A Full Suite of Fundraising Decks

Fundraising decks come in various shapes and sizes to suit multiple purposes. There is no one-size-fits-all, so it pays to have a sense of the numerous sorts to make intelligent decisions about what to create and send in various circumstances.

One of the confusing aspects of being a first-time founder engaging in fundraising is that there is no standard pitch deck that can be used in all circumstances. The challenge is that many people will casually ask for your “deck,” implying that there is only one. So let’s discuss some of the different types and purposes of fundraising decks to arm you with some principles to consider.

In general, fundraising pitch decks are intended to provide information investors need to evaluate a startup for a potential investment. All of them will cover some of the same topics, including the unmet need or problem the startup is solving, the solution, the target market and size, the team, the competitive advantage, some financial information, and other such material. Since a pitch deck is intended to tell the story of a particular venture concisely, it will need to be customized to fit the essential elements of that venture. Depending on the type of deck required, the main differences will be in the scope of information and the amount of detail provided. The key to identifying the type of pitch deck you are dealing with is understanding when and how you expect to use the deck. In the following sections, I will give some guidelines to help you figure out what type of deck you are working with and some guidance on what is important in such decks.

Pitch Competition or Demo Day Deck

Many first-time founders will get their first exposure to developing a pitch deck as part of an accelerator or other first-time founder training program. Since most such programs seek to provide the experience of presenting a pitch, the culmination of most such programs is a demo day or pitch competition. To get through many pitches in succession, these pitches will be short (often 5, 10, or 12 minutes) and high-level for efficiency and attention span reasons. The final deliverable pitch deck of your startup will be presented to a large group of people/audience and possibly a judging panel. There may or may not be a few minutes of question-and-answer time added on after you complete your presentation. 

For this type of deck, you should keep the following in mind:

• You are presenting to a reasonably large group or judging panel, not having a conversational dialog. That means that you must assume that at least some of your audience know little about your space, and you have to make your pitch very clear. No jargon. Not too much detail. Images often help to make the idea concrete. What is the essence of the answer to each aspect you need to cover?
  
  
• You are intensely time-limited and can give your entire pitch without interruption. This enables you to flow through your story how you want to tell it. Pictures, build slides and other techniques can be very effective when you have control of the flow. Practice your pitch until you can deliver it flawlessly and with flair.
  
  
• Remember that an audience cannot read lots of content on your slides and listen to you, so minimize the text and complexity of your slides.
  
  
• Understand that a pitch competition or demo day deck is a very specialized deck intended to be voiced over without interruption. There are few actual fundraising situations where these conditions exist, so realize that this is a “special purpose” deck and that the coaches trying to help you make the most of this special opportunity may give you feedback and direction that does not apply to other sorts of decks. Also, just because you can “win” pitch competitions does not mean you can successfully raise money.

Reading Deck

For “real” fundraising, you will want to develop a reading deck. This deck is intended to be read by potential investors who have asked you to “send your deck” so they can get an impression of what you are doing before deciding whether to invest the time in meeting and talking to you. It still needs to be concise, but you cannot assume that you will be voicing over the images and brief bullets. Therefore, you need to put more detail on the slides so that someone flipping through it can figure out what you are doing. (An alternative approach that serves the same purpose is to put together a one or two-page executive summary introduction that you send when someone asks you to email your “deck.”)

For this type of deck, you should keep the following in mind:

• Your goal is to help potential investors determine if your opportunity fits their area(s) of interest or not. Remember, if you really are not a fit for a potential investor, then you do not want to waste your time or theirs with a meeting. Time is your most precious resource, and a reading deck can be beneficial in enabling an asynchronous initial impression of “fit” assessment.

• Cover the same essential topics as any other deck, but assume that you won’t be there to explain. Therefore, the slides need enough information to tell the story to a reader instead of a listener. Keep it short, clear, and focused on the most essential elements. Digging into every nuance and detail is not necessary. Each slide should have a unifying theme.

• When you have a follow-up meeting after sending a reading deck, have the deck handy so that if your potential investor has a question on a particular slide, you can flip to that slide and address the question. However, do not try to get through your entire reading deck in a meeting. More likely, you will start that first meeting by introducing yourself, your background, and a verbal overview (possibly with the help of an intro deck – see next section) and then dive into the potential investor’s questions. Use the reading deck only as reference material for a conversation.
  
  

Intro Deck

Because you likely were asked to send a deck in advance, and you sent a reading deck, there emerges a need for an “intro deck” that harmonizes with your reading deck. The goal of an intro deck is to allow you to succinctly present your startup in perhaps 15 minutes (if you were uninterrupted, which will rarely be true!). When you are having an introductory meeting with a potential investor or two, it will be much less of a presentation and much more of a conversation. Your goal is to allow the investors to get to know you, experience your passion, and get their questions answered. Be prepared for the conversation to jump around, and be crisp in your answers with lots of pauses to allow the investors to share their thoughts and ask follow-up questions.

For this type of deck, you should keep the following in mind:

• Since you will be talking, the slides in this deck should have fewer words and just hit the highlights. Put additional details or supporting material for likely questions in the appendix.

• Initial meetings almost always begin with introductions all around. Have the investors go first to get a sense of who they are and, if they are VCs, a little about their fund. Then share some about your background to establish who you are and why you are suited to be leading this venture. Finally, it is often very natural to flow right from your introduction into a short story about the genesis of your venture. Usually, all of this will be verbal.

• The intro deck will often benefit from an “executive summary” slide right in the beginning that hits key metrics like industry, stage, 3-5 word essence of what the startup is about, number of employees, funding raised to date, funding you are looking to raise now, and perhaps a critical traction metric or description. This helps quickly orient the listener and gets a bunch of quick facts on the table. Often this is the only slide that gets presented before the investor starts in on their initial questions, so I think of it as the less than 1-minute elevator pitch.

• Make sure that the material is consistent with your reading deck so; for example, if you highlight three market segments in the reading deck, use the same three market segments in the intro deck, but provide different amounts of words on the slides so they are tailored to whether you expect someone to read the deck or listen to you tell the story with the support of the deck.
  
  

Due Diligence Deck(s)

In addition to the general purpose decks that describe your whole business in varying levels of detail, there are likely to be some specialty decks that you produce and use as part of completing due diligence with serious investors. For example, you may need to have a “deep dive technology deck” (deep dive is relative here…there is more detail than in your primary deck, and it may be targeted at a more technically specialized audience, but do not give away your true secret sauce here.), a market analysis deck, a detailed competitive analysis deck, a clinical data deck, and any number of other decks depending on the nature of your business.

For these types of decks, you should keep the following in mind:

• The key to due diligence decks is that you generally will not create them until some investor has moved into serious due diligence and asks you to respond to more detailed questions in a particular topic area. It will involve work, and often you will need the help of whoever on your team knows that particular function the best because these specialty decks are intended for an audience that is more conversant in the function at hand and is already familiar with the business overview.
  
  
• If you have more than one investor who enters this stage, you may need to respond to different questions for each one, so you may or may not be able to leverage the work of creating specialty decks for multiple investors. Beware that just handing out specialty decks may generate questions for other investors that they were not worried about, so try only to reuse them if the same questions are being asked.

To successfully fundraise, you will likely need all of these different pitch deck types, fitted together like puzzle pieces to tell the story of your startup, and dealt onto the table at the right moment to effectively share your story. Hopefully, this framework will help you think about what you might need to develop and also help you avoid using a deck ill-suited for your purpose.