Pitch Deck Template & Guidelines

October 10, 2013

⬢ buildings

Your pitch deck is both a very individual thing and something that should contain the same basic information to give prospective investors / advisors a snapshot of your company.

Dave McClure of 500Startups created a great “How to pitch a VC” guideline / template way back in 2009, and we still use it as the basis for starting all of our pitch decks.

Don’t think of your pitch deck as something that you are literally pitching on stage with. Those kinds of “live” presentations are not going to close an investment - they are designed to get you to your first meeting, win a contest, or otherwise be more theatrical than informational.

How long should your pitch deck be? It’s 10 slides. No, really, it should be 10 slides long. You’ll always be building / tweaking a custom deck for different investors or advisors, and your master deck will have an infinite appendix of additional slides, information, graphs, testimonials, wacky future ideas, and more, but aim for 10 slides as the main part of your pitch.

More:

• We’ve put a copy of Dave McClure’s presentation as a Keynote or PPT on Google Drive, or view it on SlideShare
• Also check out Ryan Spoon’s How to Create an Early Stage Pitch Deck - very relevant is the note that this a deck that needs to work without voice overs or transitions / builds
• It’s also useful to think about what kind of company you are pitching. Jason Shen documented 11 startup pitch archetypes with examples from YC companies