How to Make a Pitch Deck: The Ten Slides Investors Need
On 21 February 1843 the House of Representatives in Washington was debating a bill to spend $30,000 testing Samuel Morse's electro-magnetic telegraph. Cave Johnson, a congressman from Tennessee, rose to speak. This Congress had done a great deal to encourage science, he said, and he did not wish to see mesmerism neglected. His amendment proposed that half the money go to mesmeric experiments. Another member suggested adding Millerism too, and the banter that followed had the chamber in fits of laughter. The chairman declined to rule the amendment out of order: deciding how far the magnetism of mesmerism resembled that of the telegraph, he said, would require a scientific analysis. According to the Congressional Globe, 22 members voted for it; the noes were not even counted.
Morse knew that chamber well. Twenty-one years earlier, in his life before the telegraph, he had been a painter and had put this very hall on canvas. Now he was an inventor waiting on the vote, with his money running out. Five years before, in February 1838, he had strung ten miles of wire around the Committee on Commerce room and demonstrated the instrument to anyone who came. According to the letters collected by his son, Edward Lind Morse, President Van Buren and his whole cabinet came to watch. People saw, marvelled and left unconvinced.
On 23 February 1843 the bill passed the House by 89 votes to 83. That same day Morse wrote to his partner Alfred Vail that if the Senate turned it down he would return to New York with a fraction of a dollar in his pocket. 3 March was the last day of the session, and that morning more than 140 bills stood ahead of his. When his friends in the Senate told him there was no hope, Morse went back to his room and went to bed. The next morning, as he came down to breakfast, Annie, the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents Henry Ellsworth, was waiting for him: her father had been there when the session closed at midnight and had seen the President sign the bill.
The telegraph worked in 1838 too. What changed was that people who did not understand the machine made a decision.
What is a pitch deck for?
A pitch deck is the set of slides that lets someone who does not know your company say, in a short time, "I would put money into this." In 2018 Aaron Harris, then a partner at Y Combinator, published a template for YC's seed round decks. Its central idea fits in one line: be clear and be concise.
In Harris's view most seed stage companies simply do not have much meaningful detail to explore. When founders pretend they do, the story gets muddled and the investor gets lost. A deck is not the place for a treatise on your market or your philosophy of the world. The narrative comes first; everything else is commentary.
In the template each heading counts as the first slide of a set. One slide is ideal, two or three are fine if you need them, and a set of more than three is too much for a seed round. Only the title page is always a single slide.
The ten slides of a seed deck
Title: your name and one line
The company name and a single sentence describing what you do. If you cannot write that sentence, the problem is not the deck but an idea that has not yet come into focus.
Problem and solution
State the problem clearly; detail on how it affects real people or businesses is valuable. Then the solution: explain what you do in as few words as possible, with the concrete benefits you deliver.
Traction: let the numbers speak
If you have traction, show it. The numbers should be clear and meaningful. Harris adds a reassuring note: your curve will not be as smooth as the one in the template, and that is fine. If you have other strong metrics, add them; usage figures are good, revenue is better.
Insight, business model and market
Explain what makes you special, what makes the business work, what you see that others have missed. You may not know every detail of your business model yet, but you should know most of them. The market slide answers three questions: is it big, can you make it big, and how much money will you make from it?
Team
One of the most important slides at seed stage. Explain why the founders are particularly well suited to this problem. As Harris puts it, nobody cares about your advisors.
The ask: how much, and for what
Say how much money you need and what it will get you. If you can show where you will be in a year, and whether you will be ready for the next round, that is the strongest moment in the deck. Morse's ask in 1843 had the same shape: $30,000 and a trial line. The money went into an experimental line of about 60 kilometres between Washington and Baltimore.
The curse of knowledge and songs tapped on a table
Why did Morse's visitors marvel and walk away? Part of the answer lies in psychology. In 1989 the economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber gave a name to a familiar effect, the "curse of knowledge": once you know something, you cannot easily imagine what someone who does not know it will see.
A year later Elizabeth Newton, a doctoral student at Stanford, showed it with a simple experiment. Some participants tapped out the rhythm of well-known songs on a table; others tried to name the tune. The tappers expected roughly half of the listeners to get it. Across 120 attempts only 3 songs were identified, or 2.5%. The tapper heard the melody in their head; the listener heard only knocks.
Your deck is often a song tapped on a table. You have been thinking about the product for years and you hear the melody behind every slide. The investor hears the knocking. Showing the deck to someone who has never seen your product and asking them to explain what they understood is the cheapest known cure.
The word itself offers a clue. The English pitch comes from the Middle English verb picchen, "to thrust in, fasten, settle"; we still say "to pitch a tent". The spot in a market allotted to a trader is a pitch, and so is the patter used to sell the goods. A good pitch drives a stake into the listener's mind and sets up your story there.
A final word
In the sixteenth of the letters collected as Les Provinciales, dated 4 December 1656, Blaise Pascal explains why the letter has run so long:
"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."
I have made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter.
A short deck is the product of long preparation. Could someone who has never seen your deck describe your company in their own words after the first three slides?
To build your market slide on solid numbers, How to Estimate Market Size: A Guide to TAM, SAM and SOM is worth a read.
