---
name: pitch-deck
description: Use when asked to write, structure, or critique a startup pitch deck — fundraising slideshow content, common templates, or investor-advice frameworks (market-first, asymmetric bets, aggregation theory) — grounded in joelparkerhenderson/pitch-deck.
---

# Pitch Deck

A pitch deck is a business slideshow that summarizes a project and its
purpose — most commonly a startup and its product — for fundraising, and
also useful for recruiting cofounders, teammates, and strategic partners/
customers.

## What a pitch deck needs to do

Three jobs, not always all in the same deck: summarize the venture clearly
enough for a stranger to grasp it fast, make the fundraising case to
investors/advisors, and recruit people (cofounders, hires, partners) who
need a compelling reason to join or work with you.

## Common template shape

Widely-referenced templates (Sequoia Capital's, YCombinator guidance, and
similar) converge on a broadly similar arc: problem, solution, market
size, product, business model, traction, competition, team, financials,
and the ask. Treat any specific template as a starting structure to adapt,
not a rigid form — the strongest decks are shaped around what's most
persuasive for the specific business, not a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

## Key advisory frameworks worth knowing

- **Seven questions (Peter Thiel)** — Thiel's framework poses a set of
  hard questions a startup must answer well (on engineering, timing,
  monopoly, people, distribution, durability, and secret) — useful as a
  self-check before pitching, since investors will probe exactly these.
- **Venn diagram of ideas (Peter Thiel)** — locating an idea at the
  intersection of what's genuinely new, what's actually valuable, and
  what's defensible, rather than strong on only one axis.
- **Market first, team second (Elad Gil)** — the argument that a large,
  growing market can carry an average team further than a great team in a
  poor market — a lens for how to sequence a pitch's emphasis.
- **Aggregation theory / commoditization of trust (Stratechery/Ben
  Thompson)** — frameworks for how internet-era platforms win by
  aggregating demand and reducing the cost of establishing trust between
  parties; useful vocabulary when a pitch's competitive thesis rests on
  platform dynamics.
- **Asymmetric bets / value stack (Floodgate)** — the idea that the best
  venture bets have asymmetric upside relative to downside risk, and that
  a startup's real value proposition should be described as a stack of
  compounding advantages, not one feature.
- **Achieving product/market fit, crazy but good, disruptive technology
  shift, bold thinking (Atrium)** — a cluster of investor-advice framings
  emphasizing that the best pitches sound ambitious and slightly
  unbelievable while being grounded in a real, demonstrable insight — the
  "crazy but good" framing specifically names the tension a strong pitch
  should resolve rather than avoid.

## Related planning artifacts

A pitch deck usually draws on — and should stay consistent with — other
planning artifacts a founder maintains separately: [[strategic-balanced-scorecard]]
for the underlying strategic plan, [[objectives-and-key-results]]
for near-term execution goals, and [[key-performance-indicators]]
for the traction metrics a deck's "traction" slide actually cites. A deck
whose traction numbers don't trace back to the same KPIs the team tracks
internally is a red flag investors are trained to look for.

## Common pitfalls

- **A deck optimized for reading, not presenting** (or vice versa) — a
  deck meant to be talked through live can be sparser than one meant to
  be emailed and read cold; conflating the two produces a deck that fails
  at both.
- **Traction slide numbers that don't match internal tracking** — see
  above; investors routinely probe this specifically.
- **Market-size slides using a top-down TAM with no bottom-up
  justification** — a large total-addressable-market number unsupported
  by a credible path to capturing any specific slice of it reads as
  unconvincing rather than ambitious.
- **Skipping the "why now" question** — a strong pitch usually explains
  why this specific timing makes the opportunity real now, not just why
  the idea is good in the abstract.
- **Treating the deck as static** — the strongest founders revise their
  deck's narrative as they learn more from actual investor meetings and
  customer conversations, rather than pitching the same deck unchanged
  across dozens of meetings.

## Learn more

- [joelparkerhenderson/pitch-deck](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/pitch-deck) — the source for this skill, with individual advice pages by source.
- [Y Combinator: How to build your seed round pitch deck](https://www.ycombinator.com/library)
- [[strategic-balanced-scorecard]], [[objectives-and-key-results]], [[key-performance-indicators]] for the underlying planning artifacts a pitch deck should stay consistent with.