Pitch Deck
Definition
A pitch deck is the document a founder sends before a meeting and talks over during it. The shape is fairly settled: problem, solution, product, market, business model, traction, competition, team, and the amount being raised with what it buys. Ten to twenty slides is normal; past thirty it stops being a deck and becomes a report. Decks are built in Keynote, PowerPoint or Figma and exported to PDF, because a PDF file looks the same on every machine and cannot be edited by accident. The version that gets emailed is often a fuller cut than the one presented live, since nobody is there to narrate it.
Why It Matters
A deck travels. The partner you send it to forwards it to two colleagues, and one of them opens it on a phone between meetings. A 40 MB file of full-bleed photographs may never arrive at all: many corporate mail systems reject attachments somewhere above 10 to 25 MB, and hitting the email attachment limit means your deck bounces rather than lands. Sending a link avoids that, and it gives you something an attachment never does — the ability to fix the wrong figure on slide four without asking anyone to delete the old copy. It also tells you whether the deck was opened, which is the difference between a slow investor and an uninterested one.
How It Works
Export the finished deck to PDF, then look at the file size before anything else. Compressing images to around 150 dpi and dropping fonts you are not using will often take a 40 MB export under 5 MB with no visible loss. Upload that file to a host that serves it over HTTPS at a stable address, and the browser's built-in viewer renders it inline rather than downloading it, provided the response carries a Content-Type of application/pdf and no attachment disposition header. Put the deck behind a password if the raise is not public. Keep the address the same across revisions so that a link sent three weeks ago still opens the current deck — that is what PDF hosting buys you over a transfer service whose links expire.
Real-World Example
A seed-stage founder exports a 14-slide deck, compresses it to 3.8 MB and publishes it at northbeam-seed.99helpers.site behind a password shared in the covering email. Two days later a pilot converts and the traction slide changes; she uploads the new file to the same address, and every link already sent opens the updated deck. The 99helpers analytics show views from four countries and three downloads — enough to tell her the deck is circulating inside the fund rather than sitting unopened. Nobody had to be sent a corrected attachment.
Common Mistakes
- ✕Emailing the deck as a 40 MB attachment — it bounces on strict mail servers, and on the ones it clears it lands in a mailbox the recipient is already trying to empty
- ✕Sending the PowerPoint file rather than a PDF — fonts substitute on a machine that does not have them, and a careful layout reflows into something you never saw
- ✕Publishing each revision at a new address — the old link stays alive with the old numbers on it, and that is the one that gets forwarded
Related Terms
Investor Update
An investor update is the short, regular note a founder sends to existing investors: how the numbers moved, what happened, what went wrong, and what help is needed. Monthly or quarterly, usually one page.
Online Proposal
A pitch, quote or scope document published at a web address and sent as a link rather than an attachment. The client opens it in a browser; you keep the ability to correct it after sending.
PDF Hosting
Publishing a .pdf at a web address so it opens in the reader's browser rather than landing in their downloads folder. The header the host sends decides which of those happens.
Email Attachment Limit
An email attachment limit is the largest message, attachments included, that a mail provider will accept. Gmail caps it at 25 MB and most Outlook accounts at 20 MB, and the real ceiling for a file is lower than either figure.
Document Tracking
Recording what happens to a document after you send it — whether it was opened, how often, and sometimes how far it was read. The techniques run from ordinary counting to covert per-person surveillance, and the two are not the same thing.
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