Financial Services and Pitch deck

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Startups frequently prepare a “pitch deck” to present their company to prospective angel or venture capital investors. The pitch deck typically consists of 15-20 slides in a PowerPoint presentation and is intended to showcase the company’s products, technology, and team to the investors.

Raising capital from investors is difficult and time consuming. Therefore, it’s crucial that a startup absolutely nails its investor pitch deck and articulates a compelling and interesting story.

Important Do’s and Don’ts for Investor Pitch Decks

Too many startups make a number of avoidable mistakes when creating their investor pitch decks. Here is a list of preliminary do’s and don’ts to keep in mind:

Pitch Deck Do’s

• Do include this wording at the bottom left of the pitch deck cover page: “Confidential and Proprietary. Copyright (c) by [Name of Company]. All Rights Reserved.”
• Do convince the viewer of why the market opportunity is large.
• Do include visually interesting graphics and images.
• Do send the pitch deck in a PDF format to prospective investors in advance of a meeting.
• Don’t force the investor to get it from Google Docs, Dropbox, or some other online service, as you are just putting up a barrier to the investor actually reading it.
• Do plan to have a demo of your product as part of the in-person presentation.
• Do tell a compelling, memorable, and interesting story that shows your passion for the business.
• Do show that you have more than just an idea, and that you have gotten early traction on developing the product, getting customers, or signing up partners.
• Do have a soundbite for investors to remember you by.
• Do use a consistent font size, color, and header title style throughout the slides.

Pitch Deck Don’ts

• Don’t make the pitch deck more than 15-20 slides long (investors have limited attention spans). If you feel you need to add more information, include it as an appendix.
• Don’t have too many wordy slides.
• Don’t provide excessive financial details, as that can be provided in a follow-up.
• Don’t try to cover everything in the pitch deck. Your in-person presentation will give you an opportunity to add and highlight key information.
• Don’t use a lot of jargon or acronyms that the investor may not immediately understand.
• Don’t underestimate or belittle the competition.
• Don’t have your pitch deck look out of date. You don’t want a date on the cover page that is several months old (that is why I avoid putting a date on the cover page at all). And you don’t want information or metrics in the deck about your business that look stale or outdated.
• Don’t have a poor layout, bad graphics, or a low-quality “look and feel.” Think about hiring a graphic designer.