Turn VC theory into practice by mastering the pitch deck and the storytelling arcs that win investors, customers, and teams.
1. Don't Pitch a Template. Tell Your Story.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools a founder has.
A clear story wins over investors, inspires customers, and convinces early employees to join your mission. The best pitch decks are not crammed with jargon or endless data. They take something complex and present it in a way that anyone can understand. Clarity always beats complexity.
But there’s no single “boilerplate” pitch. Every company has a different origin story, and the most effective decks lean into their unique positioning.
Too often I receive a pitch deck devoid of personality and that feels more akin to a checklist. The best founders learn how to stir emotion and pitch a mission beyond the deck.
So what are some effective narrative arcs?
2. Narrative Arcs
Narrative Arc | Arc Description | Example | Use If |
Vision for the Future | Our vision for the future is inevitable → here’s why → we’re building it now and this is just the first step. | Canva — great design is limited by a complex toolchain → democratise tools and unlock a massive market of prosumers. | Your biggest strength is conviction about where the world is headed (climate, AI, biotech). |
Founders journey | The product and vision is the culmination of the founder’s life experiences and traditionally reflects their “life’s work”.
These experiences translate to an earned secret about the market they’re uniquely placed to exploit. | Air BNB - the idea for AirBNB emerged through personal experience living in SF and renting out an air bed to free up cash. | Your unique life experiences express why you will win and your unique insight to the market. |
Problem → Solution | Big, undeniable pain → here’s the elegant fix → traction shows it works. | Carta seed (2009) — paper stock certificates are broken → digital cap tables. | You’re solving something obvious and viscerally painful, but need to win investor confidence with structure and simplicity. |
Why Now? | The conditions have finally aligned (tech/regulation/behavior) → the window is open → we’re the ones seizing it. | Coinbase seed — timing was everything. Bitcoin is scaling, we will build the on-ramp before the regulatory gates close and benefit from massive market expansion. | You’re in a market where timing is decisive. |
Ecosystem / Platform | The system is broken or incomplete → we’re the missing keystone → everything else grows because of us. | Stripe — “Payments infrastructure for the internet.” Not just a product, but the rails that powered a whole ecosystem. | Works well when building infrastructure, developer tools, or a platform that others depend on. |
3. Defining Your Unfair Advantage
Step 1: Define your unfair advantage.
What is the one thing that sets your start up apart? That means your team rather than others will succeed?
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Do you have a unique insight into the future of the market?
- Is your team uniquely positioned to solve this problem?
- Does this company amount to your life’s work?
- Has a market, technology or regulatory unlock freshly made your company possible?
Investors do not look for balanced teams or ideas. We look for spikes that confer a team with tiny resources a chance to win a massive market.
Step 2: Choose a narrative that amplifies this advantage.
There are many ways to tell a story - construct the narrative that amplifies the greatest differentiator or boldest bet.
- If you have bold vision for the future, lean Vision-First.
- If you’ve lived the problem, lean Founder’s Journey.
- If your timing is your edge, lean Why Now?
- If your product will propel forward a fresh market, lean Ecosystem.
The Coinbase seed deck (here) is a great example of a “why now’ narrative. Bitcoin is a “new digital currency” with accelerating adoption but tools and UX gates usage.
Aside: Be wary of using generic ‘why now’ statements - “AI unlocks X”. If the category is already busy why now is just a precondition and would not translate as the spike to construct a narrative around.
Step 3: Frame out the narrative with slide headings.
Each slide should have a single idea; and together the deck should construct a cogent narrative leaving the investor a clear idea of why they should back you.
Remember pitch decks are there to amplify your story. Keep slides visual. Avoid more than 2 bullet points. You want the investor focussed on what your saying and for the pitch to assist your storytelling.
Step 4: Iterate. Reconfigure. See what works.
It is common for the first pitch deck to go through 20+ iterations on the path to a crisp version of the story.
Bonus Tips:
- Find founders who have raised and practice. Make sure they tell you the unvarnished truth.
- Look for visual queues of interest. Are people leaning in? Asking questions?
- Focus on the questions people ask — are they ‘good’ questions or do they just not seem to “get it”. If it’s the latter, then it’s on you to tell a sharper story.
- Is the narrative landing?
- What are the three key points of the presentation?
- Why should you invest in us?
The questions investors ask are always more reflective of their hesitations than the ‘feedback’ they will send you.
3. Pitch Deck Do's & Don'ts
✅ Do’s
Keep it punchy | Target 12–16 slides for a pre-seed / seed pitch. Each slide should answer one question, nothing more. |
Place you and your team front and centre | At the early stage it is always about the team. Why are you uniquely positioned to win this market? |
Choose a clear narrative | Each founding story is unique and yet so many pitch decks rhyme. Craft a narrative that amplifies your unfair advantage. |
Demo the product | Bring the product to life and help the investor see first hand the power for your customers. |
Bring the customer voice front and centre. | Anchor every statement in grounded customer truths. Instead of making high level market observations, focus on low level customer detail. |
Show don’t tell | Leverage numbers and real traction to bring the story to life. |
Design matters. | A beautiful, readable deck signals craftsmanship and clarity of thought. |
❌ Don’ts
Avoid adjectives. | Adjectives = sloppy storytelling. Provide evidence and let it speak for itself. |
Too much technical detail. | Clarity of technical communication > depth. Try to avoid getting stuck in the weeds of a technical discussion. |
Don’t be generic. | Avoid a slide-by-slide hit of problem → product → market → GTM → traction → team. |
TAM > SAM > SOM. | Personal pet peeve but this is not an interesting slide. Layer a conversation of product > pricing power > market sizing.
Where you start is less important than where you’re going. |
Avoid word vomit | If the investor is reading your slide they are not listening to you. Stick to declarative statements, visualisations, and customer narrative. |
4. Pitch Deck Showdown:: Canva vs AirBNB
😇 The Good: Canva
Canva’s seed deck is a masterclass in early stage storytelling.
What Canva Got Right
- Crystal clear narrative
You won’t see a generic TAM, SAM and SOM slide. The market sizes across the value chain demonstrate the value on the table. While the pyramids below highlight the potential for Canva to expand the market, cleverly depicting Adobe an already public company and Wall St darling as capturing only a small part of the pie.
- An obviously massive market
You won’t see a generic TAM, SAM and SOM slide. The market sizes across the value chain demonstrate the value on the table. While the pyramids below highlight the potential for Canva to expand the market, cleverly depicting Adobe an already public company and Wall St darling as capturing only a small part of the pie.
- An earned secret.
This is expert level delineation of the core of the technical and product counter-positioning. Bringing to life the stark difference in the status quo user experience vs. what Canva imagined.
- Novel distribution insights.
Right from the beginning Canva was thinking about how they could propel growth. Cloud unlocking collaboration and the path from single seat → multi seat expansion. As well as the templates optimised for SEO, their now infamous organic growth engine.
What Canva Can Improve:
- The founder’s journey front and centre.
“We’ve done this before” was buried on slide 10 and the team slide even further on slide 20. This is somewhat typical of Australian and Kiwi teams gun shy on expressing why they are THE team to take on THIS market opportunity. Mel and Cliff’s experience at Fusion books is a beautiful first act and validates through first hand experience how they uncovered the core insights that underpins Canva. Bringing this forward would have lended more credibility to the market observations up front.
- Business model product fit.
The least believable slide was the micropayments business model. It feels imagined, doesn’t reference by analogy and was disconnected to the market.
👿 The Bad: AirBNB
AirBNB managed to raise their seed round in spite of a dull deck, devoid of storytelling.
Instead of honing in on their unique insight and Brian Chesky’s unique journey of discovery for AirBNB, the deck follows the famous Sequoia pitch deck template (see below).
What AirBnB Got Right
- One idea per slide: Each slide clearly focusses on a single idea.
- Numbers not adjective: It reasons well from analogy and leverages concrete indicators for demand “Couchsurfing.com - 600,000 users”. Shows that they are tapping into a vein of poorly serviced demand.
- Early distribution insights: AirBNB is a network effects company - finding early novel distribution insights is a crucial. This thinking on day one shines through.
What AirB2B Can Improve
- What is their unfair advantage? Because the pitch is so traditionally structured it is not clear what their unique advantage is.
- Is this a fresh market insight? We can increase the market for travel accomodation by unlocking fresh inventory at a different price point.
- Was the idea born from a founder’s journey? “Founder’s Brian and Joe, struggling to pay rent in SF rented out their loft when hotels were fully booked for a big design conference… discovering latent demand (consumers wanted to save money) and latent supply (people want to make money from empty housing inventory).
- Fuzzy problem <> market definition. The connection to culture feels forced and doesn’t translate to an urgent customer need. Testimonials and customer voice is left to the end and should have been brought forward to lend credibility to the problem definition.
- Artificially constrained market. Reduces AirBNB to serving the budget market - doesn’t encourage investors to believe in the adjacent possible.
AirBnB’s Narrative, Re-ordered
The narrative: Founder’s journey → central insight
- The origin story (founder’s journey)
- A demand side insight
- Voice of customer (demand side)
- The supply side insight
- Other market signals
- Product insight
- An obviously big opportunity AND the adjacent possible
- Key distribution insight
- Ask and milestones
“While living in SF, struggling to pay rent we learned that during a big design conference all of the hotels were sold out and wildly expensive - so we rented out an air bed in our loft”
“Current supply (hotels) leaves demand on the table. Consumers want more choice, lower price points, different locations and more cultural immersion”
Testimonials that tell the story of their customer. An effective approach is telling a single consumer story
“There is a tonne of latent property supply that is under-utilised and lazy. Landlords that travel. Spare rooms. The most expensive and most in demand locations are the best markets”
“Couchsurfing.com has 600k users, Craigslist attempts and fails to solve this market place challenge”
Demo / wireframe walkthrough - bring the product to life! Breakdown the customer product unlock - building trust in the consumer, life map based search and UX.
“There is large unmet demand today and a clear path to taking market share from the $XB hotel market that is highly fragmented and homogenous.”
“Beat the cold start problem through event driven marketing - providing the value maximising path to early demand and supply unlock”
“$500k to generate $2M of run rate revenue and X stays at AirBNB”
Check out the Gamma exemplar below.
The Sequoia Template: Why I’d Avoid It?
- It doesn’t focus the investor on YOUR unfair advantage
- It screams of an MBA style answer. VCs do not invest by tick box means.
- It doesn’t let the spikes shine through.
Use the headings as inspiration for the topics but blend in your story and find a structure that best represents your fresh take on the market.
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