Your Pitch Deck Isn’t About Ticking Boxes. It’s a Window Into Execution
By Andreea Wade
Every founder googles “how to build a pitch deck.” And every article says the same thing: cover the problem, the solution, the market, the team, the competition, the ask. It’s a checklist. Clean slides, nice font, investor-friendly structure: ‘’wHO knOWs a gOOD piTcH deCk designer?’’- thousands of founders wail eagerly (have been there myself).
But here’s the truth: most of those decks tell us nothing about whether you can actually do the thing you’re setting out to do.
I’m a founder who’s built, scaled, and sold a company. Now, I’m a VC. And if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s this: at the early stage, we’re backing execution, not theory. We’re not investing in your idea, we’re investing in how you think, how you learn, how you act, and how you adapt.
And your pitch deck, whether you realise it or not, tells us everything we need to know about that.
Execution is what earns trust at early stage
At this stage, ideas will evolve. Business models will bend. What doesn’t change is your ability to learn quickly, solve real problems, and make progress without perfect information. That’s what we’re looking for.
Investors don’t need a vision board. We need evidence you can build something real, and fast.
The best founders don’t hide behind strategy slides. They show how they’ve already started moving. They don’t just say what they will do, they walk you through what they’ve already done, what they’ve learned, and how that learning is shaping what comes next. ← If I could point a gazillion arrows at this, I would.
Execution doesn’t mean you’re already doing millions in revenue. It means you’re making smart decisions, fast. You’re running loops. You’re testing hypotheses. You’re engaging with the real world, not just building in your head.
Most first-time founders underestimate this. They focus on what the deck “should” look like. But experienced founders know the deck is secondary, it’s just a tool to show how well they understand their space, their customer, and what they’re building.
Execution doesn’t mean perfection. It means:
You’ve talked to dozens of customers
You’ve tested a version of your solution, even if it’s rough
You’ve made decisions based on feedback
You’ve got a path to proving (or disproving) your assumptions
That’s what signals momentum. That’s what gets us to lean in.
What second-time founders do differently
Experienced founders tend to do a few things very well, and consistently better than first-time founders. Not because they’re smarter. But because they’ve made mistakes before. They’ve shipped too early, or too late. They’ve built before talking to customers. They’ve raised too fast or too slow.
So now, they operate differently, and it shows up in the pitch.
They’ve spent more time in the market than in Figma
They don’t just understand the customer — they understand the entire landscape:
The workflows that are broken
The industry is changing
Relevant boardroom pressures customers face
The competitors customers are already using
The business models that are changing
The budgets that are shifting
The partners who matter in distribution
The direction innovation is moving in
Who’s raising, who’s exiting, who’s acquiring
This context gives them a sharp point of view on what matters and what doesn’t. When they describe their solution, they’re not guessing, they’re synthesising.
2. They bring evidence, not just ideas
Even at pre-seed, they come in with something:
Quotes from discovery interviews
A rough prototype tested with early users
Conversion rates from a simple landing page
Feedback from design partners
LOIs or pre-commits from future customers
3. They narrate decisions, not dreams
Their deck is basically a highlight reel of judgment calls and lessons learned.
I spoke to a repeat founder recently. Eighteen months in, here is what the founder had (besides paying customers and a solid pipeline):
Two hundred hours of focus groups before writing a line of code.
Pilot customers as individuals first (repeat learning loop), then whole pilot teams.
A running list of screw-ups: “We didn’t know”, “Here’s what we did wrong”, “We learned this the hard way”, “It’s still not perfect.”
That language is gold. It shows humility, learning velocity, and a bias for action. First-time founders talk about what they will do. Second-timers talk about what actually happened. And they lean into detail because they aren’t afraid to share the learnings as they have translated them into progress.
It becomes clear, very quickly, that we’re not just hearing a pitch, we’re watching how they operate.
As an ex operator, I know what to do with this. As a VC, I can better lean into my due diligence and, at such an early stage, into my belief that this person, this team, can do it.
What if you don’t have much yet?
This is the most common (and honest) question we get at early stage. And it’s a fair one. But even without a product, you can show evidence of execution. Here’s what that can look like:
Discovery calls with real customers → Use their exact words in your slides and offer context around their use case (get into that detail)
Letters of intent or endorsement → Early proof of trust
Landing page conversion data → GTM signal
Testimonial quotes from pilots or early users
Short videos from design partners walking through early builds
Experiments you’ve run and what you learned (even if it “didn’t work”)
This kind of proof tells us that you’re not sitting around theorising. You’re out in the world, talking to buyers, shaping what you build based on feedback, and moving.
Final thought: audit your deck like this
Before you share your deck, ask yourself:
Does every slide tell me something about how we think, how we learn, or how we execute?
If the answer is no, cut it, or fix it.
Your pitch isn’t a performance. It’s a reflection of how you operate. The goal isn’t to impress. It’s to show that you’re the kind of founder who gets stuff done.
And trust me, we’re looking for that.
At Delta Partners, we back founders at the earliest stages, often before the product is polished or the path is fully mapped out. What matters to us is how you think, how you learn, and how you move.
Get in touch if that’s you.
