We have some news upcoming about Standard Treasury. But before that...
Almost every week, I get thank you notes for publishing our YC application. It is one of my most viewed blog posts ever. Those notes remind me over the large, supportive community of entrepreneurs. It's been one of the more heartwarming lessons about running an early stage company: there is a supportive conspiracy between all founders against the world (and, well, investors in particular).
That support — of lessons learned, or how to improve your pitch, or tidbits on investor's quirks, or how to manage psychology, or how to fail — is often private but is sometimes public. Whether its about a second seed round, laying off a large part of the team, or selling your company, many founders are quite generous about passing their learnings forward, good or bad.
One thing I found very useful while fundraising was to look at published fundraising decks, both successful and unsuccessful (Mixpanel, Dwolla, and LinkedIn come to mind on the successful side). Since almost all of the "ideas" from our deck have published elsewhere, either on our website or in the Standard Treasury as Bank post, we decided to publish our Series A deck. It's imperfect (slide 7 is inaccurate, we got asked a thousand times to explain slide 14 (it's in '000s), the appendixes tend to be too long, we did not focus enough on the already built product), but Dan and I think it might be instructive for others.
In time, we'll be able to talk more about this process and the things that did and didn't work. Lots of lessons learned. To start though, here is the deck.