Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Maples: Answering every investor objection creates an obscure 'Franken deck'

Mike Maples, Jr. · Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate) · Jul 7, 2024 · at 1:20:28

Mike Maples, Jr. (partner at Floodgate) explains to Lenny Rachitsky why founders should avoid adding slides to their fundraising decks in response to feedback from non-believing investors.

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“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 advice or they'll, they'll go pitch a bunch of firms and they didn't consider who's prepared to possibly believe who isn't. And so then they get objections to their pitch from people who aren't going to believe anyway. And then they try to have a slide to meet that objection. And before you know it, You have what I call a Franken deck. And so you have this huge, gigantic presentation trying to anticipate every objection. And the person who was ready to believe you in the first place doesn't know what you were trying to say because you obscured it with all this other stuff.”

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