I learned almost everything I know from sitting in partner meetings hearing how investors evaluate companies behind closed doors, raising capital myself, but mostly following the advice of Y-Combinator, the most successful early stage investment firm of all time (seed deck advice here) and watching hundreds of founders choose to listen (and mostly raise) or innovate (and mostly not raise).

When creating a pitch deck, focus on creating a first slide that is:

• Exciting
• Simple to understand
• Unarguable
• Ambitious

Here’s some other distractions you should avoid in your slides.

• Too much text.
• Excessive explanations and caveats.
• Excessive branding per slide.
• Animation or things that can go wrong
• Subtle humor.

<aside> 🔥 Investors are busy and distractible. Your opening line needs to earn you the right to the rest of the pitch.

</aside>

If an investor doesn’t understand your business, disagrees with your opening hypothesis, or thinks your vision is small, it will be hard to keep their attention for the rest of the meeting. I tend to find investors fall into two buckets:

• Investors who imagine what happens if this truly works (the minority)