Pitch Deck

“Your pitch deck should be no more than five to 10 slides, and the first thing that your pitch deck needs to have is your story. Why you? Why this? Why now?”

“You can tell what stage of a company and what type of management they have. By the quality, by the theme, just by the look of the deck. And it sounds shallow and maybe a lot of investors won't admit it, but I make a definite judgment call on that.”

“VCs share pitch decks with each other all the time. Like, why do they need a spy?”

“I think the rate of improvement of those tools is going to make the sort of scaffolding first draft Deck generation process relatively commoditized from a language standpoint.”

“I think that like every experienced VC or investor can really grasp it, like from two or three slides, just like skimming them through. And you're spending maybe 10 seconds.”

“The goal of the deck, the goal of that first outreach is to get a meeting. That's all. You're not going to get an investment after your first email to an investor, right? It's a process, and every step, you want to get that next step.”

“In fact, I think it's the highest form of storytelling there is, right, because condensing a very complex idea or business into 20 slides is not easy.”

“For me personally, is an element is like, you send me the deck as the pre-read opening versus get on a call, right, is I say, be proactive. If you really have something that good, and you'll send me the deck right up front, and it's that good, I'm going to wan…”

“Huge, huge mistake to go into a round with no deck. Because the visuals are so important to the storytelling that if you just have this, like, text and, like, you know, 20 paragraphs in a row, it's just, like, so boring, because if you have one image where peo…”

“One slide everyone should have on their deck, I think, is three reasons why you should not invest in us today. And then say, our, I don't know, our sales cycle is too slow, give the data. Our net retention number is too low, give the data. And then on the next…”

“A lot of times, this is the other thing I see happen is the poor founder will get advice from 20 different people about their pitch deck. And a lot of the people giving them advice are not believers in that different future. They're giving generic startup advi…”

“Slide one, you say what you do as if I literally know nothing. So it's not, we're Airbnb, we're a marketplace for unused residential housing space. Bad. But you'll get advice that says to do that because VCs think marketplaces are hot, residential real estate'…”

“I think the deck is great for like getting the intro and setting the initial context. And the memo is good for once you've like pulled someone's attention and they're actually serious about maybe investing in your business.”

“If you only have one deck with one pitch, you're doing it wrong. You've got to try different avenues of attack. You've got to try different language. You've got to try different pitches to determine which of these work.”

“The most important thing is that you show the definition of what is the market, and what is the TAM, and what is the SAM, and then show the numbers, and I don't necessarily think that the decks should show the calculations.”

“If you actually just change the facts of your business, right? Like make progress more often than not. The investor will look at that prognus as a much better signal than any modification you made to your deck or any modification you made to the words in your …”

“Never mail your deck ahead of time, because then they'll make their decision before they see you.”

“And from the beginning, I mean, in our first pitch deck, it said, we are going to become a company that saves taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and makes tens of billions of dollars a year.”

“Like, when I first started making pitch decks, I would put up the big logo slide from the very beginning, like, look at all our amazing customers. No one cares about that. You know, what they care about is, do you understand the problem that they have? Which i…”

“The second thing about pitch decks is you want to keep this really short. You don't want to moan on and on and on and on, right? Like I'm going to be doing up here for the next, according to 28 minutes. But you want to keep it really short and try and keep tha…”

“I can't think of one case where I sent out a pitch deck before the pitch, and the person then wanted to actually invest.”

“Every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck. So the hardest questions were answered right at the front.”

“You probably need more than one version, and really don't take the shortcut and make it generally applicable. What I mean is know who your audience is and sell directly to them. So if you're talking to a manager, use the language a manager uses, use examples t…”

“For raising seed, I think decks are not that useful. As an angel investor myself, I almost never even look at the deck. I just want to look at the founder and hear their story and see how they tell it.”

“Decks are a very efficient way to communicate, and you still need to iron out all the details of what you're doing, and you should have a white paper, but you need to have a friendlier entry point for investors, employees, and partners alike”

“I'm going to raise money without a deck. I don't give a shit about a deck. It's like, here, you're, this is what we're doing right now. You're going to want to work with us. This is what we mean. this is what we want to do going forward. And people are …”

“The first pitch deck we had was terrible. It was like, 60 slides, it had, it took like, an hour to go through, and it talked about all of the things that Picketail could become. It was just like, it was such a visionary, like, naive, we're going to take over t…”

“Because as it turns out, the purpose of a deck is not to answer all questions about a business. It's to create ground for, like, interesting discussions to come. Like, VCs, in general, are interested people, and they want to be curious at the end of a presenta…”

“I don't need to see those numbers because they're made up numbers anyway. They're guesses in many ways.”