5 Pitch Deck Mistakes Every Founder Makes (And How to Fix Them)

I’m obsessed with pitch decks. I’ve made them as a founder, I’ve reviewed them as an investor, and now I make them full-time at OPTIO, a firm that specializes in crafting stories to help founders raise venture capital. We’ve helped founders raise more than a billion dollars of capital – and we’ve steered them away from the same mistakes, over and over again. 

Here’s a rundown of those mistakes, and how you can set them right. 

Talking about your tech 

Don’t talk about your tech. 

Ok, that’s crazy. You have to talk about it. But your technology is just a tool to deliver a solution. I don’t care that my car has a V8 engine; I care that it gets me from point A to point B.  Talk about your solution first, and then frame the tech as a way to deliver that solution. 

Technology isn’t investable until it makes an actual person’s life better. We worked with some incredible rocket scientists who loved talking about their technology that made rocket engines 5% more efficient. When they said it like that, no one cared. Here’s a recreation of their original slide: 

Well, it turns out that a 5% more efficient rocket engine means you can 4.5X the payload. Why? Because almost all the weight of a rocket is fuel. Now that has the power to make a lot of people’s lives better. Here’s how we updated the slide: 

Boring the audience

Think about the last time someone opened a PowerPoint presentation in a meeting. Chances are, your heart sank. You knew it would be boring. 

Don’t make the same mistake.

People care about people. Even VCs perk up when there’s a picture of a human on a slide, when you talk about real stories of real people. 

When you can, use anecdotes to reinforce the data. You need both. Check out this great example from the LunchClub deck: 

Earlier in the deck, they had a lot of data related to connections they’d created earlier in the deck. But as soon as they showed a single, tangible example of a meaningful connection, you get it. You think, “this is cool.”

A thousand customers is just a statistic, a single story is traction.

Being precise, not simple 

I always tell technical founders: my job is to piss you off. Why? Because technical founders write pitch decks like academic articles: technical, dense, and utterly incomprehensible to anyone without a PhD. 

Here’s a classic example of a bad slide we see from technical founders : 

Most of the time, VCs will read your presentation before agreeing to meet with you in person. (Always imagine VCs scrolling through your deck as they wait for their oat milk latte at Blue Bottle Coffee: that’s the sort of attention span you have to work with.) The point of a pitch deck is not to close a deal. It’s to get a meeting. Keep things as simple as possible to get yourself into the room—you can get as complex as you want in technical due diligence.

Here’s the same slide, with clear messaging and without all the unnecessary data:

Forgetting the glue

Great pitch decks make you want to keep reading. Even the most beautiful slides will lose readers if there is no glue sticking them together. The glue in a pitch deck? Its overarching story. 

And remember: stories rely on conflict. If your deck begins by introducing a big scary problem and then guides the reader toward a hero solution, the reader will actually pay attention.

Here’s an example of a deck outline that’s not story: 

• Hello
• We have a customer 
• I went to Stanford
• There really isn’t a solution in this space
• We have good features 
• And reasonable prices 
• It’s a big market 
• Please invest

Now here’s a pitch deck outline for the same company, but told as a story: 

• My last startup failed for a stupid reason: We couldn’t get a SOC 2 Certification quickly
• When I told my friends, a lot of them had the same problem
• It turns out there are ~200k B2B SaaS businesses that need this
• So we automated the whole process 
• And we already have a happy pilot customer paying us 10k/month
• Now, we’re on a mission to save the 200k other companies that need certification. Join the fight!

The first outline was disjointed and impersonal. The second one was a story you could tell around a campfire. 

Making VCs think 

That’s always a dangerous place to be. 

At OPTIO, we like to spoon-feed narratives to VCs. How? By making sure every slide has a headline. 

Don’t just say, “Problem.” Say, “Stagnant labor productivity is the #1 problem in construction.” Everything else on the slide should be evidence that supports your bold headline.

Here’s a slide without a headline. Notice it takes a while to understand the argument:

Now here’s how we recreated the same slide to slap you in the face with our argument: 

If you steer clear of these mistakes, you’ll have a much stronger pitch deck. 

And if you’re feeling intimidated, check out these original pitches for Uber and Airbnb. They’re underwhelming. You can do better!

Uber Pitch deck

Airbnb pitch deck