Nobody starts a company because they love fundraising. But for many companies, accelerating a venture-scale business requires millions – or billions – of dollars worth of capital.

Unfortunately, building fundraising decks and pitching investors are not skills that founders develop before starting a company; they're learned by doing. So first-time entrepreneurs often struggle to craft a story – their story – that will end in a term sheet.

While it's true that every company is unique, it's also true that every pitch has the same goal: to assure venture investors that your company has the potential to achieve a valuation over a billion dollars. Your startup may not yet generate revenue, but it must generate conviction.

This is no small feat. It requires a leap of both reason and faith, which means that an effective pitch must instill confidence and inspire belief. An investor needs to see you are an expert in your space, a master of your own data, and the kind of storyteller who can convince customers, employees and the next round of investors to join you on an improbable journey. Early-stage founder, this is for you. It draws from six years of building pitches that have led to $4.5B in raised capital. As you embark on raising your seed or Series A round, you'll need to tell a story with a mix of vision and execution appropriate to your company stage. This resource will help you articulate why your company should exist – and give investors the best chance at squinting and seeing that billion-dollar outcome. Let's begin.

Think in acts, not slides

The startup world has a lot of lore – and deep archives – on pitching. There's commentary on early decks of now-famous companies, pattern-matching posts on pitching from venture capitalists and presentation templates galore.

Instead of thinking in terms of slides, we recommend that you separate your pitch into three basic "acts" and work through each of them one by one. These three acts represent the essential movements of every pitch and give founders a clear sense of what needs to be proven at each stage and how to prove it.

The three acts are as follows:

• Act I: Make your case. What are you building? What can it become? Why now? Why you?
  
• Act II: De-risk your approach. What have you done to increase your odds of success?
  
• Act III: Broaden your case. What does success mean to you, your investors and the world?
  

In this guide, we'll focus on the first act. This is where founders set the tone of the pitch and the framing for everything that follows, whereas the second and third acts lean into company-specific proof points. The first act is where we dedicate most of our time with founders – we find that we spend over half of our time crafting and refining the first few slides of the pitch. It's that important.

The first act and its pitch plots

Your deck's first act – or first few slides – must hook an investor. There's a misconception that you must follow a strict sequence of slides to make a compelling case. In fact, the first act of a pitch can contain any combination of slides, as long as it communicates your:

• Unique understanding of your market
  
• Key insight into that market
  
• Unique product or service
  
• Signal that your approach is working
  

That's a lot of impression to make and information to convey over your opening slides, let alone an entire deck. The first act does the heavy lifting, and it must do so efficiently. Over the years, we've noticed some recurring narratives when producing strong first acts. We call these pitch "plots" – or frameworks to organise your story. Choosing the right pitch plot is a critical first step.

The five most common pitch plots

Most early-stage startups map to one of five pitch plots. Each has a similar structure:

• The beats are the parts of a story that build on each other to form a plot. A good rule of thumb is to allocate one slide – and a minute or less of speaking – per beat.
  
• The sample deck in each section illustrates how the beats connect and how each pitch plot might look in the wild.
  
• The field notes are our top observations on each pitch plot – namely where they've worked best and fallen short for founders and companies.
  

A final, important note: There is not one plot that works best – they've all worked with investors. Before you pitch, experiment with different pitch plots to find the one that allows you to authentically explain the best, most resonant case for your opportunity.

🔄 Starting over

Many investors like to make bold bets – few wagers are more daring than reinventing a market from the ground up. Think Tesla or Ethos. Or perhaps economist Joseph Schumpeter, as this plot unleashes the "gale of creative destruction" through which an industry evolves by levelling and recreating itself.

The beats

"This is the mess that is our market today…"

The idea here is to paint a picture of a market, an industry or a workflow that is stuck in the past. Maybe it's still mired in paperwork. It might involve hours of manual work that could be completed in seconds with automation. Maybe the software hasn't gotten better since 1980. Or it simply hasn't taken off. Your goal is to make the audience feel this criminal level of inertia – whether it's with statistics, images or a powerful anecdote.

"Here is how it got there…"

Educate your audience. Help them to understand why the market looks the way it does. Is it dominated by incumbents with no incentive – or ability – to innovate? Is there a historical reason why it had to be the way it is, but no longer does? Has there been a big technological challenge that is yet to be solved? Whatever the answer, it should neatly set the stage for the key insight you're about to unveil.

"What if we could start over from scratch?"

Wipe the slate clean and show how your company has a distinct advantage precisely because you are a new entrant. Show the investor how this market might be rebuilt if a founder didn't have the baggage of being an incumbent, the burden of history or lack of available technology. Make the solution seem simple, straightforward and inevitable.

"That's what we've done…"

Contrast your solution to the mess you described earlier. Walk your audience through how your product works, with a focus on the tangible differences that result from starting from scratch: Is it faster, cheaper, more delightful, less onerous or simply better than what's out there?

The sample deck

The field notes

When it works. This plot works best if you are educating investors on a market that's unfamiliar to them. It allows you to demonstrate expertise and gives your investors the freedom to evaluate your business in a vacuum. If you can convince an investor that your company is the only one taking your approach, then you are the only founder who matters.

Use caution. Avoid "educating" an investor with a story they already know. If you don't know what an interested observer of your field definitely knows, you don't know your field. And worse yet, it's a negative signal. For example, don't hinge your pitch to fintech investors on the challenges of the unbanked. They've almost certainly heard (and probably have funded) that pitch. The last thing you want is to get caught in a ten-minute debate on the first slide – or worse yet, generate knowing nods and blank stares. It's also important to consider what it is about your approach that makes it unique. For example, if what sets you apart is your marketing strategy – as opposed to something more defensible – it might be hard to argue that you are fundamentally reimagining your market, and your pitch might seem like an overreach.

⬇️ Doing that over here

A precise and powerful analogy goes a long way, especially when your analogs are valued in the $1B+ range. Early-stage versions of Catch ("Gusto for freelancers") or BallerTV ("ESPN for amateur sports") would've been good candidates for this plot. This is a particularly useful choice when your investors are not already intimately familiar with your market.

The beats

"Look at this other market (or these other markets) that have evolved…"

Big waves move all boats, so if you see other major markets transformed by a trend, plausibly that trend will arrive in your market soon. In the past, these forces might have been mobility, the cloud or the internet of things. Today, they're more likely to be artificial intelligence, real-time decisioning or any number of trends that are reshaping markets. These examples are powerful, because they prime your approach before you introduce it.

"Our market has been left behind…"

Next, draw a sharp contrast between these markets and yours by explaining how your market works today. Focus on the pain points created by these forces not being reflected. If done well, you'll create a sense of inevitability. Nature abhors a vacuum.

"It would look like this…"

This is your chance to pay off the analogy. Paint a picture of what your market would look like if it met the modern standard. Take your audience step-by-step through a transformed experience and its implications for users, for your industry and for the company that can deliver that experience.

"This is exactly what we are building…"

Present your company as the agent of change between where the market is today and the perfect world that you've just laid out. Explain what you've already accomplished to put you on that path and what remains to be done. The idea is to show, simply and clearly, that you are on course to realise that vision.

The sample deck

The field notes

When it works. This plot is entirely dependent on the size of the gap between where your market is and what it should, would, or could be with the right technology. It is also particularly effective if you can distil what makes you unique down to a single technology or business model (e.g. artificial intelligence, SaaS, etc.) so that the link to other markets is extremely clear.

Use caution. Pressure test every aspect of the analogy to make sure it's airtight. If there is any inconsistency between your market and its analog, investors will start poking holes. The fewer variables between the two markets the better. The last thing you want to do is to get dragged into an argument about a market that you don't even operate in. Plus, there's a good chance investors have spent time – and capital – getting smart on your analog markets.

💡 But here's the thing…

This is less of a plot than it is a rhetorical device, but it can be an incredibly effective way to open a pitch. If your goal is to convince an investor that you are the best person to solve a problem, then the best thing you can do is demonstrate that you understand the problem better than anyone else. For example, this plot might be a nice fit for