pitch deck

Definition

A PowerPoint presentation optimized for skimming, typically 10-15 slides explaining why your startup will change the world and only needs $2M to do it. It's fiction dressed up as financial projections.

Example Usage

Our pitch deck has a great 'team' slide with photos of advisors who've never attended a meeting, and a 'traction' slide with a graph that starts at zero last month.

Origin

Borrowed from Hollywood pitch culture via management consulting

Fun Fact

The most-viewed pitch deck ever is Airbnb's, which misspells words and uses terrible design—proving that execution matters more than typography, much to every founder's relief.

Source: Venture capital fundraising and presentation standards

Related Terms

Beginner

bridge round

Emergency funding meant to tide a startup over until the 'real' funding round happens, often at desperate terms. Named after a bridge because you're hoping it doesn't collapse before you reach the other side.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

pre-money valuation

What investors claim your company is worth before they invest—a number that's actually meaningless but gets thrown around in press releases. Add the investment amount to get post-money, which is what your ownership percentage is actually based on.

🚀 Startup / VC

Advanced

Cap Table

A spreadsheet that tracks who owns what percentage of a company, growing increasingly depressing with each funding round as the founders' share shrinks like a wool sweater in a dryer. It's the scoreboard of startup capitalism.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

founder's dilemma

The impossible choice between maintaining control of your company and maximizing its financial value, first articulated by Harvard's Noam Wasserman. You can be rich or you can be king, but probably not both.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

entrepreneur

A glamorized term for someone who decided that working for themselves would be less stressful than having a boss (spoiler: they were wrong). These brave or foolish souls start their own ventures, risking everything from savings to sanity in pursuit of the dream of being their own boss and working only 80 hours a week instead of 40. Every LinkedIn bio now includes this word because 'unemployed but optimistic' doesn't have the same ring to it.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

optionality

Keeping multiple strategic paths open while committing to none, often praised as strategic flexibility or criticized as inability to make decisions. The business equivalent of dating multiple people because you're 'keeping your options open.'

🚀 Startup / VC

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Intermediate

Market Fit

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