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.
Book a One Hour Deck Review →
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⚙ PUBLISHING NOTES // Delete this entire section before exporting to Wordable
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Target keywords: biotech pitch deck mistakes, biotech pitch deck design, investor presentation mistakes
SEO title: 5 Biotech Pitch Deck Mistakes From 200 Decks | 1821 Design Studio
Meta description: After 20 years and 200+ biotech pitch decks, here are the 5 mistakes I see in nearly every investor presentation, and the design fixes that changed everything.
URL slug: /blog/biotech-pitch-deck-mistakes
Category: The Pitch Deck Playbook
Tags: biotech pitch deck, pitch deck design, investor presentation, startup fundraising, life sciences
Internal links
• “Hunger Arc” → link to Post 3 when published
• “One Hour Deck Review” → /one-hour-deck-review
• “biotech and life sciences” in intro → /biotech page
LinkedIn post
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]
Social quotes
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.”
Pre-publish checklist
- Target keyword (“biotech pitch deck”) in title and first 100 words
- Internal link to Deck Review page (/one-hour-deck-review)
- Internal link to biotech page
- Hunger Arc link placeholder for Post 3
- CTA block at end of post
- Next-post teaser with open loop
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- URL slug set to /blog/biotech-pitch-deck-mistakes
- Category set to The Pitch Deck Playbook
- Tags added
- LinkedIn post copied and posted
- Featured image set (Hunger Arc illustration)