Intro to the YC seed deck template: Not a template slide

slide
Demo Day for our Winter 2018 batch is a week

from today. We’re largely focused on preparing companies for their on-stage presentations, but are also working with them on slightly longer decks to use in follow-up conversations with investors.

I’ve written about pitching before, and realized that what we were missing was a clear template for how founders should lay out their stories through slides. The deck below is a template for how I think companies should build seed decks. While the main target for this template is a company raising its seed round, the deck is not all that different from best practices for a Series A deck - which we’ll release next.

The key point to remember here is that founders should strive for clarity and concision. This is not the right place to write a treatise on your market or world philosophy. The simple truth is that there isn’t very much meaningful detail to explore for most seed stage companies. When founders pretend that there is, their stories get muddled, and the investors get lost.

Focus on narrative. The rest is commentary.[1]

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[1] This deck is intentionally simple in design. Kevin Hale wrote a great piece about how to design decks well. https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-design-a-better-pitch-deck/

Thanks to Jared Friedman for suggesting that we put this together, and for reviewing it.

build a seed deck

time
Bad seed decks mean they don’t raise the money they

need
No money means companies are forced to survive on revenue

lives and cleans teeth

month.

100% retention

fundraises without our decks

is 90% less
Edward Tufte approved
We pick better color schemes
Have you

heard of the power of paper?

+ 1% royalty on business revenue
That’s $6m in revenue last

year alone
Free to produce new decks, because we don’t do any work, it’s a google slide template

day
That’s the first market, but it’s slowed because of how

hard decks are to build
We’re going to make decks bigger, better, and easier, which means more decks

eng who does not sleep

we’ll hit all the milestones for our next round within

2 days
Thanks