Highlights:
- Before booking a face-to-face meeting, VC Marc Cohen wanted to hear founders describe their company and vision in their own words.
- Rather than book multiple pitch meetings, Marc turned to asynchronous videos using Willo.
- Built for high-volume recruiting, Willo’s share features and integrations made it perfect for the use case of VCs reviewing pitches before booking a meeting.
With the approach of a Silicon Valley VC but the partnership mentality of a family office, Marc Cohen, founder and sole partner at unbundled vc, works to back amazing founders and help them grow their businesses. If all goes well, he generates wealth for his family with his thesis of “investing incredibly.”
He’s used to the deluge of pitches a VC is bound to receive and was first introduced to the idea of video pitches in his previous role at 1818 Venture Capital.
But with unbundled, he had a unique need: being on the small island of Guernsey, he isn’t likely to have founders stopping by his office. Yet he didn’t want to simply sit on Zoom calls all day. He turned to Willo to make structured, asynchronous video pitches his go-to solution for learning about a founder before booking a follow-up meeting.
The problem: wanting to hear founders in their own words
For Marc’s investment thesis to work, he needs to know the business inside and out before putting money into it. While he conducts due diligence and his own self-assessment later in the process, he’s found the best way to learn about a business is much simpler: listen to the founder’s own words.
“The best founders are able to describe their business compellingly and concisely,” said Marc.
Listening to founders speak about their own business serves two functions for Marc
- He learns about the business.
- He learns if the founders know enough about their own business to explain succinctly.
Both are essential when choosing which founders and companies to back.
But he simply doesn’t have enough time in the day (nor the desire) to sit on Zoom calls all day. And living on the small island of Guernsey off the UK coast, it’s not likely he’ll be at a tech networking event and hear dozens of pitches live in one evening.
He needed a better solution. He’d leveraged video pitches in his past role at 1818 Venture Capital and wondered whether they would help him this time around, too. But Marc wanted a solution that would contain the whole process. It wasn’t about getting people to film themselves and send it via a Google Drive or WeTransfer link—he needed a comprehensive platform to keep all the information centralized, easily accessible, and secure.
Ultimately, he decided to use Willo as his provider of choice to receive video pitches at scale.
The solution: asynchronous video pitches with Willo
Implementation was simple for Marc. Despite the fact that Willo was originally built for hiring and HR, he didn’t have to make any customizations or configurations to the platform—it worked out of the box for receiving VC pitches at scale.
In particular, two Willo features made the platform perfect for him:
- Sharing functionality: Willo enables secure sharing of specific videos and other information, making it easy for Marc to share with other stakeholders securely.
- Zapier integration: Zapier’s no-code solution made it easy for Marc to connect Willo with the rest of his investment tech stack.
After receiving multiple video pitches and making investments based on them in the past, Marc noticed a powerful trend: people who did well in a video pitch tended to build stronger businesses. And that meant greater returns for Marc and his fund.
“We found there was a very strong correlation between performance in the video pitches and the businesses we invested in,” said Marc.
What’s next: scaling with async video
Async video intros using Willo are now the first step for every founder who wants to meet with Marc. It’s not always a pitch, sometimes it’s just an introductory video explaining what someone does and who they are. And it’s essential for Marc’s ability to get to know founders.
If the video intro goes well, Marc will book a meeting. But this process enables him to view a lot more pitches, handle more deal flow, and filter for quality before committing his time to a live meeting.
“It is important to me to hear about the business in the founder's own words before I agree to meet them,” said Marc.
