Pitch Deck Writing

Pitch Deck Writing

Overview

A pitch deck is a slide-based artifact that compresses a fundraising, sales, or partnership case into a tight narrative arc — usually 10 to 14 slides — designed to be skimmed in minutes and remembered in seconds.

Core Concepts

1. The 10/20/30 rule (Kawasaki)

Guy Kawasaki’s rule for investor/pitch contexts:

• 10 slides — the human mind cannot absorb more than ten concepts in a single sitting in a pitch context
• 20 minutes — even if you have a full hour, present in 20 minutes; leave the rest for discussion
• 30-point minimum font — if you cannot fit your message in 30pt type, you have too many words

2. The canonical Sequoia / Reid Hoffman structure

10–12 slides in this order:

1. Title / Company purpose — one-line description
2. Problem — the customer pain, with evidence
3. Solution — your product as the answer
4. Why now — timing argument; why this couldn’t have been built 5 years ago
5. Market size — TAM/SAM/SOM, bottom-up preferred
6. Competition — who else is in the space, how you differ
7. Product — screenshots, demo, key features
8. Business model — how you make money
9. Team — why this team can win
10. Traction — what you’ve already proven
11. Financials — current state and projections
12. Ask — how much you’re raising, what you’ll do with it

Slide 4 (“Why now”) is the slide most founders skip and the slide most VCs care about.

3. The narrative arc — problem → solution → traction → team → ask

Strip away the template specifics and every effective pitch deck follows five beats:

1. Problem — establish the pain. The reader nods.
2. Solution — show your answer. The reader believes the answer is plausible.
3. Traction — prove it’s working. The reader believes the answer is real.
4. Team — prove you can execute. The reader believes you specifically can win.
5. Ask — close. The reader knows what you want and what they get.

4. The appendix convention

Strong decks have an appendix — 5 to 20 extra slides beyond the main 10–12 — NOT shown in the live pitch but sent with the deck.

5. The “no cliffhanger” rule

Pitch decks are NOT mystery novels. Slide 1 should already answer “what does this company do” at headline level.

6. “What I most want you to remember” — the closer

End the deck with one slide that names the single thing you want the audience to walk away remembering. Not a recap — one sentence, one number, one image.

7. The slide-title-as-thesis rule

Every slide has a title. The title is a thesis, not a category.

• Category title (weak): “Market Size”
• Thesis title (strong): “$47B TAM growing 22% annually; we serve the underserved bottom 60%”

Sequoia / Series A deck — slide-by-slide

Anti-Patterns

1. The mystery opening — first 3 slides don’t say what the company does.
2. Wall-of-text slides — paragraphs of body copy presented live.
3. No “why now” — deck skips the timing argument.
4. No traction (when you have some) — burying real data deep.
5. Generic team slide — “20+ years experience” instead of specific credentials.
6. Competition denial — “we have no competitors.”
7. TAM inflation — “$2T global market” with no bottom-up math.
8. No ask — the deck ends with vague “let’s talk.”
9. Cliffhanger close — last slide is “Thank you” or “Questions?”

Decision Heuristics

References

1. Guy Kawasaki, “The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint”
2. Sequoia Capital, “Writing a Business Plan”
3. Y Combinator, “How to build your seed round pitch deck”
4. Reid Hoffman / Greylock partners — LinkedIn Series B deck annotated by Hoffman