Presented at the VanVR "Business of VR" meetup in Vancouver, BC

1. http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo
VanVR: The Business of VR
Thinking about
Investment for your VR
Startup
Q4 2015

2. 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

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

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

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

6. Boris Mann, @bmann HUMAN • http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo
VR Landscape - 234 companies, $13B
• Application / Content
• Tools / Platform
• VR Content Studio
• Reality Capture
• VR Content Distribution Platform
• Infrastructure
• HMD
• User Input

7. Boris Mann, @bmann HUMAN • http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo
Market Segmentation
• Types of VR Experiences
• Film
• Gaming
• Practical
• Types of Headsets
• Powered Headsets
• PhoneVR

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

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

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

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

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

13. –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.

14. http://ishuman.co • @IsHumanCo
THANK YOU
Email: boris@ishuman.co
Twitter: @bmann / @isHumanCo

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