Pitch decks·Deck design·2025-26
Designed multiple decks, one behind ~$500K raised and one that won a spot from 450 applicants.
Context
Decks carry a lot of weight at fast-moving companies. They are how the positioning gets into a room, and how the studio and its portfolio companies go to investors and to clients.
Everyone here sells by telling a story. So a deck is not a document you leave behind. It is the thing someone stands up and talks over, and it has to hold up while they do.
The challenge
A deck has one user, and it is not the audience. It is the person holding the room. Each of these was designed backwards from whoever had to give it.
What happened
Three decks came out of that. Two are still in active use by the teams they were built for.
The work
Shifu Ventures, The Investor Deck
Sri, the founder, pitches like a storyteller. Whiteboard, marker, context first. The old deck worked against him.
So the rule was simple: whatever makes Sri confident wins. Thirty plus versions over eight to nine months, revised after every few real pitches.
I learned Procreate Dreams for the concept animations and built it as an interactive Figma prototype instead of a PDF.
Before the rework he pitched a handful of investors. After it he closed bigger ones.
~$500K
raised after the rework, attributed in part to the deck
30+
versions, each revised against real pitches
Shifu Foundation, The Nudge Deck
The Nudge Institute picks a handful of organizations out of hundreds. Shifu Foundation applied with a video and a deck.
There was one day to build the deck. Prateek, Sri and Mausmi gave me the clarity inputs, and I built it in a single thirteen hour sitting.
Shifu Foundation got selected.
5 of ~450
organizations selected, an acceptance rate near 1.1%
13 hours
from blank file to the final-round deck
Photon Legal, The Sales Deck
- The old deck undersold serious legal work to high ticket clients.
- That was a positioning problem first. Prateek helped me fix it.
- Then I rebuilt the deck around it: minimal, premium, in the founder's selling order.
- Built as an auto-layout Figma system, so the team makes a copy per client. I trained them on it.
- They take it into sales meetings with high ticket clients.
