5 Common Pitch Deck Mistakes Founders Make that Annoy Investors

I was judging a pitch competition for a neighboring university. The event was meant to be an informal “practice” session to help the students prepare for pitching venture capitalists. As a result, the person who’d invited me wanted me to give feedback on the pitches rather than the companies. In other words, I was supposed to critique the structure of the presentations as opposed to any specific content. She wanted me to point out any issues in the pitch decks that might “annoy investors.” Normally, at these kinds of things, I’m expected to give feedback on the startups themselves, so I appreciated an opportunity to focus only on the structure of the pitches and the slides. I spent the next two hours listening to 15 pitches. A lot of the feedback I gave was specific to each pitch, but some of the problems seemed more common than others and spanned multiple decks. I’ve done my best to remember what they were, and I’ve shared a few of the bigger issues here in case they’re useful to all of you. <h1>1. Starting with a question</h1> If you’ve seen more than a dozen startup pitches, you’ve almost certainly seen an entrepreneur begin a pitch by asking some sort of broad, open-ended question. It goes something like this: “How many of you have ever struggled to find the perfect podcast?” <a href="https://aarondinin.medium.com/5-common-pitch-deck-mistakes-founders-make-that-annoy-investors-fa996ff681a9">Visit Now</a>