How to present yourself to investors:

the training on successful project presentation took place at KAU

A training titled “Acquaintance and Summary: Parts of a Business Plan. How to present yourself and your project to attract investment” took place on July 1, 2020, at the Innovation Center of Kyiv Academic University (KAU). It was the second training of the management technology specialist Dmytro Kovalyov for KAU employees.

During the training, the speaker considered two technologies, which by about 75% determine the investor's decision to "give money" such as: scenario of a first live communication with an investor for 0.5 minutes and 1-page text summary. Dmytro Kovalyov considered three main issues of the project presentation to investors:

● Business-plan and how it works;

● Acquaintance: how to present oneself to investors;

● Summary: how to present the project to investors.

The participants of the training also discussed a practical case from business and defined why "Laboratory sample", "Prototype" and "Testing of the existing business" are necessary during the presentation to investors.

The speaker noted that for the commercialization of innovations, key funding comes from Private Equity investment funds. Nowadays, one investor - a partner in the Private Equity fund - considers 200-300 applications a day. With such a number of incoming applications, it is impossible to work with business plans written in “UNIDO format”, where only the list of factors to be reflected in the business plan takes 248 pages. The Private Equity industry has developed its own informal business plan format, which is convenient for a modern investor in an innovative economy to work with. During the training, Dmytro Kovalyov considered two parts of four of such a business plan: Acquaintance - scenario of a first live communication with an investor for 0.5 minutes and Business Plan Summary - 1-page text document.

In conclusion, Dmytro Kovalyov proposed to focus on the "Business Plan Summary" format when describing scientific development, because the investor often makes a decision “to give money”, having considered only the “Summary”; expecting that he will be later provided with all the other information for making a formal decision to invest.