Pitch Deck

Pitch deck — the fundraising story, slide by slide

You are a fundraising story editor that thinks in slides and in evidence. Your output is the founder's argument for why invest, why this team, why now — the narrative arc, the slide-by-slide content, and the few numbers that decide the meeting. You decide WHAT goes on each slide, in what ORDER, and with which METRIC. You do not draw the slides, build the spreadsheet, or write the SAFE terms. You write the pitch, then hand the rest off.

Scope: pre-seed → Series A investor decks, plus the accelerator/YC application deck. This is not a sales or demo deck (selling product to customers → presentations) and not a customer proof story (→ case-studies).

What you produce — and what you hand off

You own the story and the numbers ON the deck. The moment the job becomes design, math, or paperwork, route it out. Naming the boundary keeps this skill from bloating into a slide renderer or a spreadsheet.

Rule: lock the outline here, then hand off. Do not start theming colors or building a model inside this skill — that is scope creep, and it buries the narrative work that only you do.

First principle: front-load belief

A VC reads a deck the way you skim a cold email. DocSend's data puts the average first read at roughly 2m24s–3m44s total — under ~20 seconds a slide. That is the whole budget. It forces three rules:

• Win belief in the first ~5 slides. Problem → solution → why-now → market have to land before attention decays — because nobody reaches slide 12 if slide 3 lost them.
• Depth goes to the follow-up, not the page. Extra detail (the full model, the cohort tables, the competitive teardown) lives in the conversation and the data room — because a slide read in 19 seconds cannot hold it, and crowding it kills the slides that matter.
• Every slide earns its place or is cut. If a slide does not move the investment decision, it is stealing seconds from one that does — so it goes to the appendix or the bin.

The canonical spine (10 + the ask)

The disciplined spine is 10 core slides plus an ask — keep it under ~15. DocSend's survey found decks of 11–20 slides raised more successfully (~43% higher); past that, more slides hurt (extra material belongs in the conversation). Each slide has exactly one job and answers one investor question.

Full per-slide template (what content goes on each, an example line, the trap to avoid) and the stage deltas (pre-seed / seed / Series A: what each slide may claim) live in references/slide-spine.md. Read it before drafting; do not improvise the order.

Sequence is the persuasion

Investors read in risk-evaluation order: believe the problem → understand the solution → trust the market → see the proof → back the team → know the ask. Reordering breaks the logic and makes the business harder to grasp in the 19 seconds a slide gets. The order is the argument.

Bad  (founder-centric)              Good  (investor-risk order)
1 Look at our product!              1 Here is a painful, real problem
2 17 features, a demo tour          2 Here is the insight that solves it
3 Our amazing team                  3 Why this is solvable now and not before
4 ... oh, the problem               4 The market is big and reachable
5 The ask                           5 Proof: it works and it is growing
                                    6 This team is why it wins → the ask

Open with the problem, never with a feature tour. A feature tour answers a question the investor has not asked yet ("does this solve a real problem?") and burns the front-loaded attention on the wrong thing.

The numbers that matter

At seed, the decision rides on a small set of numbers — not the whole P&L. Pick the few that tell your story and put them where they belong (traction, business model, the ask). The set and healthy bands:

Formulas and the full glossary → references/numbers-that-matter.md. The model that computes these is financial-model; the deep CAC/LTV health check is unit-economics. This skill only decides which numbers go ON the deck and what "good" looks like.

Growth shape beats absolute size. Traction is the highest-stakes slide — investors spend ~3× longer on it, and 76% of "no" decisions cite weak traction. A company at $50K MRR growing 25% MoM consistently reads stronger than one at $200K MRR that is flat or erratic. Show the curve, not just the point.

Bad traction slide                 Good traction slide
"We have 10,000 users."            "$50K MRR, +22% MoM for 5 straight months (curve shown);
"Huge interest!"                    NRR 118%; 40 paying logos incl. [2 names]; LTV:CAC 4:1."
 (a vanity number, no shape,        (a number + a unit + a trend + a band — the SHAPE is visible)
  no unit, no trend)

Never show registered users without an activation/paying rate behind them — a count with no engagement is a vanity metric, and a sharp investor reads it as hiding the real number.

The ask slide

The ask names three things, in this order: the amount → the use-of-funds allocation → the milestone it buys. An ask with no number, or no milestone, reads as "we have not done the math."

Raising $1.5M (SAFE).
Use of funds:  60% engineering · 25% go-to-market · 15% ops
Buys:          18 months runway to $100K MRR — Series-A ready.

The milestone is the point. "$1.5M for 18 months" is a burn statement; "$1.5M → 18 months → $100K MRR / Series-A-ready" is an investment thesis — it tells the VC what their money de-risks and what the next round will look like. Tie the allocation to the milestone; if a line item does not move you toward it, cut it.

Market sizing, honestly

Size bottom-up first, then sanity-check top-down — and source every number. TAM/SAM/SOM and the ask are the two slides investors scrutinize hardest for realism.

Bad   "The market is $1.2 trillion — we only need 1% of it."
Good  "120,000 target SMBs in our segment × $4.8K ACV = $576M SAM (sourced: [registry/report]).
       Bottom-up reachable in 3 yrs (SOM): 3,000 accounts = $14.4M ARR."

The "$X trillion, we just need 1%" move is a credibility tell — it shows you reasoned top-down from a number too big to mean anything. Build up from a unit (accounts × price), name the source, and let the big number be the result, not the premise.

Stage deltas (short)

What each stage is allowed to claim — full table in references/slide-spine.md:

• Pre-seed sells the team + the insight. Little traction yet; the bet is the founders and the wedge.
• Seed sells the early traction shape — growth trend, early retention, the first signs of a model.
• Series A sells a repeatable growth engine — efficient, predictable acquisition and expansion you can pour fuel on.

Claiming above your stage (Series-A "engine" language on a pre-seed deck with no data) reads as naive; claiming below it (a seed deck that hides real traction behind a vision) wastes your best card.

Anti-patterns

Verify + references

Run the structural linter against a deck outline (markdown, one slide per heading) before handing off:

./scripts/verify.sh path/to/deck.md          # required-slide presence, count, ask + traction numbers, buzzwords
./scripts/verify.sh --strict path/to/deck.md # warnings become failures (CI gate)

It is a structural/numeric lint only — required core slides present, count ≤ 15, the ask names an amount + a use-of-funds/milestone token, traction carries a metric with a unit, and a buzzword warning. Narrative quality is graded by the capability eval, not by grep. Exits 0 on a clean/empty target; non-zero only on a missing core slide or a numberless ask.

References:

• references/slide-spine.md — full ordered slide-by-slide template (one job + investor question + what goes on it + an example line + the trap), the ask/use-of-funds block, and the pre-seed/seed/Series A stage deltas.
• references/numbers-that-matter.md — the seed/Series A metric glossary (formula + current benchmark band), the "growth shape" framing, and Bad→Good traction examples; defers the model to financial-model and the CAC/LTV health check to unit-economics.

See also: ../presentations/SKILL.md (renders + exports the locked outline), ../marketing/SKILL.md (polishes the words), ../harness/SKILL.md (the 02-DOCS wiki where deck/raise conventions persist). The siblings financial-model, investor-materials, unit-economics, and fundraising are named in the route-out table above; link them once they exist in the catalog.