A couple of years ago, we launched a new series called Pitch Deck Teardowns! Astute readers may already have figured out what that is all about: You submit a pitch deck and we share it with our readers, highlighting things that are awesome, making suggestions for improvements and celebrating the fun, innovative and surprising things that we find. You can see some of our existing pitch deck teardowns here.
I am particularly interested in decks that fulfill these criteria:
- The fundraise was successful: This is just reasonable. If you’re still out there raising money, we don’t know if the deck “worked,” and it becomes hard to use it as an example.
- Within the past year or so: Part of the problem for founders is that a lot of sample decks out there are 10 to 15 years old. That’s cool and all, but a lot shifts in startup land in a year, never mind a decade.
- As little redaction as possible: I prioritize decks that are in their full, original form. Having said that, I appreciate that pitch decks often have proprietary or commercially sensitive data in them. We welcome you to edit or redact, but we encourage you to do so in a way that maintains the overall “flavor” of the deck. You might, for example, delete a data axis but leave the rest of the graph intact, or replace “We hope to hire Mark Zuckerberg as our CTO” with “We are hiring XXX as our CTO.”
- (Optional) The fundraise was covered on TechCrunch: We prioritize funding rounds that were covered by TechCrunch, but that’s a bonus – if we haven’t yet covered your startup, perhaps this is our chance!
Our goal is to build up a database of sample decks that startup founders can review and learn from.
What if you don’t want to share all your secrets?
On the topic of redactions; we recently reviewed a deck that came with the following notes; it’s a perfect example of how you can protect some sensitive data, while still giving TechCrunch’s readers enough context to be able to understand what would have gone on these slides. The company simply removed the contents of the slide and added the word ‘redacted’.
Slide 13 – Monthly active users (graph of users over time) / Slide 14 – Beta users from (companies’ logos), Slide 15 – Content partners (dev tool companies’ logos) / Slide 18 – Ask (number of months runway, goal for number of active users and quests played, goal for number of content partner companies)
Another (even better) option, if possible, would be to delete the axis of a graph, but keep the graph itself intact.
Another (even better) option, if possible, would be to delete the axis of a graph, but keep the graph itself intact, or to just delete the most sensitive data, and leave as much of the slide intact as possible.
Do you charge money for this?
It’s kind of incredible that I have to add this, but… No, TechCrunch doesn’t accept money for pitch submissions or editorial content. I know, because I tried, to somewhat hilarious results:
… Long story short: You’re doing us a favor, here, so no, of course we don’t charge you for submitting a pitch deck.
How can I submit the deck?
👉👉👉 You can submit your deck for review here. 👈👈👈
Comment