If you want to raise venture capital funding, you should be able to tell a compelling story to get anywhere. What’s more, according to conventional wisdom, your story should be supported by a pitch-perfect deck, too. How many slides a deck needs and what order they should be in is up for debate, but the deck itself is nonnegotiable.
That said, there are, in fact, people out there raising lots of capital without employing a deck at all. I was really intrigued to speak to two of them and learn how they did it.
Before Michal Cieplinski became the CEO and founder of fintech startup Capstack, he successfully founded several companies and invested in others. Today, he has refined his storytelling chops to the extent that he doesn’t use a deck at all.
For Cieplinski, not using a deck yields a major benefit: You ensure that your startup is based on a real product and not a feature. The perils associated with launching a business that relies on another product are many and dangerous, but in short, if the original product changes or is no longer available, then it’s bye-bye for your business.
Your idea needs to stand alone. As Cieplinski says, if your company is reliant on a proprietary product, you often have so much to explain to potential investors that you need a deck to help you.
“It’s a feature, meaning it’s not a stand-alone product,” he says. “As a result, you can’t really tell a story, because it’s a thing that needs a lot of other things. Yeah, [each] story has a beginning, a middle and an end.”
Cieplinski veers away from decks because he finds that they don’t support a founder in telling their story. Instead of helping to guide a conversation between a founder and potential investors, decks tend to be used as information dumps without a clear purpose.
“The deck is a visual, guiding tool for the conversation,” says Cieplinski. “It should not be used for anything more than that. People tend to use a deck as an information dump. That is never going to work.”
Clearly, there are times when a visual aid can be vital for telling your story. It makes sense to use graphs and charts, for example, because pictures can describe numbers and patterns far better than words. Charts can also assist in explaining complex processes, and occasionally, a photo of your product or plant is precisely what you need.
But the point here is that you’re using diagrammatics or illustrations to fulfill a very specific purpose where they have the edge over your words. They aren’t overshadowing your storytelling; they’re helping bring it to life.
“You should always use a deck as a guide, an aiding tool to your conversation if you realize there are portions that get quite complicated,” says Cieplinski.
Cieplinski shared an insight he gained by raising funds without using a deck: If the VCs aren’t able to connect with him and see the potential in his idea without a deck, then maybe they aren’t the right investors for him.
“In the back of my mind,” says Cieplinski, “if you’re not getting it [a presentation without a deck], then you may not be the right investor, because I am going to make it very easy to understand.”
That makes sense. As a founder, you’ll be working with your VCs closely, sometimes in challenging circumstances, for years. If your investors somehow don’t understand you, what motivates you, what’s important to you, or how you work, it’s going to be a difficult relationship. Such relationships can easily fail through poor communication, personality clashes or mismatched expectations. So, if neither of you need a deck to understand your company and your vision, maybe it’s a sign of a strong partnership.
Cieplinski isn’t actually anti-deck; he’s pro-storytelling. What he really objects to is the misuse of decks.
Will McGugan, CEO and founder of Textualize, which allows Python developers who don’t have front-end skills to build web apps entirely with Python, has a very different experience of raising without a deck: The VCs found him before he even approached any.
“I was doing this thing called office hours,” said McGugan. “Basically, you set aside half an hour at the end of the day just to talk to someone in the community. And because I was working open source, it was quite useful. I get to talk to people using my projects.”
One of the people McGugan spoke to happened to be Tony Liu, a partner at Costanoa Ventures. McGugan wasn’t thinking about funding, so he treated the chat like any other conversation even though he knew Liu was a VC. But as the weeks went by, Liu helped McGugan plan out how he could monetize one of his projects. The point here is that there wasn’t a pitch deck and McGugan didn’t have to pitch his project.
“It was basically a description of what I intended to build and what I intended to do with it,” said McGugan. “I sent that to Tony and he sent it around to his partners, and I guess it worked because we’ve got funding.”
Even if you’re not looking for funding, some VCs always have their ears to the ground and eyes peeled for new projects. Sometimes it’s just about having the right conversation at the right time.
There’s usually more than one way to do many things in this world, and that’s true for raising VC funding, too.