Writing a great pitch deck

When explaining your business to potential investors you’re probably being asked for a pitch deck for review. Crafting one that communicates the vision well in the average 3 minutes and 44 seconds that investors spend on your deck can often take more than a few weeks! I’ve certainly made hundreds of improvements to my decks as I have received more and more feedback.

I’ve gone through this process many times, and along with feedback from trusted advisors, I have found the wealth of resources available online really useful. I wanted to share what I’ve found. If you have any suggestions for additional resources that I’ve missed, please email me and I’ll add them to this post.

A good deck is useful way beyond investor pitches; I use parts of mine in big client pitches and when introducing new team members to the business.

Best Practice

Best practice: Lessons from analysis of how investors look at decks http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/lessons-from-a-study-of-perfect-pitch-decks-vcs-spend-an-average-of-3-minutes-44-seconds-on-them/

Best Practice: How to pitch a VC by Dave McClure, 500 startups http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/UTR/how-to-pitch-a-vc-dave-mcclure

Same presentation with updates and suggestions from others: http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slidesthatrock/how-to-pitch-a-vc-redesigned

Video by David Rose (Entrepreneur and investor) on things you should know before pitching a VC. https://youtu.be/lzDBrMisLm0

Example: Sequoia’s Investment Memo on YouTube (this is how your business will get appraised) http://milesgrimshaw.com/sequoia-investment-memo/

Examples

Curated list of decks: http://www.pitchenvy.com/

Curated list of decks 2: http://bestpitchdecks.com/

Curated list of decks 3: http://alexanderjarvis.com/blog/2015/05/19/pitch-deck-collection-from-vc-funded-startups/

Mixpanel’s deck is considered as a great deck by many investors. https://mixpanel.com/blog/2014/12/18/open-sourcing-our-pitch-deck-that-helped-us-get-our-865m-valuation

Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn Series B Pitch — accompanied by tips / advice http://reidhoffman.org/linkedin-pitch-to-greylock/

AirBNB’s deck http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-a-13-billion-dollar-startups-first-ever-pitch-deck-2011-9?op=1

Originally published at www.nickholzherr.com.