Here’s what we talked about (condensed by Claude from our own words and then roughly edited by me):

The deck is DEFAULT and that’s awesome

• It’s the default Google Slides template! And it’s great.

• Imagine if Jeff had clicked the little “beautify this slide” nano banana button, it would’ve definitely been worse

• There’s a sophistication to simplicity. By not designing the deck, they’re saying: the content is so good that it doesn’t matter.

• JZ gets skeptical when a first-round deck looks too nice. It makes him wonder how the founders spent their time and money.

• This is the “bare-bones beats beautiful” rule from the Pitch Sprint.

Oh yeah here’s the deck or at least the tweet:

Simple is powerful, but UNCOMFORTABLE

• Look at the opening slide. It’s SUPER simple! The diagram is, like, 3 things.

• It’s exceptionally clear: here’s what we do, boom, boom, boom, here’s how it becomes huge.

• Simplifying like this is great, because investors don’t have to wonder what you’re doing. “Here is what we’re doing. Yes it’s simple. But it’s hard!”

• BUT… simplifying past a certain point feels dangerous... you’ve stripped away all the nuance and cleverness. You can hide behind complexity. You can hide behind fanciness.

• We don’t do anybody any favors by making things complex.

Now check out the team slides:

What do you think? Here’s what we think:

Team, team, team

• Most decks have one team slide. This one has three. Makes sense, they wanted to raise a gazillion dollars and the team is what it’s all about.

• This line is so nice: “We have worked together for 10–30 years and deeply enjoy working hard together on difficult problems.”

• Any founder can do this. Investors know a top failure mode for startups is cofounders who stop enjoying working together. Show the relationship, simply and sincerely.

Also…

Jeff got away with one (that the rest of us can’t)

• One slide lists the AI founders who came up through their teams at Google and left to start major companies.

• The intended message (we think) is “check this out we know how to find and lead the best AI talent in the world.”

• But… the slide never says that! So you might look at it and get the message “great people leave our organization.”

• A title says what the slide is about. A headline makes a point.

• Jeff Dean? he can skip the headline. At the sub-Jeff-Dean level (which is most of us), write a headline.

Making a pitch deck helps you think

• Jeff Dean probably could’ve raised without the pitch deck. He’s Jeff Dean!

• But even if they didn’t need a deck, making a pitch deck is helpful for the founders, too. Making a deck forces the cofounders to sit down and define: this is what we’re about, and this is how we make it work.

So… nice one Jeff!

Bye!

Whoa that video is long! Yeah. I mean, I walked through the whole thing step by step, what do you expect? BUT! Good news for you. I got help from Claude to reorganize my words from the video and turn them into a summary, which hopefully doesn’t sound too much like an LLM? I even asked Claude to turn the em dashes into ellipses (...) to hide his work (he seemed cool with it). This is still me writing this by the way. Now we’re shifting to Claude organizing the transcript, with spot edits by me:

We made this to help founders

• Pitch decks codify how you think about your business. At the early stages, that narrative is everything… BUT...

• Making pitch decks is hard! The stakes are high, and most founders don’t know what investors are looking for in that narrative.

• At Character Capital, we review a lot of decks (about 1,500 per year) and help a lot of founders build their decks.

• So we created the Pitch Sprint to help founders in our portfolio.

• Here it is so you can use it too!

Two rules before you start

• Don’t start with AI. Think hard about each step with your own brain. When AI crafts the narrative and the slides, the narrative gets watered down.

• Bare-bones beats beautiful. The best pitch decks are often badly designed with great thinking inside. Words, screenshots, and the hockey stick chart matter. Typography and color palette don’t.

Team + story + traction = raise

• An amazing team can counterbalance thin traction. Massive traction can counterbalance almost anything. The combined formula has to work.

• The Pitch Sprint is structured around this formula: team first, story in the middle, traction and the raise at the end.

The narrative template: TOASSSST

These nine slides, in this order, answer investor objections as they come up:

• T: Team. What makes these founders badass?

• O: Opportunity. What’s the big problem, and what is the path to a billion-plus dollars?

• A: Approach. What’s your product? Show it.

• S: Special (differentiation). What sets you apart from everyone else chasing this?

• S: Special (moat). What stops another startup, or a foundation model, from eating your lunch?

• S: Success. What’s the early evidence of traction?

• S: Soon. What are you building next?

• T: Treasure. What are you raising?

(Okay yeah, I had to go way out of my way to make this spell TOASSSST. Nobody calls the “raise” the “treasure”. But it’s a great acronym!)

How the sprint works

• The Pitch Sprint, like our other sprints, is a step-by-step recipe for making decisions.

• We use a Miro template (below) with two rows:

  • Workspaces full of sticky notes and instructions, and a rough slide template below.

  • Work out headlines, logos, and visuals up top, then fill in the slides as you go.

• Every step is a note-and-vote: silent writing in parallel, silent dot voting, then the decider (usually the CEO) makes the call. Discuss if you need to, but do the silent stuff first.

• Sticky colors mean something:

  • yellow = headline

  • pink = visual

  • blue = secondary text

Here’s the Miro template:

Now go make a draft of your deck

• Note: It’s still REALLY hard to raise right now. With AI coding, the barrier to entry for competition is low. With foundation models offering new solutions all the time, investors are fearful of buying a stake in a company that becomes obsolete with the next release. Which brings me to one more point…

• Make a rough draft of your deck as soon as you can, WAY before you need to raise. Building a successful startup is hard, and it’s better to find out you don’t have a coherent strategy early, while you can still do something about it.

And hey, the Pitch Sprint is part of Character Labs, our program for pre-seed startups… so, if you’re a founder, please apply. We’d love to learn more about what you’re up to.

Learn more about Character Labs

Also, if you want to know even more about the Pitch Sprint, here’s ANOTHER video, with Eli and JZ and me explaining why and how we built it. Yeah, this video is EVEN LONGER.

Bye!

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I’ve been working on a bunch of new Sprint formats, and tomorrow their first big test begins.