Startup pitch Decks are the presentations startups make to venture capitalists to secure funding. They are most often used in introductory meetings. An effective pitch deck can make or break a company’s chances of being funded. Product Managers can learn a lot from startup pitch decks. A pitch deck essentially tells a story of why a company should be funded. Product managers face similar challenges every day. They need to be able to tell the story of their product to a wide set of constituencies like executives for funding, development teams for context and prioritization, and marketing for campaigns and demand generation.
Anatomy of a Startup Pitch Deck
Startup pitch decks have been around for as long as companies have raised money from VCs. During the DotCom bubble, the stories of kids getting funded with nothing but a PowerPoint deck are legendary. Guy Kawasaki, noted evangelist and founder of Garage Technology Ventures, offered this advice on pitch decks:
It’s quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach an agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.
Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.
Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.
The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch
Sequoia, the legendary venture capital firm, suggests the following structure for a startup pitch deck from their Writing a Business Plan by Team Sequoia
- Company purpose Start here: define your company in a single declarative sentence. This is harder than it looks. It’s easy to get caught up listing features instead of communicating your mission.
- Problem Describe the pain of your customer. How is this addressed today and what are the shortcomings to current solutions.
- Solution Explain your eureka moment. Why is your value prop unique and compelling? Why will it endure? And where does it go from here?
- Why now? The best companies almost always have a clear why now? Nature hates a vacuum—so why hasn’t your solution been built before now?
- Market potential Identify your customer and your market. Some of the best companies invent their own markets.
- Competition/alternatives Who are your direct and indirect competitors. Show that you have a plan to win.
- Business model How do you intend to thrive?
- Team Tell the story of your founders and key team members.
- Financials If you have any, please include them.
- Vision If all goes well, what will you have built-in five years?
Google has about 10.9 million suggestions for how to write a startup pitch deck. Conventional wisdom says that you should combine the key aspects of what Kawasaki and Sequoia recommend.
How Can Product Managers Use Startup Pitch Decks?
Communication is a critical skill for product managers. There is a constant need to share your product vision, strategy, and roadmap with various constituencies. You need to be able to clearly, crisply, and quickly share things with Marketing, Sales, Development, and even customers. A startup pitch deck format is a very effective technique to do this.
The Sales team needs to understand the overall context of your product so they can understand the prioritization decisions you make at any time. Marketing needs to appreciate your views on the marketplace so they can plan effective messaging and demand generation campaigns. Development needs to understand why you chose to sequence some features before others.
None of these audiences is going to spend hours reading a 100-page document that describes your vision, strategy, and roadmap. You need a tool that can quickly describe your product strategy. It needs to be suitable for a wide variety of audiences. A startup pitch deck is a perfect tool for this purpose.
Example Startup Pitch Decks
Here are seven startup pitch decks to give you an idea of how some complex product ideas were reduced to just a few slides:
Here is a table with links to each deck:
Company | Year | Round | Slides |
MySQL | 2003 | Series B | 186 |
2004 | Series B | 37 | |
2004 | Seed | 27 | |
Uber | 2008 | Seed | 25 |
WeWork | 2008 | Series D | 37 |
Coinbase | 2012 | Seed | 11 |
Pilleve | 2017 | Pre-Seed | 10 |
Startup Pitch Deck Takeaways
There are a few things that product managers can take away from these pitches:
There Is No Recipe for a Winning Deck
None of these decks strictly followed the Kawasaki/Sequoia recommendation. Each reflects the nature and personality of the founders. MySQL is almost a dissertation while CoinBase was more like a movie trailer.
The Story is Most Important
All of these decks tell a story. The stories have beginning, middles, and ends. Their stories start with a problem, continue with a conflict, and end with a resolution (your product solves a big and valuable problem).
Numbers Are Not the Main Point
One thing that is surprising is that aside from market sizes and potential, financial numbers play a very small part in these presentations. At most, these decks have one slide on Pro-forma P&Ls. At some point in the fundraising process financial projections become important, but significant details are not required in the beginning.
Summary
Product Managers can learn a lot from startup pitch decks. There is more art than science when it comes to telling an interesting and compelling story. Product managers can use startup pitch decks as an inspiration for how they tell their stories to executives, developers, marketing, and sales.
Also published on Medium.