Providing clarity in a pitch deck

I came to know about Jeff Hunter, CEO of Talentism (former Head of Recruitment at Bridgewater Associates) through the Farnam Street podcast. He is working on particularly interesting area and that is to help leaders to provide clarity for their team, hence avoiding confusion. He helped and coached leaders from high growth startups, to PE-owned portfolio companies, to Fortune 500 firms.

After some personal reflection based on my experience as a management consultant, I found that it’s impressive how simple the mental model is. You see, “an organization is a group of people working together to achieve shared goals”. Without clarity on what this group of people wants to achieve, I would argue that there will be an organization dysfunctional brewing on the horizon. In other words, at a high-level perspective, most organizational problems tend to happen when the leader does not provide clarity to the team.

So, how does this relate to a pitch deck? A great pitch deck provides great clarity on the business direction including and not limited to the market it wants to attack, business model, competitive advantage, target milestones, challenges, and risk mitigation to mention a few.

Asking the “Why” question helps a lot on building pitch deck. For instance:

• Why this is the right market to attack?
• Why will our business model work?
• Why we have the moats?
• Why are we able to attract great talents into the firm to help us achieve the next milestone?
• Why we can mitigate such challenges?

Providing such clarity to potential investors not only helps to answers most of their questions in advance but also demonstrates a clear thought process from a founder. The latter is vital to avoid confusion in an organization and avoid “unnecessary” organizational problems. Resources should be allocated properly in solving the right problem as startups typically have a short runaway.

Below are some of the examples of great pitch decks that I know of:

• Mathilde Collins from Front that consistently provides clarity on Front’s pitch decks (Series A-C). My theory is that she can provide such clarity as she consistently blocks some of her time to “think and reflect”. That is not easy to find in current business leaders as we tend to value “speed over velocity”
• Rippling’s pitch deck or should I say an essay. My theory is that Conrad Parker leverage Amazon’s best practice on no PowerPoint policy. Amazon believes PowerPoint is not an effective way to provide clarity to the audiences, hence employees need to write a memo about their presentation topic. Conrad applied the same principle by providing clarity through a memo instead of a pitch deck. It worked and they received a $45 mil investment for Series A!

Here are the links to their pitch decks:

• Front’s Series A: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/front-series-a-deck-f2e2775a419b
• Front’s Series B: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/front-series-b-deck-6dc686267a24
• Front’s Series C: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/front-series-c-deck-11773b
• Rippling’s Investment Memo: https://www.rippling.com/blog/company-news/rippling-series-a-pitch-deck-and-memo/