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Open Core Ventures Handbook/đź’°Fundraising/đź’¬Creating a pitch deck

Creating a pitch deck

Use the OCV Pitch Deck template to create your deck.
When it’s time to create a deck, use the slide title ideas populated in your
🏗️
Building Blocks document. To create the deck, refine your slide title statements into the best possible version for each section. Move those to the deck and refine.
Don’t change the flow or try to reinvent the wheel. You may need to add a slide or two for additional company or industry context but overall, follow the template. The deck template represents how investors think—it’s a fools errand to attempt to retrain investors on how to think about a pitch.

OCV Pitch Deck Template

Your OCV Ops dashboard is pre-populated with a pitch deck template adapted from the Sequoia pitch deck template. Use this to create your deck.
  1. Company Purpose: Define the company in a single declarative sentence.
  1. Problem: Pain of customer or customer’s customer, how the customer addresses the issue today
  1. Solution: Value proposition to make the customer’s life better, where does the product physically sit, use cases
  1. Why now: Historical evolution of the category, recent trends making the solution possible
  1. Market size: The customer profile you cater to, calculate TAM, SAM, SOM
  1. Competition: List of competitors, list of competitive advantages
  1. Product: Product line-up (form factor, functionality, features, architecture, intellectual property), development roadmap
  1. Open Core: Difference between the open source project and commercial product
  1. Business Model: Revenue model, pricing, average account size/lifetime value, sales and distribution model, customer pipeline/list
  1. Team: Founders and management, board of directors/board of advisors
  1. The deal: $XMM to raise XYZ Series A milestones. If applicable, a hockey stick 5-year revenue forecast.

Tips for drafting the deck

  1. The first iteration of the pitch deck only includes the titles of each slide.
  1. The title of each slide should be the conclusion, or key takeaway, of the slide. For example: the “team” slide isn’t titled “Team” it’s titled “Linux Experts. The “product” slide title describes what your product is.
  1. Titles should be active tense and not contain commas.
  1. Include an “Open Core” slide explaining the difference between the open source project and the commercial product. (Including in the OCV template.)
  1. Slides need to speak for themselves. Don’t rely on voice overs.
  1. The conclusion is one line.

Additional deck examples

10(ish) slides with Professor Ethan Mollick
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