A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs come to me asking for advice building a great pitch deck.

These are Notes I Wish I Had When I Started

These are the notes that I wish I had when I started out fundraising.

They come from an email thread titled "Pitch Deck Resources" that I've kept snoozing in my inbox since 2020. These notes consist of hastily jotted down lines and links that have continued to grow as I've re-fowarded it to tens of friends and acquaintances and helped them collectively raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Great Pitch Decks are Hard, But They're Also About Practice

Since our first raise for Condor over five years ago, building a great pitch deck has almost become second nature. It still doesn't mean that it's easy, but once you've been through a few reps of a process that few people actually do in their lives, you start to realize that it's "just" a matter of practice (I promise you, it's the case, even though I didn't believe it myself when I started out).

The first time is the hardest. Building a pitch deck for a real seed raise for the first time is tough. You're trying to build your own conviction in the business, perspective take with investors often don't know your business, and learn how to raise $X-XXM - something which very few people actually have the experience of doing to coach you (advising a fundraise doesn't count).

At the end of the day, nothing beats having a real business and practicing to make perfect good enough.

Work in Progress

In addition to building a great deck and business plan, how to fundraise is a whole other topic that I'll leave for another post.

In the meantime, the notes below for a great deck are still rough, incomplete, and missing a lot, but hopefully they are a helpful starting point if you're in the shoes I was wearing many years ago - as much as they are value reminders that I revisit every time I find myself starting a new deck!

Questions, comments, suggestions to improve this? Feel free to reach out.

Keys to a Great Pitch Deck

The process of building a great pitch deck (and pitch):

1) Get the core narrative...

2) ...Backed by a strong business model/plan that you have actual personal conviction and data to back up.

3) Iterate on those two points above with yourself, friends, and low stakes people, until you have refined the narrative, plan, and your conviction.

4) Initial slides ~<20 (even better if sub 15 or 7), then build out an appendix to answer every questions you here that keeps coming up during calls.

5) Then go out in front of the key people who matter and whom other people can intro you to, once you have the deck and pitch down cold.

Principles

What you should be keeping in mind:

• Business Model + Conviction > "Pitch" - You should be using the deck and pitch process to work on the business NOT build a "pitch." You're looking to find all the holes in your plan and if and how to plug them - sometimes that means abandoning the plant all together.
  
  The result of a great pitch deck process should be serious progress on the business. A persuasive pitch and funding is a side effect. Along those lines...
• You are optimizing for conviction not persuasion. Can you say with a straight face that you have done everything in your power within practical (and some impractical) bounds such that you have full conviction to devote your life and other people's money to making this happen?
  
  The first person you are trying to convince is yourself! It doesn't matter if YOU don't believe it.
• 100% clear, 80% correct - You're optimizing for zero confusion. It's okay (and good) if people want to ask questions to clarify nuances - that means that they are engaged. Think Pyramid Principle. Get the basics, then explain the you can always explain your more precise answers in the appendix.
• Talk to me like I'm a seven year old - Investors and big execs are interrupt driven and scatterbrained by default. Guy Kawaski once told me that "the air gets thin at the top [and you lose IQ points with decreasing oxygen]."
  
  VCs see hundreds of decks in a day. Have empathy. Feed it to them like feeding a baby. I often add a slide after the cover that has each bullet they can copy for their investment committee meeting. They'll appreciate it, and you'll be more likely to raise some money.
• "Does it make sense if I squint at the slide?" - You should be able to squint at each slide and get one key point out of it without looking too close at the details. John Foley's bare bones original Peloton Deck is a good example of this.
• Backed by real data - You need to back up each big point with real data. Take the time to Google / DeepResearch / Perplexity / go to your local library. Better yet, talk to REAL customers and people. Follow your professor's advice from school and cite credible sources - you'll be glad when you need to review them yourself in the future.
  
  You data doesn't need to be perfect, but if it takes <1 day to gather and you haven't done it yet, then why does someone need to give you $XM to figure it out?
• Don't be afraid to be be bold - If you've covered that above - especially conviction - don't be afraid to be bold (and have some fun with it). I don't necessarily recommend emulating the Vision Fund strategy, but Softbank's covid-era 2020 Golden Goose Deck is an epic version of swag that I often refer to for inspiration.
• Pitch 100x times (they pitch some more) - Unless you've raised at least seven figures of funding, I guarantee you haven't practiced your pitch enough. 100x means ONE HUNDRED TIMES - not "five times to people [and 100 times] in my head."
  
  For context, we pitched my first venture backed company, Condor, to over 120 investors in our first round. That's not including the 1000s of practice pitches we worked and reworked over the years.
  
  One person counts as one pitch. You can only get unbiased feedback from a person the first time you pitch them. Once you talk to them, they have context and aren't seeing it with fresh eyes; you've burned them. Keep talking to more people.

Great Pitch Deck Resources

Resources that I personally revisit again and again:

• Backable (Book | Audible) - good general approach to fundraising mindset. Most important for seed.
• PitchDeckCoach Template - good starting point of what investors are looking for in their “commodity.”
• HBS Startup Bootcamp Pitch Template - good slides to focus your business thinking.
• Original 2011 Peloton Pitch Deck - A great example that a very clear narrative is much more important than nice graphics. The graphics that John Foley does have are also very clear.
  
  In my opinion, this is the gold standard, of pitch deck and narrative clarity. Every early pitch deck should aspire to be this clear (and this ugly).
  
  Public record courtesy of a 2019 lawsuit.
• Michael Siebel's YC Pitch Advice - Michael Siebel's SaaStr presentation on how to pitch a startup is a great example of getting "100% clear, 80% correct." YC has some decent slides examples too.
• Alex Iskold's Seed Deck Outline - A great outline of what investors look for in each slide.
  
  One of the most important golden nuggets in Alex's post is the note about scraping "magic quadrants" and framing competition in terms of:
  • (A) what your competitors do well and
  • (B) how you are different.
• Disciplined Enterpreneurship - If you realize that you need to get back to the basics of your business model or you're feeling a little lost, I highly recommend this book by Bill Aulet as a structured, data driven approach to building conviction that is the critical foundation for any deck.

I know I'm talking to a more sophisticated entrepreneur if I see a competition slide following Alex's format.

More Recommendations for Honing Your Pitch

Tactics I use to help me breakthrough sticking points:

• Try to explain it simply from first principles to someone smart who doesn't know or understand the industry (or someone no so smart). A corollary is to try to "explain it to a seven-year-old."
• Ask for their feedback at each point on what is not clear.
• Ask them to interrupt on what they are confused about.
• Don't ask if it is a good idea. Per The Mom Test, everyone wants to lie to you to be nice.
• Take genuine feedback - this is tough. It is easy to want to correct someone when they misunderstand something like it is their problem instead of channeling your inner fascinated anthropologist and trying to figure out the "why" behind it.
• Record yourself using Voice Memos or a similar app throughout the conversation so you can focus on explaining it to your sounding board instead of context switching between explaining and writing.
  
  Now with AI you can even feed this back into ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini (or your other preferred LLM of choice) and use it to
• Repeat. Go back and work on writing it.
• If you're stuck...
  • Storyboard. Use stickies, figma, or a (visual) table, with the major points on each top line, the narrative point below that, and the supporting points below those.
  • Don't be afraid to throw things out. Save a copy. Start from scratch. Working from first prinicples with all your previous thinking helps things flow. Don't worry about being comprehensive. You can always add follow up points.
  • The Creativity Faucet is real. Sometimes it takes several hours of thinking (and a break) before the ideas really start flowing. Just start jotting stuff down on paper (and see the point about about not being afraid to "thorw things out").

Good Structure

Good format to clarify your thinking:

• Look at key structure
• Free write on a pad of paper
• Walk through structure (voice memo)
• Structure on a sheet:

• Test, iterate, repeat

Appendix

Michael Siebel's "How to Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup"

Original 2011 Peloton Pitch Deck

SoftBank's 2020 "Golden Goose" Earnings Presentation