What Investors Actually Look for in a Pitch Deck, Slide by Slide

In 2008, Brian Chesky and his co-founders tried to raise $150,000 for Airbnb at a $1.5 million valuation. They pitched seven prominent investors in Silicon Valley. Five said no, and two never replied. Chesky later published the rejection emails himself, and the reasons were ordinary: wrong market, not a fit for the fund, travel didn’t look big enough. In April 2009 the company closed a $600,000 seed round led by Sequoia Capital, and the pitch deck it used has been dissected by founders ever since. That story usually gets told as a lesson about persistence. It is also a lesson…