How many decks do you need?

A question that comes up with some regularity is how many decks you need. As we discussed in Chapter 3, your presentation deck should have as little text on it as you can get away with. That works when you are presenting, and you use the slides as prompts for yourself, to show photos or graphs, or if you want to emphasize the key points you are making for your investors. That isn’t the only way a deck is used. You will also hear about a “send-ahead deck” or a “leave-behind deck.”

To figure out how to customize the decks, think about how your recipients will use them. The send-ahead deck is for an investor to decide whether to take a meeting. They may also use it to prepare ahead of a phone screen. The leave-behind deck is for an investor to revisit your pitch and to look more closely at the details (especially financial tables or graphs) after you’ve left the meeting.

Some founders decide to make one deck, but as with all one-size-fits-all solutions, there are challenges with this. There will be a temptation to include more information than you strictly need on the presentation deck, so it makes sense without a voice-over. This can result in a messy deck stuffed with too much information. On the other hand, if you try to send a deck that only has graphs and photos on it, it is hard to make sense of it in isolation, without additional context.

My approach is to spend 80% of your time on the presentation deck. Ultimately, this is where the rubber hits the road; convincing someone to invest will happen in your pitch meetings and the conversations with your investors. In the process of creating your pitch, you are creating your narrative of your startup. Once you have a pitch and a deck you are happy with, think about what other collateral you need to complete the process.

Alternative decks

For the send-ahead deck, I’ve seen founders create a one-pager that summarizes the main reasons why the company will be successful. The one-pager is usually a PDF summarizing the entire pitch on a single page, with some graphics or charts to underline the salient points. Another approach is to create a “teaser deck”—instead of including all the points that are relevant to the pitching process, you add the three to four showstopper slides. If your team is world class, include a team slide. If your traction is taking off, lead with your traction slide.

The other common approach is to create a separate deck for emailing. You present from your great-looking presentation deck, but if someone wants to see the deck in advance or after your pitch, you send the investors a version that works on its own. With this approach, you should use the same order and headlines for each slide, but add more text to help make the narrative, so the slides tell the full story of what you are trying to do.

A couple of the startups I’ve worked with took yet another tack. Instead of spending effort on creating a second design of the deck to make more space for text, they used the “presenter notes” feature in Keynote or PowerPoint to add the additional information, context, and links to external resources. Most presentation software has a feature that enables you to print the slides with your presenter notes alongside it. Use that feature to create PDFs of your slides. Make sure that your slides are still readable at the size they appear on the PDF, but if you followed the “fewer words, larger text” approach to deck design we discussed in Chapter 3, that should work well.

Should you send a deck in advance?

Some founders are worried that if they send a deck to an investor, the investor will leak the deck or share it with one of your competitors. In my experience, that is exceedingly rare, for two reasons. For one thing, your presentation will have confidential information on it, but the magic in company building is in the execution. Even if a competitor had a PDF of your pitch, it wouldn’t be all that useful to them. Far more importantly, investors live and die by their deal flow. If they get caught sharing decks, founders will hesitate to reach out to them, which completely ruins the VC business model. Reputationally, VCs have much more to lose on sharing your deck than the tiny incremental improvement they may see in a portfolio company as the result of them having seen your investor story.

You don’t need to ask for an NDA before you send a deck—the VCs won’t sign it. There is one exception; if you have plans to file a patent, but you haven’t filed it yet, and if you are planning to talk about your intellectual property, make sure there is an NDA in place. The worst-case scenario here is that talking about the technology before you file your patent could invalidate the patent. In any case, information that sensitive shouldn’t go on a deck, and to protect the defensibility of your patents, you should insist on an NDA being signed before you discuss the details of unfiled patents. If you don’t have an NDA in place, don’t go into the details. Better yet, get your provisional filing in with the patent office to avoid the problem altogether.

It is safe to send your deck to VCs. If they ask for it, don’t push back and don’t refuse, but nothing says that you have to send the same version of your presentation deck to them—get creative, and remember that it’s all about information exchange. You may be asked for a deck, but usually, the request is actually for a particular set of information. How you convey that information is up to you—send your presentation PDF if you want, or create a separate version of it if you think that tells the story better.