Startup Decks and selling Stories – lessons from Zuora

Every startup faces the problem of explaining themselves to the investors and customers alike. Startups live at the edge of uncertainty exploring new ideas and have to thoughtfully present their case. Recently I came across the pitch deck from Zuora – Subscription SaaS company. See the deck here and a good commentary about this deck is here.

Nearly a decade back, when toiling inside Microsoft, I was the owner for subscription and commerce platform efforts. For nearly 5 years from year 2001 through 2005, the team I was part of, developed a reusable and scalable platform for enabling subscription style business within Microsoft. Microsoft was making 90+% of its revenues from software licenses and other assorted streams. Consumer subscription business was prevalent in the (maturing) MSN Internet Access Business and emergent Xbox Live business. When I picked up ownership of the organization in 2005, I aspired to diversify and grow our platform to support many aspects – subscriptions, transactions, micropayments, and enterprise subscriptions. The vision and foundation we laid down is helping Microsoft now. As Microsoft transitioned to more online services with the new breed of services like Office 365, Azure, Windows (Subscription, anyone?), there is a stronger need and use of the platform. However selling such a platform internally was a tough job 10 years back.

Zuora has done a masterful job of creating a compelling deck that can tell the story about subscriptions and how it matters. Netflix is probably the best example of a consumer subscription service that has mushroomed from a million users 10+ years back to nearly 100 million users now. Now we are definitely in the subscription economy. And businesses need better systems to run their business in this subscription economy. Hats off to Zuora team for capitalizing on this momentum. I enjoyed reading the deck and a few things I took away are:

1. Be Succinct in the pitch
2. Show the big goals
3. Enable breadth of businesses (ours was internal and Microsoft focused)
4. Go sell the vision