The 3 Slides Entrepreneurs Need to Remove From Their Fundraising Pitch Decks Right Now
Most pitch decks have three useless slides that are making it harder to successfully raise capital
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A pitch deck for a fundraising entrepreneur is like an air tank for a scuba diver. Sure, you could technically attempt your job without it, but the end result won’t go particularly well.
Since every fundraising entrepreneur needs a pitch deck, it means every fundraising entrepreneur has to figure out what belongs in a pitch deck, and the way they do it is almost certainly some combination of the following four things:
- Searching the Internet (Google/YouTube/Medium/etc.)
- Watching other people give their pitches at pitch competitions
- Getting trained in some sort of incubator/accelerator type of program
- Watching Shark Tank and/or Dragon’s Den
Let’s throw out the last one. If you learned how to give fundraising pitches by watching reality TV, I can’t help you. In fact, nobody can. You’re a lost cause, and you’re never going to raise meaningful capital.
For everyone else who learned to give fundraising pitches using whatever combination of the other methods, your pitch deck almost certainly contains the following three slides that, when we stop to actually think about them and their purpose, don’t make any sense.
#1: The Team Slide
Yes, great startups are built by great teams. But do you need an entire slide telling investors about your team and how great it is?
Of course not!
Think about the team slide in your fundraising pitch deck from an investor’s perspective. Specifically, what valuable and reliable information can investors learn about your startup’s team from your team slide?
NOTHING!
No entrepreneur is ever going to say: “Here’s my team… it sucks!” Instead, every entrepreneur is going to claim to have a “rockstar” team. As a result, investors are never going to trust anything they learn about a startup’s team during a fundraising pitch, which makes the slide a complete waste…
