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As a founder, I have raised from the very best VCs. This includes Andre Horowitz, Founder Collective, and even Jason Calacan.
TK Kader shares 8 essential pitch deck slides and strategies to help SaaS and AI founders raise funding from top investors.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Investors first want to understand the founder’s background and motivation.
- Highlighting a strong, quantifiable macro trend is essential to show market timing.
- A pitch deck’s effectiveness depends on the strategic narrative, not just slide design.
- Founders must clearly communicate how they will use funds and their go-to-market plan.
- Building investor confidence through storytelling is as important as presenting data.
What the video covers
- TK Kader draws from his experience raising capital from top VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Founder Collective.
- He emphasizes the competitive fundraising landscape for SaaS and AI startups today.
- The video outlines 8 winning slides that every pitch deck must include to effectively communicate with investors.
- The first crucial slide focuses on the founder's story and background to build investor trust.
- The second slide highlights a macro trend to justify why the business opportunity exists now.
- TK explains the importance of not just having slides but understanding the strategy and narrative behind each.
- He shares personal anecdotes about investor interactions to illustrate key points.
- The video encourages founders to craft a compelling story that resonates beyond just product details.
- Distribution strategy and use of funds are also key slides discussed later in the video.
- The video is part of a series aimed at helping SaaS and AI founders grow faster with actionable advice.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and fundraising background
- 01:04Welcome and channel overview
- 02:04Motivation and early fundraising lessons
- 03:03Importance of the founder story slide
- 04:19The power of macro trends in your pitch
- 06:38Pitch deck strategy and investor mindset
- 07:39Building investor confidence and problem/solution slides
- 09:36Distribution strategy and use of funds
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Through this journey, all the investors that I've had have helped me and coached me through each of those stages of fundraising, so I could raise that next round.
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If you're a founder raising for your SaaS or AI business today, it is more competitive than ever before.
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There's more capital and more investors than ever before, but also there's more talented founders like you raising than ever before.
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So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through my eight winning slides that will help you craft a pitch deck that will help you pitch investors so you're able to raise money and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. Intro,
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What's up everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel I help SaaS and AI founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster and AI businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome.
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I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your business faster.
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So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon. That way, you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK Energy. Now, if you're already part of this community, if you're part of my go-to-market programs, my people, welcome back.
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It's really awesome to see you over here. I remember the moment I was headed out to raise my Series A.
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I was sitting down with my seed investor, Bill Trenchard at the time, and he was walking through my pitch deck. It was super nerve-wracking because I was trying to put the narrative together.
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I was trying to put the story together. I was trying to put all the numbers together, and he was sitting there on a random afternoon and going slide by slide, giving me pointers and giving me tips. I learned a lot during that process.
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I learned a lot going into raising a Series A even after my seed, and one of the things that I learned was there was an art to creating really great pitch decks and pitching investors.
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It's not just about showing the business; it's also about how to really communicate to the investors and why this is a really great business opportunity. I was all nerves even after that session, but he looked me in the eye and said, "Don't worry,
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you're going to be able to raise, you're going to be able to figure this out."
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And that gave me a world of motivation, and it really meant a lot to me.
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We went on to raise our Series A from Jackson Square Ventures. We went on and raised our Series B from Andreessen Horowitz, and through that whole journey, I learned a ton about fundraising and pitch decks. Fast forward to today, over the last six years,
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I've coached countless founders through their fundraising process, and they've successfully raised and grown their company.
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So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the eight winning slides that you absolutely need to have in your winning pitch deck.
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And this is going to be suddenly different. It's not about the design of the decks, it's not about certain slides that obviously you need to have and you probably know already, but it's the strategy behind these slides and why they're important and how to
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really communicate what's important in the fundraising process. So if you're excited to dig in, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm, and let's go to slide number one, principle number one.
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Now, these particular slides can be in any order. I'm not going to talk about the order here, but these slides do need to exist. So we're just going to be talking about the eight slides that are important to exist in the context of your pitch deck and
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in the context of your pitch meeting. The first slide that's super important really answers why.
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This is one of the things that founders forget often because they're going into this meeting and they're so fixated on the product and the business, but really the investor is first trying to figure out should I invest in this
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person and invest in this founder? So one of the most important things to have in your slide deck is the story behind you and your team and why you're coming into building this company, what context you come from. When I was raising money,
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I had the context around having exited. It was a small exit in terms of HipCow.
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I had the context of having worked at Plaid. I had the context of having worked at Bridgewater, which is one of the best hedge funds in the world, and those little pieces, while kind of unrelated to Tdap, which is what I was building,
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was important in painting the picture of where I come from. Having worked at really quality organizations, whatever your story is, maybe you went to Stanford and you're ex-Stripe, or you have none of those points of pedigree, there's some story to tell. Hone in on that,
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own it, and really tell that story because that's super important. One story I will share that sticks out in my mind: I remember I was at my pitch meeting at Andreessen Horowitz, and literally the first three minutes of the meeting was Ben Horowitz asking me about where I was
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born, where I grew up, and what that was like. I was talking about being born in Bangladesh and moving to the US when I was 10 years old and working for my dad when I was 12. So story is important, and the
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best of the best investors first are trying to size up the entrepreneur, you, the founder, and where you come from.
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All those little data points tell a lot about who you are and if you're really cut out for this or not. Alright, the second slide that's super important is what I call the macro trend.
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Investors are wondering why do anything at all right now in the space that you're in, in the business that you're building?
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So you really want to highlight a macro trend. I talk about the idea of a macro trend very often on this channel because it goes into your go-to-market machine as well.
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A macro trend is a big quantifiable trend that's happening in the world separate from whether you run your business or if your customer buys your product or not.
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It is just true. It is happening and has been proven. That's what a macro trend is, and starting your presentation about a macro trend, about a big shift that's happening in the world, is super important.
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A macro trend could be around how only 40% of the world is on the cloud; the rest are still on-premise. A macro trend could be about AI adoption.
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A macro trend could be about anything in the specific industry that you want to do business in, but a macro trend stands on its own whether you build the business or not, whether your customer buys your product or not.
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That macro trend remains to be true and is a change that's happening, and it's always important to craft that in the pitch deck because it goes to show that, hey, whether you do this investment or not, this change is happening, and we're going to go figure out how to capitalize on
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that change. So macro trends really speak to the why now, why do anything, anything, and it's super important to highlight that when you're getting into it. Alright, slide number three. Actually, before we go to slide number three, let me pause here for a second.
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What you'll notice is I'm trying to give you the slides that go into a pitch deck. You've likely heard about some of these slides before, but what I'm trying to do is as an experienced founder, as someone that's raised money, as someone that has invested in companies,
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to give you the perspective on what really is going through the mindset of the investor and what needs to be on that slide and what you need to pitch and say to really nail it. It's one thing to just have that slide.
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It's another thing to understand why that slide is there and how to weave it into your narrative. So hopefully you're getting value from this. If you are, be sure to smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and also just give
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me a yes in the comments below. I a
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Number three, slide number three is problem and solution. Given the macro trend, given your background, you've decided to build this company. You woke up one day and you said, someone's got to do something about this.
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That's the problem and that's why we're creating this solution. And so you obviously want to have some sort of a problem and solution slide, but you'll notice that a lot of times founders start with the problem in the
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solution before they talk about where they come from and their macro trend, it comes out of nowhere and you're like, we're going to go solve CRM. It's like, what? Why? But if you start with like, Hey, I used to work at Salesforce,
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I used to work on CRM and they just can't move fast enough, so I quit my job and now there's a whole micro trend about, there used to be just a few CRM players.
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Now there's so many and no one even likes it and so therefore CRM is a problem.
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That's why we're building an AI for CRM that hits different. So you really want to frame the problem and the solution not as the first slide but as part of a story.
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And that's what some of these other slides are really designed to do and that by the time you get to the problem and the solution, the investor is really bought into like, oh my god, this guy knows a lot about this problem.
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They have history about this problem. They have domain knowledge about this problem. This problem is tied to a macro trend.
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Now they have a view on how they're going to solve it. Super interesting at that point and that's what really makes the difference between the founders that can tell a proper story and a narrative to really win deals with investors versus founders that may have a good business but the
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investors still don't write the check. So that's slide number three. Super important. Number four is to have a traction side. Obviously.
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Now there's a few things that have shifted at the time of this filming. It's 2025, there are certain things that just aren't cool anymore.
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Lemme talk about what's not cool. Pre-revenue, not cool anymore. There are so many AI companies that are rushing out of the gates and just generating revenue. If you're still at zero revenue, it's weird investor going to be like,
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what is wrong with you? If you have a wait list, you're like, well, we haven't launched yet. We have a thousand person wait list.
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Investors have kind of seen the picture. Those wait lists tend to mean nothing. Anyone's willing to sign up for a wait list.
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So if you're going to show traction, if you're going to go raise money, unless you're super pre-seed and you have pedigree and you're raising really on your team history, you're like, we're going to go do this and you'd be stupid not to invest in us,
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then it's fine not to have a traction slide. But otherwise, if you don't have as much pedigree, you're going to have to have traction.
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Otherwise, investors don't see the proof points and they won't invest in you. And so you really want to show users active and revenue, ideally both, but definitely at least the first one you want to show that this many users are
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using the product. It could be free, it could be a small nominal amount, but ideally there's revenue coming, so that should be in the traction slide. Oh, also positioning of the traction slide. If you have really strong numbers,
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put it up early. Just own it like, Hey, by the way, you're probably wondering if this is legit or not. This is not theory.
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Here's our traction. If it's mediocre or kind of building and it's not quite there yet, put it later on because you want to put the narrative on like, Hey, this is why it's going to be a big thing and we have some early proof points,
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but we're really getting there. So you want to put it a little bit later, so be strategic about that. Number five, you need to have a distribution slide.
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So the one thing that remains true is it's easier to build software than ever before. Vibe coding, it's easier to launch companies than ever before, but distribution is still the hardest. It's so noisy out there. Even with ai,
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if you just had to say AI and people would be like, oh my god, I totally want to do this, I'll give it a shot.
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But very quickly people have been burned. So AI revenue is not as durable. Investors that are watching for that. Customers are very shrewd. If you say ai, they're going to be like, is that really ai?
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Or do you just have a bunch of people in South Asia doing stuff for you?
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There's a difference and there's a company called Builder AI that just shut down after fraud by claiming that so people have been burned.
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So you need to show that you can get distribution. Why distribution is still the ultimate moat.
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It really separates out the founders that are set up to succeed and the founders that just don't know what they're doing. So you really want to show that you understand that distribution. When it comes to the distribution slide,
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there's two things you want to hit. You want to first highlight what's working, what's already working to get you the distribution that you do have.
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And the second is the future plans to show that hey, we're raising 3 million bucks and once we raise the 3 million, we're going to double down on what's already working, but we're going to unlock these four go-to-market machines.
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That's going to scale it even faster than we've already thought through this. You want to show a level of sophistication because today the entry point to build technology is lower than ever, but distribution is harder than ever.
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So that's what investors really pay attention to is like, Hey, does this guy know this? Is gal know how to get attention in the world?
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Do they understand go to market? Are they embracing it? So super important, go to market and distribution slide, split it between what's working already and future plans. Number six, slide number six. By the way, we're cranking right through these.
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I had a bunch of teeth. If I'm moving too fast, feel free to rewind and rewatch parts. Okay, number six, financials. You want to show the financials.
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You want to show some version of what you're going to do with the money.
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A lot of founders I talked to and even investors, they've joked around like, oh my god, how can you possibly create a five-year plan? This is lying, this is dumb. And to a certain point, your financials going forward is a little bit of a spreadsheet exercise.
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It is true however, and no one is going to be like, oh my god, in your seed deck you said you would hit this and you didn't. It will evolve.
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However, the financials you put together shows your thinking of if you know what you're going to be able to do with the money.
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So investors are really trying to understand two things. Number one, do you know what to do with the money?
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That's the first thing they're trying to figure out. So they really want to just understand like, hey, if I give you $3 million or you raise 3 million in this round, will you know what to do with the money? Is it going to go all in r and d?
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Is it going to go in sales and marketing support? What do the margins look like?
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Is a lot of it going to open ai? They want to understand how you're thinking about this.
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So that's the first question. That's why financials are important. The second thing, and this is something that I didn't learn until much later, investors are trying to figure out two things. One, is this a viable company and should they invest this round? So that's one.
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All of this stuff matters for them. The second thing they're trying to figure out is will you raise the next round? That's something they're trying to figure out.
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So what they're trying to figure out is, alright, let's just say I say yes to this and you raise the 3 million if you follow the financials and the plan, when do you run out of money?
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When do you do your next raise? What revenue are you at in that next raise and what is going to be the valuation because of that revenue? And will you be able to raise it?
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So they're trying to understand, yeah, this sounds good right now, but is this the founder that's going to be able to execute on this plan and raise the next round? If you can't raise the next round, then my investment goes to zero and that sucks. So they're trying to figure that
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out and that's where they look at the financials. They look at how much you're raising, how are you going to spend it, how many months you have of runway, when are you going to go off for your next raise?
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And they're trying to play out what is this company going to look like when they go for their next race? Will they be able to raise?
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That's what they're really trying to figure out and they're trying to look at it based on the financials and they're looking at the go-to-market also to say, if they unlock that go-to-market machine, will they get the numbers that they're saying?
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So they're trying to use their judgment there, which is why the financial slide is super important.
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This typically comes towards the end. That's why I put it as number six. But super important. Number seven, killer case study.
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You should always have a slide with a killer case study. This kind of bookends it in the beginning is a macro trend like, hey, this is happening with or without you, with or without us.
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The other one is a killer case study. It's a little bit of a, don't just take our word for it.
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Here's what our best customer has to say and highlight that. And if you have multiple case studies, if you have one great one, highlight that one. If you don't have at least one great one, go get one.
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If you have multiple, choose the best one or highlight the big one and then have some smaller ones, but have a killer case study so that you again bookend the external validation.
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One is the macro trend. Somewhere in the middle is at traction. Move it up if it's got a lot of traction, but also towards the end is the killer case study, so it really drives it. Then slide number eight,
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I put this as slide number eight. It's not necessarily the last slide, but there's a reason why I put this towards the end is the demo.
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The reason for this is every single time I raised money, I did give a demo that was a core part of the investment deck.
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When I did the partner meetings, I did a demo, I did do all of that, but the thing that stuck out to me is probably 0% of my institutional investors ever logged into the product.
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They didn't really understand what was in the product, and this is very common. I've talked to other founders about it. This is very common.
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So the demo is important and you want to show the demo, you want to have a killer demo, but it's not the most important you want to show it. But all these other things, the traction, the macro trend, your history and domain knowledge,
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all these other things really paint a more important picture about the investment in the business and then the demo backs it up. So I put this towards the end and the reason I say this is a lot of founders want to start with the
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demo. Sometimes that's important, especially if you've got breakthrough technology where you're going to show the demo and they're like, oh my god, you're demoing Chad GPT for the first time.
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To an investor like, okay, start with the demo. You don't need to plan anything else, but for a majority of cases, you really want to put the business structure first and then show the product.
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That's just as important. Okay? So those are the eight winning slides that you absolutely need and more importantly why you need them and the strategy behind them.
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So if you're getting value from this, please smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm and just put a hacky S in the comments that I know you're with me.
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Let's recap so you get the full flow of these. Number one, you want to tell your founder and team story, just paint the picture of why you care about this problem and how you got here.
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It might seem obvious to you, but for investors it's super valuable. Number two, the macro trend. Talk about why this is happening, what big change is happening with or without you, with or without them, with or without the customers.
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Macro trends also come in really handy in your go-to-market machine as well. Then talk about the problem and the solution.
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That way it's framed around the bigger pieces and the story behind it. Highlight the traction. User active of revenue or revenue.
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Don't show up as pre-revenue unless you've got a ton of pedigree as founders because it's just not in style anymore.
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It's weird if you don't have any revenue. Now I have over 400 episodes, half of them on how to get initial revenue. So it's weird if you don't have it.
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So own it. Get some revenue. Go to market and distribution, show what's already working and what your future plans are.
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Highlight your financials. Remember the financials are about showing if you know what to do with the money and if you do everything you say you're going to do with the money, will you be able to raise the next round?
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That's what you're really trying to communicate through those financials, and that's what the investors trying to figure out. Have a killer case study, super important and demo. Make sure you have a great demo, but it's not as important as you think.
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All these other pieces are just if not more important. So now the eight winning slides that I've learned about the hard way, the real strategy behind these, so you really understand how these come together.
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If you're in this fundraising process and you're looking to figure out how do I drive growth for the business, how do I get distribution? Then I have a free resource for you.
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Go ahead and grab a copy of my five point SaaS growth strategy guide inside of this guide. I give you the five key pillars for driving growth, for assassin ai business and fundraising is one of them.
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It includes other pillars also, but fundraising is one of the key pillars and inside of that guide, I have an entire section dedicated on additional resources or on fundraising.
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So go ahead and grab a copy of that. It's going to be super valuable for you.
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So to grab a copy, just go to get unstoppable.com/strategy, get unstoppable.com/strategy. If you got value from this video, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
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It just loves it when you do that. And so we put a lot of love into these episodes. If you have a fellow founder, a team member, if you're part of a Slack group, WhatsApp group of other founders,
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please share this video with them and mean the world to us. Also, if you haven't already, please post in the comments I want to hear from you.
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It makes my day when I hear from founders who have gotten value from our content. We put a lot of love in these. Also, I drop an episode like this every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
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So be sure to hit that subscribe button and then bell icon, that way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business.
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When you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable. I'm tk and I'll see you in the next episode or inside the five point SaaS growth Strategy guide, which includes the five key pillars of driving growth and fundraising is one of
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them. A lot of details there. So go check it out. Take care everybody.
Topics:pitch deckfundraisingventure capitalSaaS startupsAI startupsinvestor pitchstartup fundraisingTK Kadermacro trendsfounder story
