I. What and Why: Five Reasons Your Business Needs An Executive Summary

I.1. VCs are Busy

Venture Capitalists specialize in being very busy people. Imagine getting 500 e-mail messages per day, receiving 3 lengthy business plans per day, or monitoring five or six companies in an investment portfolio at once. Imagine having only ten or twelve years to receive your return on an investment portfolio after you've put $50+M into it. And imagine being concerned about all four of these intense things at once. The scenario is typical for any Silicon Valley VC investor and illustrates why VCs are driven to assess most business opportunities within 30 seconds of their being described. An Executive Summary of two to three pages fits the attention span the venture industry allows potential opportunities.

Surely, wider cultural dynamics are also a reason why a business can receive assessment in seconds rather than with due consideration. Business operates at a pace unlike the pace reading a novel takes. Business operates at a market pace. An efficient market is brisk and our culture invests a lot in having it that way. Liquidity, the rate at which transactions occur, or the ease at which one can enter and exit a market, is enhanced in good markets. Market pacing has consequences for the dynamics of new business creation. Since it is at the forefront of new business creation, venture funding is especially shaped by market pace, more so than other business funding mechanisms.

Before you decide that it's just not fair, remember how quickly each of us can take in an advertisement and understand whether we want the advertised product or not. Businesses rise and fall with such decisions and the decisions have always been speedy. John Doerr, the preeminent Silicon Valley VC, agonizes that we live in "a time famine" created by technological innovation. Pity the VC, for he/she has assessed much of life as being overtaken by market pace and Moore's Law!

I.2. Industry Expected Tool For Introduction

Silicon Valley's venture community has its expectations and a well crafted Executive Summary is among them. Suppose you were to meet a new person at a business lunch. You'll agree that a normal enough expectation would entail exchanging a greeting, getting seated, and looking over the menu. Without an appropriate greeting, the person you meet may find you disorienting. A greeting is one of many social devices which exist to facilitate and cohere expectations of participants in societal activities. An Executive Summary of two to three pages has become an operative social device in the Valley for the introduction, presentation, and assessment of a business potential. Without this extremely concise document, one is hardly prepared to explain a business. But to create a new business, one must anticipate explaining it with concision very many times, to investors, partners, employees, and customers.

I.3. Merging Excellence Together in Both Technology and Business

The Valley seeks to advance technological innovation. It will consider business built around technological advance more seriously than business which offers no such advance. The magic of dramatic growth has been associated over and over again with new technology. An Executive Summary often needs to unite a technological and business vision. This provides the challenge of explicating both parts of an innovative business and requires a broad mastery of differing types of concepts. A person such as Dr. N. Vania, whose knowledge spans rigorous subjects of physics, probability, logic, to an intimate understanding of market and moral psychology, is equipped to understand, elucidate, and integrate the two different types of vision, technological and business, that the most promising business opportunities provide.

I.4. Crystallization of Your Plan or Concept

A brilliant Executive Summary represents a crystallization of your business plan or concept. It is a short document of two or three pages. But this shortness does not indicate that anything is left unsaid about your business. Don't mistake its concise nature for a lack of content. Rather, its very concision implicitly, when not explicitly, says everything about your business! Just as a two page resume may implicitly reference the entire, detailed history of a powerful career, an Executive Summary has to "say it all".

The VC George Zachary emphasizes this point when he says that with a good Executive Summary in hand, he can write a business's business plan from that summary. An excellent Executive summary serves as an outline of a business plan and as a consolidation of a business's business model. While businesses must develop their business plans and then concisely present themselves with an Executive Summary, a summary can also serve those who are in the process of developing their business plan and business model. Keep in mind that the best people for offering coherent conceptualization and synthesizing of vast, disparate, information are those trained in a discipline such as Analytic Philosophy. Dr. N. Vania's training in the field of analytic philosophy was itself unusually broad, including the philosophy of science and normative philosophy.

I.5. Future Touchstone

An Executive Summary is a wonderful tool which the executive management of a business can rely upon as a touchstone of its ongoing, harried efforts. To review the Executive Summary every four months and check the development of the business against it would not be a bad idea. If the vision of the business has shifted, a re-conceptualization or adjustment is due.

II. The Problem: Executive Summaries Often Are of Poor Quality

II.1.Inside Industry Knowledge: Knowing What's Expected and What Works

Most VCs expect someone approaching their firm for funding to address key topics in an Executive Summary in an orderly way. Each topic may have special subtleties that may not be apparent to someone who is not in the business of assessing hundreds of summaries. For example, while it’s evident that a management team is a topic for discussion, is it so evident how a team might be listed? Will its internal relations be clear and not raise concerns? Apparently, this simple aspect is not evident and VCs mention their capacity to assess this often overlooked matter. And, just how long and in what depth should one treat a topic? Venture-aware people do know whether three paragraphs or three sentences are appropriate.

II.2.Excellence in Overall Conceptualization

A entrepreneur is a visionary, a history-making agent. A gifted leader has a dream a couple of decades ahead of the times and a will to build towards that dream now. Entrepreneurship requires an exceeding level of conceptual capacity brought to bear in business action and daily decisiveness. An Executive Summary should have the assurance of the energizing vision and purpose for an endeavor that will consume great numbers of people over lifetimes. The conceptual level for the document detailing the basic scheme of a new business is high. An entrepreneur is aided when the conceptual depth and world changing aspects of a project are brought forward in an Executive Summary. Those who are gifted in elucidating grand conceptual designs, such as philosophers, are real masters in giving substance to nascent conceptions.

II.3.Technology and Business Together

Different temperaments, different objectives, different compelling motivations, different dress and style - the world of technology and business can be very far apart. Finding those who travel with ease among these differing spheres is not always easy. It takes a special touch to enhance and integrate both parts of the start-up equation.

II.4.The Overwhelmed Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur can have so much in his or her hands, that it is easy to not mentally collect together the cohesive picture that lies behind all of the flurry. A moment’s quiet and reflection could serve well, but such is not granted the entrepreneur! Rattling off those three pages to explain the whole scheme of an utterly bold initiative means losing more hours that are needed to grasp a historically high access to capital!

II.5.The Writing Thing

A person of action, an entrepreneur, is not also a skilled writer. Good writing takes patience which may frustrate an entrepreneur. As one who has editorially assessed word-by-word detail of people’s writing, Dr. N. Vania realizes that intriguing, far-reaching ideas do not always goes hand in hand with a polished or eloquent statement of bright ideas.

II.6. Venture Introduction, It Is Who You Know

Have you picked your favorite VCs? What are their tendencies and leanings? Venture-aware people such as Dr. N. Vania know that understanding each VC is an important part of the venture funding equation.

III. The Solution: Excellent Executive Summaries

III.1. Arshiya Ventures: A Venture Knowledgeable Source

Arshiya Ventures is an initiative of its Founder, Dr. N. Vania, to provide assistance to venture-oriented start-ups. She consults to develop Executive Summaries, to orient a start-up in its process of seeking funding, to introduce start-ups to venture participants, and to develop a start-up's business strategy. She leads start-ups to networks of outstanding consultants, business service providers, and venture events which can improve their chances in the funding search.

III.2. An Overall Conceptualizer

III.3. The Hard Sciences, The Soft Sciences

Dr. N. Vania is impassioned by both.

III.4. Able to Draw Out, Check, Enhance Your Vision

Skilled at and excited to draw out your vision and assist in its articulation.

III.5. An Exacting Standard for Prose

Like careful footnotes.

III.6. Friends in the Right Places

She knows her way around Silicon Valley.