Journalism and the Perfect Pitch Deck

Having been pretty immersed in the VC funded startup experience at Predikto for a couple of years now, I have (counter to what I would have ever thought), taken an intellectual curiosity to pitch decks, including studying great examples like LinkedIn’s fantastically annotated deck from their Series B.

Despite having pretty much always been in some sort of engineering, I don’t come from a family of engineers. In fact, I was mostly raised around marketing and advertising folks. Part of that influence has been an ingrained sense of some things that have been applicable to my more technically slanted career. In this case, it’s one of the core tenants of journalism applied to pitching.

The Journalism Approach

A good pitch deck is like a good piece of investigative journalism. You are taking the consumer (potential investors) through a narrative backed by defensible facts. Put yourselves in the shoes of a journalist reporting on the current state and prospective future of your company. If done well, you can beg the questions you want begged, and preempt those you expect. Like any good investigative report, you ought to start with the 5 W’s and 1 H:

  1. Who?
  2. What?
  3. When?
  4. Where?
  5. Why?
  6. How?

Breaking Down the Questions

The ordering of them is tricky, but let’s walk through each in the context of a pitch:

  • Who are the team, and who are the customers?
  • What is the product, and what is the problem it solves?
  • When is the timing for this product right, or: why now?
  • Where (as in what stage) is the company, where are the customers, where is the talent?
  • Why this problem (see: market-founder-fit), and why this product (as opposed to that of competitors’)?
  • How do you scale/monetize/exit?

The Perfect Structure

In its most concise form, this kind of pitch is exactly 7 slides, a title and one per question. For longer decks there may be 2-3 slides per question. The point is that any deck with one of these points missing, is, like a piece of journalism, incomplete.

A Real World Example: LinkedIn

Looking at LinkedIn’s Series B deck as an example, Reid Hoffman nails all 6 questions:

  • Who: team on slide 34/35, customers on slides 15 and 16
  • What: product on slide 2, problem on slide 3
  • When: timing on slides 18, 24, 30, 32 and 33
  • Where: company on slides 10-11, customers on slides 15 and 16
  • Why: market on slide 22, competitors on 18-21
  • How: monetization on slide 30, scale on 31

This framework provides a comprehensive structure for telling your company’s story while ensuring you cover all the key points investors need to hear.