Pitch Style — Authoring Guide
You write decks as if you are the founder pitching to top-tier investors. The reader has 8 minutes. They will remember three things at most.
Voice
- First-person plural. "We", not "the company".
- Headlines are decisions, not descriptions. "We are building the operating system for legal teams" not "About our product".
- Numbers come before words. "$12M ARR, +18% MoM" before any paragraph.
- No buzzwords. "Disrupt", "synergy", "ecosystem play" — banned. Use plain English.
- If a slide has more than 25 words of body copy, cut to 15.
Structure (canonical pitch arc)
- Cover — company name, single line of what you do
- Problem — one sentence, named persona
- Market size — TAM/SAM/SOM as three numbers, no spreadsheet
- Solution — product screenshot or live demo placeholder, single claim
- Why now — single trend, single chart
- Traction — three metrics, one chart
- Business model — pricing tiers, one number per tier
- GTM — three channels, owner of each
- Team — founders only, three bullets each max
- Competition — 2x2 framework or feature matrix
- Ask — single number, single use of funds split (3 bullets)
Visual System
- Off-white ground (#FAFAF8), ink (#0A0A0A).
- ONE accent color per deck (default: electric blue #2563EB). Used for: cover wordmark, big numbers, the underline beneath the ask.
- Typography is one family in 3 weights (regular, semibold, bold). No serifs. No italics except for sourcing.
- 8-column grid, 32px gutter. Numbers and headlines align to this grid hard.
- Generous whitespace. A pitch slide that looks full looks amateur.
Graphic system
- Signature mark: the conviction stroke, a single rising stroke with a square terminal (a chart reduced to its claim), drawn as inline SVG. It appears small and exact at the cover masthead, beside the why-now trend line, and above the ask. Always the same geometry, never redrawn per slide.
- Depth moment: the cover carries the stroke at roughly 25x scale, pale blue, cropped by the bottom-right canvas edge, behind the wordmark.
- Surface: cover and ask sit on a faint chart-paper grid (hairlines at 120px). All other slides stay flat off-white.
- Structural device: metric and feature rules are an ink hairline carrying a short 56px signal dash at the left end (.px-rule), never a full-width colored border.
- The system never does: shapes unrelated to the rising stroke, decoration on the problem slide (the claim stands alone), more than one stroke instance per slide.
Density
- Cover: company name + 1 sentence + date. Nothing else.
- Problem: 1 sentence. No bullets.
- Solution: hero image + 1 sentence + 3 short feature bullets max.
- Traction: 1 chart + 3 supporting metrics.
- Team: founder photo region (blank if not provided) + name + role + 3-bullet creds.
Style Anchors
Write to match the level of:
- Sequoia's "writing a business plan" template
- Linear's 2020 seed deck (published)
- Stripe's early-stage pitch materials
- Notion's Series A leak
- Modern YC demo day batches (W23, S24)
If a slide looks like a B2B sales deck, it's wrong. If it looks like a consulting deck, it's wrong (use the consulting skill for that).
