Seed Round Pitch Deck Template

A seed deck usually fails in the meeting after the one where it worked. It gets built once, from memory and from whatever was on screen that week, and every number in it is true on the day it is typed. Then diligence asks where a figure came from, and the honest answer is that somebody computed it once, in a spreadsheet that is gone, on a definition nobody wrote down. A number you cannot re-derive looks exactly like one you can, because both are digits on a slide.

So this pack builds the deck from the evidence sheet rather than the other way round. Every number gets a row carrying four fields: source, definition, as-of date and owner. Then everything that can be re-derived gets re-derived from the source, without looking at the slide. On the worked example, twenty-nine of forty-one numbers could be re-derived, eighteen came back identical, and eleven moved. Nine of the eleven moved down. The two that moved up were acquisition cost and its payback, where up is the worse direction.

Nobody had lied. Every ambiguous definition had been resolved once, quickly, at the moment of writing. The story then gets written from what survived, which is the opposite of the usual order and the reason it holds: a narrative built first and evidenced later always contains one claim the evidence will not support. That claim will be the most memorable line in the deck. It sits beside the data room the same round needs.