deck used by AppNexus, then a platform that would let companies run applications in the cloud. Seven months after its A round, it pivoted to focus entirely on ad tech.
Buzzfeed, current valuation: $1.5B
Buzzfeed’s 2008 pitch deck cited 2.5M page views per month. Today, the website claims over 200M million monthly uniques as NBC Universal poured a $200M investment that valued Buzzfeed at $1.5B.
LinkedIn, IPO in 2011
Greylock Partners dug up LinkedIn’s Series B pitch deck from August 2004. The deck billed LinkedIn as “professional people search 2.0.” LinkedIn had yet to generate a dime of revenue — but the deck highlights revenue as a high priority and identifies clear streams to achieve it. Today, LinkedIn’s market cap is over $28B.
YouTube, acquired for $1.6B in 2006
In YouTube’s initial pitch deck (page 30 in the document below), the online video platform counted under 10,000 users and 100,000 video views per day but had rapid growth. More recently, YouTube was seeing 7 billon video views per day and over 1 billion users. The deck, which includes Sequoia Capital’s investment memo by partner Roelof Botha, was dug up by Thrive Capital’s Miles Grimshaw.
Axel Springer, Insider Inc.'s parent company, is an investor in Airbnb.
