Pitch Deck Teardown: Forethought’s $65M Series C deck

Forethought has been on our radar for a long time — the company won our 2018 Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, and just a few weeks ago, CEO Deon Nicholas joined Vanessa Larco from NEA on TechCrunch Live to talk about pitching and pitch decks:

Today, it’s my pleasure to tear down the company’s 23-slide deck that helped it raise a $65 million Series C late last year.

Forethought’s mission is to help humans perform better using AI. “One of the things that we’ve focused on is being a human-centered AI platform. And that’s what has really come through … with our mission, and really our mission is to unlock human potential through artificial intelligence,” Nicholas told TechCrunch’s Ron Miller.

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Slides in this deck

1. Cover slide
2. Founders slide
3. TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield slide — (Yes, really!)
4. Traction slide (redacted numbers)
5. Customer list slide
6. “Forbes 2021 next billion-dollar startups” — mystery slide
7. “Think about the last time you were on hold” — problem slide
8. “The cost of bad customer service” — problem slide
9. “Transform customer experiences with human-centered AI” — solution slide
10.  “Complete platform” — product slide
11.   “True AI” — product slide
12.   “Rapid time-to-value” — product slide
13.   “Secure and trusted” — product slide
14.   “Intelligent gap detection” — product slide
15.   “Trusted by the best” — customer breakdown slide
16.   “Metrics Summary” (redacted) — traction slide
17.   Customer testimonials slide
18.   ARR expansion per cohort (redacted) — customer development slide
19.   “Forethinkers” team slide
20.   Advisors and investors slide
21.   “What’s next” (redacted) — road map slide
22.   “Where we’re going” (redacted) — revenue growth slide
23.   “Unlock human potential through AI” — mission slide

Three things to love

There’s a lot to love about this deck, and it’s hard to only pick three things. In the past few pitch deck teardowns, I’ve often focused on the beginning of the narrative — the first few slides.

Ending on mission

I’ve argued before how important it is to have a good final slide. To understand why, remember that in a lot of pitching situations, the first and last slides are on the screen for a longer time. The first because you’re faffing about with getting coffee, waiting for people and getting situated. The last because during the Q&A at the end of a pitch, it’s not uncommon to leave the final slide up — at least until you have to move to another slide in the deck to clarify something. To be fair, this was more true when you were pitching in-person than when you’re pitching virtually, but it’s good practice to make every slide do some heavy lifting.

A lot of the time, the final slide is just a repeat of the company’s tagline or motto and the founder’s contact details; it’s logical to repeat your vision or mission here, but it’s rarely done, and that’s a shame. If you have a clearly articulated mission, why not fly that flag as you’re doing your pitching?

Ugh, an investor slide

A lot of startups include an advisors-and-investors slide. A customer advisory board is less common, but I’ve seen that, too. In the vast majority of cases, this is a slide full of people that makes my eyes glaze over — people who are unlikely to genuinely be of help to your company. Forethought’s slide made me do a double take because it is a rare exception to that rule. It initially caught my attention when I recognized Ashton Kutcher from the photo. That prompted me to take a closer look. This slide is extraordinary and probably the first of this type of slide I’ve seen that actually deserves to be part of the deck.

Having the CEO of Waymo and a Stanford AI lab professor as advisors is a flex. The customer advisory board includes (presumably busy) decision-making customers for Pinterest, Instacart and Carta. And the investors? Well … it’s not always clear how much actual time individual investors put into a startup, and that’d be a question I’d be asking Forethought, but it’s certainly a conversation starter: How did the company pull off adding a handful of household names to its cap table, and will they add value beyond their cash and famous faces?

Contextualized numbers are sexy

I include Slide 17 as a “thing to love” for a couple of reasons. Similar to the investors slide, it’s rare to see a customer testimonial slide that actually does any heavy lifting. Mostly it’s fluff that shows up instead of real traction. However, in this case, the company was able to do something really clever; Forethought is bringing some impressive customer stats to the forefront — and backing it up with real feedback from its customers.

In my past startups, I’ve done a lot of customer support, and if anyone had put any of those stats in front of me, I’d have bought on the spot: 43% of customer interactions don’t result in a support ticket? Routing accuracy of 85%? Handle tickets 21% faster and get 32% more productivity out of each of your customer support staff? That’s extraordinary by any measure — but tying it to customer testimonials makes the story come to life so much more. Very well done indeed. It also helps that the slide is well designed, easy to read and the logos show that these are a solid lineup of customers, too.

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In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Forethought could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Three things that could be improved

Forethought raised $65 million with this deck, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be even better! Here are a few of the things I noticed.

More clarity please!

OK, so perhaps this is nitpicking. What would you think when you see this slide? That Forethought’s customers are the next billion-dollar startups or that Forethought is? Slide 5 is “We Power Organizations That Change The World,” with 25 customer logos. The slide that comes after is “Think about the last time you were on hold.” It is bold, but in the context of 5 and 7, I’m not fully clear what the company is trying to say with slide 6.

I googled it, and it turns out that, yes, Forethought is on the 2021 Forbes next billion-dollar-startups list, but if I have to google something that’s on a slide to figure out what it’s meant to do, it’s a failure.

Of course, the founders would be using this slide to talk about their successes and recognitions, but without the benefit of a voice-over, this isn’t clear enough.

I invite you to think about the slide in three contexts: How does it read if an investor flicks through the deck before the meeting? How does it work as a presentation deck for you to talk over? How does it work as a “leave-behind deck” — i.e., the one that you send to the investors after a meeting is complete? Sometimes, I recommend making three versions of a deck: One is a send-ahead deck that investors can use to choose to take a meeting or not. On this version, you could use a bit more text if you need to contextualize slides or explain things. The second version is your presentation deck. Less text, but you know you’ll be there to give voice-over and context, and you can tie the slides together nicely. Finally, a take-home deck. This is probably the same as your send-ahead deck, but you should also include relevant appendices (and yes, your deck should probably have appendices).

In any case, if this deck is Forethought’s presentation deck, this piece of feedback is moot — but remember this for your own pitch decks: If they are meant to be consumed without your voice-over, they have to make sense in isolation.

A bit heavy on product

As you can see from the list of slides above, Forethought has seven or eight slides in its deck that could be said to be product slides. In its defense, each slide tells a different portion of the story, but, as I keep repeating, your investor doesn’t care about your product. Not really. Not deeply. And at the Series C stage, they care a lot more about customer acquisition cost, profitability, growth trajectory, recurring revenues, etc.

I fully understand the company’s desire to show off the parts of the product it is proud of, how it works, etc., but I’m willing to bet that “top researchers & advisors” was glossed over in every single meeting. Why? Because nobody cares: It’s too in the weeds. If the customers are happy (and it seems that they are) and the revenue chart is going up and to the right, you’re probably better off using benefits-based messaging than going deep on the tech. The cool thing is that Forethought already showed that it has mastered the benefits-based narrative, as I hinted at in the section about Slide 17. Showing how this helps your customer is going to be a lot more helpful than this set of product slides — and you can probably trim down from seven to one or two slides in the process.

Keep it simple and clean in the main deck. If you need to rabbit-hole on tech, that’s fine, but that’s what later conversations and your appendix are for.

Careful what you highlight!

The Forethought deck has two team slides, both relatively uninspired. Slide 2 shows the company’s two founders and a handful of recognizable logos. Then there’s Slide 19, which shows eight more folks and another 15 logos. In his funding article, Ron reported that Forethought has 145 employees and that the company expects to reach around 250 by the end of 2022. In other words, the 10 people featured in the deck represent a small fraction of the team, and they don’t really tell a good part of the story.

Again, I suspect that this is a presentation deck and that the founders have a coherent narrative that goes with both the founder slide (“Why are these the perfect people to run this company?”) and with the broader team slide. For the latter, I expect Forethought can point to its diversity figures and speak to why each business unit of the company is in good hands with these folks. It’s also likely that they’ll make a big deal out of these people being great hiring managers and that is the thing that unlocks the hiring of an additional 100 people following the Series C.

But none of that comes to the forefront on this slide, and it’s hard to say whether this adds any value at all to this deck. With a voice-over, maybe, but as-is, I’d argue to move Slide 19 to the appendix. Other approaches could be to highlight the most important business units and why they are in good hands — or just get rid of it altogether.

Where’s my operating plan?

I might also have criticized Forethought for its lack of an operating plan or detailed financials, but the founders left me with a note, stating that the total annual recurring revenue and year-on-year growth numbers were removed, alongside details on the product road map and a financial summary. I understand why the company may not want to share this sensitive data with the rest of the world — but if you use this deck as an example, remember to include all of that!

The full pitch deck

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