Crafting a Pitch Deck that Can’t Be Ignored

Yashad Kulkarni38min

Speaker 1

00:05

Thank you pre recorded Alex, this is not pre recorded Danny, I'm super excited to introduce our panel on pitch deck and how to create a pitch deck that can't be ignored. I gotta be honest, I think I'm doing our panelists, we've probably have read collectively 10s of 1000s of pitch decks at this point. And yet, some of them still grab our attention. Some of them still are the ones that are memorable and actually get investment. And that's what we're here to talk about today. I'm super excited to have more Sava and Mercedes talking about all aspects of pitch decks, we're gonna get into some of the logistics, the new technologies that are coming out, and obviously, how pitches have changed in 2021, in sort of this post, weird COVID pandemic, experience, all that and more coming up. But more, I'm going to start with you, your seed stage investor, obviously, looking at a lot of decks all the time, how has reading, pitch decks changed for you over the last two years, given the pandemic?

Speaker 2

01:01

Well, thank you for having me here. So excited to be here with you guys, I would say the volume of pitches that we receive has increased and continues to increase at some form of exponential rake. So it's been, you know, for us, you know, we have to become far more efficient at sorting and reading through these DAGs. So, you know, US internally at pear, we've grown our team, partly to handle you know, the fact that there was just a lot more people starting companies, you know, the decks that we used to receive were in the same way in some form of doxon, or PDF. So the actual reading of the individual deck hasn't changed, but the rate and volume dramatically.

Speaker 1

01:42

And Mercedes, same attempt to you, I mean, what are you seeing when you're looking at pitch decks these days,

Speaker 3

01:47

the decks are getting better and better in terms of design, I think more and more people have realized that the visual representation of your deck is just as important as the material and the content that's in there, you know, there's these instinctive, kind of like, milliseconds, you know, seconds that an investor looks at your deck and almost make a snap judgment about whether it's even in the realm of something they want to look at it. Unfortunately, you know, it shouldn't be like that. But that's, you know, we're human. And so I think having I'm seeing decks that are super polished, I don't know where everyone's getting these great graphics from, but they're amazing.

Speaker 1

02:23

And so, from your perspective, at TechStars, what are you seeing with pitch deck these days? In 2021?

Speaker 4

02:30

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a combination of teaser decks and different formats that I'm like, wait, I don't think I've seen that before. And then the ones that made me a little bit hurt inside, when they're, like, 40, to 50 pages long, not much, they want to just boil the ocean and tell you everything, because they're so passionate about it, and I love it. And, um, but I'm like, hold on, you need to be able to shorten it there. And so I think it's this is movement, I'm just getting so much feedback and going on, let me do what Martha let me do what Mercedes said, let me do what Silva said. And now this pitch deck is super long. And so they're doing what we're telling him. But then at some point, it has to be back down to the fundamentals and being like, cool, like, here's what we need to know about the business. So we can then get on to a phone call. And so it's been a mixed bag over the last year for sure.

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