What is a startup data room?

A startup data room is the place where investors get detailed information about your company and your plans, beyond the pitch deck. Preparing it is one of the most important and time-consuming tasks before a fundraising round starts.

As a venture capital investor (VC), I see more and more data rooms built in Notion, a tool for building linked pages and simple databases. I like this development. Notion gives you a lot of flexibility to present information in a way that is compelling and easy to digest.

Before a round, you prepare two main sources of information:

1. The pitch deck: short, with a compelling, easy-to-understand story.
2. The data room: everything an investor needs once they want to learn more.

What should a startup data room contain?

A startup data room contains two levels of information, and each level serves a different moment in the process.

• Level 1 – context and depth: more context and deeper information on the main topics of your pitch deck. This covers everything that helps an investor understand your case, your market and your opportunity better. In the past, many founders built a detailed version of the pitch deck for this.
• Level 2 – confidential details: customer contracts, employee contracts, balance sheets and other financial statements, detailed information about customers and the proprietary parts of your tech stack, the technology your product is built on. This is what people used to call the classic data room.

Level 1 pages are much easier to update in Notion than in a detailed slide deck.

When should investors get access to which documents?

Investors get access step by step, as they move forward in the process with you. Do not give every investor access to both levels from the start. Investors earn the right to more information.

Confidential material from level 2 is most often shared only after a signed term sheet. A term sheet is the short document in which investor and founders agree on the main terms of an investment before the final contracts.

In practice, this works with copies:

1. One copy per investor: each investor gets their own copy of your Notion data room, so not all VCs access the same pages.
2. New content for advanced investors: you add level 2 content only to the copies of investors who have earned it and have reached a mature point in the process.

Do you still need an extended pitch deck?

No, a Notion data room can replace the extended pitch deck. A founder in my fundraising program asked me exactly this: how do you give VCs the detailed information they want after the first deck?

The first deck you send should be short and end with a compelling last slide. Do not add detailed slides in an appendix. If an investor wants to know more, they ask you for it and engage with you.

An extended version of the deck is not a bad thing per se, but I would not build one, for two reasons:

• Time: you spend hours on layout and visual details. For detailed information, design adds little value. For the first impression of your initial deck, it does.
• Overhead: every fundamental change has to be made in two deck versions.

Today, I would put all detailed information into the Notion data room, on sub-pages, with a link to the pitch deck. As a VC, I appreciate one single source of truth for everything about a startup. A well-structured data room also makes it easier for me to find what I am looking for.

How do you handle investor questions in your data room?

You create a questions-and-answers (Q&A) page in the data room for each investor you talk to. After a first meeting, interested investors send many questions, more and more often by email. When founders answer each one in a separate email, the answers end up spread across many threads.

The Q&A page solves this:

1. Collect: every question from email, WhatsApp or any other channel goes onto that investor's Q&A page.
2. Answer: you write the answer on the page.
3. Notify: you tell the investor, for example: "Thanks for the questions, we added them together with our answers to our data room (link)."
4. Add live questions: after a call, you add the questions from the conversation to the page, sometimes with additional facts.

You build a repository of questions and can reuse answers, because many investors ask similar things. The investor gets all answers in one place. That helps in team discussions and when they write the investment memo, the internal document in which an investor team argues for a deal. You also keep the documentation in your own hands, so fewer details get lost between you and the investor.

If you prefer bundled questions over a constant inflow of single ones, tell the investor politely. A strong founder once asked me to send my questions only in aggregated form. I respected that a lot.

How do you build a Notion data room step by step?

You build it in six steps, from the deck to the investor-specific copies:

1. Finish the pitch deck: short and compelling, without a detailed appendix.
2. Build level 1: one page with context and depth for each main topic of the deck.
3. Prepare level 2: contracts, financial statements and customer details, kept out of the shared pages for now.
4. Copy per investor: one data room copy for each investor you talk to.
5. Add a Q&A page: one per copy, ready for the first questions.
6. Open level 2 step by step: add confidential content to a copy when that investor has earned it, most often after a signed term sheet.