Insights for Founders Raising Their Next Round

For decades, Silicon Valley Bank was the quiet infrastructure behind the startup world. Founders didn't talk about it the way they talked about term sheets or valuations, but almost every early stage company banked there, and almost every VC recommended it. Then, in March 2023, it collapsed in less than 48 hours. What happened next didn't just shake the banking industry. It changed how founders think about raising money, managing cash, and choosing who to trust with their company's survival.

Investors decide how closely they'll pay attention to the rest of your deck within the first two slides. Before they see your traction, your market size, or your ask, they're forming an opinion based on how you frame the problem and how you present your solution. Get these two slides wrong, and everything after them gets read with less patience. Get them right, and the rest of the deck earns the benefit of the doubt.

A lot of founders use the same deck structure at every stage, just updating the numbers as they go. That's a mistake. Investors read pre-seed, seed, and Series A decks with completely different expectations, because they're evaluating completely different things at each stage. Understanding what changes at each round can be the difference between a deck that lands and one that gets passed on.