A Pitch Deck Masterclass
Lessons for founders from reviewing ~1000+ pitch decks
Recently the kind folks at AWS and Innovation Bay invited me to lead a workshop on pitch decks. I have learned a lot since I was a founder myself writing pitch decks and I really enjoyed reflecting on the learnings that separate the good from the great. The feedback from that workshop has been great so I’m sharing my slides here in case others find it useful.
These are just my opinions. You will find many smart people who disagree with them. Even within Blackbird, we sometimes disagree on the merits of a particular slide. Ultimately you’re the founder, you have to decide what holds true for you.
Full deck is below.
The Basics
Fundraising is a six month, full time job for at least 1 founder. Most of the effort is spent perfecting your teaser deck, intro email and getting your first investor meetings.
This presentation assumes that you have a meeting (whether virtual or in-person) with an investor or are pitching the Partner Meeting. If you are interested in the stage before this, preparing the ‘teaser’, ‘intro’ or ‘marketing’ deck that you email out to try to get the meeting, then check out this Giants webinar led by Michael Batko, Startmate CEO. My presentation borrows heavily from his deck, which borrows heavily from Nick Crocker’s deck, with some significant deviations to reflect the different context of pitching ‘in person’.
You should start with some initial basic planning questions and make sure to confirm these with the person who is organising the meeting.
A lot of this will seem basic, and it is, but in the stress and general chaos of running a startup it often gets forgotten. Being prepared will make you calmer resulting in you presenting more confidently and ultimately make a better impression.
Who are you meeting?
- Are you pitching just one partner, all the partners, the full investment team? Most people feel more nervous with bigger audiences of strangers so it helps to psychologically prepare for this and consider factors like: how much do they know about me, my company, this industry or this problem? This helps you calibrate how much background or explanatory information should you include.
- On your side, only founders should attend investors pitches. No advisors. No board members. No exceptions. Grown up startups don’t need chaperones.
What is the format?
- Most typically a pitch will be 1 hour long. You should aim to speak for no more than 20–30 minutes (ideally with questions throughout to keep it conversational and interesting) and the remaining time for questions. A pitch is going badly if you speak for 90% of the time.
- Be prepared to do a demo and/or show the product.
When is the pitch happening?
- If you’re attending in person, arrive 10 minutes early. Don’t arrive too much earlier than that as pitches often take place back to back and the investor may not be ready to host you yet.
- If you are flying in for a meeting, fly in the night before if possible.
- Swap phone numbers with your contact in case of last minute changes.
Where is the pitch happening?
- Is it happening on Zoom/video conferencing software, in a cafe or in a boardroom? Download any software the day before, get comfortable with it ahead of time.
- Consider noise levels of public places, ability to focus and concentrate in public spaces and wifi requirements if you may be doing a product demo.
How do you do the pitch?
- Most great pitches have a great pitch deck that accompany them.
- You do not need to print anything out to leave behind. You do not need to leave your business cards. If you have set up an in person meeting, they know how to find you.
Why are you pitching?
- You are almost guaranteed to not walk away with a term sheet from an investor pitch. Most investors will want time to discuss and do some further research (commonly known as “due diligence” or “DD” — more on that coming soon) before issuing term sheets.
- Therefore, your job in a pitch meeting is just to move to the next step. If you’re pitching the partner meeting, you just want to generate enough excitement and curiosity to go to due diligence stage.
- The non-obvious thing to mention is that because pitching investors is so time-consuming, as a founder you too should be as concerned to disqualify out low probability prospects too. You need to focus your time and energy on folks who seem truly interested.
Start Here
One common mistake I see many founders make is trying to cram too much into their pitch. It is very difficult to convey all of the amazingness of your company and answer all the doubts in a one hour meeting.
The reality of human attention and human memory is that it is limited. When you try to convey everything, you convey nothing.
“Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.”
— Leo Babuata
I recommend startups use this framework when planning their pitch. Get out a blank piece of paper and list out answers to the following question:
If your audience only retains 3 things from the 1 hour they spend with you, what are those 3 things? Hint: they should be your top 3 strongest points.
Structure your entire pitch deck around those 3 things ONLY.
Contrast this to when most founders sit down and begin crafting their pitch, it starts with a google search for pitch decks and the find and replace process begins, swapping out X company’s problem for Y company’s problem. This is rarely a good idea. For some companies, the deep, painfulness of the problem is the most compelling thing they have and that’s why it comes first. For others, it’s maybe not such an obvious problem but wow, their traction is off the charts! For others they have not yet built a product and the problem is unvalidated, but this is one hell of a team and they have some domain expertise that perhaps uniquely positions them to attack a given market. You get the idea. No two startups are alike, and so no two pitch decks should be either.
Having done this exercise many times with Startmate and Blackbird companies and others, inevitably the entire pitch gets re-written. It ends up telling more of a narrative, more authentic and more unique, which our busy distracted brains like and are more likely to remember days later.
Some other advice
Here are some other bits of advice, in no particular order:
- Your deck is a visual aide, not a script. Do not read from it. Use it to reinforce your points.
- Make it beautiful. If you are a B2C startup, make it very beautiful. Investors will question whether you have true consumer DNA if you present an ugly pitch deck. Plus, there is simply no excuse for an ugly deck now that Canva exists in the world.
- One idea per slide. Unlike for a ‘teaser’ deck, your board deck can have as many slides as you need to make your points. You can move through simple, well-designed slides quickly. I haven’t measured this but I suspect Zoom pitches do well with more frequent slides as the visual transitions help keep the viewer focussed and alert.
- Use numbers, not adjectives to make your points. Adjectives just aren’t very believable whereas numbers can be benchmarked. When it comes to product and traction, the metrics you value reveal a lot about the quality of your thinking. This is another subliminal way that you convey you’re a high quality founder.
- Infographics. We all love an infographic. But they should simplify, not confuse. If I need them explained, they aren’t helpful. Remember: slides should reinforce your points.
- Check spelling.
- Nail your first slide.
- And your last slide! This slide is up on the screen for ~30 minutes! Unlike your marketing deck, the last slide of your board deck will be up for longer than any other slide during your pitch (if you’ve planned your pitch right). Do not waste that real estate. Whatever your strongest point is, have that slide sitting behind you (or on the screen) sending subliminal success messages for as long as possible. Amazing team? End on your team slide. Great traction? End on a chart up and to the right. Do not waste this space on your contact details or thank you.
Your Three Most Important Slides
Invariably your 3 most important points boil down to something to do with the Size of Opportunity, the Team and Traction.
Size of Opportunity
The Opportunity slide/s should try to communicate both your ambition, the size of the market and the severity of the problem.
Ideally it should also try to convey something about what you do. It’s not uncommon to get 5–6 slides into a pitch and not really understand what the company is selling and to whom.
Team
It’s a cliche because it’s true: investors care a lot about the team. However, the team slide is often the most underwhelming slide in most pitch decks that I see.
These are the questions in the back of my mind when I meet founders:
Is this their life’s work?
Your discovery and connection to the problem qualifies you to solve it and win against other competitors you encounter along the way.
Are these founders magnets for talent?
Attracting talent to early stage startups is so hard and yet you cannot build anything truly great alone.
You can’t pay top salaries, you do not yet have an employer brand to attract people to you, no-one gets prestige points when telling family and friends where they work, people don’t (yet) know how to value the equity you give them.
The only competitive edge you have is your mission and vision. Your ability to convince others of what does not yet exist, and the chance to be part of a small group of people who bring it to life, is all you have.
In my experience, it is a leading indicator of success when founders are greedy for talent they cannot yet afford and find ingenious ways to convince those people join them. If you have managed to do that, don’t hide it.
Do I want to go on the journey for the next 7–10 years with these people?
Remember the funnel narrows from hundreds of pitches to just 2–3 investments per investor per year. Inevitably an investor will ask themselves if they can see themselves working with those founders, in that industry, serving those customers every day for the better part of a decade.
Your Deck is Your Team Slide
Inevitably then your whole pitch deck is your team slide.
Your problem and solution slide explains why this is your life’s work.
Your product and go-to-market slides contain the kind of rich detail and insights that prove why your team is uniquely qualified to win in a sea of competition.
Your traction slides show how you have the hustle to produce something out of nothing.
Your team slide shows, hopefully, the early indications that you are a magnet for talent.
This is the Team slide from Front App’s Series A deck. It is successful on a number of levels. The co-founders Mathilde and Lauren validate themselves with university and YC logos: ‘We’re smart young things’.
Wth the addition of Cailen and Greg who left Box/Dropbox to join Front, Mathilde has shown she can be a magnet for talent and that she is ambitious when it comes to hiring.
Lastly, she addresses the remaining doubt left in a Silicon Valley tech investors’ mind: ‘how will you compete against Google/Facebook etc to hire engineers’? The answer: ‘We won’t. We’ll monopolise the best of France’s engineering talent instead’. I’ve seen this work very successfully for Aussie and Kiwi startups, too.
Some other common mistakes:
- Adding up the “years of experience” you’ve had.
- Forgetting the logos.
- Underselling yourself.
- Weird titles that don’t mean anything.
- Including adjectives not numbers.
- Too many people on the team slide.
- Too many advisors on the team slide.
- No diversity on your team slide 😞
Traction
Whether it’s dollars or users or engagement, traction should always be described with numbers.
If you’re post-revenue, investors anchor to $1M of revenue within 1–2 years (ideally, with no external funding). Then to stay on the venture track you need to triple it, then triple it again, then double it, double it and double it again. T2D3.
Use charts or graphics to assist. Tables are very hard to read in a presentation and usually don’t have the same impact. Here are some examples.
Some Common Mistakes
The competition slide
I know, they’re popular. I may have whipped up one or two in my time too.
In a pitch setting, however, they don’t work.
If there aren’t many names, you have probably don’t need a competitive landscape slide.
If there are too many names, this graphic is too busy and hard to read while listening to someone speak.
Feature Comparison Slides
Like the competitive landscape slide, they are hard to read. They also speak to the past or present of your product, not its future.
Investors invest in the future.
Features are easy to copy, product vision is not.
Customer testimonials
They are always positive. I have never seen a negative customer review in a pitch deck testimonial.
More instructive than a testimonial is a customer story. How did they discover the product, how often do they use it, what impact does it have for them (in numbers)? How many more customers like these are there in the world?
The Exit Slide
We don’t want founders to have an exit strategy. The hard thing is building a great business, not selling a slice of a great business.
A Pitch Deck Masterclass: Canva’s Seed Round Deck
We ended the the workshop with a walkthrough of Canva’s Seed Round deck. Most decks don’t age that well. Search forAirbnb’s or Uber’s seed round decks and you’ll see what I mean.
Canva’s Seed deck sets the bar for pitch decks in my opinion.
The top 3 things you take away from this deck, in my view, are:
- These are amazing founders. They deeply understand the problem for users and they have clearly identified an exciting product roadmap. They’ve validated the idea and opportunity in a niche (yearbooks) and run that business to profitability — no mean feat. They have a clear plan for their go-to-market — targeting social media and digital marketers who have a deep need to create great visual content and are very viral users.
- The opportunity is HUGE. The current market for the problem they’re attacking is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and that undersizes the opportunity because today’s market is mostly professionals only. Canva wants to expand the market to offer great design to anyone.
- The time is now. No-one is doing this in the cloud, no-one is leveraging social media to acquire users and no-one is explicitly targeting the consumer and SME market.
What you barely notice is that they don’t have a product and they don’t have any traction.
What you instead have is an unbelievably clear articulation of the product vision and validation that they have built and shipped a product just like this before (Fusion Books) and run that business successfully to profitability. And they have key people around them like Cam Adams and Lars Rasmussen who can help them build to team to ship world-class technology. They are magnets for talent.
Conclusion
To wrap it all up…
Start with your top 3 points and craft a narrative around those.
Choose simplicity over complexity.
Use numbers, not adjectives.
Prepare and practice as much as you can to as many people as you can.
Good luck.
Let me know if you found this helpful in the comments.
