Your Deck is Outdated
Here is what investors actually want to see.
Co-authored with Alex O’Hagan-Padron.
Founders get plenty of feedback on their pitch decks.
What they rarely hear is what investors are actually thinking when the meeting ends:
The questions that come up in partner meetings.
The patterns that make eyes glaze over.
The slides that don’t land the way founders expect.
Alex is an investor at Flyover Capital, where she leads the First Flight pre-seed program. Liam spent four years at KCRise Fund leading deal sourcing.
Between the two of us, we’ve reviewed thousands of decks across pre-seed and seed stage companies. We’re writing this because the standard deck playbook isn’t keeping up. Slides that worked two years ago now invite questions they never used to, especially in the age of AI.
Here are three things we think every founder should hear.
1.) The AI Survival Question
Every investor reviewing your deck is asking themselves a version of this: Why can’t a foundation model do this?
They may not say it out loud. But if your product touches AI, or could be disrupted by it, they’re wondering. And the standard competitive landscape slide with a grid and checkmarks doesn’t answer the question.
What they’re really asking:
Is this a feature or product?
What happens when the foundation models get better?
What do you have that can’t be replicated with an API call?
The founders who address this directly, before investors ask, stand out. Not because they have perfect answers, but because they’ve clearly thought about defensibility in a world where AI capabilities are improving by the month.
Answer it before they ask. Make it part of your pitch.
A strong answer to the AI survival question is founder-market fit. We call it the “Right to Build”:
Do you have access to hard-to-obtain data?
A unique distribution channel?
An unmatched network in your industry that lets you move faster than anyone else?
These aren’t nice-to-haves. They are the reason an investor believes you will win, even with the great unknown that is AI.
2.) Addressable Market Without Concentric Circles
We’ve seen the TAM/SAM/SOM concentric circles countless times. A $600 billion market at the top, your slice at the bottom, and a vague data point from an online industry report.
The concentric circle slide has become white noise. Investors skip past it.
What investors actually want to see is bottom-up math. Walk them through your assumptions. Show them you understand who you’re selling to, how many of them exist, what you’ll charge, and what a realistic conversion rate looks like.
Here’s an example:
There are about 50,000 CPA firms in the U.S. You’re targeting small firms—under ten employees, roughly 86% of the market—because they’re drowning in manual processes but can’t afford enterprise software. That’s around 43,000 firms.
You’re projecting 2% adoption in year one. Why so conservative? It’s a fragmented market with long sales cycles, and you’re a new entrant building trust. Two percent reflects what you can realistically close while refining your go-to-market.
At $400/month, you’re priced for budget-conscious small firms. Early conversations validated that $400 feels reasonable for a tool that saves five-plus hours of weekly admin work—owners said they’d pay up to $500 but flinch above that.
The math: 43,000 × 2% = 860 customers. 860 × $400 × 12 = $4.1M ARR.
That’s your SOM. It’s not a fantasy slice of a multi-billion-dollar market, but a grounded, defensible number you can actually go get. And it shows investors you understand your customer, your pricing, and your constraints.
Believable beats impressive every time.
One more thing most founders miss: every investor’s reaction to your market slide is filtered through their fund economics.
A $10M fund and a $100M fund have different return thresholds and different exit expectations. To return capital to their own investors, VCs need markets with enough room for growth and acquisition.
Do your homework on the investor you’re pitching. Frame your market opportunity in terms that map to their math, not just yours.
3.) Competitive Landscape as White Space
The competitive landscape slide isn’t about proving you’re better than everyone else. It’s about showing the gap in the market and why you’re the one to fill it.
Too many founders treat this slide as an opportunity to check boxes their competitors can’t. That approach backfires. Investors have seen it before, and they know the other company could make a similar chart with the columns rearranged in their favor.
Instead, answer three questions:
Why does this lane exist? What’s the market gap that isn’t being served well by existing players?
Why do you own it? What about your product, team, or approach makes you the right company to fill that gap?
Why does that position make you strategically interesting? Specifically, why does occupying this white space make you a potential acquisition target for larger players trying to fill the same gap?
The framing is forward-looking and positive. Competition is context, not threat.
You’re giving your investor a clean narrative to share: here’s the market, here’s the gap, here’s why this company owns it.
And here’s a move most founders don’t make but should: show what your competitors do that you’ve deliberately chosen not to.
It signals conviction about your roadmap and opens up a much more interesting conversation about your point-of-view on the market.
The Common Thread
Each of these comes down to the same thing: showing investors that you’ve done the hard thinking they’re going to do anyway.
You’ve anticipated the AI question.
You’ve built your market sizing from real assumptions.
You’ve framed your competitive position around opportunity, not superiority.
That’s what earns trust and what makes your deck easier to champion when you’re not in the room.
Legal Disclaimer
This post reflects our personal perspectives as investors and does not constitute investment or legal advice.
Co-authored with Alexandra O’Hagan-Padron
Alex is a pre-seed investor at Flyover Capital, where she leads First Flight, the firm’s pre-seed program. She focuses on non-coastal founders building category-defining technology in industries most investors overlook. Before joining Flyover, Alex was a Vice President at KEEN Growth Capital where she invested in food & beverage CPG and food technologies.
About Liam
Liam is an attorney and former venture capital principal who has worked across tech transactions, M&A, IP, and early-stage investing. He’s spent years on both sides of the table—negotiating deals as counsel and evaluating opportunities as an investor.
Field Notes for Founders brings practical insights from that experience to help entrepreneurs build smarter companies.