Mission-First Pitch Succeeds

A story about how Pat Brown secured venture funding for Impossible Foods with an unconventional pitch deck.

"I had never raised money before, but fortunately I lived on the Stanford campus which was within short biking distance of half the venture capital in the world. I could just bike over to Khosla Ventures in less than 10 minutes.

I gave my pitch and it was a completely amateurish pitch deck. My first slide was about mission, and the next 9 slides were about the mission and why it was so important. It wasn't until the 10th slide that I said anything about how this could function as a business. But fortunately, that 10th slide had $1 trillion on it - that was the magical moment when they reached for their checkbooks.

When I launched the company, I knew for sure this was going to succeed. I believed it was totally doable and I was completely determined. I wasn't going to let this fall short of complete success. I didn't know how we were going to do it, I just knew it was doable. It was evident from my deck that I really didn't know how I was going to do it, and I also didn't know how to run a business, as was obvious to the investors once they saw how bad a job I did of pitching to them."