I would not treat this story as a sign of how to convince VCs. It is almost never the case that VCs say yes because of one magically convincing point you make.
Fred is not a purely functional VC (by which I mean not that he's dysfunctional, but that he's stateful). This slide was accompanied by lots of other evidence, including multiple prior meetings. The slide was just the final increment that pushed him over into yes. It is very unlikely that if a random person had walked up to him and shown him the same slide, Fred would have been convinced.
What convinces VCs is, in order, (a) growth, (b) the founders' personal characteristics, (c) what you say to them. If you seem like an effective person and you have graphs that go up steeply, your pitch could be a bunch of platitudes and they'd still be eager to invest. (As would we, to be honest.) Whereas if you seem like an ineffective person and have no traction, you could have the best story in the world, and they will all say no. (Here we're a little more forgiving; we try to distinguish between genuine ineffectiveness and similar but curable phenomena like youth, inexperience, diffidence, and fear.)
Fred is not a purely functional VC (by which I mean not that he's dysfunctional, but that he's stateful). This slide was accompanied by lots of other evidence, including multiple prior meetings. The slide was just the final increment that pushed him over into yes. It is very unlikely that if a random person had walked up to him and shown him the same slide, Fred would have been convinced.
What convinces VCs is, in order, (a) growth, (b) the founders' personal characteristics, (c) what you say to them. If you seem like an effective person and you have graphs that go up steeply, your pitch could be a bunch of platitudes and they'd still be eager to invest. (As would we, to be honest.) Whereas if you seem like an ineffective person and have no traction, you could have the best story in the world, and they will all say no. (Here we're a little more forgiving; we try to distinguish between genuine ineffectiveness and similar but curable phenomena like youth, inexperience, diffidence, and fear.)