
I've collected over 600 pitch decks - drew_m
https://starthouse.xyz?ref=hn
======
huac
are these real decks? the quora one appears to be a course project. reddit
also appears to be a marketing deck rather than VC pitch deck (still can be
valuable but not quite the same)

------
zeusly
Nice work, maybe add the ability to link to a specific page, like
[https://starthouse.xyz/facebook#4](https://starthouse.xyz/facebook#4)

There are already two comments here that could use the feature.

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drew_m
Addressing the issue of fake pitch decks:

I gathered the decks from a variety of sources on the web and trusted they
were originals. Although interpretations of company pitch decks may be of
value for some people. I'd rather this be a collection of original pitch
decks.

If I had have known this would receive the interest it got, I would have spent
more time vetting them before uploading. The vast majority of them are
originals and come from demo days of accelerators. But going through them
again, some of them do indeed look dubious and I've removed them. I'm working
on adding sources/references to each of the decks as well some of the other
great ideas people have had.

If anyone notices pitches that don't look to be originals please comment here
and I'll take them down. Thanks :)

------
hummel
It especially bothers me to find the same kind of post every X weeks.
Compiling pitch decks, hundreds of pitch decks, use these pitch decks from
successful companies. You can be one of them too! That's a lie, you can't.

Not only economic conditions, political environment and personal relationships
matter, but we are simply selling the same idea to hundreds of thousands of
entrepreneurs around the world. The boomers are determined to explain to us
how successful they were and the steps they took to achieve their enormous
fortune and success. What they forget to explain is how a large part of their
success is based on the economic conditions created by their parents and
mostly on fraud or dubious behavior.

We sell the idea that they can be Google or Facebook, that they can compete or
create new markets. But this idea is false. They have capitalized on all
economic sectors, all market verticals and captured 90% of the existing
opportunities. And if they forget some of them, they can eventually buy it.
They drown you before you're born.

The market is rigged, even if you find market-traction, you will fail to
attract investors even with the right relationships (no luck for you syrian
refugee). Even the idea is good and represent a jump in a deep tech space, you
essentially will get nothing unless you come out from MIT, Stanford and so (No
luck for you Italian engineer)

Your pitch deck doesn't matter to anyone. VCs are waiting for 90% of projects
to sink without financing, for months to get better conditions or simply to
keep the surviving companies. Something their parents would never have done.

------
mariocesar
Will be great to know the source/reference of each deck. How did you get them,
where did you get them ?

~~~
drew_m
Good idea, I can add the sources/references in. They were scattered around a
lot of different websites

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APuschilov
The issue with pitch decks is that they represent only the legible part of the
fundraising process. The promise of a good pitch deck is that it gets you
funded. However, this is far from the truth.

The truth is that the biggest early-ish rounds (pre Series B) were not closed
because of the pitch deck, but despite of it.

Actually, the earlier the round the less important does the pitch deck become.

It's the illegible part, that so few talk about and that can't be shared that
is the main driver. It's the social reality surrounding the founders and the
round. It's the whisper and rumors inside the investor community, who makes
the intro, the medium of the intro (phone or email) and many other small
things.

------
Reedx
Related, I think it'd be interesting to see a compilation of projected revenue
from pitches vs actual.

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shp0ngle
Well, now it's time to train a GAN network on these to create new pitches from
scratch.

~~~
nojvek
AI generated AI startups. Why not?

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mLuby
Excellent, now with sufficient training, an AI can learn to pitch itself to
gain more resources.

~~~
dade_
Next HN post: notapitchdeck.com

~~~
arkis22
This is honestly what I was hoping for

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jedberg
As a fun exercise once at YC Demo Day, I decided to categorize the information
on each slide and then record the order the categories were presented. I then
noted which presentations I found the most compelling. Sadly I can no longer
find the notes, as they were on paper.

I remember the categories I came up with:

* Name of company

* Problem being solved

* Solution being offered

* Total Addressable Market

* Current revenue/signups/other hockey stick graph

* How much is being asked for/current investors

* Who is on the team/why they are most qualified

Most of the pitches went in the order above, with some minor variations. Some
skipped some of the slides.

But what I remember is the the ones that seemed most notable and memorable
were the ones that used a significantly different order.

~~~
joeblau
YC also has a post for their seed deck template[1].

[1] - [https://blog.ycombinator.com/intro-to-the-yc-seed-
deck/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/intro-to-the-yc-seed-deck/)

~~~
jedberg
Wow funny. I did my analysis before this but I guess they’ve been using the
template internally for a while.

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mgamache
good resource. I wish the decks had some metadata:

1) A date as there's a fashion to these decks and what worked a few years ago
might be all wrong today 2) Did they get funded from the deck? 3) revenue (or
user count) at the time of the deck 4) Market Size 5) Founder's previous exit
(or connection to Google/FB etc..) I know this is difficult, but some founders
can get money on an envelope sketch because they made VCs wealthy in the past.

I realize this is difficult data to get, but it would make the decks much more
informative.

------
Accacin
So I've always seen the word "deck" and never really understood what it meant.
Turns out a "deck" is just a powerpoint? Why do people call them decks?

~~~
cvs268
Physical slides were using transparencies or slides. A bunch of them stacked
together would be like a deck of cards - a slide-deck.

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arnonejoe
The demographics slide from Facebooks pitch deck in 2004 is pretty hilarious.
I wonder if sean parker created this.

[https://starthouse.xyz/facebook](https://starthouse.xyz/facebook)

~~~
jkingsman
I feel dumb but I don't get it... do the first two pertain to the third's
kegstand?

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throwaway888abc
Great work! Love it, nice website, huge library of useful resources, smooth
presentation, easy to navigate, all bells and whistles, kudos, bookmarked,
will use for sure. Thank you

~~~
tsurnyc
How did you get the search to work?

~~~
drew_m
I used fuse.js - it's a fuzzy search javascript library which works pretty
well.

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underdeserver
The AirBnB one I thought was particularly good. Clean preso, no superfluous
information, readable, addresses all the concerns, short and to the point.

The reddit one is the exact opposite in that regard, but it has cats.

~~~
superhuzza
>The reddit one is the exact opposite in that regard, but it has cats.

I came to comment about this, it seemed particularly bad. I can only imagine
doing this if I wanted to send a message of:

"We don't really need you - we're not taking this seriously at all".

------
ErwinBell
If these are real, I'm sure all those startup founders are thankful for having
their phone numbers published in public...

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winrid
I want to see what this does when passed through some kind of Neural net...

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ttul
The pitch deck is only good if the concept, team, and opportunity are good. A
pitch deck should not be hard to put together if you have those three things
on your side. If you do not, no slick pitch deck will really help you.

~~~
drew_m
Not that I have first-hand experience at successfully pitching for huge money,
but I completely agree. A lot of successful companies have average pitch decks
but have great content on their side. One takeaway I've gotten from this side-
project is that with pitch decks design doesn't matter but story-telling does.

~~~
ttul
The archive of pitch decks is really just post hoc confirmation of what were
excellent, well-timed, and well-executed business plans. Imagine the thousands
of great pitches that didn't end so well. I have seen many excellent teams
with great pitches that failed for reasons entirely outside their control and
reasonable ability to anticipate.

------
seemslegit
Should be enough to get a neural net to raise till round C or so.

------
x13
How can I be notified when this is back? I love it.

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aaisola
Ideally these would be organized by stage, sector etc.

~~~
drew_m
Yeah absolutely, I'd like that too. I think year, amount raised, stage, sector
and team size would be a good start

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supernova87a
Is there somewhere the source PDFs or PPTs can be found? I'd rather be able to
browse the files than have to go to a website controlled by someone to page
through.

~~~
drew_m
Understandable, it isn't available now but I could add the option to bulk
download all files if people would be interested. Or I could email you the
pdfs or share them on a Drive if you'd like?

~~~
stevenicr
I'd love to see this too - I could learn from this when offline / at slow
interwebs places.. and it's the kind of bite sized learning that lends itself
to short bursts like waiting in line and such.

~~~
drew_m
The thought didn't cross my mind when I was building it but come to think of
it, it's actually something I'd like too. It would be nice to be able download
them for traveling. I can implement it so

~~~
safwans
I'd love to see that feature also

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raylus
maybe your search doesn't work, not sure...

------
fenwick67
The Uber pitch deck is amusing, including the quote "profitable by design"
(Uber is still not profitable 10 years later)

~~~
vertis
It's interesting, but there is a real difference between, has found product-
market fit but unprofitable because trying to grow in "silicon valley style"
and no product-market fit and might never make money.

To my mind, Uber chooses to lose money. They don't have to spend 700m a year
advertising, and they could probably trim the fat in other areas as well (and
have in the case of COVID--19),

Leaving COVID--19 alone for a second, the operating expenses have to be taken
with a grain of salt, I would be very surprised if they HAVE to do a lot of
those to keep the business from falling apart.

Ref: [https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-
mo...](https://news.crunchbase.com/news/understanding-uber-loses-money/)

------
huxflux
Cool idea, thanks!

------
gitgud
It's the funny that Facebook were pitching advertising to investors in 2004,
and they didn't have any ads until 2007.

It's also interesting that there's no information on sources or anything to
explain these pitch decks. I'm pretty sure the original would not start with "
_Facebook 's original pitch deck_", so how much each pitch has been altered?

Also survivor-ship bias... these are all highly sucessful companies with
amazing products. It would also be great to see how failed businesses still
got funding, e.g; "Juicero" or "Theranos"...

[https://starthouse.xyz/facebook](https://starthouse.xyz/facebook)

[https://about.fb.com/news/2007/11/facebook-unveils-
facebook-...](https://about.fb.com/news/2007/11/facebook-unveils-facebook-
ads/)

~~~
spurdoman77
Successful startups dont really need that good pitch decks or pitching in
general, because the metrics speak for themselves. Would be certainly more
interesting to see Juicero pitch deck.

~~~
coolspot
For Theranos I guess it was roughly:

1) list of big names advising or on board of directors acquired through
connections

2) total adressable market of blood tests

3) current cost and complexity - need full vial for each single test

4) promise of lower cost and complexity - just one drop of blood

5) at some point down the time line they likely have added DoD contract and
Walgreens partnership

~~~
benerdTTM
6)Pre-orders (Governments in West Africa for Ebola, US military for Medvacs
and Safeway)

------
luckydata
Most of those pitch decks are "after the fact" fabrications, not the actual
original decks. I'm afraid this resource is nearly useless, even if I admire
how much work went into it.

~~~
dajohnson89
Why do you suspect they're fake?

~~~
luckydata
In a couple spots I know they are. In others there's foresight that the
founders simply wouldn't have had. In some the tone is clearly 2 year business
student etc... they are not real pitch decks. I've seen more than my share of
real ones to know the difference.

~~~
drew_m
Sorry man... I'm sure you have good reasons to question the validity of some
of them and I don't doubt your sincerity. It was my understanding that they
are all legitimate. I don't want to promote a 2nd year business student's work
as an original pitch deck so I can look more closely into the provenance of
problem slides if you could name these and I'll either redact them or adjust
the title accordingly. Thanks for bringing this up :)

~~~
ghc
I just want to add my 2 cents in hope that it's helpful. I'm a co-
founder/partner of a seed-stage VC fund and do keep track of the pitch decks
we've seen as a partnership over the past two funds spanning six years.

Comparing these decks to the decks I have in our tracker (a dataset of similar
size to yours), there's a lot of differences. Even if you only take the pitch
decks of the _successful_ companies (most of which we didn't invest in), a lot
of these decks look a lot more polished.

Here's what I think is going on: Some decks are undoubtably real seed pitch
decks, some decks are demo day decks from accelerators, and a few of these
decks (Facebook's, for example) are after-the-fact business school exercises
from students.

So, I _do_ think most decks are real, but what's tripping up some people is
how polished some of the decks are. True pitch decks used to get a seed round
or into an accelerator aren't very polished because you're constantly changing
the deck based on feedback over the span of 20-50 pitches. The truth is that
many investors I know worry when they see a too-polished deck that everyone
else has already seen the deal and passed :-P.

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weareconvo
And then displayed them in the worst way you could think of? Why does it
instantly produce two-way scrolling? How do you even advance to the next
slide? Why does Facebook's pitch deck have three pitch decks and an ad for the
site I'm already on?

~~~
brokenmachine
I don't get two-way scrolling here, and there's very obvious orange "First,
previous, next, last" buttons under each slide.

Imagine being so entitled that you get this annoyed by something you were
given for free and can close at any time.

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mariocesar
No way to explore?

I had to search for "a" to have a kind of full list of the presentations.

Will be nice if there is some sort of categories, collections or tags.

~~~
drew_m
Yeah absolutely, I was thinking a filter by the funding round, year, team size
and industry would be good. Any others? It has been a fun side project and I
wasn't sure if people would be interested in it so I wanted to launch early
and get some feedback before putting more time into it.

~~~
govg
Might be too much to ask - but is it possible to add current status ( public /
private / acquired / defunct ), funding source ( prominent VCs that picked
them up ) or valuation ( highest / seed / other rounds )

------
bernardv
Very nice - thank-you. Easy to use, great content.

~~~
drew_m
Glad you like it, thanks a million.

~~~
oreid
Thank you!

------
primogen
Can somebody explain the images used to represent men and women on slide 16 of
the Facebook pitch deck? [1]

[1] [https://starthouse.xyz/facebook](https://starthouse.xyz/facebook)

~~~
dorkwood
I believe it's the view you'd see under a toilet stall.

~~~
WatchDog
Women don't have feet?

~~~
peterpeppers
We stand on the seat on public restrooms....or hover.

~~~
BolexNOLA
One of these sounds harder than the other but I keep changing my mind as to
which...

~~~
unishark
In asian bathrooms that have "western style" toilets, sometimes there are
signs telling people not to stand on the seat to use it as a squatting style
toilet.

