Hey,
This week, I hand over the reins to one of our partners, experts on pitch decks, who break down the 3 slides most founders screw up in their decks. A good read.
Also;
📸 - Social Snapshot: Base44 story
📊 - Infrastructure SaaS in 2025
🎙️ - Search Funds 101 w/ Jon Staenberg
🆓 - Resources for founders
Welcome to issue 127.
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Your Pitch Deck Might Be the Reason You're Getting Ignored
Most founders obsess over intros, but forget their deck is doing the real talking. Decko builds investor-ready pitch decks from scratch, run by a team of active VCs and expert designers. If you want to raise real money, you need a real deck.
Thunder founders get 10% off.
Get Started
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Social Snapshot
🗞️ The Base44 acquisition: Ben Lang on X.
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Jon Staenberg's 35% ROI Playbook
Last week, I spoke with Jon Staenberg, founding partner of Agate Hound Fund, to unpack the real mechanics behind venture capital and search funds. From his early days at Microsoft, to founding a search fund that delivers 35% net annual returns, Jon pulls no punches. Great lesson in investing in small businesses and the “retire early” myth vs. 60‑hour workweeks.
Watch Now
Listen on:
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Data Corner
Infrastructure SaaS in 2025
According to PitchBook’s Q1 2025 Infrastructure SaaS report, capital is still flowing into the sector, even if deal volume continues its downward slide. Total funding hit $3.5B across 98 deals, down in count but up in quality compared to the average quarter last year (when you strip out Databricks’ massive $10B Series J from Q4). Without that outlier, capital raised is up 23% from prior quarters.
DevOps and data software led the pack, each raising over $1B; DevOps spiked 280% QoQ to $1.16B across 29 deals, barely edging out data infra at $1.1B across 26. Meanwhile, IT ops saw a 31% bump to $746M. The outlier? App infra—most deals but the least capital ($514M, down 64%).
AI remains the gravitational center for big checks, but the real signal here is that serious capital is still backing the plumbing behind it.
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Raising Capital for your startup?
Thunder's mission is to guide founders toward the right path to reach their North Star, be it through securing equity or debt financing or navigating the path to a successful exit.
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The 3 slides most founders screw up in their decks.
Most founders are bad at making pitch decks. After helping 300+ startups who've raised over $1B with their decks, here are the mistakes we see founders consistently making when they come to us:
1) Intro Slide - You don’t have one.
The intro slide comes before the “problem, solution, product…” story we’re all familiar with. It’s the slide that gets people to listen.
It should have 2 things on it: a simple explanation of your business and the most impressive things about it. Logos of your biggest customers, revenue growth, customer testimonials, notable investors, etc.
Whether or not investors understand your company right away, they’ll always understand concrete indicators of success.
2) Market Size - You did the wrong analysis.
A lot of companies go straight to a top-down analysis when bottom-up is a much better fit for their startup.
Top-down is grabbing some stat off of Statista about how big a market is and slapping it in your deck. Then maybe slicing it into a TAM SAM and SOM.
Bottom-up is getting an estimate of how many potential customers you have, and multiplying that by your price.
The first is good if you’re replacing or taking a cut of an existing type of spend. The second is good if you’re creating a new type of spend, which most startups are.
3) Product & How it Works - You’re explaining it to yourself, not your investor.
You should run your product slides by at least 10 people before showing them to an investor. Show your parents, your friends who know nothing about tech, and anyone else willing to give feedback. If they don’t understand, go back to the drawing board.
It’s easy to become convinced that everyone in tech thinks like an engineer or programmer. Some might, but you need your deck to be understandable by everyone who could be an eligible investor–not just those with the same education as you.
Explain what your product does and how you know it’s the best solution out there. Then later, you can get into discussions about the finer tech details.
We have a free thing at DECKO for this - if you send your deck here we’ll hop on a call to give you our feedback + suggestions to improve it.
By Robert Harary, founder at DECKO
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Fundraising Resources
💸 - Access working capital fast - Explore options for free
😍 - Free list of AI Recommended VCs - Apply for free
👨💻 - Free fundraising coaching session - Schedule 15 minutes with us
📝 - Playbook for Negotiating Term Sheets - Download it Here
💽 - Playbook for Setting Up and Sharing Your Data Room - Download it Here
✉️ - Playbook for Sending Investing Updates - Download it Here
📞 - Guide to Nailing Your First Calls With Investors - Download it Here
📆 - Your 12-month Fundraising Plan- Download it Here
💫 - Pitch deck design services for founders by VCs - Decko
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Let's stay in touch:
- Written by Jason Kirby - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrkirby
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