Author: 1821admin

I’ve spent 20 years designing biotech pitch decks. I’ve also spent many of those mornings and evenings on the ice with a unicorn broom and a 42-pound granite stone. Turns out the two have more in common than you’d think.

I’m a curler. Not the hair kind. The kind that involves screaming on ice.

For the uninitiated: curling is a sport where four people take turns sliding polished granite stones down a sheet of ice toward a target, the house. Two team members sweep the ice in front of the stone to control its speed and path. A skip stands at the far end, reading the conditions, calling the shots, and trying to place each stone exactly where it needs to be.

It sounds simple. It is not. The ice is alive. It changes throughout the game. The pebble wears down, the temperature shifts, the path a stone took in the first end won’t be the same in the eighth. A good curler reads these changes constantly and adjusts.

I’ve been doing this for years. And at some point, I realized that everything I know about curling, I also know about presentation design.

Reading the ice

In curling, “reading the ice” means understanding the surface conditions before you release the stone. Where is it fast? Where is it slow? Where does it curl more than expected? You make these reads before every single delivery, because the ice is never the same twice.

A pitch meeting works the same way.

Every room is different ice. A founder who delivers the same presentation the same way in every room is throwing stones without reading the ice.

The best presenters I’ve worked with are constant readers. They notice when the energy dips and adjust their pacing. They sense when an investor is confused and slow down to explain. They feel when the room is with them and know to ride that momentum instead of interrupting it with the next slide.

You can’t script this. You can only develop it through preparation, rehearsal, and enough reps that reading the room becomes instinct. The deck gives you the strategy. Reading the ice is what makes the delivery land.

The skip doesn’t throw every stone

In a curling team, the skip is the strategist. They call every shot, decide the weight, pick the line, and place the broom where the stone needs to go. But the skip doesn’t throw every stone. In fact, the skip only throws two out of eight per end. The lead, second, and third each throw their own.

This is the part that most startup founders get wrong.

I’ve watched founders try to do everything themselves: design the deck, write the narrative, build the financial model, rehearse the pitch, handle the Q&A, and manage the follow-up. That’s a skip who insists on throwing all eight stones. It doesn’t work in curling and it doesn’t work in a raise.

The strongest biotech pitches I’ve been part of had clear roles. The CEO delivered the vision and the ask. The CSO owned the science. The CFO handled the financial questions. Each person threw their stone, and the skip called the game.

When a founder tries to handle the mechanism of action, the clinical data, the regulatory strategy, the business model, and the team narrative all by themselves, the delivery gets thin. They’re not giving any single part the weight it deserves. They’re throwing too many stones and sweeping none of them.

The skip’s job is to see the whole sheet, not to throw every rock.

Sweeping

This is the one that maps most directly to what I do for a living.

In curling, sweepers don’t change the direction of the stone. The line is set at release. What sweepers do is reduce friction. They heat the ice in front of the stone so it travels farther, straighter, and closer to where the skip intended it to go.

That’s presentation design.

A good deck designer doesn’t change a founder’s message. The vision, the science, the strategy: that’s set at release. What a designer does is reduce the friction between the founder’s idea and the investor’s understanding. Clean layouts remove visual friction. A clear narrative removes cognitive friction. Smart data visualization removes analytical friction. The Hunger Arc removes structural friction.

Every design decision I make is a form of sweeping. Typography that’s easy to read? Sweeping. Colour that shifts with the emotional arc? Sweeping. A mechanism of action spread across three slides instead of crammed onto one? Hard sweeping.

Over-designing a deck is like over-sweeping a stone: you push it past the target.

And just like in curling, you have to know when to sweep and when to let the stone travel on its own. Sometimes the founder’s words are strong enough that the slide should be nearly empty. Sometimes the data is compelling enough that it doesn’t need a fancy visualization. Knowing when to put the brooms down is as important as knowing when to sweep hard.

The house

In curling, the target is called the house. It’s a set of concentric circles, and the goal is to get your stones closer to the centre (the button) than your opponent’s.

In a pitch meeting, the button is the term sheet. And just like in curling, you don’t get there with one stone. You get there with a series of well-placed shots that build position throughout the game. The opening slide sets up the angle. The narrative builds the guard. The data draws to the button. And the ask is the final stone that scores the end.

If you’ve been following this series, that should sound familiar. The Hunger Arc is a curling end. Each slide is a stone, and they all need to work together.

Why I curl

People always ask me why I curl. It’s cold, it’s slow on television, and explaining the rules takes longer than most people’s patience allows.

I curl because it’s the most strategic team sport I’ve ever played. Because every delivery is a fresh read on changing conditions. Because the outcome depends on four people trusting each other completely. Because there’s a specific, physical satisfaction in watching a stone travel 150 feet and come to rest exactly where you wanted it. There are so many different ways to approach the sport, and my brain comes alive thinking about it.

That’s also why I design pitch decks.

A great presentation is a team of well-placed stones on a sheet of ice that’s always changing. You read the conditions, you trust your team, you sweep when it matters, and if you’ve done everything right, you’re sitting on the button when it counts.

Good curling.

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The Pitch Deck Playbook  ·  Post 1 of 6

After 20 years and more than 200 pitch decks, most of them for biotech and life sciences companies, here are the five mistakes I see in nearly every deck that comes through our studio.

I’ve been in the pitch deck trenches for over 20 years. Preclinical startups, Series B raises, IPO roadshows, CES keynotes. I once built a 72-slide deck in a single day. I once built a deck with nothing but three snouts in it, to represent the Three Little Pigs. Two completely different projects, same goal: make the people in the room believe.

I’ve also made mistakes in my own decks as a founder. The kind where you walk out of the room and think, well, that could have gone differently.

About 8 out of every 10 decks that come through our studio share the same problems. Nearly all of them are fixable, once you know what to look for.

1. Treating your deck like a document

Early in my career, I believed that more text meant more persuasion. More data on the slide, more words explaining the mechanism, more footnotes citing the literature. Right?

Wrong.

A cluttered slide doesn’t inform. It overwhelms. The moment an investor sees a wall of text, they either try to read instead of listening to you, or they tune out entirely. Either way, you’ve lost the room.

This is especially brutal in biotech. I’ve seen founders cram an entire mechanism of action onto one slide: the pathway diagram, the target, the binding mechanism, three lines of explanatory text, and a citation. The slide looks like a journal figure. The investor, who may not have a PhD in your specific discipline, is silently panicking.

If someone can read your deck and get the full picture without you in the room, you haven’t built a presentation. You’ve built a report. And reports don’t raise money.

Your deck is not a document. It’s a visual aid for a conversation. One idea per slide. Your pipeline table doesn’t need every indication on one screen. Your mechanism of action can unfold across two or three slides, the way you’d explain it over coffee, not the way you’d present it at a poster session.

2. Forgetting that a deck is a meal, not a menu

I used to focus on individual slides. The layout, the typography, the colour balance. Each slide looked beautiful in isolation.

The problem? A pitch deck isn’t a collection of slides. It’s a journey.

Think of it like a tasting menu. Each dish builds on the last and by the end, you’re not just full, you’re satisfied. There’s a reason the amuse-bouche comes first. There’s a reason dessert is sweet. The progression is what makes the whole thing memorable.

I call it the Hunger Arc, and it changed everything about how I build presentations.

The problem slide creates hunger: the unmet need, the patients who aren’t being served. Solution is the first taste. Traction is the main course: the data, the milestones that prove this isn’t just a good idea on paper. Team and Operating Plan are the cheese course. And the ask is dessert.

Serve dessert first and nobody’s hungry for the rest.

I see this constantly in biotech decks: founders who lead with the ask, or who jump to the pipeline before the investor understands why anyone should care about the disease.

When I restructured a client’s deck around the Hunger Arc, the founder told me it was the first time an investor meeting felt like a conversation instead of a performance.

Post 3 in this series goes deep on the Hunger Arc.

3. Letting a template tell your story

When you’re a biotech founder with a CTA submission due, a board meeting next week, and a pitch in three days, grabbing a template feels responsible.

But the template includes 15 slide layouts. You need 8. So you fill in the extras because they’re there, and suddenly you’re presenting slides that don’t serve your story, because a template designer who has never touched a pipeline slide decided they should exist.

Worse, the template looks like every other template. Same blue gradient, same stock photo of someone pipetting, same pipeline table layout your competitor used at JPMorgan last week. When your deck looks like everyone else’s, you’re invisible before you’ve said a word.

A deck that looks and feels like your company is a deck an investor remembers on the flight home. The Three Little Pigs deck worked precisely because it didn’t look like anything else in the room. It was weird, bold, and impossible to forget.

Your mechanism of action isn’t generic. Your clinical data isn’t generic. Your deck shouldn’t be either.

4. Designing slides when you should be designing an experience

I once believed a well-designed deck spoke for itself. Beautiful slides, tight copy, smart data visualization. What more do you need?

Connection.

A presentation is a live experience between a human on stage and humans in seats. The slides are one ingredient. The presenter, the pacing, the room, the moments where something unexpected happens? That’s the rest of the recipe.

When we were building Delta’s CES keynote, there was a moment in the run-of-show where the energy was going to dip. Thousands of people had just been on a flight and were about to sit through another hour. We needed to break the pattern.

Someone said, “Why don’t we give out blankets?”

That turned into, “Let’s put a ticket in a few of the blankets.”

That turned into an Oprah moment. A Golden Ticket.

The room lit up. People talked about it for the rest of the conference. It had nothing to do with slide design. It was about understanding that you’re not delivering a file. You’re creating a moment.

This matters even more in biotech, where founders default to presenting like they’re defending a thesis. You’re not at a podium reading a poster. You’re in a room with people who need to feel something about your science before they’ll write a cheque.

The best slide in the world can’t compete with a room that’s already checked out.

5. Ignoring what the colours are doing to the room

Colour isn’t decoration. It’s communication. Blue builds trust. Green signals growth. Red creates urgency. The wrong palette can undermine your message before anyone reads a word.

I’ve seen biotech founders default to their brand colours even when those colours fight the emotional tone of the pitch. Every slide the same flat corporate blue, start to finish. Problem, solution, data, ask, all in one undifferentiated wash. The audience feels it as monotony, even if the content is strong.

Now I use colour with intent. When we shift from problem to solution, the palette shifts with it. When we get to the data, the colours get quieter so the numbers can speak. When we hit the ask, the palette sharpens again. Most people don’t notice this consciously. They just feel it. And feeling is what moves a room.

If your deck looks the same on slide 3 as it does on slide 15, you’re serving every course on the same plate, in the same light, at the same temperature. It all starts to taste the same.

What now?

Every one of these lessons came from a real project, a real founder, a real room full of people who needed to believe in something. That’s what a great biotech pitch deck does. It takes complex science and makes people believe.

If you’re sitting on a deck that isn’t landing, or you’re about to build one from scratch, that’s exactly what the One Hour Deck Review is for. One hour. No BS. What’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it.

Next up in this series: The single most important slide in your deck. The one most founders treat as a throwaway, and the one that makes investors decide in the first 8 seconds whether they’re in or out. It’s not the slide you think it is.

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I’ve built more than 200 pitch decks in 20 years. Most of them for biotech companies raising everything from seed rounds to IPOs.

I once built a 72-slide deck in a single day. I once built a deck with nothing but three pig snouts in it. Two completely different projects, same goal: make the room believe.

After all that, I keep seeing the same five mistakes in about 8 out of 10 decks that come through our studio. They show up in seed decks and Series C decks alike. And they’re almost always fixable.

The biggest one? Treating your deck like a document. If an investor can read your deck and get the full picture without you in the room, you haven’t built a presentation. You’ve built a report. And reports don’t raise money.

I wrote up all five, along with the fixes that changed how I design presentations, in the first post of The Pitch Deck Playbook.

[Link to post]

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Quote 1:  “If someone can read your deck and get the full picture without you in the room, you haven’t built a presentation. You’ve built a report. And reports don’t raise money.”

Quote 2:  “A pitch deck isn’t a collection of slides. It’s a journey. Think of it like a tasting menu.”

Quote 3:  “Your mechanism of action isn’t generic. Your clinical data isn’t generic. Your deck shouldn’t be either.”

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Most pitch decks open with a logo and a tagline. That’s the most wasted slide in every deck — and you have about 8 seconds before an investor decides whether to lean in or reach for their phone.

Every pitch deck I’ve ever seen starts the same way.

Logo. Company name. Maybe a tagline. Maybe a date. Sometimes a stock photo of a city skyline or a circuit board or — God help us — a handshake.

It’s the most wasted slide in every deck. And it’s the first thing an investor sees.

I wrote about this years ago, and I was blunt then: don’t use the opening of your presentation to talk about yourself. Five years later, I’m even more convinced. In fact, I’d go further: the first slide of most pitch decks is actively lying — it’s pretending to be important while saying absolutely nothing.

Here’s the problem. The first 8 seconds of your presentation are when an investor decides whether to lean in or reach for their phone. Eight seconds. You get one shot at establishing the emotional contract between you and the room. And what do most founders do with those 8 seconds?

They show a logo.
What’s actually happening in those 8 seconds

When you stand up to present, the audience is asking one unconscious question: Should I pay attention to this?

Not “What does this company do?” Not “How big is the market?” Just: Is this going to be worth my time?

A logo slide answers that question with silence. It says, “Hello, I exist.” That’s not a reason to pay attention. It’s a placeholder. It’s the presentation equivalent of walking up to someone at a party and just stating your name and standing there.
What to do instead

Open with the problem. Not “Slide 2: The Problem.” The actual opening moment of the presentation should be the problem.

The strongest decks I’ve built start with tension. A number that’s alarming. A question that’s uncomfortable. A scenario that the investor recognizes from their own portfolio or their own life. Something that makes the room think, Yeah, that IS a problem. Tell me more.

One of the most effective opening slides I’ve ever designed had three words on it. Three words and a number. It described the scale of a problem in a way that made every person in the room inhale slightly. The founder didn’t even need to speak for the first five seconds — the slide did the work. And when she did speak, the room was already leaning in.

That’s what a first slide should do. Not introduce you. Introduce the tension.
“But they need to know who I am”

No, they don’t. Not yet.

Here’s a truth that took me a while to accept: nobody in that room cares who you are until they care about the problem you’re solving. Once they care about the problem, they will want to know who you are. That’s the natural human sequence — curiosity about the problem creates curiosity about the person trying to solve it.

Think about it the way you’d tell a story at dinner. You don’t start with, “My name is Ashley and I’ve been a presentation designer for 20 years.” You start with, “So I was in this meeting with a CEO, and the entire keynote was about to fall apart…” People lean in because there’s a story with stakes. They ask who you are after they’re hooked.

Your deck should work the same way. Problem first. Who you are comes later — and when it does, it has context. The audience already cares about the problem, so your background in solving it means something. Your team slide stops being a resume dump and becomes proof that the right people are on the case.
The one-two punch

The formula I use now for the first two slides of almost every deck:

Slide 1: The tension. One powerful stat, question, or statement that establishes why this problem matters. No logo. No company name. Just the problem, presented in a way that’s impossible to ignore.

Slide 2: The human cost. A single sentence or image that makes the problem feel personal. Not data — emotion. “This is what it looks like for the 4 million people affected every year.” or “For the average startup founder, this means…” Now they feel it, not just understand it.

By slide 3, when you introduce your solution, the audience isn’t politely listening — they’re actively hoping you have the answer. That’s a completely different kind of attention. That’s the kind that leads to second meetings.
Your logo isn’t gone — it’s relocated

I’m not saying your logo never appears. It does — in the bottom corner of every slide, quietly establishing brand presence throughout the entire deck. It’s there for the investor who flips through the PDF later and needs to remember which company this was. But it doesn’t need to be the star of slide 1. It was never the star. Your problem is.
Try this

Open your current deck right now. Look at slide 1. Ask yourself: if this were the only slide an investor saw — in a stack of 30 decks on a Thursday afternoon — would it make them want to see slide 2?

If the answer is no, you’ve got work to do. And honestly? That’s a good place to be. Because now you know.
So what now?

Your opening creates tension — or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground. And if your first slide is a logo on a dark background, you’re starting every pitch in a hole.

If you want someone with 20 years of experience to look at your opening — and the rest of your deck — the One Hour Deck Review will tell you exactly what’s landing and what’s not. No BS, just an honest breakdown.

Next up: Your opening creates tension. But how do you sustain it across 12, 15, 20 slides without losing the room? In the next post, I’m breaking down the narrative framework I use on every single deck — the one I adapted from screenwriting for boardrooms. I call it the Hunger Arc, and it’s the single most useful thing I’ve developed in 20 years of building decks.

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My favourite clients usually follow the same formula.

When they begin, everything is on track. The world is theirs, the runway is just long enough for the dream to have a chance, they have a few investors on board, an imminent and relevant problem, and a solution that has the power to solve it.

Armed with a new logo, website, and brand guideline, the identity is fantastic. As ready as a newly minted dinosaur park, they have spared no expense.

The calls start trickling in. “We heard about your story from a colleague, and want to really get to know you.” Calendars fill up. First-class tickets appear. Maybe it’s London and Geneva. Maybe it’s a string of Zoom links with names that make your stomach flip.

The rest of the night is spent on the deck. Copying information from the old version into the new template. Adding extra slides to beef it up. It looks great — miles ahead of yesterday. Rehearsals happen on the plane, or pacing the kitchen at midnight.

Two days later, the meetings go really well. Great energy. Real connection.

Two weeks later: silence.

The meetings have been unfruitful. A few polite follow-ups. Nothing substantial is coming from the deck on the website or the one that was emailed out. The momentum that felt so real has evaporated.

This is where we usually begin to work together. And this is where the honesty comes in.

The problem isn’t you. The problem is your pitch deck.

It’s not just a document. It’s the single most powerful piece of communication your company has at the early stage — and most founders treat it like an afterthought.

Here’s what typically happens: a startup invests heavily in brand identity. Logo, colours, typography, website — the full package. Then the pitch deck gets built on a Sunday night using the brand template and whatever slides the founder remembers seeing in someone else’s deck.

The identity is the outfit. The deck is the conversation. You can wear a beautiful suit to a meeting, but if you can’t articulate why someone should give you their money, the suit doesn’t matter.

At the early stage — pre-revenue, when the company is still more vision than reality — your pitch deck is the beating heart of your company. It’s the thing that travels when you can’t. It speaks when you’re not in the room. And most founders hand it to investors knowing, somewhere in their gut, that it isn’t good enough.

The two decks you actually need

You don’t have one pitch deck. You have two.

The deck you present in person is a visual aid for a conversation. It’s sparse, designed to support your voice and your energy. The slides don’t need to make sense without you — because you’re there.

The deck that gets emailed and forwarded has to work without you. It carries the full story in a way that’s clear and self-contained. This is the deck an associate reads at 11pm and decides whether to pass up to a partner.

These are not the same deck. Trying to make one deck serve both purposes is one of the most common mistakes founders make — and it’s why we often build both.

What a neglected deck is actually costing you

That founder I described at the beginning? Here’s what was actually happening.

People were downloading the presentation from the website. The analytics showed real traffic. Investors were clicking. But they weren’t reaching out.

The intros that were coming in? All based on personal interactions — warm introductions, conversations at events. The human connection was working. The deck wasn’t.

When we dug into why, the problems were obvious in hindsight. Too long. Front-loaded the company’s story instead of the problem. Charts that took three minutes each to understand. No clear ask. A narrative that read like a Wikipedia article instead of a story with momentum.

Every day that deck sat on the website, it was costing the company opportunities the founder never knew about.

Four questions to ask your deck right now

Answer these brutally.

Does it tell a story?

Is there a clear problem, a clear solution, and a clear path to you being that solution? Does the investor feel hungry for what you’re offering — or are they politely waiting for you to finish?

We use a framework called the Hunger Arc — structuring the deck like a tasting menu where each slide creates appetite for the next. Problem creates hunger. Solution is the first taste. Traction is the main course. The ask is dessert. If you’re serving information in random order, nobody leaves satisfied.

Is it light in weight but a juggernaut in impact?

How many charts are in there? How many slides exist because a template included them, not because your story requires them? In roughly 8 out of 10 decks that come through our studio, we cut at least a third of the slides. Not because the information isn’t important — because the story doesn’t need it all on stage.

Does it allow you to speak authentically?

When I work with clients, I listen for the moments when their voice changes — when they speed up because they’re excited, get quiet because something matters deeply. Those moments are gold. The deck should be designed to support them. If you’re reading slides instead of talking to people, the design is fighting you.

Is it human?

Years ago, a client walked in with a project that made the hairs on my neck stand up. Cancer diagnostics. I’ve had family members battle cancer. The problem wasn’t abstract to me — it was personal.

Because they made that emotional connection in the first moments, their story became a story I wanted to share. When we ran the test presentation, the same thing happened. People in the room didn’t just understand the business model. They felt the mission.

That’s not fluff. Every investor is a human being with their own story. If your deck makes a genuine emotional connection, that investor doesn’t just remember your company — they talk about it. At dinner. In partner meetings. Your story becomes their story. Not the EBITDA projection. Not the market size. The human thing that made them care.

Invest in the heartbeat

There are companies with average logos and extraordinary decks. They’re at the top of the stack. There are also companies with stunning brand identities and terrible decks. They look great on paper. They lose the room at slide 4.

Your deck, when it’s well-designed, lives through others. It works while you sleep. It makes your case when you’re not in the room. Like a beating heart, it’s a constant feedback loop — reflecting how your company is growing, what you believe, and where you’re going.

Make sure it’s healthy. Make sure it represents the best version of the company you’re building.

And if you’re not sure whether it does? That’s exactly what the One Hour Deck Review is for. One hour. No BS. Just 20 years of pattern recognition applied to your slides.

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