Anyone can make a deck today. The harder question is whether you can hold the attention of someone hearing you for the first time.
One personal hack: Before you make a single pitch, listen to at least three podcasts.
Pick one speaker you admire. Pick one who doesn’t hold your attention. And pick a third who engages you perfectly well, but you walk away without having learned anything new.
Then look at what happened in each. What did the speaker do in the first minute? Where did your mind wander? When it was over, what could you repeat to a friend?
The third speaker is the one I want founders to think about most. The one who loses you is easy to spot, and the one you admire is easy to admire. But the one who was pleasant, prepared and polished, and left you with nothing new, is the one most founders are at risk of becoming.
Everyone talks about clarity today. I have met enough founders to know that clarity is not about having a beautifully designed deck or using fewer words on a slide. I have met founders who have spent weeks perfecting their deck and still cannot explain their business to me in simple words. I have also met founders who can tell me their next three milestones, their revenue target and the size of their next round, but cannot articulate what they actually want to build over the next twenty years.
And that, to me, is what the pitch meeting is really about.
It is not about the deck. It is about how clearly you think.
Everyone has the same deck now
Technology has made it incredibly easy to create a pitch deck. There are templates for everything, AI can help write the narrative, and in an afternoon you can have clean slides, a tidy story and confident language.
There is nothing wrong with using AI to make your deck. I use AI myself every day. The problem is when AI becomes a substitute for thinking.
Most decks look remarkably similar today. There is a problem statement, followed by the solution, the market, the product, traction, competition, business model, team and the fundraising ask. The colours and fonts may change, but the structure is largely the same.
As an investor, I can often tell when a deck has been heavily generated or polished using AI. Sometimes the slides are too crowded, sometimes the language is too perfect and sometimes there are ten different ways of saying something that could have been said in one sentence.
But that is not what bothers me.
What I want to know is whether you understand what you are saying.
Because once the conversation starts, the deck disappears very quickly.
I start asking about customers. What did the customer actually tell you? What happened the last time you spoke to one? Why did they choose you? What did they not like? What did you change because of something a customer told you?
This is where the real founder usually emerges.
A founder who has spent the last two years deeply involved in a problem talks about customers differently. They remember the conversation. They remember the complaint. They remember the customer who almost left. They can tell you what surprised them and what they had originally believed that turned out to be wrong.
You can put a beautifully written version of all of this into a deck, but you cannot manufacture the understanding.
So what does a pitch deck really need to tell me?
For me, there are five things every founder needs to be able to explain clearly, whether they are on slide 3 or sitting across the table from me without a deck.
1. What is the problem, and why does it matter?
I want to understand the problem in the language of the customer, not in the language of the startup.
Who has the problem? How often do they experience it? What do they do today? What does that cost them, in money, time, frustration or opportunity?
The best founders I meet often spend more time talking about the problem than their product because they have spent years understanding why it exists.
And I want to know why this problem, and why now. What has changed that makes it possible to solve it today when it could not be solved five or ten years ago?
2. Why are you the team that can win?
This is often reduced to a team slide with photographs, job titles and logos of previous companies.
That is not what I am looking for.
I want to understand why you are uniquely placed to solve this problem. What have you seen or experienced that others have not? What gives you an unusual understanding of the customer, the technology or the market?
This does not always mean that you have spent ten years in the industry. Sometimes the most interesting founders come from outside an industry and see something that people inside it have stopped questioning.
But there needs to be a reason why you are the person who should spend the next ten or twenty years solving this problem.
That is a much harder question than “Tell me about the team.”
3. How big can this become?
Market size is one of the easiest slides to make and one of the easiest to get wrong.
I care less about whether you tell me that the market is $2 billion or $20 billion and much more about how you got there.
A top-down market size can make almost anything look enormous. If there are 50 million potential customers and each one could theoretically spend ₹10,000, you have a ₹5,000 crore market. The arithmetic may be correct, but it tells me very little.
I want to understand the market from the bottom up. How many customers exist today? What do they spend? How often do they buy? What could they spend if you solve the problem better?
A bottom-up number often looks smaller than a top-down number, and that is not a weakness. It is usually a sign that you have actually thought about the market.
And then I want to know how the market could change over the next five or ten years.
4. Who are you really competing with?
This is another slide that I think founders often misunderstand.
Competition is not just a list of companies with logos.
Your biggest competitor may be Excel. It may be WhatsApp. It may be a person doing something manually. It may be that customers simply do nothing because the problem is not painful enough for them to change.
I want to know how customers behave today, irrespective of your product.
What are they doing to solve the problem? Why have they chosen that solution? What would have to change for them to behave differently?
And then I want to understand how your product changes that behaviour.
That is the real competition slide.
A founder who tells me, “We don’t have any competition,” usually worries me more than a founder who can name ten competitors and explain exactly why customers choose each of them.
5. How does this become a business?
The business model is not simply a slide saying subscription, transaction fee, commission or SaaS.
I want to understand who pays, why they pay, how much they pay, how often they pay and what it costs you to acquire and serve them.
At an early stage, I do not expect all the answers. But I want to see that you are thinking about the economics of the business and not just the revenue opportunity.
And as the company grows, the questions become more specific. I want to see cohorts, retention, margins, repeat behaviour, customer acquisition costs and whatever other numbers actually matter for that business.
The story has to eventually meet the numbers.
The investor is listening for your thinking
I use something I call the Angel Investing Canvas. It has four boxes: the Opportunity, the People, me as an angel, and thesis fit.
The important thing for a founder is when I fill it. I do not really fill it while you are showing me your slides. I fill it afterwards, when the conversation has ended and I am trying to make sense of what I heard.
Two of those four boxes are largely yours to influence: the Opportunity and the People.
The five things above help me understand the Opportunity. But the People box is something I understand from the conversation itself.
I am thinking about your energy, how you learn, how you respond.
If you are a founder, trust me when I say that irrespective of having to raise money, you should meet investors. The questions being asked, and the perspectives revealed when someone has to commit their capital is very different. You also get a sense of the market and competition, as investors are talking to more than one founder. It can bring a very unique perspective, which probably we would miss as founders.
Hope this helps you prepare for your next investor meeting, with better understanding of how a business is being evaluated. I have also attached a sample template that could be used, for first time founders. While it is a template, use this as a guideline to tell your story and numbers. Make this personal as thats what helps with building a deeper conversation.
Sample deck attached.
Have a good weekend.
Warm Regards,
Shanti