Fundraising is hard, and founders know they face a battle to win investors’ attention. Deciding how you structure your pitch deck is one of the most consequential decisions an early-stage founder will make: put simply, a great deck gets you in the right rooms with the right people. Examples like Airbnb’s first pitch deck have almost become part of Silicon Valley folklore: it’s no exaggeration to say that by unlocking investment and winning you new fans in the venture capital (VC) ecosystem, these slides could shape the trajectory of your startup.

While startup pitch decks make fascinating reading for founders preparing to raise VC money, no-one knows better what will excite an investor than investors themselves. So, in a new analysis, we have distilled information from over a dozen deck templates created by some top VC investors. The templates are broadly focused on startups asking for their first institutional investment – usually a pre-seed or seed funding round.

So, what are the real pitch deck essentials? And which components of a pitch actually turn investors off? Read on to get the data, and the key lessons for fundraising founders.

There is plenty of healthy disagreement about what you need to include in a startup pitch deck. (In 2024, for instance, Emily Wood made her case for why the TAM slide – a staple of most startup decks – needed to be reimagined).

During an investor conversation, founders might create two or three versions of a pitch deck. There might be a one-page synopsis of the business at a very high level; then, there will be an extended deck used in investor outreach, designed to get VCs excited about meeting with you. And there might be a version of this deck that’s adapted for the meeting itself. As you’ll be talking through the deck ‘live’, the meeting deck usually includes fewer words and more visuals.

The extended pitch deck is perhaps the most important phase in this process. But what slides do you need to prioritise, and what can you leave out?

We’ve aggregated data from 13 pitch deck templates recommended by leading VCs, including Sequoia, Y Combinator, Octopus Ventures and First Round Capital, on the pitch deck structures they recommend to founders. (You can find a list of all the VCs that feature in our analysis in our appendix below¹).

We assessed every slide in each VC’s deck template, giving a ‘ranking’ of the popularity of different slides across the group of decks:

There are a few areas where investors are closely aligned – both in the slides where opinion is unanimous, and where investors are (almost) united in their disregard of certain topics.

We could only analyse the pitch deck slides that were recommended by at least one investor, so there will likely be other topics used by founders that don’t appear here. If your pitch deck has a topic that doesn’t feature above, you may wish to consider that none of 12 leading investors recommend spending time on that area. With that out of the way, let’s get to the analysis.

There are two non-negotiable pitch deck ingredients that were recommended by every one of the investors in our cohort: your team, and the problem you’re solving.

When analysing early-stage startups, investors have relatively few metrics and traction to go on. It’s also true that, as reporter and pitching coach Haje Jan Kamps says, “it’s unlikely that you are special enough to have a 100% unique idea.” So how do you differentiate yourself? By articulating that your startup has the best people possible tackling the problem.

The founders must be on the team slide, and you can think about including senior team members if they have great (and/or highly relevant) companies on their CV and/or they’ve spent significant time working on the problem you’re solving in a previous role. That should suffice. You don’t have to include the whole team, particularly if there are five or more employees, and try not to flood the team slide with advisors either. Highline Beta partner Ben Yoskovitz recommends putting advisors in your deck’s appendix, for example, rather than listing them alongside the founders and core team.

The other universally recommended slide articulates the problem you’re solving. You might think this is self-explanatory, but often, founders need to work hard to nail down the single sentence that best sums up the problem you’re tackling. A great problem slide should be a blend of art and science: compelling data that sums up the scale of the issue, and an emotional statement that drives home the problem’s severity.

Think about a problem slide for an imaginary company that says, “Modern drug discovery is slow and expensive.” A problem is expressed, but the statement is vague and imprecise. Let’s try a new problem statement for the same company: “It takes several years, and an average of $2.3 billion, to bring a new drug to market.” A startup aiming to speed up the pace of drug development might say that both statements are true. But the scale and severity of the problem – and the potential market opportunity – are much easier to understand in the second example.

Which other slides are seen as must-haves?

More than 90% of the VC decks cited market size and competition as slides they’d want to see in a pitch deck.

Market size is important because, in the words of Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine, “if you don’t attack a big market, you’re highly unlikely to build a big company.” There’s no one way for a startup to arrive at their total addressable market. If they’re building in an established industry that’s covered by analysts, there is likely to be authoritative research that sizes the market accurately.

The job is harder if the space is newer. Quantum computing, for instance, is regarded as a high-potential industry that could change tech for good, but the space is perceived as being some years from coming to fruition. A 2023 Citi report predicted that four years from time of publication, the quantum market could be anywhere “from $700 million to $8.6 billion”. That range demonstrates just how much variance there can be in market sizing.

When it comes to competition, founders can be nervous about highlighting other existing players that may be much bigger or with significant market share. But as Reid Hoffman says, “arguing that you have no prospective competitors” is not a strength. In fact, the presence of larger competitors may validate a VC’s enthusiasm in your startup: it is concrete evidence that customers in your space need a product or service, and that they are willing to pay for it. Your job in a pitch for investment is using your competition slide to articulate why you’re moving quicker and building better than the rivals you highlight.

10 of our 12 VCs recommend including slides on the product you’re building, your business model, and your solution to the problem you describe. Describing how your technology represents a unique approach to the problem is crucial, as is providing information on how you anticipate making money.

Three quarters of the investors in our analysis look for slides that focus on evidence of the momentum you’re picking up, and on your ‘ask’ – where you explicitly detail how much money you’re seeking and how you’ll use the capital. There is also broad support for a ‘Why now?’ slide: 66% of investors suggest including a slide that summarises why current social trends or market conditions make this the perfect time to build your startup.

While there is consensus on certain aspects of a pitch deck, opinion is divided in other areas. It may seem surprising that investors don’t uniformly agree on whether you should show a breakdown of your financials: just 42% of investors recommend including a slide on company finances in a pitch deck.

Partly, that’s because financials for early-stage companies aren’t yet well structured, especially when there isn’t a financial professional (a former banker or accountant) on the founding team. And when most companies in this situation are loss-making, providing profit and loss statements aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker for VCs: they know that a more disciplined approach to financials will come later.

In my own experience, a slide on financials is a valuable guide to a founder’s thinking. It communicates to investors that there is structured thinking in the early team, and it is a short-hand way to quantify the scale of the founders’ ambition for their business. Even if a startup is at an early stage in its development, including data on your burn rate and runway is a helpful guide to the financial fundamentals for investors.

Meanwhile, only a quarter of VCs advise founders to include a slide dedicated to the company’s purpose. That’s perhaps because investors expect your purpose to be defined as part of the problem statement – you exist to solve a specific problem for a particular group of customers, which may well be the best expression of why the company was founded.

Almost all the VCs in our dataset advise against including a slide on potential exit outcomes. It might seem intuitive for founders to offer VCs a taste of how they think they could generate strong outcomes for their fund. But most early-stage investors are looking for founders who are wholly committed to building a large, enduring business. In this context, having one eye on an acquisition may communicate to an investor that the founder’s focus is purely on monetary gain and not on building a true category winner. 20VC founder Harry Stebbings is fairly unequivocal when he says, “Do not have an exit slide. We are building a company for the next 10 years, not a quick flip.”

The startup ecosystem can seem cut-throat at times. And it’s true that VCs don’t necessarily want to sit through a long, unclear startup pitch. That’s why investors put deck templates together in the first place: they hope that founders can use that guidance to create pithy, impactful and exciting presentations.

Most investors recommend keeping pitch decks as short as possible. We found that the 10 most ‘popular’ slides were recommended by two-thirds or more of our cohort. Those 10 slides might be a good place to start for a founder building a pitch deck from scratch. But pitch decks are a product of your business, and every startup is different. Don’t be shy about deviating from the most-recommended slides, if you think there’s a compelling reason to do so.