On August 2, 2022, our special investor guest Max Fleitmann roasted 5 pitch decks of consenting startups in the presence of Roastmaster General Shaun Gold and Executioner-in-Residence Stephane Nasser.
See below the video and transcript of the event.
Wanna attend the next Roast or get your deck roasted? Check out this post!
Pitch Deck Roast 1 - Video
Pitch Deck Roast 1 - Transcript
Hello hello hello !
Welcome to the first open vc pitch roast coming to you live from the 305 that's right miami!
I'm Sean Gold coming to you from the hottest new startup tech hub Silicon Swamp seriously miami a tech hub you say startup accelerator and people think it's something for their car anyways i want to welcome you all here because we're going to show you how a vc thinks when they open your pitch deck this event is being live streamed on youtube linkedin twitter um so please like share retweet subscribe all that jazz and most importantly if you want your pitch deck to be roasted we are going to have a link in the chat so if you're brave enough and courageous enough to come on the next roast we do we'll be glad to have you so the way this is going to work is that we've collected five pitch decks from consenting that's right consenting founders and we're going to roast them live right here in front of you so to do that i'd like to welcome the man who regrets not being born before the reign of terror the man who wishes the guillotine was back in style the man who wants to have his corporate office at the bastille the executioner in residence and co-founder of openvc stephan nasser hey sean hi everyone uh thanks uh thanks for the intro that's that's a strong intro uh hard to go after that uh hi everybody we're really really happy and excited to launch this this new format this uh this roast uh it's a new thing uh for us at openvc and uh you know in the past six months we've spent a lot of time connecting founders and investors within pitch decks i have personally reviewed i think 100 pitch decks a week for the past six months and so uh we see a lot of you know recurring mistakes happening and want to help with that and we also see a lot of ways that that we can help and we thought okay this format you know fun and educational could be a great way to achieve that uh as a quick reminder if you're not familiar openvc is a free and open platform where we help funders connect with investors so if you're an early stage tech founder german sas company u.s biotech anything from priscilla to series a you can head out to openvc.app check us out it's a 100 free for both sides and that's it for the promo and shown back to you all right well thank you for that openvc is dope as the kids say and uh we're keeping it dope with this rose so i'm gonna introduce our special vc guests who will hold the title of chief roasting officer just for this event he's a berlin-based venture capitalist which means he's dull and obnoxious the blitz to mike krieg the only german who won't ask for your papers the man who will make you wish for a new berlin wall max fleitman hey guys thanks for for inviting me to this event yeah as you already said instead tuning in from berlin uh i have a really really special connection to pitch decks because i was building shitty pitch decks myself back in the time over the last 15 years i've created several businesses at first myself and then switched sides of the table and became a full-time investor over the last two years i looked at i don't know thousands of pitch decks of good companies bad companies and something in between and i also have like this special passion for pitch decks because i have another company that helps founders raise capital for their um startup and so i helped over 3 000 founders raise money for their startup and really excited to be here today and see some good pitch decks bad pitch decks and something in between hold on there's going to be good pitch decks i guess we'll never know all right well donkey shane max that was a very short introduction but pointless all right so next up we have the three rules of the roast now number one this is important this is all in good fun we're trying to make this educational we're trying to provide actionable advice for founders who are watch for founders who are watching so being able to take a joke in life is so important especially with decks like these seriously what were you thinking when you made these um number two these are real conditions max does not know the decks he hasn't seen them he's going to open them and spend two to three minutes on each while saying out loud what he thinks there is no filter the first thoughts that come to his mind so you can understand the thought process of when you submit your deck to an investor um you know so he's going to give his unfiltered true honest thoughts on each train wreck i mean deck andy has his checkbook so in the event that i am wrong hold on in the event that i am wrong let me try again um max may may take a meeting and may actually invest in one of these startups um and dogs may actually be able to talk i don't know the final rule is that we have 10 minutes total per deck so in the chat which i see is blowing up feel free to comment ask questions we'll use that to discuss each deck after max's review nothing is off the table we want to hear from you um so yeah before we begin i want to salute and commend each founder who is willing to submit their deck to this rose to have the guts and the bravery and the fortitude to get roasted on all of our channels and by us um these aren't the worst decks we've ever seen uh so that's something you guys have going for you um and you'll forever be known for your courage but definitely not your entrepreneur not definitely not your entrepreneurial acumen that's for sure let's do it the first one is in the lace which i can promise will be the first and final time a venture capitalist ever seriously takes a look at this deck take it away max okay here we go
so max joint
okay so let's open this deck and take a first look so the first thing that comes to my mind when i see this kind of thing is a hockey stick that i see in a lot of pitch decks and honestly uh i can't see them anymore because in most cases these kind of hockey sticks are can be found in somewhere around the financial numbers and in 120 of the decks that i saw this this was like total [ __ ] so let's check on what it is here so um we want to connect the wealthiest 15 with the rest of the world out so i was asking myself why do we want to connect these two groups let's go one line further so first of all i see like four or five different sizes of the font inside the deck and so i really don't know where to look at so i'm i just see something growing on here but i don't know if they mean if this is growing or what kind of thing is growing because i would expect something way more clearer to be honest and extreme poverty is stagnating so i don't know what they really want to tell me with this kind of like problem side despite of the 85 percent of the world lives in poverty so maybe just leave all of this down here out of the deck because it doesn't add any value and now we are going to a really really crazy slide that i might need like more than five minutes to understand because we have like different axes on the bottom here and low-income countries this is us so honestly i would be really annoyed to look at this because i don't get the sense or the message of this kind of slide and this is really important because i only will be only like spending 10 to 15 seconds looking at this and so either choose just like bold text blocks or on the other hand visuals that i can actually understand and i don't see any of these two around here so i would probably click just one slide further now we have the same message than or as on the like first slide the cover slide that we saw so uh that's it's interesting to be honest and now ah okay now now we are going to the solution so we are trying to use the money of the wealth and make it more like either like tax them more they won't like it i i think or just give it away to fill up philanthropy so where is the business case here i'm asking my myself now um okay so actually we are building a platform here obviously and we are trying to uh make donating money easier i guess and to be honest now we are on slide six of the pitch deck and i really don't know what all of this is about so probably we should be looking at some kind of like product at some point here and we'll get to that i'm sure i still don't know what it's about yeah it's like it's it's weird it's weird so obviously it is something around fundraising or fintech now is the one of the buzzwords and impact so maybe the market slide will show us how big all of this is ah okay donor advised funds so like a market size for me is something that we can grasp a little bit of and so for me it would be interesting to see what our share of all of this donations would be um and if okay we are not just like doing it in the us but we are also doing it in the global market so we are really going big here uh i don't really understand why this is important at this point so okay now we are looking at the solution that does matching tracking and impact and all all in all i just see so many different like logos text blocks and everything that i really don't understand what all of this is about but i guess ignacio has a plan what he's doing with all of this um at least he has been a global fellow for 10 different uh times in his life and there are also a lot of logos so um in general i would say all of these slides are like filled up with different stuff that i don't understand right away and
maybe this is like the only slide that is really really relevant and we can delete all of the 10 slides before because in the end this is the mission of the company i guess and yeah they are launching 600k i'm really really glad that it's not more because i think there needs to be done some kind of like work on strategy and i would probably drop this deck because it really doesn't get me excited and i'll see any opportunity here oh come on max this business could make hundreds of dollars it it probably can but i won't be the one who will participating in the upside ah i guess i guess the the checkbook is closed for in lace so uh actually so max just discovered the deck i i had a bit of an advantage because i could look at it uh earlier and so i think one one thing about this day that could really be improved is the the way they frame their the narrative is quite political if you look at the first few slides it's about okay look the word isn't fair it's very unfair it's super unfair and by the way you are privileged right and then we're gonna either tax you or you're gonna have to give money willingly so it's not super uh enticing you know it's kind of um you know giving you a lesson and and it's not starting from a need or from a from actual use case however there's something interesting if you look at the market slide here yeah they're not just above this one yeah so it's a big market right it's a big market there's a lot of money to be made and we can imagine some intermediation platform can be successful so what i would have done in terms of narrative is i would completely get rid of the kind of political narrative at the start and i would start with okay there is like 300 billion dollar individual donations in the us which is a lot right and then you have the problem which is uh i think above uh if you go above yeah there's not just below slide six yeah this one so the left part is the promo cover is over 400 beyond our donations every year in the us which is huge however it's uh it's a pain in the ass ineffective negative and scalable that's the second slide your like the problem the first side is the opportunity second side the problem and then the the part here on the right the blue part that's your solution yeah right so the thing that we need to to show here from a startup perspective is that the way fundraising or donations are working right now it's broken and now is the right time to change it and if we are successful at changing it then there is this like huge opportunity of taking some of this like huge numbers that we saw on the market slide and put it like in our pockets if we can say so and this is our tool for it yeah yeah exactly and so and i see some comments that are very interesting people complaining about the way investors think and and i think that's actually the value of what we're doing right now right because max is actually making an effort and trying to understand now think about a vc who opens your pitch deck on your mobile phone in the metro in paris right how much attention and focus is going to give to your your pitch deck and that's that's the kind of level attention you're going to get especially if you're cold emailing so from that point of view i think it's on the founders side to make the effort although it feels unfair and i think someone said the way fundraising is done today is broken i tend to agree but it's also how the market is right so it's up to you as a founder to to do your homework i think they should change the name from enlace to entombed fix the deck give it back to max for for a second shot fix it up and let's get you funded already you got a good problem you're trying to solve i don't know what it is but we'll we'll find it out together yep absolutely and then on the if you can scroll down a little bit yeah so this this uh just a few more comments just trying to to to add on top if you go back to slide eight so the geography here so i don't know how you guys feel about that but i feel it's kind of you're giving me facts which are you know interesting but this belongs to an appendix right you're not gonna get the asian donation market on year one or two right so this is maybe appendix yeah yeah and if i'm if i'm thinking about like good pitch decks in general a good pitch tank is always about leaving information out so we have two or three minutes of the attention of an investor who opens the deck and we decide how they spend these two or three minutes and every information that is too much on these kind of slides just is like this uh or weird information here weird information there you can always put it inside the appendix but you are going to decide okay on the first ten slide this is the most important information and this also shows that you have underst understood your product but also the market and the most important things out of it yeah and i just want to say we have the founder ignacio rodriguez in the chat he's the founder being rosie he said this was amazing there we go thanks for putting it up there thank you ignacio for being brave and being able to take the punches you you you are an inspiration uh especially to me to stick with a real job all right and uh i'm so happy to provide more structured feedback you know later on uh if you need to shall we move on to the next one oh yeah we definitely gotta do the next one next up is sim sim illusion which i mean it's uh it's a short deck shorter than the time the founders spent on coming up with a name some illusion what is this from the makers of sim city i mean branding 101 guys come on max take it away makshnel yeah so uh opening up this thing i'm always like really annoyed by weirdly aligned decks to be honest because it just like if i only have this kind of short amount of time i like to have like a very clear structure on the stuff that i see and i also really want to see what this all of this is about on the cover slide simulate reality make better decisions for what so i need some kind of context to understand all of this uh okay so coming up next thing that i just see is like no uh no slight numbers or anything so it would be hard to reference with my colleagues but now we are diving into a storyline here so meet adam um i remember this guy from wework i hope you could they couldn't they couldn't pick a better founder elizabeth holmes from theranos not available i i mean was was bernie madoff to to to to extreme or i mean come on okay this looks like a rainbow down here so uh i think the problem is something around like making decisions and not knowing the consequences but we can leave a lot of this stuff out and just put a punch line down here um but now we can tame the chaos okay uh i'm i think like the the way they just put in the photo here looks really really weird and as someone was doing it in paint or something and also the choice of the font looks really really like uh as someone was doing it who has never done a design before together is indented in the top title like why is there a space why isn't it just started at the left of the page yeah and there are like three different indents here so come on okay but we can tame the chaos so we can build a business inside a simulation okay oh okay oh okay now now it's getting really really weird because we got another color in the house and now we are also have some kind of like it looks like i don't know age of empires or something that is coming up uh on the bottom right and the choice of fonts and also the indents again is like really weird so i don't know what the heck is going on here so we should probably work a little bit on that and little a little i i don't think i mean i don't think i can do this how do you roast a catastrophe okay how do you how do you roast the look at this what is this is this adam newman's new startup or is he just here as the as the mascot yeah and i would ask myself where did you get the inspo for this deck so i've never i've never seen something like this before it looks like like the the the stuff that i was doing in fifth grade in school to be honest and we should pro okay we should probably just dump it into the trash and do something like a new deck again but ah okay okay so i should buy a game and not software in a software as a service model and i don't know what the heck is going on here to be honest uh okay and now it gets really really weird because just like hundreds of numbers are thrown at us and ah okay ah nice but at least they see that we as vcs need a big upside so we see like 128 million dollars in mrr so this is what really gets me excited but but we need some kind of like explanation for this because otherwise this would be the biggest [ __ ] show that i've ever seen uh so is this a competition slide i'm not sure really i think so i think so it's a competition slide i don't i don't know what any of this is i feel like i remember when i said earlier that these aren't the worst decks i've ever seen well i've been proven wrong this is definitely one of the worst i've ever seen yeah i'm glad they are not looking for an investment with this deck
okay so okay i think uh this is like really nice so that we at least don't know who the founder is and can't like hunt him down and ask him why the heck did he create this so uh i mean we could we could call him and then giggle and hang up laughing when he answers you know just because look at this what i don't understand this i don't understand any of this no me neither and i really have this feeling like this is something that is totally made up to really bother us down here because like i have never seen a deck like this and if you are looking for pitch decks you will also will never find a deck like this so even the worst decks that i've seen in the web are looking way better than this well they're not asking for money look they want to get to know you so i guess um they don't have facebook or linkedin um so yeah this is uh i guess i guess they just want to be friends would you want to be friends with this team max i prefer not to to be honest so okay so you guys had your fun now it's my turn uh i'm gonna start from the bottom uh okay okay so first thing is some people tell you you know you should not like you should not ask for a meeting just to exchange notes you know these kind of things if you go you're going to ask me something if i'm an investor i'm not here to to discuss i have enough meanings you know to take so i'm not sure like how good or bad strategies you hear both sides definitely agree with you max on the design and this is something super interesting right obviously this person i i don't remember the name like he's starting to build a company put some time putting together pitch deck it's it's poorly done but you know he did try right and but all we're talking about is the design we're not even we didn't discuss the business once yeah yeah because because they're hiring the first customers yeah okay where is that where is that right on the slide we have to hire obviously a successful business hires their first customers so and and you can also use them as investors actually but uh and someone says the website looks much better so we can we maybe we can take a look at that later but i just want to point out you know how much impact design has uh and how we don't care at all about the business because we just de-focused by by uh by the design another thing so i like so maybe i'm guilty i i like the adam knowing man at the beginning i think it's a good attention uh catcher you know what about adam newman at the end with the shirt that says he loves the company this is that's still good but at some point you know i like i'm okay like entertain me for the the first slide or the first two slides i'll give you that right yeah then give me some substance what's the business about you yeah to be honest so i would have scrolled like from this slide to this slide and this third and this would be all okay but i would have probably dropped the deck around this line because if they are not even taking the time to align the text and have like proper headings or something they are not like it's not worth my time looking at this kind of thing yeah so this tells me one they are they kind of disrespect me because they don't even care to give me a good presentation two they don't understand the power of design and if they don't understand that with their investors they're not gonna understand that you know in their marketing or with their customers and three i don't understand what they do like i i i read it's combination of gaming and simulations but like give me more show me something so yeah that's that's really really really even trying very hard i cannot i i just cannot like get into it and of course they don't tell you anything about what they've achieved like is there prototype is there a like mvp do they have users you don't know any of that so yeah for me it's uh yeah it's it's hard it's it's a hard one to chew it's it's an impossibility good try though it looks like it was made with clippy from powerpoint 20 years ago and clinton told them what to do
and i'm asking myself on every slide this is kind of like exit button is this my button to just like drop it into the bin or what kind of button is this
all right should we move to the next one please please yeah i've suffered enough on this one can you send the link steph oh yeah sorry i'm gonna send you the link yeah our next one as we get the link set up here you're gonna love it don't worry we've got a three more on this natural disaster that's happening this wrath of god mighty pets here they're looking uh this one could be good they're looking for an angel investor but listen you don't need an angel you need a miracle take it away max okay so first look at the deck uh at least i can see that they are looking for an investment in 2022 and they have also have like a a solid looking logo and at least an alignment on the first slide um so i would ask myself what does blur the lines between traditional veterinary care and mainstream pet health mean so what is the value that i can get out of mighty pets okay now we are looking at different issues so first of all i am just a little bit overwhelmed by the pure amount of issues that we are seeing on this kind of slide so that was the issues that the investors get from looking at the deck at least me i mean i've got stomach issues and pain i've got i've got an eye condition from this but yes it applies to pets as well um yeah so as but i understand that there are a lot of like pet health issues that where i need to bring my pet to the doctor and i also understand from this slide that it's like products are like expensive and the market is quite huge so i'm a little bit interested right now how mighty pets will change that or where our approach in the market is right now so let's jump to the next slide um overall now i'm a little bit overwhelmed again because there are like so many um highlighted parts of the text so we have red down here red up here and i would prefer to have just like one punch line that tells me what all of this is about but uh let's take a look so it seemed they have already quite a lot of products um and they are also selling it at a like reasonable price tank so okay thank you johnny i love you johnny sorry max go ahead we haven't had to give some luck to johnny in the chat but i'm but i'm asking myself if i'm looking at this slide so where's the difference to all the other like pet products on the market so uh maybe delete a lot of these different screenshots and all of this text and give me the reason why i should buy it in the end oh and this is also a really really good one we have a team that delivers results okay obviously every single team in every single pitch deck says that so just give me a reason why you are different than all of the other people and why you are the right team to bring it max two out of three of these founders have cats okay that's it right there at the bottom last bullet cat parent can't parent oh yeah this is oh kendra okay this is we have experienced people so that's that's extremely extremely needed and they also have so all of them have so much uh experience in other industries so uh maybe it would be interesting for me to learn why they have experience to build an actual like startup and pet startup and not like uh some international program management or innovation strategy around governance or something this is like startup is about bringing something to life uh first and then you have to be really passionate about all of this but at least i can jump straight to their linkedin and check them out um now i'm asking myself why is the design so much different from all the other slides was just the first thing that came to my mind and some of these numbers we have seen before i think um but ah okay we are going to take 1.5 share in the in the market and i'm asking myself always around these kind of numbers where do they come from because uh in the end a calculator yeah yeah a broken calculator so most of the numbers in pitch decks that i see are just total non-lens and i have seen nothing where they fit up in the end or like uh where they're actually right um but oh maybe we have some explanation down here uh okay so uh okay if we attract all of the 190 million potential customers and all pay an average order value of 25 is this per month is this per year uh i guess per year this seems quite low we have a potential of 4.8 billion um at least it's not 5 billion that'd be a little excessive and unrealistic yeah but this slide in general is also very very weird because on the one hand they i just came from the like whole target market and now they are talking about the underserved market but i'm not like really grasped at what this underserved market is looking like but at least the pet industry in general is growing and this is also like the fourth slide on market on the market side so uh if there are like four more we are quite good i guess um so it's working other brands out there i just see like pixelated images down here so why don't you use like the same stuff that you did here and i also see a lot of long texts that really don't get me excited around all of this so tell me why mighty pets is different than all of the other products ah okay we are truly unique premium product at attainable prices this is what i see in the supermarket on every second product to be honest so maybe we can just put it besides all of the other products
um now some great logos around here that i don't understand that i don't know and us manufacturers so also a lot of like different icons around here stuff that really is hard to understand at first but okay so this is actually something that that i that i like so 15 000 ratings on amazon four point stop 4.5 stars shows that they're actually selling stuff so why don't we have the traction way before in some kind of slide oh and now oh no no no this this doesn't look good so why why is this like this is not good this is not good so if i see something like this in the deck ah there's some huge red flag uh because like it's growing it's growing it's growing it's growing now it's decreasing and then it should be growing again so um okay covet related issues supply chain issues could explain it but this is always something that i would really describe and give more data on because otherwise i wouldn't believe it and um the revenue model so or this is way too complex just tell me is this a subscription is it a one-time payment not this kind of like weird [ __ ] uh okay so we have oh we have different revenue models and now we are not talking about revenue models anymore but we are talking about like metrics in general so i don't know what we are doing here to be honest revenue for me is about like how i make money uh but at least we have a strategy on how to create customers for this kind of business influences trust us but i want to see numbers around here so give me some like actual campaigns that you did some actual numbers some results out of this just saying oh we are we are good in everything it's not the stuff look how happy those dogs look those are dog influencers and they love it they can't yeah it looks like it looks like it still looks like stock photos to be honest um and now we are raising 1.2 million to 10x sales in three years ah i don't know what should i request down here so there's like six or seven times on one slide on request so what should i request you now here the the revenues so already you're in business here here i have to jump in because it's a public stream they're asked to to conceal some data points because you know they want to protect their
okay uh all in all the the best deck that we have seen so far today but i think there's huge potential because we can just delete like half of the slides and make the other slides a little bit more concise about the stuff that we have already done and this is like the biggest level that you as mighty pads have that you are already in business you have sales you have customers you are working with influencers so show it and just don't like put in some weird text blocks that don't say anything and get some different pets holding up the product maybe a snake tarantula cockatoo you know there's a whole market out there you're missing the exotic pets market that no one's going after yeah 100 you guys already have numbers so you should put that forward uh too much text and low value text i think that's exactly what what uh what you said uh just now max like too much text that doesn't bring much information uh and and i think as you said you don't understand the positioning of that thing and and there could be a giraffe all guesses uh and and and there could be you know a word you say okay this is gonna be i think for me when i if i make a little effort of imagination i think okay this is gonna be a kind of uh d2c you know premium uh pet is gonna be like the what's this uh mattress brand that sells online that everybody loves you know that is super expensive oscar casper or something yeah so it's like casper of you know of uh pet pet price and then i get it like in like three words casper for like pet food okay and it's subscription so i understand the metrics it's e-commerce and yeah thanks alexis casper so but but also but also one small note here around like i i me as an investor i'm always looking for opportunities in the businesses that i invest in and there could be an opportunity for example if something changes in the market so for example when the app store came up there was a lot of like new opportunities around creating apps for these kind of app stores and so um in the pitch decks you could see okay we are the first app that will be building i don't know uh a marketplace for farmers on the app store or anything and on the other side now if i look at a lot of decks um i'm missing out on this kind of like opportunity thinking so for example for mighty pets this could be a change in um customer behavior so customers are shopping more online and also the owners of the pads are they want to shop in
recurring models or something and now we can be the first brand that does it for i don't know uh docs for example and we have seen in the past that it works for humans when they are ordering from hellofresh or something so this is the kind of opportunity that i want to see yeah uh exactly and and i think actually they have a good case for that right because it's like in the west people have fewer kids and more pets that's one thing those are usually demographics that have higher disposable income so they don't care spending tons of money on you know unproven like premium pet food because they it's more about feeling good and and people buy more lines so you have this nice like you know vin diagram with three circles they're dead in the center so they are at the intersection of trends uh but yeah they don't end up they kind of say that in the first slide but you don't you don't remember it's because it's too much text and yeah and just one final word on it so if there's something like post code with now a lot of like investors don't like to invest into d2c and e-commerce anymore because all the numbers are going down so if you know that this is the case right now for your industry make sure to add a slide uh for this specifically and explain why you think you are still uh in a good position to grow mighty pads or your d2c company despite all of the market trends that we are seeing
nice all right all right there's hope for you there's hope that's good all right up next you're ready for our next stop on the misery train cloodle cloudle cloudle is like the gmail of security uh don't don't compare your company to another more established company that everybody knows to describe your company okay that's just rule number one because i i have a feeling it's kind of not like gmail and uh if even if it is they have a 1.5 billion user head start on you so take it away max okay first thing that comes to my mind is all of this white space that i'm seeing here so why don't you make like the the heading a little bit bigger and it's like gmail of security for sres okay understand this also i personally like if you know who you are talking to right away so the founder on the on the first side but now let's jump in and now we are seeing again these huge blocks of text that i really hate because i don't know where i should be looking at and i'm jumping from one text block to the other instead of having the main like the main value of the slides somewhere in the center or in the head in the heading like something like an action title uh but okay a cyber security tsunami there's a cyber security tsunami upon us okay i don't see a tsunami here i see some someone with a lock like hanging from the roof um okay but the time it's not impossible you cannot not have the reference it's yeah he's coming to steal your data
it is i guess i guess you don't get the mission impossible reference from a movie from over 30 years ago come on oh yeah that's right well i'm old from 19 it's 1995's biggest movie clearly you should remember the reference all right yeah i i was just like so i'm so
i don't know where to look at in this deck because like there are like so many informations in so many sentences so i would probably just like click one slight further to learn more about this oh okay and now we have another kind of like market slide or something or competition future now uh without the right tools most business values in digital okay i don't know where all why all of these logos are here um so ah okay okay now we are right now we have like domains apps and stuff and in the future it will be more like crypto nfts and all of that stuff but where's the problem around this so how okay okay so the the cyber criminals are trying to steal stuff from us but um we don't we on the one hand we don't see it and we don't know how to act but can't you make this a little bit more clear without like spending three slides on that um this is a team slide in this team slide i don't understand why you put like 200 logos down here for me it would be way more interesting to learn what you actually did in all of these companies before and why you are the right persons to get this kind of startup off the ground and the problem that i have with this with the teams type in this kind of like order in the deck is that i still don't know where the solution is for this kind of problem and i'm also not 100 sure that i understood the problem um
okay this is like actually the same stuff that we had like two slides before just like the total opposite so this should be the solution and now you're always using this kind of like weird way of dividing your slides into like different text blocks so isn't there any kind of like visual we can use or mock-up or anything um and also if we are saying something like cloud academy stack overflow plus khan academy for sres this is also very unspecific so just give me the value proposition of it what kind of value am i getting out of this as a business owner or as an sre um okay so this should be some kind of like customer story i don't think customer stories should be inside most decks at least not if they are like this long because um no one will read all of this on the rest on the on the right side so maybe just put it on your traction slide with a little sentence of what you did for them and this is something that i miss a lot in all of your deck like the value proposition but now we are looking at the market opportunity so also asking myself 10 of the available market where does this number come from to be honest and if we are looking okay 90 thousand acv is this something you already charge is this something that you assume you can charge does the competition charge it um would be great to have more background information on that
okay now we're looking at the traction metrics and i think there is a better way of displaying it because right now it looks like a a table that was yeah from some kind of like investment banking presentation or something and i would expect it in a slight deck of 100 slides or something but the traction slide is always about really showing off what you have already done as a company and really giving me attention on these like three or four or five key metrics key stuff key things that you have already done and so take this kind of opportunity and show me for example that you have already 15 000 assets under protection
okay so in general a lot of context is missing on these kind of slides so it would be great to understand what you are what you are telling me with this kind of slide in terms of this is your go to market slide is this uh another slide on the features on the product uh i'm not really sure about this um but at least okay i understand you're raising 300k um this is what you are going to do with it um for these kind of slides i really would like to see something more specific so um what are you spending the money on and what is like the exact um thing that we will be accomplishing with it with it so um is it just like the marketplace listing is it something we can do in i don't know one hour is it really hard to do it um and how much do we need a specific ranking i always like to have like concrete goals um i like this kind of cta in the end and now we have like okay one appendix so all in all an okayish deck but really i didn't grasp the opportunity because all of all the text that is around here also would add like slide numbers it would make it way easier um and i haven't seen anything around the product to be honest steph what do you think yeah for me this is the deck that has the the widest gap between the potential you know it could be super exciting and i will explain why in a second and the actual delivery of the deck i think there is a gap here the one before mighty pets seems like a decent to good opportunity and the deck is also pretty good right i mean compared with the rest obviously uh this one i feel that there's a gap i'll tell you why so okay uh first off completely agree with max's comment here too much white uh we have the logo twice we don't need the logo twice so here actually if you spend some time reading the narrative which i did because i had the deck before so i cheated uh in the first few slides the narrative is pretty solid it's like a there's a big threat which is cyber security and this is something everybody will agree on cyber security is hot it's a big trend everybody wants to hop on the cyber security bandwagon even when they're not from the industry i'm not from the industry but there's a strong team uh that does cyber security stuff and they seem to know their [ __ ] if the lead is strong i would probably want to go invest so at like i'm i'm in like and i think everybody's pretty much in if the lights are green on the rest and then the second slide is about that the opportunity is actually growing because we have more and more assets variable assets online right before it was maybe your domain name could be hacked or your your database could be hacked now it's also your nft your crypto so the opportunity is getting even bigger so super exciting like tell me more but then uh it's and as someone said yes it's very technical you don't tell me what srs are you tell me you're the gmail and then you tell me you are cam academy and then you tell me your stack overflow right in the same deck you have three different things i really don't see the the difference between each of them or the commonalities uh the layout has zero hierarchy like if you go to slide before and i think this is like basic design concept and you're a founder and you feel you shouldn't care about that but you should because that's how people understand you think here i don't know what i should read first what is the core message uh i'm lost right i'm overwhelmed so i don't and i still don't don't understand what they do i i and if you guys are listening by the way hello i don't understand what you guys do and i don't understand it neither yes right explain it to me like i'm an idiot which shouldn't be too hard yeah right and i mean you should do that for everything so if we move forward a little bit uh when i'm looking at the like cyber security deck or anything very technical what i will re-look at is a team because i want a team that is deep in that space and here okay 35 years of experience why not you know but give me some good points give me some meat like for each one of you guys i cash for ya some deep what uh what have you achieved what's your track record in that space and i see a lot of logos and i think max you said that i don't know who this is is this like your clients is this like pilots is this the companies you've worked with before i have no idea
and and also like for me the best founders in like very techy topics are able to explain what they do in a very very simple way so everyone can understand it and you always have to think about like if i'm opening the deck as an investor for the first time i haven't been working 35 years in the industry as you have been doing it so for you like sending out the deck is like the first step to get the foot in the door and then you have enough time to explain all of the details in the second or third meeting but for the first just to get like this is just to get the first meeting so leave out all unnecessary stuff and just give me like the high level story around why this is exciting yeah exactly get me excited like don't i mean i'm excited because we're done with it that's the most exciting part we never have to look at it again wait let's be fair to them let's just continue still sres i don't know what srs are again i have three times sres you make me feel dumb and by the way i see those little characters i think they come from maybe unsplash or one of an andro on one of those websites i think they're kind of done and overdone right so it's kind of tiring me uh yeah that's i mean that's a detail but you know when you see like 20 decks a day like i do and like a lot of investors do uh you you kind of get annoyed easily which is probably i shouldn't be but that's really okay then yeah i still don't understand what the product is as max said i would love a mock-up i would love a screen or something screenshot the traction this is not attraction show me a curve show me yeah make it more i mean remove all the description maybe and just show me like the logo the number that's enough and all the description that's for the conversation uh in person if we get to that point and that's and that's a big if that's a big yeah that should be good right it's a big f again i open this like waiting for my uber uh and and i'm just two minutes to decide if i reply with uh and send you my calendar link yeah site reliability engineering says maurice i am still not so sure what it means i can imagine that you know we can look that up together let's continue yeah here again like again it's design it's done but three times the same logo it's a bit boring uh maybe one logo for that like represents what you're talking about i mean it's not it's not that hard there are tons of templates out there anyway uh i don't know let's let's go to the end and also i always like if in a deck you always like use the same kind of like slide structure in terms of like for example how you show like three bullet points that you are showing this can be the same in terms of like structure for the traction but also i don't know the go to market but if you are changing or all the elements over and over again and swapping them all around the slide it makes it really really hard to like just scroll down and understand the the red line that goes through it yeah you know those decks that have the three parts it's like the slide is sliced into three vertical boxes and then you have five times that same layout one after the other you you kind of you you just you're bored you feel like you're it's a different information every time but you're bored because you feel like you're looking at the same thing again and again so yeah let's let's just finish it uh what's uh what's going on please please help please and 200k okay whatever i feel the ask is is relevant compared to the level of maturity i can i can guess i don't know max if you feel the same this seems reasonable but yeah i'm not excited the thing is i don't know at what kind of level they are this is an idea this is already a working product is this like uh do we already have customers so this is like my biggest question mark so what are we looking at here yeah it's like gmail but better it's first slide duh come on you know gmail meets can academy meets uh what's the third one again uh whatever you know
duh that's that's a bargain this company can make you a millionaire if you're already a billionaire
thanks joe let's move on did i send you the last thing uh no no no no the last one last but not least the last one key mate a key mate which is a which is a deck that makes me wish i'd had an actual pitch for a real deck with some trees some patio furniture or a barbecue which brings us to our sponsor ikea if you need panache patio furniture for your deck ikea has it all just because summer may be ending doesn't mean the fun that your deck has to make sure to use my code said help at checkout now let's get the keymay
it's like the same stuff over over and over again around the design of the deck and this is like so important at least for myself because right now if i'm looking at this kind of deck i imagine someone didn't know how to export this kind of deck properly because it has like this big white border around the deck and i'm asking myself why is this border existent and also i know that i'm getting a pitch deck so we shouldn't write that this is a pitch deck do you
i wouldn't uh and we can assume it's a pitch back we can assume but yes continue if it goes to my email probably it's a pitch deck but could be also some kind of like brochure for some kind of i don't know uh weird weird stuff from the supermarket or something but why don't why don't you use like this kind of like all of this space to just tell me what teammate is about because i don't know it again and also please leave out everything that is totally unnecessary so presented by is just like i don't know waste of waste of time okay but now actually i like this is the first deck where i can totally understand what the product is about so we are building a marketplace for short stay lodging we have mock-ups here so i know this is a working product or at least it should be soon so i wouldn't tell them that it will be soon available on google play and then show the mock-ups so leave this out um and it connects travelers on any budget with vetted local hosts okay now i want to have like the problem why we need this oh no okay so this is like on the one hand from the design perspective this is catastrophe because why it has so much white space why are you having like these kind of like block formats for for your text and the third thing is why are you having like it's this what what is on this kind of slide it's the same stuff that is one slide before so just leave it out okay now we have like a totally different problem and i can see uh that the design was just copied out of like google sheets or i don't know word or something into the into the presentation and you didn't even take the time to format it in a new way so i would be really annoyed here and also um
also i don't understand why like if you are not blind you would see that you can't read this kind of logo here so why are you putting it down here and also again too much text just tell me what the problems are and maybe also switch the solution on another slide because this looks like really really boring and annoying um it doesn't look like it at all come on it doesn't look okay now now we are also jumping into the typo train so we have com call me pt tiers or something around here so please make sure that you don't have any typos in your pitch deck um and uh would be also great if you could i don't know put logos or something here because this looks like a presentation that was done in the 90s or something you know when you had like this little uh this little thing in your powerpoint that helped you to create this kind of presentations um and now it's getting really weird because now it looks like
it looks a little bit like in a church or something i don't know so i don't see like the business context around this kind of like stock image and obviously like stock images in general are a bad idea so if you don't have a proper image just leave the image out at all um and this seems like the same stuff i've written two times before so let's jump over to the next one how our platform works okay you can this is like again why are you always using so much text you can also show this to some kind of diagram or something with some arrows and just have like the main aspects of it because i will never read six or seven bullets of of text on one slide um now we are having again like totally different colors that we are using so if you just choose a color palette for your business and then use it on every slide and don't mix everything up um and also why are you like telling me the same exact number on the left side and then on the right side so i can read all of this so on the left side should be some more information despite it um now we are actually jumping in some kind of like different types of accommodation but i'm asking myself why do i need this information around here so maybe some context around this and this is this looks almost like from here to here it changes into an internal company presentation or something where i just see like the kpis for the last months or something but i'm but you're not talking about why it is interesting for me as an investor but now we are looking at the founding team hold on hold on they're wearing the shirt with their logo of their startup on the shirt that's like going to see a band and the band is wearing their own shirt please just don't do that just for a cool aspect please wear any other shirt but one that has your startup name on it and again i see a mistake that i see in a lot of decks and that we had before like just listing up all the different companies you've worked before no one cares about it the only thing that i care about is why you are the right person to build this kind of business and the experiences or the learnings that you had in your previous businesses jobs however that made you the right person to do it now and not like listing up your cv for your cv i can request it later or i can go to your linkedin but this is around giving me confidence to invest my money into you um okay this is the classic go-to-market slide that i see for a lot of business and that's that is like total nonsense so this just says me okay we are not sure how we are going to market we are just trying everything and we don't have a clear strategy i want to see clear task clear strategies for example build our own brand on social media through like working together with influencers on a weekly basis and be very concrete about this but the thing with early stage startups is always limited resources and if a startup tells me they are doing conventional media channels like television they are doing social media and all of the four channels that you see here they are doing paid promotions and they are doing seo and sem all at the same time i call [ __ ] on them because you can never do it all at once especially not in the early stages um our progress so far so i would exp this looks like a okay so maybe i uh i'm a little bit annoyed by this kind of like visual because i would expect uh like just like the main bullet on what you have done or adding some kind of numbers and like dates or years or something but i don't see this kind of like progress just working well for well for this kind of information um and now this is another stock photo that you can delete because this looks like [ __ ] and come on that plant is going to grow to a huge tree and you don't need to be so formal in in your deck just give me the information and not some kind of like a big article that you would write in school or something so
and i would expect the funding amount somewhere in the end of the deck and not like before the revenue model so you are making 10 commissions from hosts okay another weird unsplash or i don't know clip art gif or something so all in all uh i think the best slide in this deck was the first one and you could almost like delete 90 of the other ones because i don't get any additional information blunt into the point one pager that's all you need save us some time save us some heartbreak and actually you know what i'm gonna defend them a little bit i do like the colors so you know maybe i'm like a five year old but i like the catching because you're a color blind oh yeah maybe right there yeah that's true actually uh i don't i don't have anything against the colors but you need to have like a palette that you are using the same way for every slide but we have every kind of color from the rainbow around these kind of slides so why don't you just like stay and use the three or four colors that you choose in the beginning yeah okay so design is one thing but now let's put design aside because we focused on design a lot and let's try to you know look a bit at the substance behind for example so if i understand correctly this kind of airbnb for nigeria right which which uh i'm am i correct i'm not sure but it's kind of what i understand and that you know that could be cool i guess i mean africa is a touristy market uh it has its own you know challenges and and and payment systems and regulation stuff so maybe you you're going in a different platform why not um so if you scroll down a little i just you know point out a few things i i can share so now just the first slide though i mean the one before that yeah so sas based marketplace no it's a marketplace need for size based yeah airbnb for original nigeria exactly um and i look they made an effort i mean you have the mock-ups they're pretty nice this is this is neat right i mean they made an effort on the on the images it's just uh everything around this is is like step part but there are some good like parts that they could you know if we scroll down a little uh yeah also something but for example for example just pointing out one thing so what is like software as a service based marketplace for me you either have like a software as a service model or you have a marketplace model in the core of your business but what what is like the connection between these two you know the other thing they are founders are not investors so you know when you and i would speak to understand what you know what the codes are what the keywords are but they don't and so that's the thing as a founder you need to kind of level up and learn including the vocabulary that investors use uh so you could use for example the term of market network which is a new term i think one or two years ago coined by nfx right uh and that that success cross marketplace play so you you you could refer to that there's another thing it's about the titles so there is what we call action titles and what's called main titles and the title should be you know the the key message and i think you know when you like it's not problem in solution you describe the problem right we're um we're fixing a or b or c which we don't have here uh yeah well we have to read i don't like reading good way defending good job defending them stuff then look you know everybody's so lazy right even i even swipe on tick tock because it's too long for me sometimes we need that's what someone should do we should have a tick dock but for the millisecond crowd that's the thing right you have that to catch my attention and and it's so important so and there are i mean very nice mock-ups and screenshots it's just a shame that the rest is not you know yes so for example just by changing the titles so for example instead of how our platform works you can say uh key made is the easiest way to list your property uh to fellow travelers or like to promote your property to fellow travelers uh this like gives you the opportunity to leave out at least like two or three of the other bullet points yeah and also and also for example around the the market slide here the market slide is for me the most important information i can get out of this is how good a founder can understand the market he's working in so give me what how you are reading this slide as a founder so do you think this market is attractive why is this market attractive what kind of things are changing in the market is it growing is it decreasing and give me some more context on your thinking because in the end with all of these early stage startups i'm betting on you as a founder and not specifically on business idea so it's also a pitch deck is around understanding how i founded things and if i trust him in the capability of getting this off the ground and another topic one of the most convincing thing is showing what you've already done and i think it's all of the decks we've seen except for the mighty pets except for the pet food thing none of them has really shown that i think right like what have you so these guys they have incorporated if you if you go down yeah yeah sure we got the t-shirts made come on no but okay look okay the t-shirt is kind of a 2010 thing right i think at the time when you know accelerate accelerators were a big thing and you wanted to have the photo and the photo is nice i mean those guys are good right i see them i i i want to hang out with them they do have a beer uh yeah they want to hang out with you if you're going to give them a check
but that here you see like okay so i and by the way that's something i see on a lot a lot of pitch decks especially very sage especially in emerging uh markets you know more than in the us um people we say yeah we incorporate it we have a bank account uh we filed we like register the brand of that stuff nobody cares about that the only exception i make is the de la reci corp when you are in an emerging market because it's an information that may be useful for vc because a lot of this is we say we only invest in u.s based companies and so knowing that you're a c-corp in delaware i'm i can invest in you you're in my scope but all the rest uh and you know is secondary right so talking about survey and stuff i understand it's important for you it's work you've done but it's weak validation you know a wait list unless it's you know a half a million you know people on the waitlist but waitlist all that stuff is weak validation today with no code you're supposed to be able to put together something without coding in a week and test the market so the bar is super high and if you're raising phones from a vc especially if you call emailing you have to show something it cannot be just a story
and that's um i mean that's that's my opinion on this uh fifteen thousand dollar family and friends yeah so but there's something that i would disagree a little bit on so um around the product market fit survey completion for me traction can be anything that you have been doing since the moment you started thinking about this kind of idea and obviously the longer you are in business this will be more around like revenue numbers user numbers and everything but for me as an investor it is also a strong sign that you are really uh onto something if you did the hard thing of talking to 100 people 200 people but then just give me also a little bit of context of what you learned out of these kind of like surveys or interviews that you did because in the end there are still a lot of businesses and founders that are just oh i have an idea and now i start and build my idea but in the end like finding proper product market fit is like the hardest thing to do and everything that you that you are doing to get closer to validating or not validating your hypotheses is like important for me okay so let me ask you uh max we're going to take the example of alexis in the comments if someone puts in a pitch deck we have 400 people signed up to our wait list in the past three months is that compelling enough for you to take the meeting is that like enough traction or strong enough that okay i'm going to like give them a call as an investor if if they are just telling me i have this waitlist of 400 people no but if i'm thinking and looking at pitch decks for me it's about like how many check marks i can get for myself and just imagine uh i need like my personal threshold is around like 20 check marks in my head that i need to accomplish then this 400 people on the waitlist could be the thing that moves the needle in the end and it's way better than if you're just saying or uh we are working on this for six months and we don't have anything to show so it's around like for me to understand what progress you have already made and this can be this with this weightless this can be the interviews but it obviously like if you have revenue or something this is way better and i would also encourage you to think about ways on what is like a stronger validation compared to just a waitlist can you pre-sale something so this is interesting all right we have a question here uh where would you recommend emerging market startups refine their pitching shops it seems like several of whoa several of them could reuse some mentoring guidance yes so i don't know shown max if you guys see a lot of do you see a lot of deep flow from emerging markets
emerging markets are hot you know um i mean max is that your scope i see some kind of startups from the emerging markets but in total i would say this is like around 10 of the deals that i see probably um and yeah i can just like encourage you to i if i were a founder in an emerging market i would try to find communities of fellow founders and entrepreneurs that are probably not in emerging markets but somewhere uk or like europe or us based because i think in general uh you can always learn from the ecosystem that are a little bit further in their development and especially around pitch decks and how to talk to investors and everything there's so much knowledge out there in these kind of founders that you can then take and bring into your own deck because the good thing about all of this like global world is there's no problem anymore you can easily connect with anyone in the world and so i would try to do that all right can we can we close this deck i think we're done with the decks right yeah oh thank god yes
all right so and i think we lost you shown let me put you back on screen yeah put me back welcome back oh there you go so i was just saying i want to seriously thank everyone for taking the abuse and the punches and the kicks i mean it's not easy being a founder um it's not easy taking criticism and to do it in the public space like this shows that you have fortitude and and uh and it really changes my life for instance i was having a rough morning and now i'm laughing so you know there's there's always there's always something good to have but um yeah it's uh it's you have a few people have the fortitude to do it and for those who want to get roasted next there's a link in the chat going around we're gonna put it up on openvc i'm sure um for our next roast so you know be brave come on down learn something take the abuse get some laughs get some knowledge and you know get get your startup in shape please you you know you want to be successful it starts with the deck yeah that's right we're gonna try to have this every month or so until people get bored and stop showing up yeah so the next one is gonna be august 30th at the same time of day um you know don't forget to share comment like oh i sound like an influencer i feel like i have to sell protein or something now and and click on our only fans to see all exclusive stuff we should do that we should do an omni fan with the sexiest pitch deck we see the sexiest pitch deck on only fans sign up below um and yeah thank you max for for for showing up and thank you steph for hosting it and thank you for letting me tear into this and thank you for the founders for again being brave enough to to come on here and and do it thank you max do you want a last word maybe uh yeah sure thank you thank you so much for bringing me on um to all the founders that are still here i think there are so many great resources around the web just take some time before you start building your deck um get down to the basics take a look at a lot of the inspiration that you have from other decks that are like flying around the internet think about how they structure their decks but there's also amazing content on youtube amazing content in blog form written and then the most important part around your deck always iterate on your pitch deck so the first version that you create for your pitch deck will never be the same as the last version that you will be having once you are raising the money from the investors so all of the feedback that you are getting just take it as an inspiration iterate and make your deck a little bit better every time
wonderful perfect well i think uh this is it thank you everybody thanks for congratulations on a job done yeah on the job done i think that's it all right take care guys bye guys thank you
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