I Stopped Reading Founder Decks

I stopped reading founder decks about a year ago. Not as a stunt — I just realized the deck was never the thing that made me write a check.

If I trace back the last fifteen investments I've made, exactly zero of them happened because the deck told me something I couldn't have figured out in a ten-minute call. The deck told me the TAM I was supposed to believe in, the team slide that always undersells the team, the traction graph cropped to flatter whatever month they want to highlight, and the "competitive landscape" 2x2 that puts the brand in the top right corner of every chart that's ever existed.

None of that helped me make a decision. The thing that helped me decide was always one of three things: a founder talking off-script about a specific customer they remembered by name, the brand's actual customer service inbox, or watching the founder open their phone and walk me through their Shopify dashboard live.

I now ask founders to send me a three-minute Loom and a screenshot of their last thirty Klaviyo emails. That's it. If you can talk for three minutes without slides and not make me bored, your business probably has a real pulse. If you can't, the deck was carrying you and I'd rather know that early.

The Loom thing surprises people. They expect investors to want polish — a clean narrative, perfect lighting, a tight pitch. I want the opposite. I want the founder on their phone in their warehouse, with packing tape on the floor behind them, telling me what they did this week and what they're going to do next. The mess is the signal. The mess means they're doing the work.

What I've also figured out is that decks select for the wrong founder skill. A great deck rewards founders who are good at presentation. That's a real skill, but it's not the skill that builds a brand. The brands I've watched compound over five years have founders who are obsessive about operational details, customer feedback, and the boring middle of the funnel. Those are not, broadly, the founders who make beautiful slides. They're the founders who can tell me their AOV by SKU from memory and then immediately tell me which SKU they're scared to grow because the margin is wrong.

The customer service inbox is the other thing I always ask for. Founders look at me weird when I ask for read-only access for forty-eight hours. I don't read everything — I read the tone of replies, the speed, what gets escalated, what the most common complaint is. You learn more about a brand from one hour in their support inbox than from a week of investor meetings. The brands I've passed on because of what I saw in the inbox have, almost without exception, gone on to underperform. The brands where the inbox felt obsessive and human have all done well.

I'm not anti-deck. If a founder wants to send me one, fine. I'll skim it after the call as a reference document. But I no longer use it as the primary input, and I no longer feel guilty about not reading it cover to cover. The deck is the brochure. I want to see the kitchen.

What I tell founders raising right now: don't put six weeks into a deck. Put six weeks into your customer service response time, your repeat purchase cohort, and your ability to explain your business in a three-minute Loom without saying "we're the Warby Parker of" anything. Those will close investors. The deck will not.

The funny part is that the founders who push back hardest on this are usually the ones with the prettiest decks. They've spent months on the narrative and they want the narrative to do the work. I get it. It's emotionally hard to be told that the artifact you sweated over isn't the thing that moves the needle. But the investors who matter — the ones who write checks and then help you build for ten years — were never going to be convinced by your slide deck. They were going to be convinced by the way you talk about your customers when nobody's listening.