The best pitch deck I’ve seen that’s been publicly released is LinkedIn’s (LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock).
What I love about it is maybe not so much the content, but Reid Hoffman’s commentary about what he was trying to do and what he would do different.
But, you really don’t have to go beyond the first slide. The first slide is the most important slide in your presentation.
You want to do three things with your first slide:
A. Tell your audience who you are.
B. Tell your audience why you are going to win.
C. Tell your audience how big the opportunity is.
And you’d better tell your audience why you’re important fast.
You have maybe seven seconds to get your point across. You run a huge risk of losing your audience if you don’t sell your audience quickly.
Whether you agree with Hoffman’s premise or not, it’s clear, right from the start, what LinkedIn is (was) about.
And that’s the point. Don’t slowly move your audience towards why you’re going to win. Wait till slide six and your audience has moved on.
That’s the art of a great pitch deck.
It looks so easy, doesn’t it? But it’s hard work to get those three points (who you are, why you’re going to win, and how big the opportunity is) quickly understood by your audience.
In my VC experience at IDG Ventures, the best pitch deck I ever saw was of Forus Health, a global medical device company in the ophthalmology space. I sourced the Series A deal for the firm, and also participated in the B round.
Forus’ deck was just the right length (around 12-15 slides). It hit on all the key heads an investor would look for, interspersed with pictures of on-field installations, retina images and patients being screened. It presented powerful market data on avoidable blindness (importantly, communicating it to be a large and global problem), and highlighted the pedigree and extensive healthcare experience of founders (not to mention, a rockstar medical advisory board).
The Series A deck was so good that even post-investment, wherever I witnessed the CEO presenting it (e.g. to our LPs, potential business partners etc.), it would charge me up again and ‘re-convince’ me that we have a winner on our hands.
