A pitch deck is the fifth card. When the investor says “I call,” you have to show the other four

The best pitch deck I have seen this year did not raise a single zloty on its own.

In March, two founders put a printout of 19 slides in front of me. Each slide carried one idea and one number. The financial model covered five years in three scenarios. They had worked on it for seven months outside working hours and had spent PLN 380,000 of their own savings on the company.

The deck went to 31 funds. Eight of them invited the founders to a meeting. At each one they heard that it was one of the best presentations the fund had seen that year. They did not receive a single offer.

A partner at the last fund stopped the presentation at the third slide. He asked which of them had ever managed a team of more than ten people. Neither of them said a word. One was a software developer, the other an analyst at a large consulting firm. The partner thanked them and promised to be in touch.

I have changed the details so that neither the company nor the people involved can be identified.

What a pitch deck is for

A pitch deck is a short presentation for an investor, usually a dozen or so slides. Many founders treat it as a marketing piece meant to impress. That is a mistake. A deck is a well-written summary of the main elements of a business idea. Its job is to interest the investor enough that he wants to test the idea.

When the investor is interested, he says “I call,” as in poker. At that point four more cards have to be laid down next to the fifth card, which is the deck: the concept, the strategy, the plan and the financial model. A founder who wants to persuade a fund to invest must understand all four and be able to defend them.

In one of the most extensive surveys of venture capital funds, covering 885 investors at 681 firms, the average fund looked at about a hundred companies for every investment it eventually made. One in four of those companies got a meeting with management. Only 10% of deals came to the fund directly from founders. More than 30% came through professional networks, and 20% through referrals from other investors (Gompers et al., 2016). I described a similar funnel when writing about rejections by private equity funds.

The real work starts after the meeting. The average deal took 83 days. The fund spent 118 hours on due diligence and called ten people for references.

How much time an investor spends on the deck itself is measured by DocSend, a service through which funds open presentations. In its 2020 data, investors spent an average of 4 minutes and 10 seconds reading decks that raised money at the earliest stage. They spent 1 minute and 36 seconds on decks that did not raise money.

Four cards after “I call”

There is no contradiction between a short deck and the long work that has to be done before it is shown. The deck is a summary of that work. If the work is missing, there will be nothing to show after the first meeting. The order in which the four cards are produced matters, because each one follows from the one before.

It starts with the business model and the concept. The concept answers four questions: who the product is for, what problem it solves, who pays for it and why they pay this particular company. Until the founder can answer them in a single paragraph, there is no point in writing a strategy.

The growth strategy is built on the model. It says which markets the company enters and in what order, through which channels it sells and where it should be in five years.

The operating plan, the route to that goal, follows from the strategy. Whom to hire and when, how many salespeople are needed for every million zlotys of revenue, what it costs to acquire a customer and when the next product is needed.

The financial model translates the decisions on the three previous cards into money. Only when all four are ready and consistent are they turned into slides. At Capital One Advisers we keep to this order, because a deck made before the plan then has to be reworked with every question an investor asks.

This order applies to the logic. On the calendar, the work goes back to earlier stages. The financial model often shows that the strategy needs twice as many salespeople as the company can pay for. Then you have to go back to the strategy, and sometimes to the business model.

The investor knows the forecasts will not come true. In the same survey, funds admitted that fewer than 30% of their companies achieve their projected results, and 26% among early-stage companies. As many as 31% of early-stage funds do not forecast cash flows at all. They read the model for consistency. They check whether revenue grows at a pace the sales team can support, whether the cost of acquiring a customer matches the marketing budget and whether the cash will last until the next round. One inconsistency is enough to undermine the whole plan.

The investor buys people

This is the trap founders find out about last. A plan and a deck cannot replace the skills and determination needed to turn a concept into a company that will create value for its shareholders.

Funds say this openly. The team was named as the most important factor in the decision by 47% of them. Factors relating to the business itself, that is, the business model, product, market and industry, were named as most important by 37% of funds combined, and valuation by fewer than 3%. In the team, investors looked most often for ability, then industry experience, passion, experience of running a business and the ability to work together. The team was also the most frequently cited cause of failure: 55% of funds named it as the most important one.

An experiment confirms this. Researchers sent almost 17,000 messages to about 4,500 active business angels, that is, people who invest their own money in young companies. They randomly varied the information in the startup descriptions. The average investor replied markedly more often when the message described the founding team. Information about the company’s results to date and about the investor leading the round did not change his response (Bernstein et al., 2017).

The partner who stopped the presentation at the third slide said “I call” before he got to the financial model. He was checking whether these two people would build a company that would employ a hundred people in five years.

Who runs the company after the round

Steven Kaplan and his co-authors tracked 50 fund-backed companies from their first business plan to their IPO, and then for roughly three more years. Only one of them changed its core business. The CEO from the business plan stage was running the company on the day of the IPO in 72% of cases, and three years later in 44%. The authors write that weak management is much easier to fix with new people than a weak idea is with a new idea. They studied, however, only companies that succeeded. Their conclusion assumes that there is someone to replace a weak CEO with.

In the United States, a founder who lacks the skills can hand over the CEO role and remain a shareholder. Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School studied 212 US startups. After three years, half of the founders were no longer running their companies. Fewer than one in four took the company to an IPO (Harvard Business Review, 2008).

Ewens and Marx analyzed 11,929 fund-backed startups. In 15% of them, at least one founder was replaced. The replacement increased the company’s chances of an IPO or a good sale, especially when the replaced founder left the company (Review of Financial Studies, 2018).

There is, however, a condition that is rarely discussed in Poland. US funds replace founders in companies they have already invested in. The money to start goes to teams the investor has come to believe in. In the model known as a search fund, investors go even further and finance the manager alone, before he has found a company to buy and run.

In Poland, a market for professional CEOs of young companies barely exists. Funds rarely replace founders, and founders rarely give up running the company of their own accord. I have not found any data that would measure this. That is how it looks in the deals I know.

So the founder is expected to bring three things at once: skills, determination and his own money. In Startup Poland’s report “Polish Startups 2025,” 76% of the startups surveyed financed themselves from their own funds. The market for capital is small. According to PFR Ventures and Inovo.vc, 183 venture capital deals with a total value of PLN 3.4 billion were closed in Poland in 2025. In the first three quarters of 2026 the total rose to PLN 5.03 billion, but 74% of that amount was raised by two companies, ElevenLabs and ICEYE. The median round in the third quarter of 2026 was PLN 4.6 million.

Putting in your own money is rarely a formal requirement. The PFR Starter program requires a private contribution of at least 20%, but at the level of the fund. An own contribution from the startup itself is required, for example, by PARP, the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, in its grants for developing startups after incubation under the “Startup Platforms for New Ideas” program: 15% of eligible expenses. Founders put in their savings because there is no other money. In Poland, failure hurts twice. The founder loses the company he ran and the money he put into it.

Where 31% and a fivefold return come from

Venture capital funds require an average internal rate of return (IRR), that is, an annual return, of 31% from a single investment. The median expected multiple was five times. Buyout funds, which buy majority stakes in mature companies, expect less: in a separate survey of 79 such funds, the average target was a 22% IRR and the median multiple 2.5 times. Both targets follow from the arithmetic of a fund.

The first source is the distribution of outcomes. The VC funds in the Gompers survey reported that 24% of their exits end in a loss and another 19% return between one and two times the money. A return of more than ten times comes from 9% of exits. According to Correlation Ventures, of the capital invested in US companies that left fund portfolios over the last decade, less than 4% returned ten times or more, and 37% produced a loss. A few successful investments have to earn the return for the whole fund.

Then there are the fund’s costs. The manager usually charges 2% a year on committed capital and 20% of the profit (Kauffman Foundation, 2012). A simplified calculation assumes a 2% fee for the full ten years and a profit split only after investors have received all their capital back. In a fund with PLN 100 million of capital, the manager’s fees then absorb PLN 20 million, and PLN 80 million goes into companies. For investors to receive PLN 300 million, three times what they paid in, the portfolio companies must return PLN 350 million: PLN 100 million of capital returned, PLN 200 million of profit for investors and PLN 50 million for the manager. That is 4.4 times what the fund actually invested in companies.

Finally, the investors who entrust money to funds expect a premium for risk and illiquidity. The Kauffman Foundation, which itself invests in VC funds, writes of a threshold of 3–5 percentage points a year above public market returns.

Funds’ actual results are more modest. In Carta’s data for the first quarter of 2026, the median net return of US VC funds raised in 2017 was 9.2% a year. European VC funds returned an average of 11.25% a year net from inception to the end of 2025 (Invest Europe). A high target for each single investment is the condition for a decent result for the fund as a whole.

What the company must be worth at exit

Investors translate these targets into a valuation using a method that William Sahlman and Daniel Scherlis of Harvard Business School described in 1987. In its simplest form, the fund takes the company’s value at exit, divides it by the required multiple and multiplies it by the part of its stake that will survive dilution in later rounds. That gives the post-money valuation. The pre-money valuation is the post-money valuation minus the amount invested. The same calculation can be run in reverse: from the valuation the founders want to the company value the fund needs.

The two founders from the March meeting wanted to raise PLN 4.2 million, an amount close to the median Polish round, at a pre-money valuation of PLN 12.8 million. The post-money valuation was PLN 17.0 million, which gave the fund 24.7% of the shares. At a fivefold return, those shares must be worth PLN 21.0 million at exit. In this example I assume that before a sale the company will raise two more rounds, which will dilute the fund’s stake by 20% and 25%, that is, reduce it through the issue of new shares to later investors. After those rounds, the 24.7% will shrink to 14.8%, so the company must be worth about PLN 141.7 million at exit. That is the minimum if the sale proceeds are split in proportion to shareholdings. If investors in later rounds secure the right, on a sale of the company, to get their money back first and only then share in the surplus, the threshold for the first fund will be higher.

This figure shows what the investor has to believe: that these two people will build a company worth PLN 141.7 million within five to seven years. Five times the money in five years is an IRR of about 38%; in seven years, about 26%. The 31% target and the fivefold multiple meet after roughly six years. The financial model can show where this value is to come from. It does not answer the question the partner asked at the third slide.

At Capital One Advisers we start work on a pitch deck by establishing who will defend it in front of the fund. Only then do we discuss the business model, the strategy, the plan and the numbers.

One more slide

In July the founders hired a chief operating officer who had built a 40-person sales team at his previous company. They gave him 4% of the shares, which vest gradually over four years of work at the company. With the same deck, plus one slide, the round closed in September.

Polish founders rarely decide before the first round at what point their own skills will no longer be enough for the company they are promising investors. An American founder can then hand over the CEO role and keep his shares. A Polish founder usually has to learn faster than the company grows, or share it with someone who already knows how. The founders in this story chose the second path, at the cost of 4% of the shares.

Service: Raising capital and finding an investor