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I've seen hundreds of pitch decks, met dozens of founders in 2025, and made dozens of pitch decks. Talked to many investors and asked their insights about pitch decks for whole year. Here is what I learned this year:
1. **The problem slide is where you win or lose.** If an investor doesn't lean forward on slide 2, the rest doesn't matter. Most founders bury their best insight on slide 8.
2. **Founders who've experienced the problem they're solving tell better stories.** Personal connection > market research every single time.
3. **The "platform" word is poison.** I removed it from at least 10 decks this year. Just tell me what the thing actually does.
4. **Traction without context is useless.** "10K users" means nothing. "10K users, 23% MoM growth, $47 average revenue per user" means something.
5. **Most market size slides are bullshit, and investors know it.** TAM/SAM/SOM with numbers pulled from Statista doesn't impress anyone. Show me YOUR math based on YOUR customer segments.
6. **Financial projections are fiction, but they reveal how you think.** Show you understand unit economics and investors will forgive aggressive growth assumptions. Show hockey sticks with no underlying logic and investors will assume you don't know your business.
7. **The team slide should answer "why you, why now."** Your advisor's LinkedIn profile doesn't matter. Your 10 years solving this exact problem does.
8. **Asking for money without showing what milestones is just amateur.** "We need $2M for hiring and marketing" isn't a plan. "$2M gets us to $100K MRR and 18-month runway" is.
9. **Design matters less than founders think, but more than they act like it does.** Your deck doesn't need to be gorgeous, but it can't look like you don't give a shit.
10. **Every deck should answer: what's the insight only you have?** If I could've thought of your idea without domain expertise, it's not compelling enough.
11. **Slide count doesn't matter.** Based on my experience and Carta's insights, there's no correlation between slide number and fundraising success. If a slide is meaningful, keep it. If a slide is just "nice to have," remove it.
12. **Founders confuse features with benefits.** "AI-powered matching algorithm" doesn't mean shit to anyone. "Cuts hiring time from 60 days to 12" does.
13. **The fundraising story matters as much as the business story.** Why this round, why this amount, why now etc. If you can't articulate it clearly, investors smell desperation.
14. **The decks that got funded weren't perfect but they were clear.** Clarity beats cleverness every single time.
15. **Nobody reads Slide 1 (Cover slide).** They glance at it for 3 seconds. If your tagline is a paragraph, you've already lost.
16. **"AI" is a feature, not a business.** In Q1 2025, slapping "AI" on a slide worked. Now? It's noise. Tell me what problem you solve, not what tech stack you use.
17. **The "Conservative Estimate" Lie.** We know your Year 5 projection of $100M ARR is fake. You know it's fake. Focus on how you get the first $1M instead of giving huge promises.
18. **One idea per slide.** I see founders trying to cram the Problem, Solution, and Market Size onto one slide to "save space." Don't. It looks like a random note.
19. **Your TAM is wrong.** If you claim your Total Addressable Market is "The Global Internet," you don't know who your customer is. Niche down.
20. **Font size 10 is illegal.** If an investor has to squint to read your LTV/CAC ratio on a mobile screen, they're closing the file.
21. **Bullet points are boring.** Use icons, use charts, use big numbers. Walls of text are for legal contracts, not pitch decks.
22. **Stop using "Uber for X."** It's almost 2026. Come up with your own category.
23. **The Appendix is your best friend.** Keep the main deck short and tell your story clearly. Put the technical deep dives in the appendix.
24. **PDF is the only format.** Don't send a Keynote. Don't send a PPT. Fonts break. Layouts shift. Send a PDF.
25. **Your "Exit Strategy" is presumptuous.** You haven't sold one unit yet. Don't tell me about your IPO plans.
26. **Data needs context.** Don't just show a graph going up. Label the axes. Explain the spike. Everybody love labeled axes.
27. **Consistency signals competence.** If your headers jump around and your colors shift slightly, investors subconsciously think your code is messy too.
28. **Frameworks kill the story.** Most founders try to use famous frameworks. But those frameworks push founders to be standard. Instead of this, create your own story.
29. **Competition slide is your positioning.** Everybody knows you cannot compete with Google, Apple, OpenAI or other big corporates. But you really can focus a niche and grow in a vertical. You don't have to write a complex competition slide. X-Y landscape is great but you have to choose the right X and Y angles and be perfect on your niche.
30. **Don't separate "Why Now" into its own slide.** Weave it naturally into your problem (it's urgent), market (it's shifting), and competition (giants are slow). When "why now" is isolated, it feels forced.
**My predictions for 2026:**
**AI will review your deck before humans do.** I've talked to investors and many of them are already using AI reviews, custom GPTs, Claude, Gemini on their emails. Your pitch deck isn't just for humans anymore. You need to explain your business to AI too. Find the balance: clear enough for AI to understand, compelling enough for humans to care.
**Pre-seed rounds will get harder.** Building an MVP is easier than ever thanks to AI. So investors are asking for revenue or real traction even at pre-seed, and their bar will keep rising. My advice? Generate traction first, fundraise later -when it is possible of course. (And possible doesn't mean "if you have money", it means "if it is possible as technical")
**Investor outreach will be noisier than ever.** Automation tools are everywhere now. Anyone can build a bulk email campaign to investors. Standing out will require actual creativity, not just another cold email template. The spray-and-pray approach is literally dead.
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