How seed investors want an early pitch deck built

The Consumer VC work group compares deck structures, and Kirsten Green proposes a slide order for a pre-launch consumer company with a working demo.

Updated October 13, 2026

A deck carries one story; most of the group gets to the product early and keeps market claims specific enough to check.

Tell one story. Josh Elman uses five parts: the problem, the solution, who has the problem and why they will adopt, why this team now, and the raise. Kirsten Green builds it as the shift, the wedge and the layers, so the big vision reads as a sequence.
Reach the product fast and name the risks. Nabeel Hyatt has founders write the 18-month story first, get to the product early because it holds the founder's best thinking, and put the risks in the deck. He would rather earn one strong yes than a stack of lukewarm interest.
A market the reader can check. Alfred Lin says the market sets how big a company can get, so the team slide can't carry the whole decision. For technical founders, Niko Bonatsos opens with the demo and the founder's own pain, keeps market size small and checkable, and wants a why-now that names a specific enabler.
Put the business model third. For a consumer company with a working demo, Kirsten's order is the shift, the demo, the business model, evidence of behavior, the layers, what can't be copied, then team, risks and the raise. The model goes third because it decides whether the demo is fundable.

Group chat with Kirsten, Alfred, Nabeel, Niko, Josh — the Consumer VC work group

Question:

What makes an early-stage pitch deck work?

Josh ElmanPartner at Andreessen Horowitz. Founded the growth team at Twitter

I think the deck works when it helps you tell one story: why you're doing this and how big it can be. I've never thought a deck is strictly required. Its job is to give the story structure so you get through every key point in the meeting.

The structure I've recommended to founders for years has five parts

Medium:

The problem in the world you're going to solve.
Your solution, and why it uniquely solves that problem.
How many people have the problem and why they'll adopt your solution. This slide covers market size and go-to-market together.
Why you're the exact right people to do this now.
How you'll get there: the raise, the plan, and the use of funds.

Some founders open with the team, and that works too. In that case you move from team to problem by telling the personal story of why you started.

For consumer decks specifically, slide 3 is where I spend the most time. Pre-launch, I'm asking two questions. Does this feel like it "should" work at scale? And if one person explains it to a friend, would both of them feel they "should" use it?

Medium

If you have early data, don't fill the deck with downloads or waitlist numbers. Show me whether people perform the core action, and how often they do it compared with how often you expect. A simple retention grid that splits users into cold, casual, and core tells me more than any benchmark comparison, because benchmarks tell different stories for different products

Medium.

Anyway, a lot of the best companies I've backed changed direction after the first deck. Discord started as a game, Musical.ly as an education app. So the team slide ends up carrying a lot of the decision, and it should show that these founders are hungry to iterate until they find what works.

Kirsten GreenFounder and Managing Partner of Forerunner. Board member at Glossier

An early deck works when it connects two altitudes in a straight line. You paint the big picture, then pull it all the way down to today and show exactly how you get off the ground.

entrepreneur

Dollar Shave Club is my favorite example. Michael Dubin was selling razors at launch, but he pitched me a massive men's grooming company. If he'd pitched a razor company, I wouldn't have invested. What made the pitch credible was the bridge: he knew he could own razors, he knew the male consumer had evolved and been overlooked by large CPG brands that weren't using data, and he had a plan to test razors, collect data, then expand into hair care and more.

entrepreneur

So my working framework for the deck has three parts:

The shift. What changed in consumer behavior, technology, or culture that opens this window now?
The wedge. One thing you launch with and nail, including the business model. If the plan is a little bit of everything to start, I think you're doomed.
The layers. How each brick earns the right to build the next one, so the big vision reads as a sequence instead of a wish.

The model has to be on the page early. We get pitched lots of beautiful products I'd personally love to buy that don't fit, because the plan is to sell through a big retailer. Glossier anchored in product but used technology to build a direct relationship with the customer, and that relationship is what I'm underwriting.

entrepreneur

Last, the deck doesn't need every answer. It needs to show you can find them: that you see what others don't and move with precision.

forerunnerventures

Nabeel HyattEIR and former General Partner at Spark Capital. Board observer at Discord

Josh is right that the deck exists to carry one story. I'd just write that story before touching any of the five slides, because founders fall back on numbers when they don't have a story to tell. When I help a founder get ready for their next round, I don't open a slide template. I ask: what do you want to be able to tell the world in 18 months about this product? Write that down first. After that we can argue about whether it's actually doable or whether you're sandbagging.

Spotify

Here's how I'd structure the deck:

Build it around whatever you've obsessed over the most, and for nearly every early founder that's the product, so I'd get to it faster than a long problem section allows. A founder spent maybe two or three hours on the TAM slide, and these days a model probably spat it out for them. The product holds thousands of hours of their thinking, so that's where an investor actually learns who they're dealing with.Spotify
Put the risks in the deck. Founders love the realtor trick: list everything wonderful, then point at the one flaw so nobody thinks about the other 30. But you're an early-stage startup, so of course something in the business is broken. Say what's risky and what you haven't figured out. The right investor will tell you they don't believe that risk is real, or they're happy to take it on, or they think you can solve it. That's the conversation you want.hallwaychat (My co-host Fraser Kelton passed along a line from someone at his firm: the fastest way to a no is a pitch with no risk in it, because that isn't a venture business.)
Write it to get one strong yes. The thing I figured out by my third and fourth startups was to pitch the way I wanted to pitch, not the way my founder friends told me to. Pitching that way earns you lots of strong no's plus one or two strong yeses, and that's ten times more valuable than a stack of "seems okay." Lukewarm interest doesn't become a check or a board seat or someone who joins your cause for ten years.hallwaychat

Question:

Josh argues that for pre-launch consumer decks the team slide ends up carrying most of the decision, because the best companies often change direction after the first deck. Alfred, do you agree? If a founder has no product data yet, what specific evidence on the slides convinces you this team will find what works?

Alfred LinPartner at Sequoia Capital. Former Chairman and COO of Zappos

I agree in part. The market and the founder are the two most important variables, and they do different jobs: the market sets how big the company can get, and the founder sets how big it will get

YouTube. Pre-launch, the team slide carries the "will" half. A great team in a market that won't be much bigger in 10 years still has a low ceiling, so I don't let the team slide carry the whole decision.

With no product data, I look for four kinds of evidence in the deck and the meeting.

They have lived the problem and stayed with it. The founders I've seen succeed were solving problems they had personally experienced, and many of them got the flywheel going only after several triesYouTube. The deck should name the specific problem they kept working on, beyond the bare fact that they started a company.
They show clear thinking at the right level of detail. Ellen DaSilva at Summer Health was a Sequoia Scout before she founded the company, and when we backed them at pre-seed in 2021 her writing already focused on first-order issues, with depth only where it matteredoutlierspath. A deck shows the same thing in what the founder chose to include and what they cut.
They separate inputs from outputs. A founder who can say which inputs they will measure and change before launch is someone who will find what works. Most teams only watch outputsYouTube.
They are honest. I ask founders to name their worst reference and explain why. How introspective the answer is tells me whether we can trust each other enough to work through a pivot togetherMedium.

The deck still has to answer Don Valentine's question: will this company matter in 10 years? Specific facts about the market and why it matters make the answer credible, even when the company is one or two people and an idea

Medium.

Question:

Nabeel says to get to the product fast because founders spend only a few hours on the TAM slide. Alfred says the market sets how big a company can get, so a pre-launch deck needs specific facts about where the market is going. Niko, for the technical founders you back who are their own customers, which of those two should get the early slides, and what did a deck that did this well actually show you?

Niko BonatsosFounder of Verdict Capital. Former Managing Director at General Catalyst

Product first. For technical founders who are their own customers, the product is the market evidence, because they are the first data point of demand. Last Thanksgiving I posted that you don't need a perfect pitch deck, you need a prototype that works

LinkedIn. So slides 1 and 2 should be the demo and the founder's own pain.

Saturn is the example I keep coming back to. Dylan Diamond and Max Baron were barely a year out of high school when they met Denali Tietjen and me in May 2019. Their pitch opened with what they lived every day: it was easier to schedule a conference call with colleagues than dinner with friends. Then they made the case for building a social platform around "shared time"

Medium. The problem came first, from their own lives, and the market argument followed from it.

Alfred is right that market size can't be skipped. I want it smaller and checkable: a few big numbers an investor can validate with one call to a banker friend, plus customers or prospects they can talk to

Medium. A model-generated TAM slide adds nothing.

The market slide I actually care about is "why now," and it should name a specific enabler: front-facing camera gave us Snapchat, GPS gave us Waze

Medium. In May 2020 I joked that the Why now slide in every deck raising money was the Covid-19 slide

X. That is Kirsten's "shift," made concrete enough to check.

Two more tests from that 2013 list. Could my mother in Greece explain it in five words? And does it sound silly to most people, the way "Snapchat is for sexting" did? A deck that makes most partners shrug and one lean in is Nabeel's strong-yes outcome.

On team, cut "hundreds of years of collective experience"

Medium. Name the people who quit good jobs to join before there was a product. That answers my last 2013 question: are their friends dying to work for them?

Question:

Niko says that at pre-seed a working prototype carries most of the weight, and Nabeel wants founders to reach the product fast. Alfred says the early facts will mostly be about the market and why it matters. Kirsten, your shift, wedge and layers framework sits between those views. For a pre-launch consumer company with a working demo, what slide order would you recommend, and where does the business model slide go?

Kirsten GreenFounder and Managing Partner of Forerunner. Board member at Glossier

With a working demo, I'd run it in this order:

The shift. One slide on what changed in behavior or technology, specific enough to check, the way Niko described "why now."
The demo, framed as the wedge. Show the one thing you launch with.
Business model, directly after the demo.
Evidence of behavior. Even pre-launch, show what people actually do with the prototype, including your own usage. The biggest risk I see in consumer is the say/do gap, so waitlists and survey enthusiasm count for little here.
The layers. How the wedge earns the right to the next product, and the next. Market size goes here, as the sum of the layers, which answers Alfred's ceiling question without a model-generated TAM.
What can't be copied: distribution, the data loop that makes the product smarter with use, and why people will trust it. With off-the-shelf models, the advantage moves to who assembles and refines the best experience.forerunnerventures
Team, risks, and the raise.

The business model goes third because it decides whether the demo is fundable. We get pitched plenty of beautiful products I'd love to buy that don't fit, because the plan is to sell through a big retailer. Glossier anchored in product but used technology to build a direct relationship with its customer, and that relationship is the thing I'm underwriting.

entrepreneur If an investor loves the demo and only finds out on slide 12 that the model doesn't work, you've lost them anyway.

Placing the model there also connects the wedge to the layers. Dollar Shave Club's razors only made sense as the start of a men's grooming company because the direct relationship and the data were in place from day one. That's what let Michael test, gather data, and expand into hair care.

entrepreneur

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Frequently Asked Questions

What should a founder cover in a first investor meeting?
How the customer is changing, what the product does about it, and the user behavior behind any numbers. Leave time to show weak data and see how the investor responds.
Which questions trip founders up in a first investor meeting?
Why the company will matter in 10 years, why a customer changes what they do, who comes back and why, and what this round pays for. Each needs a specific example or number.
What do investors look for before a startup has traction?
Founders who live the problem and have real insight into it, an idea people would describe to a friend, and early users who return on their own, even if there are few of them.
How does a pre-seed round work?
Usually one lead sets the terms and angels fill in around it. Size the round from the milestones it has to reach, keep one instrument and one cap, and keep the open window short.
What makes an accelerator application stand out?
Why this team has an edge on this problem, a product the reviewer can try, numbers that hold up to a follow-up question, and a change the team shipped after watching users.
What goes in a monthly investor update?
Runway and 3 to 6 consistent metrics, wins and setbacks, people changes, next month's milestones, the biggest open risk, and two or three asks an investor can act on.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How seed investors want an early pitch deck built

Consumer VC

Frequently Asked Questions

What should a founder cover in a first investor meeting?

Which questions trip founders up in a first investor meeting?

What do investors look for before a startup has traction?

How does a pre-seed round work?

What makes an accelerator application stand out?

What goes in a monthly investor update?

Your ideas, super powered.

How seed investors want an early pitch deck built

Consumer VC

Frequently Asked Questions

What should a founder cover in a first investor meeting?

Which questions trip founders up in a first investor meeting?

What do investors look for before a startup has traction?

How does a pre-seed round work?

What makes an accelerator application stand out?

What goes in a monthly investor update?

Your ideas, super powered.