Antler Pitch Decks

A pitch deck contributes somewhere around 10% to whether you are invested or not. The rest is mostly your team compatibility, personalities, critical thinking skills and story telling ability. Nevertheless, I want to share 2 pitch decks, during my time as a startup co-founder at Antler.

3 months into Antler Founder program and you would have an event called IC, where you would meet the Investment Committees (around 6 people) to raise your very first pre-seed funding ($110K for 12%).

2 weeks before IC you would have the pre-IC event, where you do a mock presentation and receive feedback from your coaches.

This one did not pass Pre-IC:

Antler VN 3 - Zen - Pre IC pitch deck.pdf

I received no feedback on the slides, or rather I did not ask my coach for it, because the reason we failed is more of the team formation and the way we presented. I can say for definite that this was the most terrible, horrifying presentation in the history of pitching.

After failing the Pre-IC, I got a message inviting me to join another team as CTO. We (new team) pivoted a lot, technically. We asked if it would be wise to perform an actual demo or to include a demo video and people said no. Figured.

This one passed IC:

Antler VN 3 - Rayo - IC pitch deck.pdf

We over-prepared this one, as it should be. We did not go into the appendix but just leave it there in case the committees ask any question.

I presented the first half. Watched some Youtube video about story-telling tricks and I can say it improved the flow of the presentation a lot. Unfortunately they are all verbal so you cannot see from the PDF files. I remembered hinting "Blind users spent XX minutes to learn how to use a new website" at slide 2 and 10 slides later "Now with this they only need a few second". BAM. Value propositions for you.

So there you go. I probably will not advertise this blog anywhere, so if you somehow stumble upon this because you searched for it, good luck with your fund raise!