Startup pitch decks

Read it beside the Series A to see what changes between rounds: the vision gets bigger and the evidence moves to cohorts, average selling price and efficiency. The founder lists the weaknesses investors raised (a low selling price, a small self-serve share, gross churn above target, flat net customer additions), which is exactly the diligence a growth investor runs. She gave no valuation guidance and ran a short process, and says that is what made the round competitive.

Published by the chief executive on Front's blog, with the deck embedded from her SlideShare account.

An insurer's deck, so the economics are a premium, a loss ratio and a distribution cost rather than a subscription. In the public version every metric is replaced with €X, X% or GRAPH, which shows exactly which numbers a company considers sensitive: ARPU, margins, ARR and burn. The market slides size French private health insurance at €36bn and disability cover at €11bn, and the seasonality slides explain why most contracts are signed in September and October for a January start.

Uploaded to SlideShare by an account carrying the company's name; no first-party page publishing it could be confirmed, so it is linked only.

The rare deck published with the investors' verdict on each part. Capital efficiency (spending less than annual recurring revenue) and net expansion of 50% after twelve months were the strongest slides; the acquisition slide was weak because growth was organic and nobody could say whether it would scale. The founder also had no financial model for the use of funds, and wished she had shown engagement data and named the typical buyer.

Published by the chief executive on Front's blog, with the deck embedded from her SlideShare account.

A metrics-first SaaS deck: $125K of monthly recurring revenue, a goal of $10M annual recurring revenue by the end of 2015, and the 13.5% monthly growth rate that goal requires stated on the same slide. It also discloses that 54% of revenue came from venture capital customers, a concentration an investor will price, and argues that the business development segment is growing two to three times faster. Use it to practise checking whether a growth target and the growth rate behind it are consistent.

Uploaded to SlideShare under the chief executive's name; no first-party page publishing it could be read, so it is linked only.

Twelve slides for a $65M round, built to answer the questions a software investor asks rather than to tell a long story. The post is as useful as the deck: it lists what diligence needs beyond the slides (a P&L, a quarterly sales model, a 12 to 18 month forecast and the top fifty customers' spend). That list is a good test of whether a SaaS deck's claims could survive the data room.

Published by Mixpanel on its own blog, with the deck embedded from the co-founder's SlideShare account.

A first-time founders' seed deck built around one slide: traction. The founders say so themselves, and the deck shows why a small team with paying users could raise without a long record. The second slide they single out is competition, placed to defuse the objection that social media tools were a crowded space. The round took roughly 200 investor approaches and 50 meetings, which is the honest denominator behind any seed deck.

Published by Buffer on its own blog, with the deck embedded from Buffer's SlideShare account.

Eight slides and a product still in private beta: team, problem, solution, market, competitors, progress and the ask. The market slide quotes a whole software category's size from an analyst, a top-down figure that says little about who will pay for this product. The ask is unusually clear, a $600k convertible note for eighteen months of runway with the milestones it buys, which is the part most early decks leave vague.

Published by the co-founder on Intercom's blog, with the deck embedded from his SlideShare account.

The best unit-economics page in this library: lifetime value of about $900 against a paid acquisition cost of about $100, $93 a month per subscriber, a nine-month implied life and 25% churn in the first two paid months, all on one slide. The ask separates money for the company from $6 to 7 million of founder equity sold, and the deck has a business-risks section, which few decks dare to include. Multiply the $93 by the nine months and by the 82% gross margin on the same page before you accept the $900.

Uploaded to SlideShare under the co-founder's name; no first-party page publishing it could be confirmed, so it is linked only.

The textbook market-sizing slide: two billion trips as the total market, 560 million budget and online trips as the serviceable market, and 84 million as the share it expects to win. The revenue slide then multiplies that 84 million by a $25 average fee to reach $2.1 billion, so the whole projection rests on one assumption, a 15% share, that no slide defends. Read it for the structure and then rebuild the bottom-up case the deck skips.

Uploaded to SlideShare by a third party, not by the company; linked, never reproduced.

LinkedIn had no revenue and modest organic growth, so the deck opens with an investment thesis rather than numbers: a few claims an investor must believe, with every later slide built to support one of them. Read it for how to argue a network's value before it earns anything, and for the slides that answer the obvious objections head on. Hoffman's notes say which slides he would change, which makes it a deck and a critique in one.

Published by the co-founder on his own site, slide by slide, with his commentary under each slide.

Eleven slides with almost no words: the asset, why it is hard to use, the product, and two traction charts (20% daily growth in signups, $65,000 of transactions in the first five weeks). The analogy slide, Coinbase is to bitcoin what iTunes was to MP3, does the work a market-size slide would. There is no team slide, no business model and no ask on the page, so read it as a demo-day deck that relies on the founder in the room.

Uploaded to SlideShare under the chief executive's name; no first-party page publishing it could be confirmed, so it is linked only.

A marketplace deck that leads with the problem in one picture (freelancers underbidding each other) and then with growth: $950,000 of projects in six months at 30% a month. Those are projects booked, the marketplace's gross volume, not its revenue, and the deck never states the take rate that turns one into the other. The market slide sizes online contractor billings at $1B growing to $4B, a top-down figure worth rebuilding from the bottom up.

Uploaded to SlideShare under the founder's name; no first-party page publishing it could be confirmed, so it is linked only.