Elevating the Team Slide in any Pitch Deck
By Chuck Isgar and Alex Rubalcava
Introduction
A few months ago, we started a series about effectively pitching your startup with one of the least understood slides in a deck, the use of proceeds slide. We’ve been glad to learn that many readers found value in that post. In fact, we recently led a round in a startup that created their “use of proceeds” slide using the model we shared. Today we’ll continue the series with more tips around pitch decks, this time about the team slide.
When seeking investment, every pitch deck should have a slide introducing the founders. We find that the vast majority of team slides could be improved, so we’d like to share tangible steps about how to convey the strength of a founding team on a single slide.
At Stage VP, our primary questions about a founding team are simple: can they ship, can they sell, and can they hire? A great team slide conveys your credibility, answering all of these questions in the affirmative — in just a glance.
Why is mastering your team slide important?
At the earliest stages, investors evaluate the founding team more than any other factor, since product development and customer traction are still incipient. Credibility, an open-ended quality that can characterize a 22-year-old just as much as it can a 55-year-old, is the hallmark of an effective founder. Founders need to show the credibility they have to be undertaking their venture while asking for millions of dollars of other people’s capital.
it is worth noting that our suggestions are meant to spark inspiration, rather than to be copied blindly. Every team has unique strengths, and there may be unique ways to showcase your unique team.
To make our suggestions as clear as possible, we’re going to show you three versions of a team slide: okay, better, and best.
Here’s the okay version:
This is the better version:
Here’s the best version. If we were the team behind this startup, here’s how we might suggest they craft their team slide:
Quite a bit has changed among these three versions. We’re going to analyze the changes in an effort to share our suggestions to maximize the impact of the team slide.
Here’s our six takeaways about how to think about your team slide:
If you can, include numbers behind the experience and prior accomplishments of the team members.
Focus on prior examples of leadership.
Replace text with images or logos when you can in an effort to make the slides more readable.
Emphasize what makes team members specially equipped to scale this company. For each individual on the slide, it’s better to focus on one differentiated experience or accomplishment, rather than many common skills.
Highlight the range of skills amongst your team members and, if possible, show that your team has a balance of industry and startup experience, and a combination of technical and non-technical expertise.
Highlight the most entrepreneurial accomplishments of your team.
Let’s dive in more.
Quantify and be data driven whenever possible
In Andrew’s bio, we replaced “Experience in startup sales” from the better version of the slide with a much more tangible description of his prior results in the best version: “At ABC Company, led team of 8 BDR’s and 7 AE’s who closed $2.5M in sales per year.”
Why does this matter?
In this example, we have replaced text that could mean any number of things with text that conveys very specific information that suggests both success and relevance to the new startup where Andrew is a co-founder. After all, “experience in startup sales” could mean anything, from a stint as an AE who failed to make quota before being let go in six months, to the VP of Sales at a $100 million company.
In the best version of the description about Andrew, we have conveyed several facts: Andrew worked at ABC company, led a sizable team, knew how to manage different types of employees, and delivered specific, tangible results. The text intentionally makes no qualitative claims and contains neither adjectives nor adverbs. It’s left to the reader to determine whether these numbers are impressive or not, and the act of presenting the data in this direct way conveys confidence in the impression it will generate among informed readers. Going back to our core principles, remember that investors want to back founders who are confident in being able to sell their product. Sharing clear, strong numbers without verbose descriptions reveals the team’s confidence in sales.
Of all the metrics that matter for a growing startup, sales are the most objective. Now let’s take a look at metrics that have a broader mix of objective and subjective aspects.
Show leadership skills and quantify your ability to lead a team
For Martha, we replaced her description on the better slide (“Lead software engineer at Facebook”) with “Managed 8-person front-end team for iOS app at Facebook, leading app to 10M downloads” on the best slide.
Why does this matter?
If an investor were to read “Lead software engineer at Facebook,” they would have trouble understanding the context, since Facebook has products, teams, and business units of every conceivable size. Titles also vary across companies, prompting investors to wonder whether “lead software engineer” means what they think it means, or something different, at Facebook.
There is no ambiguity with the improved description “Managed 8-person front-end team for iOS app at Facebook, leading app to 10M downloads.” This explanation not only explains exactly what Martha accomplished personally, but also clearly states how she led others. When showing investors that a startup’s technical founder can indeed ship product, emphasize the team, the timelines, and the technical details that highlight the technical founder’s experience.
Use logos or images when they can tell the same story as text while being more visually appealing
For John and Andrew (both non-technical), we replaced the bullet point with their school information (ie: “Attended University of Southern California”) from the better slide with the logo of their alma mater on the best slide.
Why does this matter?
Most investors receive many pitch decks, and will only have moments to look through your entire pitch deck. Whatever you can convey quickly, you should. Logos are recognizable and much easier for an investor to process than text.
For Martha (technical), we also replaced the text of her school name with the logo of the school. However, note that we did add details about her course of study on the best slide that didn’t exist on the okay or better slides: “BS + MA in Computer Science, focus on Machine Learning.”
Why does this matter?
We added the additional academic information about Martha because it’s relevant to her ability to ship product. The information about Martha’s academic study of machine learning is not extraneous like much other academic information we see on team slides. Her college major and master’s degree complement her work history and further build her credibility as a co-founder.
Focus on what is unique
For John, we replaced “Founded and sold ACME company” and “Experienced in partnerships and business development” in the better version with “Previously founded three B2B SaaS startups and sold Acme to HP for $3M” in the best version.
Why does this matter?
Why swap two bullet points for one? It’s better to share one impressive, memorable accomplishment rather than any number of items that could be found on anyone’s resume. Given the space constraints of a team slide, for each member of your team, you get to share only a few things. Don’t waste space talking about anything obvious, commonplace, or immaterial.
While the bullet point “Experienced in partnerships and business development” might be true, it doesn’t really say that much about John, as there’s no quantitative or consequential information in the statement. Similarly, saying “Founded and sold ACME company” doesn’t differentiate John from other founders, since selling a company can mean almost anything. But what makes John really unique is that he’s sold his previous company to a major technology company for more than a million dollars.
Remember: the team slide is not a condensed version of the resumes of each team member. Rather, it is a place first to highlight why the team is equipped to scale this company, and second, to stand out relative to the other teams pitching an investor for capital. Each bio on a team slide should include a link to a person’s LinkedIn profile, welcoming the investor to dive deeper into each member’s background, without overwhelming them on the team slide.
Show that your team’s leaders can bring different skills and expertise to the table
In the case of our example, for John, Martha, and Andrew, we wanted to make it clear in the best slide that this was not just a founding team with some varied experiences at tech companies. Rather, we wanted to emphasize that John and Andrew have specific experience building the business and sales’ side of startups, while Martha has the experience leading teams to build and ship product.
Why does this matter?
Not all founding teams have complementary skill sets, but if yours does, you should highlight the diverse capabilities of your team. Investors are not like college admissions officers, looking for well rounded individuals. We prefer a collection of “pointy” individuals, with each person bringing world class experience, expertise, or reputation to the startup they’re leading.
A strong founding team should have a balance of domain expertise and startup experience. If your startup is software for the food and beverage industry, relevant industry experience might include a stint at Coca-Cola. Startup experience is pretty self-explanatory — have you founded or helped scale startups before, regardless of the industry of the company? A team that has someone who has startup experience and someone who has industry experience is a special combination. If your team has this, you want to highlight it on the team slide. We’ll talk more in the next section about why it’s important to highlight the team’s background in startups.
The second category a VC looks for a marriage of skills is the technical vs. non-technical tradeoff. At Stage VP, we invest in software companies, and we place a very high value on strong technical teams. A technical co-founder who can recruit talented software engineers to work directly for a company can often accomplish ten times more, with one tenth the money spent, of someone less effective, especially anyone dependent on dev shops.
For the person leading the business growth of your company, you’ll most likely want to highlight how they can grow a company’s top and bottom line, whether it be through their experience with sales, customer success, marketing, or all of these.
Highlight entrepreneurial accomplishments
Even if members of your team haven’t previously founded and sold companies, they might likely still have entrepreneurial experiences that are worth highlighting.
For example, if your team is co-founded by two people who met while working for a large company — let’s say Microsoft for the sake of this example— an investor might initially be concerned that they don’t understand the world of startups. Highlighting an entrepreneurial experience within your big company career, like launching a new ad product at Bing, can show the right kind of entrepreneurial mindset. It can show that you have the skills to conceive and execute a new project even if you’ve never held the title of founder before.
And if you have been a founder before, always show that, no matter the scale. One of our portfolio companies, founded by a team of 23-year-olds, noted on its pitch deck the companies that each founder had started in college. One was an in-home personal training business, and the other a car shopping comparison web site. Neither were venture-backed, but they showed that these team members were already entrepreneurs at a young age.
In conclusion
The team slide is one of the most important, if not the most important slide in your pitch deck. Many VC investors back teams first and companies second. For this reason, the team slide should always be one of the first five in your deck, rather than coming at the end as we see from time to time.
We hope this post has been helpful to you. If you have any feedback, please let us know!
Bonus section: things to avoid on your team slide
Some founders try to inflate their credibility by padding their bios with meaningless words. Our favorite, which we have saved as a reference for many years, read in its entirety: “Philanthropist | Visionary | Influencer | Strategist”
We have no idea what this person does for a living. We’re not sure it’s anything useful for preparing a person to found and lead a startup.
Advisors: There’s nothing less valuable on a team slide than information about your advisors. At Stage VP, we have never once chosen to meet with a startup based on the identity or reputation of an advisor to the company, no matter how illustrious. Only the founders matter.