Pitch Deck: Keep It Simple Stupid

Innovate the Business, Technology, Culture; Not with the Pitch Deck.

Every investor you will ever pitch has read hundreds, likely thousands, of pitch decks. They have seen every font, every color scheme, every unconventional layout. They have watched founders spend weeks reinventing a format that was solved decades ago. And they have passed on nearly all of them.

Breaking the format is, almost always, poor judgment. It works at about 1% or less.

The uncomfortable truth is that your pitch deck is not the product. It is a permission slip, just a signal that you understand the game well enough to be taken seriously. Investors read decks with muscle memory. The moment your format breaks that rhythm, you are no longer being evaluated on your idea. You are being evaluated on your judgment.

The suggestion is to stick to the standard Sequoia Capital or the Y Combinator Pitch Deck format.

Investor’s Reality

A top-tier investor will receive thousands of inbound pitch decks per year. Even the most disciplined partner at a major fund will spend, on average, three to four minutes with a cold deck.

In those three minutes, the investor is running a rapid pattern-matching exercise against every deal they have ever seen. They are looking for familiar signals in familiar places: Is the problem real? Is the market large? Can this team execute? Does the traction justify the Ask?

When your deck uses a non-standard format, it derails their pattern-matching rhythm. The investor’s brain must now spend cognitive resources figuring out where to look, rather than evaluating what you are saying. You have introduced friction at the worst possible moment.

There is only one scenario in which a non-standard deck does not hurt you: when the investor already wants to invest and is using your deck as a reference document to confirm their conviction. In that case, format is irrelevant because the decision has already been made. For every other founder, every cold email, every warm intro, every conference pitch, the standard format is your friend.

Default Formats (Sequoia and Y Combinator)

Two frameworks have become the de facto standard for early-stage pitch decks. They differ slightly in emphasis, but both reflect decades of pattern recognition about what investors need to see. Together, they represent the cognitive map most professional investors carry into every meeting.

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia’s framework, refined through investments in Apple, Google, and Airbnb, is organized around the narrative logic of a great business. It moves from context to solution to market to traction to ask in a clean, logical arc that mirrors how an investor builds conviction.

• Company Purpose — One sentence. What do you do?
• Problem — The pain you are solving and who feels it.
• Solution — Your product and why it works.
• Why Now — The timing insight that makes this the right moment.
• Market Size — TAM, SAM, SOM. Show you understand the opportunity.
• Competition — The landscape and your defensible position.
• Product — Screenshots, demos, the actual thing.
• Business Model — How you make money.
• Traction — Metrics, growth, proof of demand.
• Team — Why are you the ones to build this?
• Financials & The Ask — Use of proceeds and what you need.

Y Combinator

Y Combinator’s approach is even more ruthlessly minimal. Shaped by thousands of application reviews and Demo Day presentations, it strips the deck to its bare essentials. The underlying philosophy: if you cannot explain your business clearly on ten slides, you do not understand your business clearly enough.

• Company — Name, tagline, and a single-sentence description.
• Problem — The specific, felt pain of a real customer.
• Solution — Simple, direct, visual if possible.
• Traction — The most important slide. What have you proven?
• Unique Insight — What do you know that others do not?
• Market Size — Bottom-up thinking is more credible than top-down.
• Business Model — Simple, clear revenue logic.
• Team — Relevant experience, co-founder relationships, why you.
• The Ask — Round size, use of funds, what you will achieve.

Keep it Simple Stupid

Simple does not mean sloppy. It does not mean low-effort or generic. It means that every design choice, every word, every slide serves a single purpose: clarity. The investor should never have to work to understand what you are telling them.

The practical rules are straightforward. One idea per slide. Visuals over walls of text. Data over adjectives, say “3x YoY growth,” not “explosive growth.” Use clean, readable fonts. Maintain consistent spacing. Make your traction slide the visual centerpiece of the deck. If a slide does not answer one of the core investor questions, it does not belong.

The decks that get meetings are not the ones with custom animations, unusual structures, or design awards. They are the ones where the investor finishes the last slide and immediately thinks, “I need to meet this team.”

The deck is a communication tool, and communication tools succeed when they are invisible. The moment a reader notices the format, the format has failed. Sometimes, founders remove sections they find uncomfortable or that contain unfavorable data. Investors will notice what is missing. They fill the gap with the worst possible assumption. If you leave out the competitive landscape, they do not assume you have no competition; instead, they assume you are naive about it. Always be the one to address the hard questions before they can ask them.

Try asking this: “Can a sharp investor, with no prior knowledge of your company, read this in four minutes and clearly articulate your problem, solution, market, traction, team, and ask?”