Last month (actually it was August—I’ve been busy), my desperate plea to founders to please stop sending AI slop decks went viral. I wrote it because my Monday-morning pitch deck review routine had gone from exciting to neutral to mildly annoying to downright soul-sucking in the course of a year. Decks used to be like a bag of Bertie Botts Every-Flavored Beans—some blah, some gross, some absolutely delightful. Today, it’s all vanilla and completely indistinguishable.
I heard from a lot of you in response.
Fellow investors adamantly agreed. Most VCs can tell when a deck is AI-generated, and are equally annoyed at the sameness. The deeper issue isn’t about the deck itself—everyone I heard from has the same allergic reaction when it’s clear that AI didn’t just design it—it did the thinking, too.
Investors weren’t alone in this—anyone who has to sift through inbound pitches for a living is in the same camp. In particular, journalists and editors in my network report that their inboxes have exploded with PR pitch slop, at an exponentially higher volume than VCs. As a VC and contributor, my inbox and I concur.
The one group I didn’t hear much from this time are founders . . . at least not in public.
I think the advice hit hard. And I get it. You hate making decks. You think they’re a time-sucking exercise in futility. You spend hundreds of hours perfecting the damn thing only for some VC to have its agent summarize it and, at best, spend 20 seconds reading it. I raise capital for my fund too—so believe you me, I hate my pitch deck too. Maybe it’s time to ditch them altogether.
Is anyone still reading decks?
One founder in particular reached out, and their comment made me pause. “What’s the point?” they said. “If VCs are using AI to review them, why shouldn’t I use AI to write them?”
Is every VC skipping the deck? Maybe I’m the last one still looking at them (like that time I read 597 résumés last year). I decided to try and find out. A couple of weeks ago, I fielded a quick poll on LinkedIn to find out if most VCs are, in fact, using AI to review pitch decks. Then I spoke, texted, and emailed with a few of the respondents.
The results were eye-opening: 72% of VCs use AI to review pitch decks, the vast majority as an augmentation of their process (39% put decks through an AI review before human review, while 29% did human review followed by AI review). It bears noting that 28% don’t use AI at all for this purpose—at least not yet. And only a tiny number use AI alone, with no human review at all.
Considering that just a couple of years ago, 99% of VCs were not using AI at all, these numbers should be taken as a snapshot of a moving trend. And that trend is definitely moving toward more AI, not less.
When I asked a few VCs to help me understand why, responses came in two camps. The first was about volume. Here’s Rebecca Mitchell, a GP at Scrub Capital : “We get over 50 deals a week, sometimes two dozen a day. I couldn’t possibly look at it all properly.” And B. Pagels-Minor, founder of DVRGNT Ventures : “For me, AI in venture is about scale. I do want to use technology to help us see how much of the world we could potentially diligence without major human interaction.”
The second theme was about automation. Take, for example, Ben Orthlieb, GP of Blue Moon VC , a fully AI-operated VC firm. At Blue Moon, AI runs “everything, including LP comms, accounting, company analysis, meeting prep, founder screening.” In this model, Ben doesn’t review any decks at all. “I use [AI] to analyze companies before I meet them and generate meeting outlines with key questions based on the analysis and their backgrounds. My AI associate gives me an in-depth review of the company, its market, and its competition. . . . I don’t need a deck.”
Ben’s fully AI-powered operating model is still unusual in venture capital. The question for founders is: Will it stay an outlier or become the norm?
Some critical context
To really understand what’s behind the desire for speed and scale in VC, it’s helpful to reflect on the extremely dramatic industry-wide changes that VCs have faced in a very short period of time.
First up, the dramatic concentration of capital into megafunds. In Q1 this year, 75% of all LP dollars went to just five funds . This trend is so pronounced that even historically disciplined USV announced its latest fund at close to a billion dollars , more than three times the size of its previous one.
The second big trend is the velocity of today’s winners. A select few AI startups are growing blazingly fast, sometimes in traction, sometimes in valuation, sometimes in both. Combine that with some very real examples of superfast, superlarge exits—like Stripe’s $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter just three years after the latter was founded. Or Anthropic, which is just five years old, and is widely expected to IPO this year, with some analysts predicting close to or more than a capital-T Trillion-dollar valuation.
Let’s just think about that for a second. A trillion dollars in enterprise value created in just five years. It’s really quite something.
Meanwhile, there are more founders than ever too. I don’t have great data on this, but the trend is clear. For instance, 20 years ago, only an estimated 3% to 5% of Harvard Business School graduates started a company before or around graduation. Last year it was 17%. Jeff Bussgang, a VC at Flybridge and senior lecturer at HBS , told me this past spring that about 30% of HBS students are doing “something entrepreneurial” while in school. That was definitely not the case when I was there.
To summarize:
There are more founders than ever before.
The size of the prize is bigger than ever before.
The winners win faster than ever before.
The biggest funders have more money than ever before.
In other words: a perfect storm, the result of which is consensus capital . VCs are furiously competing for “legible” founders, the ones that megafunds (and everyone that aims to coinvest with them) believe are likeliest to deliver a hyperscaling win, ideally before someone else spots them and throws an eye-wateringly huge term sheet their way.
VCs now need to find these founders as fast and decisively as humanly possible, which these days really means humanly im possible, AI-possible. The days of relationship-building VC are behind us. Not permanently, I hope.
Maybe permanently, I fear.
(P.S. Not every VC has become a legibility-focused “trillicorn” [trillion-dollar unicorn] hunter with zero price sensitivity . . . a lot have, but not all.)
In the context of all this, what’s a founder to do?
Because really, a great pitch deck just won’t cut it. In this market, the only founders raising successfully are consensus founders—i.e., the “legible” ones; i.e., the ones that investors believe will win, and therefore can raise so much money so quickly and easily that the expectation of success is a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least when it comes to early fundraising. (Don’t get me started on the huge amount of bias that’s packed into that last run-on sentence. That’s a topic for another day.) And the difference in experience between “legible” and “illegible” founders is not so much a gap anymore; it’s a chasm.
As a result, you see founders today desperately trying to figure out a way to become legible to all these trillicorn-hunting VCs—contorting themselves to fit the pattern, having fun with math on their traction, overstating their background, playing power games with prospective early backers. To their detriment, I think. Lying is a straight-up no-no. The hype-y FOMO stuff works well enough to get meetings—it might even work to get a few checks in your round. But it’s manipulative and shallow and, I would argue, not how you build a strong cap table and a strong company.
The way I see it, there are only three things that make a founder truly legible—and very helpfully, they all start with T’s. So I hereby coin:
The 3 T’s of Founder Legibility
Trajectory. This is an obvious one. If you’re Mira Murati breaking out of OpenAI, or Travis Kalanick raising for his next thing, investors know what you can do and are hungry to jump on board. Less famous names fit here too—the PhDs working on boundary-pushing science and robotics, talented technical staff at any of the hyperscalers, GTM wizards who scaled something huge before. The point being, if what you’ve done in the past is a clear indicator of how fast and far you can go next, your trajectory makes you legible.
Trusted relationships. A founder is legible when an investor believes they’re capable of huge things. Sometimes that belief is borne out of the investor’s firsthand knowledge. More often, it’s based on a referral from a trusted source. As a founder, the more of those “trusted sources” you can impress and cultivate, the more legible you become to a greater universe of investors. And while it’s hard to reach the highest echelon of trusted sources, relationships are a predictable path from outside to insider.
Traction. The most democratic of all. As I like to say at Founder Day : Some founders raise on faith, but eventually, all founders raise on evidence. And if you get the evidence faster, I believe capital will follow. The bad news is that these days, the bar for traction and the size of its accompanying TAM are crushingly high. (And speaking of bias, some founders face an even higher believability bar.) The good news is that, in the process of achieving this ridiculously impressive traction, you’re also building a ridiculously promising business.
Ditch the pitch deck
None of the above is easy. If it was, anyone could do it. The fact that social media makes it look easy is false advertising, pure and simple.
In the past, a great pitch deck was a ticket you needed to ride the VC train; these days, it’s more of a relic of days gone by. You still need an AI-parsable instrument of communication that quickly flags VCs the top reasons you’re worth meeting (at my firm we definitely want to see a deck or a memo ). You still need a compelling (and hopefully substantive) story that wins investors over. And you still need a great data room that codifies and simplifies every item of due diligence.
But none of this needs to look like a pitch deck. Especially generic AI-generated slop.
And hey, by the way? There’s always the other choice.
If legibility feels out of reach, and you don’t want to FOMO and lie your way to a pre-seed, there is always that least-popular path: Don’t raise VC at all. Bootstrap your company, and get yourself to the best possible source of capital: revenue from loyal and happy customers. VC has done way too good a job convincing founders that ours is the best and only way. When in reality, it’s not for everyone and it’s bad for most.
Besides, it’s crazy how much you can accomplish with AI these days. Haven’t you heard? 😉
