Most founders spend more time on their pitch deck than on the story it's supposed to tell. In our recent Inside a Techstars Accelerator virtual event, Managing Director Tim Grace and Investment Manager Gabrielle Rudd of Techstars Columbus powered by The Ohio State University, made the case that the deck is just a vessel. The narrative is the product.

The Deck Is Not the Point

The pitch deck, Tim said, "is perhaps... an overrated... one of those artifacts relative to all the different things you have to be great at, as a founder when you're pitching investors."

That doesn't mean ditch the deck. It means know what it's actually for. As Tim put it, "The pitch deck is just a vessel for a story." Or later: "It is a means to the end, not the end."

The trap most founders fall into? "A lot of people make the mistake of it being a paint-by-numbers exercise that something on the internet told them. Here's what 10 slides you should have in the slide deck."

Cold Outreach: Personalize or Don't Bother

Gaby walked through the most common pitch scenarios, starting with cold email. Her first rule: "If you have to send a cold email outreach, please, please, please make it personal." That means real research. "Reading their newsletters, looking at their portfolio companies, figuring out what types of companies they invest in, is it a good thesis fit?"

Keep it tight. "Try to make it short and to the point. If it's six paragraphs long, sometimes it's going to end up in the trash."

And resist the urge to scale outreach the easy way. "Please do not email blast all of them. That is not going to work for you... You're going to get more bang for your buck if you're sending these personalized emails one at a time."

Tim doubled down on this in the era of AI. "In the age of agents and LMS, there's great temptation to do exactly what Gaby just said. Don't do it." He added, "We can tell when it comes as a mass blast."

A few more things that get founders deleted: false urgency and being boring. "Lying or creating false urgency... that's going to be an immediate red flag for us," Gaby said. And, "The worst thing that we can do is just get a boring email... Make us excited about your business."

Warm Intros: Quality Over Quantity

When asking for a warm intro, both speakers emphasized that not all referrers are created equal. The two best, Tim explained, are "best portfolio company of that investor who hopefully is doing well... and that you have a real relationship with," and "an investor who is writing a check to you... is making a warm intro on your behalf to another investor."

The worst kind of intro? An investor who passed on you offering to introduce you around. "You're better off doing a cold email outreach," Tim said, "because what that's telling the investor they want to make a warm intro to is... they're not a good enough company for the introducing investor." His advice: "You're better off controlling the narrative yourself and just reaching out directly."

Gaby added a tactical note for founders requesting intros: send a forwardable blurb. "Send them a forward to both so that you're doing the work for them and then close the loop after you have an outcome."

The Initial Pitch: It's a Conversation, Not a Monologue

Different investors want different things in the first meeting. Some want to walk through a deck. Some want to talk. Gaby's recommendation: "Ask at the beginning of the meeting, 'Would you like to see a slide deck?' and make sure that you have a slide deck."

Either way, the dynamic should be a dialogue. "It's not a pitch, it's a presentation, even if you're using a slide deck." If you take the whole 30 minutes monologuing, she warned, "It's a brain drain."

Honesty matters too, especially with an accelerator. "We want to know the issues that you're having in your company as well. We're here to help founders. And so when you say, oh, nothing's wrong with my business, everything is great... that feels less honest to us."

Tim drilled in on why so many founders fumble the conversation: they've built a deck but never rehearsed the story. "If I'm going to tell someone the narrative of my company and... all I've done... is create a slide deck... then you actually don't know your narrative."

Gaby's prep advice was concrete. "Practicing with your friends, practicing with your family, practicing in front of the mirror, practicing in the shower. What I like to do is record myself with my phone." But, she warned, "We don't want to hear a script. We can tell that you're reading."

The Slide Itself: Less Is More

One of the cleanest takeaways from the session was about slide density. As Gaby put it, "People will listen, or they will read. They will not do both."

Tim explained how this should shape your live deck: "You want your slides to have the least amount of content that they could possibly have, just reinforcing... details to help the verbal story that you're telling."

There's a place for the dense, information-rich version. Just not in the room. "The time and place for that is not when you're in an active conversation with somebody." Gaby agreed: "Put it in an appendix. Maybe they ask for it, maybe they don't."

Be Interesting. Seriously.

Tim shared a quote that landed hard: "You've got to be interesting." And he meant it as a real strategic principle, not a soft platitude.

One technique he loves: "Starting with a claim, a fact, a piece of information that... feels like a lie... an exaggeration or something that couldn't possibly be true. And it is." When someone hears something they don't believe, "they're engaged, they're interested, they want to hear more."

Humor and warmth matter too. As Tim said, quoting a common sales aphorism, "Sales is a transfer of emotion. And you're selling. That's what you're doing when you're pitching."

Story First, Slides Second

Tim's strongest piece of advice on building a deck was to write the story before designing a single slide.

"Before you have a deck... you have a story in your head about... what is interesting, compelling, different, amazing about your company." His recommendation: write it out long form. "The best way, in my opinion... is just to write out the story like a script, like the best version of how you would talk about it. And then once you have that, it's easier to then take a look at that and... construct the slides to fit that."

That includes letting go of templated slide order. "Sometimes the team should be first... because it's an incredibly personal thing or your pedigree or connection to the thing is like the very first thing someone needs to understand."

Vision and Momentum

When it comes to the actual content of the pitch, Tim recommends anchoring on two things: a big future vision and concrete recent momentum.

For the vision, he asks founders to imagine a world where everything went right. "What does the world look like when that has happened? And being able to describe that is a very, very powerful way to help people understand the scale and scope of the impact your company could have."

For momentum, traction does not have to mean revenue. "When we say momentum, we don't always mean revenue and user traction." For deep tech, hardware, or regulated industries, "you're just not going to have revenue momentum early. So you have to come up with other things to show us your ability to progress."

He pointed to an example: "In 87 days, they've integrated six services... tracking 500,000 artists and... recorded 130 million fan interactions. That gives me a feeling that a lot is happening and that they are able to execute very quickly."

The specificity matters. "I love 87 days. So specific. Like they could have rounded up, but they didn't. So you kind of feel like it's even more accurate."

The Ask: Frame It Around Milestones, Not Money

Most founders end their deck by saying how much they're raising and how they'll spend it. Tim called this a missed opportunity. "I know you're going to spend the money. I think everyone's pretty clear on that."

What investors actually want to know: "Where do you expect that money to take you?" The right framing, he said, is milestones. "It's not the amount of time, and it's not, I'm going to spend 50% of your money on engineers."

Investors are evaluating whether the next round will be reachable. "If I invest in this company, given the resources that they're going to have... will they be able to get to a milestone that's important by the time this money runs out?"

The Bottom Line

A great pitch deck doesn't replace a great story. It carries one. Write the narrative first, rehearse it until it's natural, keep your slides spare, lead with something that makes investors lean in, and frame your ask around the milestones that prove you can do it again with the next round.

Ready to join a Techstars accelerator? Apply now.

Read More