A student, a tool, and a slide that claimed 450 terawatts

Reading a deck at its stage

The general read used to hold every company to roughly the same yardstick, which meant an early one could lose points for missing traction it had no reason to have yet. A pre-seed deck with no revenue would get measured against Series A numbers. It now works the stage out from the deck itself and holds the company to what is reasonable there, so the objections it raises are closer to the ones an investor at that stage would actually have.

A few funds are now design partners

We have started working with a couple of accelerators and funds as design partners. The general read stays the same for everyone. The work with them is on the fund-fit side, tuning how the read weighs a deck against the way a particular firm screens, which is the part that has to be built per firm rather than read off the slides.

450 terawatts of waste heat

A climate deck we ran put 450 terawatts of waste heat on slide three. Terawatts measure power, not energy, so the figure was physically meaningless, and no one who worked on the deck had caught it. The general-purpose assistants we checked it against read straight past the number. It is the kind of thing the read is meant to stop on, a figure that looks fine until you check the units against what it claims to measure.

Your product helped bring a lot of clarity on what the best path forward is. Its brutal honesty helped do that.

Founder, link-in-bio product, and the first person to pay for Verdict.

TRY IT

If you have a current deck and have not run it through this version, it is worth doing. The first read is free and takes a few minutes.