The death of the pitch deck (and the rise of the founder brand)

A cursory web search for “pitch deck guide” yields forty-five million results. This deluge of content, covering everything from financial projections to font psychology, has been endlessly recycled. Each piece promotes a similar message: that the perfect pitch deck is your all-access pass to a VC’s chequebook. But in a world where founders can fire off their deck to a thousand investors with one click, and VCs can skim them in seconds, does the pitch deck still carry the weight it once did? 

The numbers suggest perhaps not

A sobering 16% of investors spend less than ten seconds scanning a pitch deck, with average viewing time clocking in at just 3.1 minutes. For the founders who invest countless hours refining every slide, this offers a brutal reality check and a vanishingly small window in which to capture what has become venture capital’s scarcest commodity: genuine human attention. 

This isn’t just a matter of shrinking attention spans. Instead, it reflects a deeper shift in how venture capital operates, where investment decisions are defined less by intuition and experience and more by algorithms, engineers, and vast oceans of data.  

Tools like VC firm SignalFire’s AI platform, Beacon, scan over half a trillion data points to track talent moves and early-stage activity, surfacing opportunities long before an investor enters the picture. 

For investors, this evolution offers sharper signals, increased deal flow, and lower costs. For founders, it raises the bar. Your pitch deck is no longer just up against other startups; its facing algorithmic gatekeepers built to eliminate 95% of deals before a human so much as sees the first slide. 

The good news? While cold outreach gets harder, a core principle of early-stage investing remains unchanged: investors back people. When attention is scarce, the founders who meet investors where they naturally congregate and make their first impression through their profile rather than a pitch deck are increasingly pulling ahead. 

The best founders and FaaB 

This shift toward personal visibility as a strategic asset is what I’ve come to call Founder as a Brand (FaaB): a growing cohort of founders who view their public presence not only as a sales tactic but as a strategic advantage. They use it to build trust, showcase expertise, and create more opportunities. Increasingly, this visibility is not just driving sales but determining who attracts top talent, who earns investor attention, and ultimately who gets funded. 

As Duarte Garrido, Co-Founder of DOJO AI, put it: “From the moment I decided to become a founder, I knew that having a public profile would help.” That visibility, he says, “helps with everything.” For Garrido, LinkedIn became his go-to tool for reach. “We don’t do paid media. We don’t have SDRs. It’s just me and my public profile. And investors see that as an unfair advantage.” 

For the founders I’ve spoken to, such behaviour isn’t calculated investor outreach but a natural byproduct of building in public. Sharing wins, product milestones, testimonials, and market commentary. Over time, however, it’s this presence that starts attracting interest, educating investors, and quietly building validation. 

Nina Mohanty, Founder of Bloom Money, discovered this through her LinkedIn series “Migration Mondays”, which explored data and trends around global migration. “It really opened people’s eyes,” she explained. “I had VCs reading it and saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.'” Her credibility became implicit while investors learnt about a domain they might never have otherwise explored. 

Equally, what once made founders stand out ─ technical ability and speed to build ─ is becoming commoditised. With AI coding assistants and no-code platforms, anyone can now prototype rapidly. As Garrido puts it, “AI has lowered the bar to build a product. That means things like brand and founder-led presence become competitive advantages.” When a functional product can be built in a weekend, a founder’s profile increasingly becomes the moat. 

With visibility comes validation

The most successful companies cultivate investor relationships well before they need capital. What was once a formal pitch-to-investment choreography has evolved into something altogether more nuanced: months of careful relationship-building through regular updates, informal conversations, and mutual evaluation. 

So, a well-timed LinkedIn post celebrating a client win doesn’t just broadcast success; it serves as a gentle tap on the shoulder for any dormant investor relationships. “After a well-performing post, I frequently get re-approached by potential investors,” says Yann Magnan, Co-Founder of 73 Strings. “It’s a very effective way to stay top of mind.” 

Visibility might catalyse investor interest, but it doesn’t close deals. It can, however, strengthen the process. A founder with a public track record of domain insight and customer results enters the fundraising process with a layer of social credibility already in place and many questions pre-answered. 

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“It’s so much more transparent when you’ve had a public profile,” Garrido explains. “When people you’ve worked with or customers who’ve paid you are commenting on your posts, that vouches for your ability to deliver, your knowledge of the industry, and your network.” It’s authentic third-party endorsement that no polished pitch deck can replicate. 

Staying authentic in an algorithmic world

The founders getting through to investors aren’t chasing virality; they’re showing up as themselves with real insights, excitement, and imperfections. As AI-generated content floods social feeds, that personal authenticity becomes harder to fake and more valuable than ever. “You can tell,” Mohanty observes about the AI-generated posts. “The cadence, the voice, it’s being written for the algorithm, not for people.” 

This difference matters. The founders building trust online aren’t doing so because their posts are polished, but because they’re personal. Take Yann Magnan, whose feed is a mélange of fitness selfies, client wins, and reflections on the alternative assets space. “The moment you start to delegate content, you lose your personal tone,” he notes. “I’m certainly not suggesting my posts are perfect, far from it, but that’s probably what makes them work.” 

Still, this push for visibility doesn’t land the same way for everyone. As Mohanty points out, “For female founders, it feels like there’s even more need to be visible. But that visibility can come at a toxic price.” With funding already harder to secure, female founders face relentless pressure to maintain constant visibility across every platform, creating an exhausting always-on existence where personal boundaries blur in service of raising capital. 

The fundamentals remain

Let’s be clear, building a public profile doesn’t replace building a credible business. The core fundamentals – traction, team, and total addressable market – still matter enormously. Equally, you’ll still need the infamous pitch deck; many investors will want to see one, some will meaningfully engage with it, and even if they don’t, it remains a great place to stress-test your own thinking. 

But founders still viewing the pitch deck as the only weapon in their raising armoury are missing the bigger picture. As Garrido neatly concludes: “If you’re putting all of your energy into building pitch decks, you’re not doing the exact thing that will attract investors in the first place.” Instead, the winners will be those who build great products while cultivating investor intrigue and, more importantly, investor trust long before they even need the capital. 

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe