Article · 8 min read

The team slide is the most important slide in a startup pitch deck

Haje Jan Kamps · TechCrunch Free Beginner

This is the guide that argues your exact answer: stop stapling a Stanford and a Tesla logo under your name and instead show why your experience is an unfair advantage for THIS problem. Kamps, who runs pitch-deck teardowns for a living, uses his own no-logo path (a photography blogger who launched a hardware startup off deep domain knowledge and a real network) to show a first-time founder how to earn credibility without a famous employer.

  • Design the team slide to answer one question: why are you one of the best people in the world to build this specific company, not where did you work.
  • Domain depth and hard-won relationships beat a prestige logo, because a domain is far harder to learn than the peripheral skills of running a company.
  • Cut padding: keep advisors and irrelevant credentials off the slide so the founder-market-fit story is the only thing an investor reads.
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The question it answers

  1. How should I present my team slide when we are first-time founders with no big-brand names on it?

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